Ab Imperio, 2/2012
2012
annual theme:
я
StructurES and culturES of impErial and poSt-impErial divErSitв
VARIETIES OF COLONIALISM
Р
Р
Е
mEthodologв and thEorв
9
FroЦ ЭСО EНТЭors Structures and Cultures of Diversity: Nomadism as
Colonialism without a Metropole
10
я
я
I.
:
17
И
.
:
Pekka Hämäläinen TСО CШЦКЧМСО EЦpТrО. IЧtrШНuМtТШЧ: RОvОrsОН CШlШЧТКlТsЦ
25
3
/ConЭОnЭs
Forum ai
unSEttling nomadiSm
.
:
SОrРЮОТ AХОб. OЮsСКФТnО GuОst EНТtШr’s IЧtrШНuМtТШЧ tШ tСО FШruЦ. TrКvОlТЧР
PОШplО: NШЦКНТsЦ TШНКв
II.
53
hiStorв
82
П
Paths to transformation
MoХХв BrЮnson АКЧНОrТЧР GrООks: HШа RОpТЧ DТsМШvОrs tСО PОШplО
83
я
a.
:
:
112
MТФСКТХ RoгСКnsФТТ TШаКrНs tСО GlОКЦТЧР DКаЧ: LШШkТЧР ПШr tСО RОКl
EЦТХ NКsrТЭНТnov Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi
145
Travelers
-
-
Д
ы
Д
sPiritual bodв-movements
AnвК BОrnsЭОТn On Body-Crossing: Interbody Movement in Eurasian
Buddhism
168
b.
:
:
ГСКnnК KorЦТnК NШЦКНТМ OrtСШНШбв: OЧ NОа FШrЦs ШП RОlТРТШus LТПО ТЧ
CШЧtОЦpШrКrв RussТК
ц
я,
я,
IV.
я
c.
Дш
195
Sociologв, anthropologв, 228
political SciEncE
ы
domesticating landscaPes
MТМСКОХ KЮnТМСТФК “TСО SМвtСТКЧs АОrО HОrО...”: OЧ NШЦКНТМ
229
Archaeology, Modernist Form, and Early Soviet Modernity
4
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
“
…”
“
,
,
”:
-
“
”
AХОФsОТ Popov “АО ArО LШШkТЧР ПШr SШЦОtСТЧР АО HКvОЧ’t LШst”: SШvТОt “SКvКРОs”
ТЧ SОКrМС ШП TСОТr PlКМО UЧНОr tСО SuЧ
261
AТЦКr VОnЭsОХ Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its
299
Masters
: “
П
d.
”
П
inadvertent cosmoPolitanism
MКбТЦ MКЭЮsОvТМС Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic:
325
African Students as Soviet Moderns
:
-
Marina Mikhaylova A SprТЧРЛШКrН tШ К АТНОr АШrlН: RОКМtТvО
Nationalism as an Ideology of Survival
351
“
”:
VI.
ш
e.
Д
П
nEаESt mвthologiES 377
Д
nomadism for sale
SЭОpСОn M. NorrТs Nomadic Nationhood: Cinema, Nationhood, and
RОЦОЦЛrКЧМО ТЧ PШst-SШvТОt KКгКkСstКЧ
378
:
,
-
MОХКnТО KrОЛs FrШЦ К RОКl HШЦО tШ К NКtТШЧ’s BrКЧН: OЧ StКtТШЧКrв
403
and Traveling Yurts
:
П
П
Д
Politics and Poetics of nomadism
Piers Vitebsky АТlН TuЧРus КЧН tСО SpТrТts ШП PlКМОs
-
f.
-
–
OХРК BЮrОnТnК-PОЭrovК Circus: A Culture on Wheels
429
449
5
/ConЭОnЭs
ц
я
я
VII.
1.
Book rEviEаS
hiStoriographв 462
Forum ai
laurie manchester, Holy FatHers, secular sons:
clergy, IntellIgentsIa, and tHe Modern selF In revolutIonary russIa
(deKalb: northern illinois universitв Press, 2008). 304 PP.
isbn: 978-087-580-380-7 (hardbacK edition).
?
463
Rustam Matusevich Were There Popovichi?
481
AХОбКnНОr SoroМСКn PopovТМСТ as Cultural Text and Biography
LКЮrТО MКnМСОsЭОr An Answer to My Critics, or the Confessions of an
488
UЧrОpОЧtКЧt IЧtОrНТsМТplТЧКrТКЧ
,
2.
ц
rEviEаS 498
SТЦon J. KnОХХ, PОЭОr Aronsson, ArnО BЮРРО AЦЮnНsОn, AЦв JКnО
BКrnОs, SЭЮКrЭ BЮrМС, JОnnТПОr CКrЭОr, VТvТКnО GossОХТn, SКrКС A.
HЮРСОs КnН AХКn KТrаКn (EНs.), NКtТШЧКl MusОuЦs. NОа StuНТОs ПrШЦ
Around the World (LonНon; NОа ВorФ: RoЮЭХОНРО, 2011). 504 pp., ТХХs.
ISBN: 978-0-415-54774-1.
498
IХвК VТnФovОЭsФв, RussТКЧ AЦОrТМК: AЧ OvОrsОКs CШlШЧв ШП К CШЧtТЧОЧtКl EЦpТrО, 1804–1867 (NОа ВorФ КnН LonНon: OбПorН UnТvОrsТЭв
PrОss, 2011). бТТТ + 258 pp. ISBN: 978-0-19-539128-2.
509
Sharyl Corrado
AnНrОа A. GОnЭОs, EбТlО tШ SТЛОrТК, 1590–1822 (Houndmills: PalРrКvО MКМЦТХХКn, 2008). 288 pp. NКЦО InНОб, SЮЛУОМЭ InНОб. ISBN:
978-0-230-53693-7.
516
.
6
.
.
. .
:
I –
.
:И
, 2009. 388 . ISBN: 978-5-93424-411-9.
521
KrТstК SТРlОr
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
P. AНОХsРrЮЛОr, L. CoСОn, B. KЮгЦКnв. GОЭrОnnЭ НoМС vОrЛЮnНОn.
GrОnгsЭтНЭО гаТsМСОn нsЭОrrОТМС ЮnН RЮssХКnН 1772–1918. АТОn:
BöСХКЮ VОrХКР, 2011. 316 S. ISBN: 978-3-205-78625-2.
526
BörrТs KЮгЦКnв. BroНв. EТnО РКХТгТsМСО GrОnгsЭКНЭ ТЦ ХКnРОn 19.
JКСrСЮnНОrЭ. АТОn, KöХn, АОТЦКr: BöСХКЮ VОrХКР, 2011. 448 S. ISBN:
978-3-205-78763-1.
530
ŠКrūnКs LТОФТs, 1939 – tСО ВОКr tСКt CСКЧРОН EvОrвtСТЧР ТЧ LТtСuania’s History (AЦsЭОrНКЦ КnН NОа ВorФ: RoНopТ, 2010). 386 pp.,
ТХХs. BТЛХТoРrКpСв, InНОб. ISBN: 978-90-420-2763-3;
DКvТН J. SЦТЭС, DКvТН J. GКХЛrОКЭС, GОoППrОв SаКТn (EНs.), From
RОМШРЧТtТШЧ tШ RОstШrКtТШЧ: LКtvТК’s HТstШrв Кs К NКtТШЧ StКtО (AЦsЭОrНКЦ КnН NОа ВorФ: RoНopТ, 2010). 174 pp., ТХХs. ISBN: 978-90420-3099-2.
536
HКrvКrН UkrКТЧТКЧ StuНТОs, voХ. 29, no. 1-4, 2007 (2011): UФrКТnТКn
PСТХoХoРв КnН LТnРЮТsЭТМs Тn ЭСО TаОnЭв-FТrsЭ CОnЭЮrв. EНТЭОН Лв
MТМСКОХ S. FХТОr. ISSN: 0363-0570.
541
.
.
1930- .
:
(
);
“
2011. 359 . ISBN: 978-5-8243-1529-5.
:
,
. .
”,
552
ВЮХТК GrКНsФovК, SШvТОt PОШplО аТtС FОЦКlО BШНТОs: PОrПШrЦТЧР BОКutв КЧН MКtОrЧТtв ТЧ SШvТОt RussТК ТЧ tСО MТН 1930–1960s (Stockholm:
SЭoМФСoХЦ UnТvОrsТЭв, 2007). 347 pp. ISBN: 978-91-85445-72-1.
558
Danielle Morrissette
.Ш
.
.
:
);
ISBN: 978-5-8243-1530-1.
.
1937 /
.
.
.
. . .
(
, 2011. 742 .
564
7
/ConЭОnЭs
И
.
1949–1954
“
”
, 2007. 408 . (
. 1). ISBN: 978-5-8080-0703-1.
.
.
:
569
MКrТК CТгЦТМ, PОrПШrЦТЧР PКТЧ. MusТМ КЧН TrКuЦК ТЧ EКstОrЧ Europe (OбПorН КnН NОа ВorФ: OбПorН UnТvОrsТЭв PrОss, 2012). 337 pp.
BТЛХТoРrКpСв, InНОб. ISBN: 978-0-253-34907-1;
MТМСКОХ KЮrг, SШiК GuЛКТНulТЧК. A BТШРrКpСв, TrКns. CСrТsЭopС K.
LoСЦКnn КnН ОН. Лв MКХМoХЦ HКЦrТМФ Broаn (BХooЦТnРЭon, IN:
InНТКnК UnТvОrsТЭв PrОss, 2007). 233pp. BТЛХТoРrКpСв, InНОб. ISBN:
978-0-19-973460-3.
И
581
.
.
,
. И.
236 ., ISBN: 978-5-9973-0300-6;
.
.
+ , 2010. 640 .,
Ю
.
.
.
.
:
.
+, 2011.
.
:И . ISBN: 978-966-8613-53-1.
.
.
, 2008. 768 . ISBN: 978-5-250-06046-2.
588
:
593
603
LТsЭ oП ConЭrТЛЮЭors
8
607
,И
а
Forum ai
а
а
а
unSEttling nomadiSm
52
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ергей ША
Х
:
А
аш
а
а
TСО ЭrЮЭС Тs ЭСКЭ, ТЧ ЭСОТr СОКrЭ ШП СОКrЭs, RЮssТКЧs СКЭО КХХ
ШММЮpКЭТШЧs ЭСКЭ ЭТО ЭСОЦ НШаЧ ЭШ К pКrЭТМЮХКr spШЭ. …TСОв
ХКМФ ЭСО ПООХТЧР ПШr СШЦО Кs К iбОН КЧН ШХН-ОsЭКЛХТsСОН
ЭШpШРrКpСТМКХ pШТЧЭ. АО ЭСТЧФ ШП К pКrЭТМЮХКr СШЮsО Шr ЯТХlage where we were born and where we spent our impressТШЧКЛХО НКвs ШП МСТХНСШШН; ЭСОsО rОРКrН СШЦО pЮrОХв Кs К
sШМТКХ МОЧЭОr – ЭСОв КrО КЭ СШЦО ОЯОrваСОrО, sШ ХШЧР Кs ЭСОТr
ПКЦТХв Тs КЛШЮЭ ЭСОЦ. SШ вШЮ аТХХ iЧН ЭСОЦ КЭ CШЧЭТЧОЧЭКХ
аКЭОrТЧР-pХКМОs, ЧОЯОr КХШЧО, ХТФО EЧРХТsСЦОЧ, ЛЮЭ ЦШЯТЧР
КЛШЮЭ ТЧ ЭrТЛОs КЧН ЛКЭМСОs. NШЦКНs! TСОв СКЯО К ПКТrХв
rТМС ХКЧРЮКРО, вОЭ ТЭ МШЧЭКТЧs ЧШ ОqЮТЯКХОЧЭ ПШr ШЮr аШrН
“СШЦО”. …ЭСШsО аСШsО КЧМОsЭШrs СКЯО ЛООЧ КММЮsЭШЦОН
to wander over limitless spaces many be supposed to have
КМqЮТrОН К аТНОr ЯТsТШЧ, К ЦШrО rОsЭХОss ЭОЦpОrКЦОЧЭ. TСТs
Тs rОlОМЭОН ТЧ ЭСО МШЧЯОrsКЭТШЧ ШП RЮssТКЧs, ПШr ЧШЭСТЧР Тs
ЦШrО НТПiМЮХЭ ЭСКЧ ЭШ ФООp ЭСОЦ ПrШЦ ‘аКЧНОrТЧР ПrШЦ ЭСО
pШТЧЭ’; ЭСОТr ЭСШЮРСЭs lТЭ КТrТХв ПrШЦ ШЧО sЮЛУОМЭ ЭШ КЧШЭСОr
аТЭС ТЧОбСКЮsЭТЛХО аОКХЭС ШП ТНОКs. TСКЭ Тs ЭСОТr sШМТКХ
МСКrЦ. …TСОв ХТФО К аТНО РrКsp ШП ЭСОТr sЮЛУОМЭ; ЭСОв
rОКМС ШЮЭ ЭШШ ПКr, КЧН вОЭ ЦЮsЭ pОrПШrМО ТЧМХЮНО ТЭ КХХ. …IЭ
Тs ЧШЭ аТХХПЮХ prШХТбТЭв sШ ЦЮМС Кs КЧ ТrrОsТsЭТЛХО СОrОНТЭв
sЭrКТЧТЧР КПЭОr spКМТШЮsЧОss КЧН аТНО СШrТгШЧs.
NШrЦКЧ DШЮРХКs, Intellectual Nomadism, 1925.1
1
NШrЦКЧ DШЮРХКs. IЧЭОХХОМЭЮКХ NШЦКНТsЦ // NШrЦКЧ DШЮРХКs. EбpОrТЦОЧЭs. NОа ВШrФ,
1925. Pp. 137, 138, 143, 144.
53
,О
.
Н
а
:
а
ря ?
2012 .
,
“
(illegal travelers)
(
,
,
“
”
)
,
,
“
.
.“
,
”
”
,
“
” (sanitary concerns),
“
.2
“
gens du voyage, “
,
Spiegel
а
”
“
”.
”
“
,
”
” The New York Times
,
”
.
“
” (the wild squatting and camping of the Roma).
”
.
“
“
,
”
–
“
“
”
,
“
“
”
“
,
”.3
”
.
,
,
-
”.
,
DКЯТН JШХХв. FrОЧМС PrОsТНОЧЭ SСЮЭs DШаЧ RШЦК CКЦps КЧН SООФs RОХШМКЭТШЧ // TСО
NОа ВШrФ TТЦОs. 2012. AЮРЮsЭ 10. P. 7.
.
: NОа FrОЧМС РШЯОrЧЦОЧЭ ЦШЯОs
КРКТЧsЭ RШЦК МКЦps // BBC NОаs EЮrШpО. 2012. AЮРЮsЭ 9. СЭЭp://ааа.ЛЛМ.МШ.ЮФ/ЧОаs/
world-europe-19194639.
3
UХХrТМС FТМСЭЧОr. DrТЯТЧР ШЮЭ ЭСО UЧаКЧЭОН: SКrФШгв’s АКr AРКТЧsЭ ЭСО RШЦК // SpТОРОХ
OЧХТЧО. 2010. SОpЭОЦЛОr 15. СЭЭp://ааа.spТОРОХ.НО/ТЧЭОrЧКЭТШЧКХ/ОЮrШpО/НrТЯТЧР-out-theЮЧаКЧЭОН-sКrФШгв-s-аКr-КРКТЧsЭ-ЭСО-rШЦК-К-717324-2.html.
.: SЭОЯОЧ ErХКЧРОr. DШМЮЦОЧЭ CТЭОs FrОЧМС BТН ЭШ OЮsЭ RШЦК // TСО NОа ВШrФ TТЦОs.
2010. SОpЭОЦЛОr 12.
2
54
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
.
2005 .
“
.
,
“
.“
),
” “
:
,
1914 .,
,
,
“
”,
“
–
”
,
!” –
.4
“
“
”.
”
“
”
,
“
”(
–
.
”
”
“
”.
-
,
:
(pervert)
”,
,
,
.
(genuine)
(contaminate)
.
–
.5
.
.
.
,
“
”
.
,
,
-
.
.
,
“
,
,
,
,
,
-
,
.
,
-
: СЭЭp://вШЮЭЮ.ЛО/HТЧ3Ш2N8Lв0.
BцХК BКrЭШФ. OЛsОrЯКЭТШЧs ШЧ RЮЦКЧТКЧ FШХФ MЮsТМ // B. BКrЭШФ. EssКвs / EН. BОЧУКЦТЧ SЮМСШПП. NОа ВШrФ, 1976. . 198.
.: RШЧКХН BШРЮО.
DОХОЮгО’s АКв: EssКвs ТЧ TrКЧsЯОrsО EЭСТМs КЧН AОsЭСОЭТМs. AХНОrsСШЭ, 2007. p. 118-119.
4
5
55
,О
.
.
:
а
–
,
,
:“
”
.6
,
,
,
,
,
-
.
,
,
Г
,
“
”,
“
“
”
-
,
?
”,
?
“
,
–
.7
”,
“
”,
.
-
,
а
,
.
,
,
,
.8
а
.
“
”
,
?
,9
-
.
: LТТsК MКХФФТ. NКЭТШЧКХ GОШРrКpСТМ: TСО RШШЭТЧР ШП PОШpХОs КЧН ЭСО
TОrrТЭШrТКХТгКЭТШЧ ШП NКЭТШЧКХ IНОЧЭТЭв КЦШЧР SМСШХКrs КЧН RОПЮРООs // CЮХЭЮrКХ AЧЭСrШpШХШРв. 1992. VШХ. 7. NШ. 1. P . 28-29.
7
.
:
// AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2010. №. 3. . 319-344.
8
.: VТХОЦ FХЮssОr. TСТЧФТЧР AЛШЮЭ NШЦКНТsЦ // FХЮssОr. TСО FrООНШЦ ШП ЭСО MТРrКЧЭ.
OЛУОМЭТШЧs ЭШ NКЭТШЧКХТsЦ. UrЛКЧК, 2003. . 43.
9
.,
,
.“
. .
”( . .
.
.
, 2007. . 9-59).
.
: . .
.
(
,
,
).
.
, 1983; . .
.
.
.
, 1967.
.:
Ab Imperio: David
SЧОКЭС. TrТЛО, EЭЧШs, NКЭТШЧ: RОЭСТЧФТЧР EЯШХЮЭТШЧТsЭ SШМТКХ TСОШrв КЧН RОprОsОЧЭКЭТШЧs
ШП NШЦКНТМ IЧЧОr AsТК // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2009. NШ. 4.
“
”
.:
6
56
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
(
,
)
,
-
-
.
-
,
,
“
“
.
БIII .
,
.
:
;
p
,
p
p p
p
, p
, p
p
.
“
,
.10
,
,
.
,
p
p
,
“
,
p p ,
”:
,
p
(1148–1227)
-
,
p
p
”,
”.
”
“
,
p
;
p
p , p
p ?
;
.
,
.11
?”
.
-
JШsОpС C. BОrХКЧН КЧН ApКrЧШ RКШ. UЧЯОТХТЧР ЭСО SЭrКЧРОr: A NОа LШШФ КЭ PОrТpКЭОЭТМ
PОШpХОs // BОrХКЧН КЧН RКШ (EНs.). CЮsЭШЦКrв SЭrКЧРОrs: NОа PОrspОМЭТЯОs ШЧ PОrТpКЭОЭТМ
PОШpХОs ТЧ ЭСО MТННХО EКsЭ, AПrТМК, КЧН AsТК. LШЧНШЧ. 2004. p. 1-31.
10
,
//
СЭЭp://ааа.rРШ-sТЛ.rЮ/ЛШШФ/ФЧТРК/114.СЭЦ.
.: . .
.
.
.
, 1934. . 9, 36.
11
.
57
,О
.
,
:
2002 .
а
,
,
,
,
:
,
“
,
-
”.12
-
,
,
.
“
“
”
”
.
”,
.
-
:
,
.
,
,
-
,
.
.
,
. .
, . .
. .
.
2007. № 4. . 142-152.
13
. .
.
, 1976. . 279.
–
. .
//
,
.
-
,
.14
.
.
.
, 2002.
/
. 9.
,
//
:
14
,
58
,
,
.13
12
–
,
,
,
-
,
,
,
,
,
:
.
.:
.
.
“
”
:“
.
,
“
(“
”)
”
-
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
“,
“
1986 .:
-
,
,
-
.15
,
“
“
,
.16
.“
“
–
17
. “
”, –
,
”
,
“
”,
,–
…
ё
-
.“
.
“
”
,
,
.
,
,
//
15
. .
)
”, –
”
,
.
.
”:
(
-
”
, . .
,
…
. 1821. . 121. № 22. . 130.
.
, . .
.
,
”.
,
-
.
,
-
/
, 1986. . 244.
16
“
”
“
” .: ErЧОsЭ GОХХЧОr. TСО
NШЦКНТsЦ DОЛКЭО // GОХХЧОr. SЭКЭО КЧН SШМТОЭв ТЧ SШЯТОЭ TСШЮРСЭ. OбПШrН, 1988.
17
GТХХОs DОХОЮгО, FОХТб GЮКЭЭКrТ. A TСШЮsКЧН PХКЭОКЮs: CКpТЭКХТsЦ КЧН SМСТгШpСrОЧТК.
TrКЧs. BrТКЧ MКssЮЦТ. MТЧЧОКpШХТs, 1987. . 23.
.
:
ё,
.
:
.
,
,
2010. . 41.
59
,О
.
:
а
: “…
,
.“
“
(
,
.19
”–
(
,
“
.
”
,
”,
”–
,
а а)
,
-
,
,
,
)
.20
“
(
.18
“
,
,
”,
-
-
-
,
.
”,
,
)
,
,
:
,
-
,
,
.22
,
–
,
:
.
,
.
,
21
(dirt) –
,
,
.
,
-
,
,
18
MКrв DШЮРХКs. PШХХЮЭТШЧ // DШЮРХКs. IЦpХТМТЭ КЧН EбpХТМТЭ MОКЧТЧРs: EssКвs ТЧ AЧЭСrШpШХШРв. LШЧНШЧ, 1975. . 55.
19
.
:
.
// . .
.
.
.
.
, 1977. . 294.
20
,“
” “
”,
,
– skvrnа.
21
MКrв DШЮРХКs. PЮrТЭв КЧН DКЧРОr. AЧ AЧКХвsТs ШП CШЧМОpЭs ШП PШХХЮЭТШЧ КЧН TКЛШШ.
LШЧНШЧ, 1966. p.161-162.
22
DШЮРХКs. PШХХЮЭТШЧ. . 51.
60
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
“
,
”–
“
–
.
“
,
“
-
”, –
”.
а
–
(
–
”
)
–
.
,
” (luctual):
,
,“
-
,
,
,
-
.
(
“
.23
а –
,
. 1).
(
”),
,“
”
,
,
,
а
,
.
:
“
лл. 1.
.
,
,
.
“
,
”
,
.
.
-
”,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
,
, . .
-
.
.
–
.
23
.
: PТОrrО JШrТs КЧН BrТКЧ MКssЮЦТ. NШЭОs TШаКrН К NШЦКНТМ PШОЭТМs
(1996–2002) // JШrТs. A NШЦКН PШОЭТМs. EssКвs. MТННХОЭШаЧ, 2003. . 39.
61
,О
.
(
а
-
,
. 2).
,
,
“
,
:
-
.
.
-
”–
.
,
лл. 3.
62
,
(
лл. 2.
(
: СЭЭp://ХШsФЮЭМС.
вК.rЮ/rОpХТОs.бЦХ?ТЭОЦИЧШ=2).
(
. .)
. 3).
(
).
.
,
-
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
“
”
(
,
“
:
.
(
).
-
.
“
”.24
–
.
лл. 5.
24
-
-
”
а а
-
,
лл. 4.
. 4).
.
,
.
.
PТОrrО JШrТs. TСО NШЦКНТsЦ ШП PКЛХШ PТМКssШ // PТОrrО JШrТs. A NШЦКН PШОЭТМs. . 115.
63
,О
.
:
а
,
(
. 5).
(
),
”.25
“
”.
:
(
1986 .,
.
)
,
.
/
.
:
(
.
)
“
.“
”
,
”.
“
,
”
”
,
“
а а
.
а,
,
-
”,
–
,
.
“
,
,
,
-
”.26
” “
.
“
.
”
…
”,
,
,
”,
“
,
“
-
“
,
(
”
(
,
“
”,
,
)
)“
“
,
,
,
.27
.
ё
. “TСО SЦШШЭС КЧН
ЭСО SЭrТКЭОН”: DОХОЮгО КЧН GЮКЭЭКrТ. A TСШЮsКЧН PХКЭОКЮs. p. 474-476.
(
ё,
.
) .“
”, . 805-851.
26
.
/
. .
.
.
,
1986 (
).
27
.
: RШsТ BrКТНШЭЭТ. CШЦpХОбТЭв AРКТЧsЭ
MОЭСШНШХШРТМКХ NКЭТШЧКХТsЦ // BrКТНШЭЭТ. NШЦКНТМ TСОШrв. TСО PШrЭКЛХО RШsТ BrКТНШЭЭТ.
25
64
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Н ы
“
,
“
”
“
”
”, “
,
,
“
”, “
“
” “
,
”
“
,
”, “
”.
“
”,
,
“ ”,
,
(unitary)
,
”,
”
:
(coherent)
,
-
“
,
–
-
.“
,
”.
.
-
.
–
–
,
-
”, “
,
.
”
“
“
”
,
,
-
”,
.28
”
,“
?
”
“
а
,
,
-
–
-
NОа ВШrФ, 2011. p. 209-238;
.: M. CКХХКrТ GКХХТ (EН.). CШЧЭОЦpШrКrв NШЦКНТsЦs: RОХКЭТШЧs ЛОЭаООЧ LШМКХ CШЦЦЮЧТЭТОs, NКЭТШЧ-SЭКЭОs КЧН GХШЛКХ
CЮХЭЮrКХ FХШаs. ГЮrТМС, 2007.
28
CКrШХТЧО HЮЦpСrОв КЧН DКЯТН SЧОКЭС. TСО EЧН ШП NШЦКНТsЦ? SШМТОЭв, SЭКЭО КЧН ЭСО
EЧЯТrШЧЦОЧЭ ТЧ IЧЧОr AsТК. DЮrСКЦ, 1999. . 1.
65
,О
.
:
.
,
а
–
,
–
,
,
,
,
,
,
“
),
,
,
,
”.30
“
,
а
,
,
”
,
“
-
,
,
-
-
), –
,
,
,
(
-
,
,
-
–
,
,
.
,
-
,
”
,
”.31
.29
“
(
…
,
-
,
–
.
,–
,
,
,
-
29
MКЭТХНО CКХХКrТ GКХХТ. TСО NШЦКНТsЦ ШП CШЧЭОЦpШrКrТЧОss // MКЭТХНО CКХХКrТ GКХХТ
(EН.). CШЧЭОЦpШrКrв NШЦКНТsЦs. Pp. 23-24.
30
BrКТНШЭЭТ. IЧЭrШНЮМЭТШЧ // BrКТНШЭЭТ. NШЦКНТМ TСОШrв. . 14.
31
“ЧШЦКН”
nomas – “
”.
, nomas
ЧШЦШs – “
”(
).
nomos
nemein (“
”,
“
”),
n-m,
(
number
).
.
: FХЮssОr. NШЦКНs // FХЮssОr. TСО FrООНШЦ ШП ЭСО MТРrКЧЭ.
. 46; RШЧКХН BШРЮО. ApШХШРв ПШr NШЦКНШХШРв // BШРЮО. DОХОЮгО’s АКв: EssКвs ТЧ
TrКЧsЯОrsО EЭСТМs КЧН AОsЭСОЭТМs. AХНОrsСШЭ, 2007. p. 124-126. .
: CСrТsЭШpСОr
L. MТХХОr. BОвШЧН IНОЧЭТЭв: TСО PШsЭТНОЧЭТЭКrТКЧ PrОНТМКЦОЧЭ ТЧ DОХОЮгО КЧН GЮКЭЭКrТ’s A
Thousand Plateaus // MТХХОr. NКЭТШЧКХТsЭs КЧН NШЦКНs: EssКвs ШЧ FrКЧМШpСШЧО AПrТМКЧ
LТЭОrКЭЮrО КЧН CЮХЭЮrО. CСТМКРШ, 1998. p. 171-210.
66
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
,
,
,
.32
,
,
,
”
,
.
,–
.
,
.
“
,
,
-
.33
Ab Imperio,
“
”
,
–
.
,
,
“
,
”.34
.
,
а
,
,
,
.
–
”
“
-
.
,
“
”.35
-
–
.
,
–
,
,
-
32
,
.:
PОЭОr KКЛКМСЧТФ. NШЦКНs КЧН MШЛТХО PХКМОs: DТsОЧЭКЧРХТЧР PХКМО, SpКМО КЧН MШЛТХТЭв
// IНОЧЭТЭТОs: GХШЛКХ SЭЮНТОs ТЧ CЮХЭЮrО КЧН PШаОr. 2012. VШХ. 19. NШ 2. p. 210-228.
33
.,
.:
.
.
,
,
19-20
2005 . /
. . .
. .
.
, 2007.
34
“
” (sedentarist metaphysics) .: MКХФФТ. NКЭТШЧКХ GОШРrКpСТМ. . 31.
35
.
:“
–
,
”. СЭЭp://psвМСШХШРв.КМКНОЦТМ.rЮ/1670.
67
,О
.
:
а
“
,
,
”.36
,
“‘
’–
,
.
,
,
,
”
-
,
,
,
,
-
,
/
-
.
-
,
“
,
).
.
–“
(
),
–
,
,
,
,
”,
.38
.
.
,
.
“
,
-
.37
,
–
,
”
”
.
,
(
“
,
,
:
,
“
”
-
,
-
”
:
АТХХТКЦ LКЧМКsЭОr КЧН FТНОХТЭв LКЧМКsЭОr. АСШ ArО TСОsО NШЦКНs? АСКЭ DШ TСОв DШ?
CШЧЭТЧЮШЮs CСКЧРО Шr CСКЧРТЧР CШЧЭТЧЮТЭТОs? // JШsОpС GТЧКЭ КЧН AЧКЭШХв KСКгКЧШЯ
(EНs.). CСКЧРТЧР NШЦКНs ТЧ К CСКЧРТЧР АШrХН. BrТРСЭШЧ, 1998. p. 26, 32.
37
.
.
, 1983. . 73.
38
MШХХв BrЮЧsШЧ. АКЧНОrТЧР GrООФs: HШа RОpТЧ DТsМШЯОrs ЭСО PОШpХО // AЛ IЦpОrТШ.
2012. NШ. 2. P. 85.
36
68
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
,
,
.
;
,
.
,
:“
”
,
.39
–
”–
.
)
-
,
.
,
,
“
“
”.40
-
)
”(
”,
1960–1970.41
.
“
“
”
:
–
.
:
.
:
,
39
IЛТН. P. 97.
“
.
// AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. № 2. C. 113, 120.
41
IЛТН. C. 125.
40
-
-
.
щ
(negotiations)
(
,
.
,“
”
“
,
,
а
;
,
”,
“
”–
:
69
,О
.
:
а
,
,
“
,
:
,
ё
1960-
–
,
,
,
,
;
.44
.
.42
,
,
-
.
–
,
-
.45
“
”
“
,
.
.
,
,
.
”,
,
-
,
-
,
.
“
”.43
”, –
46
.
,
,
,
,
,
,
:
.
:
,
-
IЛТН. C. 136.
IЛТН. C. 123.
44
DОХОЮгО КЧН GЮКЭЭКrТ. A TСШЮsКЧН PХКЭОКЮs. . 393-394.
:
ё,
.
. . 664.
45
. . 142.
46
EЦТХ NКsrТЭНТЧШЯ. SpТrТЭЮКХ NШЦКНТsЦ КЧН CОЧЭrКХ AsТКЧ TКЛХТРСТ TrКЯОХХОrs // AЛ
IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. Pp. 153-154.
42
43
70
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
.
,
(
“
“
,
,
”,
.
,
,
-
,
-
,
.
,
,
.
1915 .
”
.
,
,
,
,
“
“
“
48
,
,
.48
47
-
.
,
“
)
–
”.
,
47
.
,
.
NКsrТЭНТЧШЯ. . 166.
.,
: .
-
,
(germ-cells)”
,
.
. //
,
”.49
,
,
-
,
.50
,
”,
-
.
21-23
2007 . /
. . .
, . .
.
, 2008. . 232-233.
49
CСКrХОs B. DКЯОЧpШrЭ. NШЦКНТsЦ, Шr TСО АКЧНОrТЧР IЦpЮХsО, аТЭС SpОМТКХ RОПОrОЧМО
ЭШ HОrОНТЭв // DКЯОЧpШrЭ. TСО FООЛХв IЧСТЛТЭОН. АКsСТЧРЭШЧ, 1915. . 26.
50
DКЯОЧpШrЭ. NШЦКНТsЦ. . 20.
,
71
,О
.
“
:
”52),
а
,
.51
(
,
.53
”
“
(
“
.
”,
, . .
(
,
“
.
)
,
),
,
,
“
,–
,
.
”, –
“
(inter-bodiment)
53
72
,
,
,
:
,
,
,
:“
,
-
,
,
,
,‘
’
,
(
),
,
(
),
,
” (DКЯОЧpШrЭ. NШЦКНТsЦ. . 24).
54
AЧвК BОrЧsЭОТЧ. OЧ BШНв-CrШssТЧР: IЧЭОrЛШНв MШЯОЦОЧЭ ТЧ EЮrКsТКЧ BЮННСТsЦ
AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 170.
,
,
,
,
,
IЛТН. . 9.
IЛТН. . 25
,
-
”.54
,
51
.
,
,
.
.
”,
-
,
,
52
-
-
,
,
,
,
//
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
/
.
,
“
:“
the icarnates)
”.
:
”
(
.
,“
“
”,
”
,
,
.
“
)
.
,
.
.
),
,
,
,
,
(
)
,
,
,
.
IЛТН. . 183.
.
-
”
-
:
,
”…56
“
,
-
.
(
:
56
,
,
,
(
,
,
”.55
,
55
(personae of
:
“
,
-
)
а
.
:
// AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. № 2. . 206.
73
,О
.
:
а
,
,
,
,
.“
”
,
“
.
,
,
, . .
,
,
:
,
“
,
” (wander).
:
,
“
”,
”.57
.
,
,
.
…’:
”–
,
(1922)
“‘
,
,
,
-
,
.
”
“
,
,
.
.
-
–
,–
.
–
,
.
,
-
”
“
–“
”.58
,
,
,–
,
,
,
TСШЦКs J. BКriОХН. TСО NШЦКНТМ AХЭОrЧКЭТЯО. UppОr SЮННХО RТЯОr, 1993. . 12.
MТМСКОХ KЮЧТМСТФК. “TСО SМвЭСТКЧs АОrО HОrО...”: OЧ NШЦКНТМ ArМСКОШХШРв, MШНОrЧТsЭ FШrЦ, КЧН EКrХв SШЯТОЭ MШНОrЧТЭв // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 232.
57
58
74
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
.“
,
”,
-
,
,
,
”.
,
,
,
-
“
,
,
,
59
“
‘
”
“
’
,
.
а
–
“
:
.
,
:
(
,
” “
“
,
”
,
.60
”
),
”.
,
“
”–
,
(
59
60
61
IЛТН. P. 232.
IЛТН. P. 235.
)
“
”
,
а
.61
а а
“
,
:
.
-
,
,
.
,
.
.
-
-
”
“
,
,
”:
// AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. № 2. . 295.
.
“
”
75
,О
.
:
а
,
,
-
,
(
)
,
“
,
.
:
.
,
“
”
а
.63
»,
,
.
,
а
.
-
.
.…
.…
,
-
“
”
.
.
«
”,
–
.
1220,
“
”
“
,
,
:
,
.
:
,
-
,
.
.
”62
.
“
”
.
AТЦКr VОЧЭsОХ EЧЭrКppТЧР HТsЭШrв ТЧ SpКМО: OЧ TЮЮЧНrК КЧН IЭs MКsЭОrs // AЛ IЦpОrТШ.
2012. NШ. 2. P. 316.
63
.
.
//
. . 14-15.
62
76
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
.
-
.
:
“
-
.
.
:
1960-
.
,
,“
-
,
“
,
,–“
,
,
,
,
’:
”
,
.65
”
-
.
-
,
,
-
.
.
,
“‘
,
”.64
”,
,
,
,
5000
,
.
;
”
-
,
,
.
-
-
,
.
64
MКбТЦ MКЭЮsОЯТМС EбpКЧНТЧР ЭСО BШЮЧНКrТОs ШП ЭСО BХКМФ AЭХКЧЭТМ: AПrТМКЧ SЭЮНОЧЭs
Кs SШЯТОЭ MШНОrЧs // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 329.
65
IЛТН. P. 348.
77
,О
.
:
а
,
“
.
”,
,
.
:
-
.
,
.
а
“
”
,
–
,
-
.
-
,
–
(
,
)
“
.
,
:
,
–
,
,
”.66
.
,
,
“
-
.
,
,
,
”
”
,
,
-
,
:“
,
”,
“
.67
66
SЭОpСОЧ M. NШrrТs. NШЦКНТМ NКЭТШЧСШШН: CТЧОЦК, NКЭТШЧСШШН, КЧН RОЦОЦЛrКЧМО
ТЧ PШsЭ-SШЯТОЭ KКгКФСsЭКЧ // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 386.
67
IЛТН. P. 396.
78
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
“
:
-
.
“
.
.
,
”.
,
-
”,
,
-
,
,
,
.
,
.
,
“
”
“
,
,
,
.
.
,
,
.
.68
-
“
“
,
,
,
”
”,
,
,
“
”.
,
,
”
70
:
,
,
.69
,
,
”
.
-
“
–
,“
.
ё
-
…”.71
68
MОХКЧТО KrОЛs. FrШЦ К RОКХ HШЦО ЭШ К NКЭТШЧ’s BrКЧН: OЧ SЭКЭТШЧКrв КЧН TrКЯОХТЧР
ВЮrЭs // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 427.
69
FХЮssОr. NШЦКНs. P. 49.
70
DОХОЮгО КЧН GЮКЭЭКrТ. A TСШЮsКЧН PХКЭОКЮs. . 399.
71
PТОrs VТЭОЛsФв. АТХН TЮЧРЮs КЧН ЭСО SpТrТЭs ШП PХКМОs // AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. NШ. 2. P. 436.
79
,О
.
:“
:
а
”
.
.
“
”,
,
“
,
…
“
“
…
”?
,
(
.
,
“
“
,
,
,
,
“
*
”
72
C. 450.
73
IЛТН. C. 454, 455.
”.72
”.
”
”,
-
,
,
.
.“
,
“
”.
,
–
”.73
*
“
.
)
-
)
,
,
,
,
(
.
.
*
,
(
“
)
“
,
”?
,
,
,
”?
,
“
80
.
.
-
,
,
,
”,
“
,
”
.
,
”,
”.
“
,
-
// AЛ IЦpОrТШ. 2012. №. 2.
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
,
,
.
- ,
:
,
(
,
.
‘
’
)
–
,
-
.“
”, –
.74
,
.
,
“
”
,
“
”.
-
,
.
.
Ab Imperio
.
–
–
–
,
2012 .
SUMMARY
OЮsСКФТЧО sЭКrЭs СТs ТЧЭrШНЮМЭТШЧ ЭШ ЭСО ПШrЮЦ ШЧ “UЧsОЭЭХТЧР NШЦКНТsЦ”
аТЭС К СТsЭШrТМКХ КЧН ЛТЛХТШРrКpСТМКХ НОЭШЮr. Bв ХШШФТЧР КЭ SШЯТОЭ КЧН pШsЭSШЯТОЭ sМСШХКrsСТp ШЧ ЧШЦКНТМ sШМТОЭТОs, СО ЭrКМОs КЧ ТЧЭОХХОМЭЮКХ ЭrКНТЭТШЧ
ЭСКЭ аШЮХН ОТЭСОr НТsЦТss ЧШЦКНТsЦ Кs К “МТЯТХТгКЭТШЧКХ ЦТsЭКФО” Шr РХШrТПв
ТЭ Кs КЧ ОбКЦpХО ШП ОбМОpЭТШЧКХТsЦ, Кs К “spОМТКХ” – КХЭОrЧКЭТЯО – pКЭС ШП
СТsЭШrТМКХ НОЯОХШpЦОЧЭ. As OЮsСКФТЧО sЮРРОsЭs, ЭСОsО ЧОРКЭТЯО КЧН pШsТЭТЯО
КЭЭОЦpЭs ЭШ ОЧМКpsЮХКЭО ЧШЦКНТsЦ, ТЧ ПКМЭ, ШЛПЮsМКЭО ТЦpШrЭКЧЭ МШЧМОpЭЮКХ
КЧН ОЭСЧШРrКpСТМ МШЧЭrТЛЮЭТШЧs ЭСКЭ sЭЮНТОs ШП ЧШЦКНТsЦ МШЮХН ЦКФО. UsТЧР
CОЧЭrКХ AsТКЧ rЮРs Кs СТs ФОв ЦОЭКpСШr, OЮsСКФТЧО sЮРРОsЭs ЭСКЭ аО МШЮХН
take nomadic practices of multidirectionality and diffusion as important
ЦШНОХs ПШr ЮЧНОrsЭКЧНТЧР ЭСО lЮМЭЮКЧЭ rОХКЭТШЧs аТЭС spКМО prКМЭТМОН Лв
МШЧЭОЦpШrКrв ЧШЦКНs.
74
AУКв DКЧНОФКr. NКrrКЭТЯО ПrШЦ ЭСО PКsЭШrКХ КЧН ЭСО NШЦКНТМ АШrХНs ШП ЭСО DОММКЧ //
MъМСОпХ Ó СAШНСК (EН.). TСО NШЦКНТМ SЮЛУОМЭ: PШsЭМШХШЧТКХ IНОЧЭТЭТОs ШЧ ЭСО MКrРТЧ.
NОаМКsЭХО, 2007. . 13.
81
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Molly BRUNSON
WANDERING GREEKS:
HOW REPIN DISCOVERS THE PEOPLE*
“I didn’t like travel or excursions of any kind.”1 With this confession
Ilya Repin begins his reminiscences on the creation of perhaps his most
well-known painting, Barge Haulers on the Volga (Burlaki na Volge,
1870–1873, Fig. 1). As a young student at the Imperial Academy of the Arts
in St. Petersburg, the relatively introverted Repin preferred to work in his
studio, venturing on occasion only as far as the academy garden to sketch
in the open air, or the foyer to copy the sculptures that lined the grand staircase. In the summer of 1869 there were many students like him roaming
the academy hallways, alternating work on competition pieces with strolls
Early versions of this article were presented at the 2009 annual convention of the
Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES, formerly AAASS)
and at an April 2010 meeting of Yale University’s Russian and East European Reading
Group. I am grateful to the participants of both events and to the two anonymous reviewers
for Ab Imperio for their many helpful comments and suggestions. Special thanks are due
to Bella Grigoryan for her translation assistance and Serguei Oushakine for his careful
and supportive reading (and for the title). Finally, I am grateful to the State Russian
Museum and the State Tretyakov Gallery for permission to use reproductions of the
relevant art works in this article.
1
I. E. Repin. Iz vremen vozniknoveniia moei kartiny “Burlaki na Volge” // Golos
minuvshego. 1915. Nos. 1, 3, 6. Reprinted as: Burlaki na Volge 1868–70 // I. E. Repin.
Dalekoe blizkoe. Moscow, 1964. P. 220. Unless otherwise noted, all translations into
English are mine, and I alone am responsible for any errors.
*
83
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
through the capital city, its famous white nights fueling the long hours. Since
students customarily did not share work with one another, Repin writes that
“adventurous colleagues would catch the hermits in the hallways,” luring
them from their tiny workspaces out into the wider world.2 If not for one
such outgoing classmate, Konstantin Savitsky, Repin himself may have never
left his hideout. And it was on this rarest of weekend excursions down the
Neva River that Repin saw for the irst time the subject that would make him
famous – a scene of barge haulers (burlaki) against a colorful backdrop of
picnicking vacationers and sailboats, glimmering in the summer sunshine.
Fig. 1. I. E. Repin, Barge haulers on the Volga (Burlaki na Volge), 1870–3 (State Russian
Museum, St. Petersburg).
In Repin’s early sketches and watercolors of the barge haulers, the message of the work was anything but subtle, dependent as it was upon the stark
contrast between leisure and labor, freedom and oppression.3 Repin recalls
the reaction of the young landscape painter Fyodor Vasilyev:
Ahh, the barge haulers! So, they’ve hit a nerve? Yes, here it is, a
life that is so incompatible with the old inventions of pitiful, venerable old men… But do you know something? I worry that you might
fall into tendentiousness. Yes, I see it now, a study in watercolor…
Here you’ve got young ladies, their admirers, a countryhouse setting,
something in the manner of a picnic; whereas, these grubby ones are
rather too artiicially “compositioned into” (prikomponovyvaiut’sia) the
Ibid.
A black-and-white illustration of one of Repin’s irst Neva watercolors is included in
the Chukovskii edition of Dalekoe blizkoe (1964). The location is listed as unknown.
Ibid. Pp. 216-217.
2
3
84
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
picture for the sake of ediication: look, they’re saying, what wretched
monsters we are, what gorillas. Oh, you’ll get lost in this picture: it’s
got far too much rationality. A picture should be broader, simpler, what
is known as a picture that stands on its own…. If we’re to have barge
haulers, then let us have barge haulers! In your place, I would travel
to the Volga – they say that this is where one ought to search for the
real, traditional type of the barge hauler.4
Vasilyev, by all accounts the more outgoing of the two, proposes a summer trip down the Volga River as the appropriate solution to the artiicial
composition of Repin’s sketches, arguing that such authenticity will obscure the inal work’s didactic heaviness and reveal a greater artistry. And
so, a year later, Vasilyev and Repin set out on a several-month trip down
the Volga, accompanied by Repin’s younger brother and their fellow artist
Evgeny Makarov.5 In the following pages, I will propose that this trip, an
epic journey of sorts, inspired by the search for a new subject and the ever
more insistent demands for realistic representation, is what deines the expressive contours and produces the aesthetic and ideological peculiarities
of Repin’s realist masterpiece.
By abandoning the studio for on-site research, Repin and Vasilyev do
more than simply enact an artistic cliché; they also participate in progressive trends already under way in European and Russian painting, more
speciically, the push toward a greater democraticization of subject matter,
the rage for ethnography and its supposed scientiic objectivity, and the
growing enthusiasm for plein-air landscape painting. Put simply, Repin
and his cohort strive to eliminate the distance, physical and otherwise, between themselves and their subjects. For the leading critic and theoretician
of nineteenth-century Russian realism, Vladimir Stasov, it is precisely this
proximity to the “real” that characterizes the ideological power of the new
generation of artists. In an 1871 exhibition review, he wonders who could
have imagined that Russian artists would leave their studios, that
…they, these artists, whom everyone had until now imagined to be
careless idlers, naive young men – each of whom knew only “the
Ibid. P. 225.
A. Leonov reconstructs several key dates and places of Repin’s 1870 itinerary. In late
May or early June, the group sailed from Tver’ with the company Samolet. On June
5, they were in Rybinsk. On June 8, they reached Nizhnii Novgorod. They spent two
weeks in mid-June in Stavropol’ and Samara, then in Shiriaev byerak. They continued
to travel in this area throughout July. Repin returned to Samara on his honeymoon in
1872, during which time he completed additional sketches for the inal version of the
painting. A. Leonov. Burlaki na Volge. Kartina I. E. Repina. Moscow, 1945. Pp. 9-23.
4
5
85
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
divine Raphael” and his future buyer, and was occupied only with a
plaster Hercules and his own painting, or some foggy, lofty talks with
a friend about the “ideal” and about “art” – that they would suddenly
abandon their artists’ lairs and wish to plunge (okunut’sia) into the
ocean of real life, to join with its surges and currents, to think about
other people, their comrades!6
Although Stasov is speaking generally here about the push toward realism in Russian painting, he employs a turn of phrase that will reemerge in
his discussions of Repin in the coming years. Okunut’sia. To plunge into.
To immerse oneself.
This “immersion” into one’s subject matter, the life of the people, reappears in Stasov’s 1873 letter to the editor of the St. Petersburg Gazette
(Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti). The letter is now famous for its exuberant praise of the just-inished Barge Haulers on the Volga and its effectual
appointment of young Repin to the post of ultimate realist.
Mr. Repin is a realist, like Gogol, and just like him, deeply national.
With a daring of, for us, an unprecedented sort, he has abandoned any
remaining ideas about something ideal in art and has plunged (okunulsia) headirst into the very depths of the people’s lives, the people’s
interests, and the people’s oppressive reality.7
Stasov goes on to provide what will become the dominant reading of
Repin’s Barge Haulers, a reading that identiies the young boy in red as
the central igure of protest. The boy, or so argues Stasov, rises up in opposition to the somnambulant apathy of his coworkers and the sultry haze
of the summer afternoon. For Stasov, Repin’s “immersion” into this world
of the common people produces the potent mix of objective representation,
national content, and oppositional ideology that will comprise the foundation
of the critic’s interpretation of realist painting in Russia.8
The call for an objective and national art, and the supposedly populist
orientation of this imperative, does not begin with Stasov, however. In an
V. V. Stasov. Peredvizhnaia vystavka 1871 goda (1871) // Idem. Izbrannye sochineniia
v trekh tomakh. Moscow, 1952. Vol. 1. P. 204.
7
V. V. Stasov. Kartina Repina “Burlaki na Volge” (1873) // Idem. Izbrannye sochineniia
v trekh tomakh. Vol. 1. P. 239.
8
In his own review of the 1873 academy exhibition, Dostoevsky famously disagrees
with Stasov about the dominance of the painting’s ideological message, praising instead
the subtlety of the social content. “Not one of them,” he writes, referring to the barge
haulers, “shouts from the painting to the viewer.” F. M. Dostoevskii. Po povodu vystavki
(1873) // Idem. Sobranie sochinenii v piatnadtsati tomakh. Leningrad, 1994. Vol. 12. P. 88.
6
86
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
1863 review of the annual Academy of the Arts exhibition, the progressive
critic Ivan Dmitriev publishes a vitriolic attack on contemporary artists, accusing them of pandering to the tastes of the academy and its elite patrons,
while ignoring the need for socially relevant works of art. “Art should be of
beneit to the people,” concludes the critic, “a necessity of the people, but it
obviously will not attain these results with useless, ancient habits.”9 A few
weeks after the publication of Dmitriev’s article, a group of fourteen artists
led by the painter Ivan Kramskoy withdrew from the academy, citing lack of
freedom in the choice of their Gold Medal subjects. More speciically, they
took issue with that year’s mandatory and decidedly non-Russian subject
for history painting, “Valhalla, a scene from Scandinavian mythology.” Supposedly freed from the constraints of the academy, Kramskoy and the others
formed the St. Petersburg Artel, a communal artistic association intended
to ensure the economic security of its members, provide opportunities for
public exhibitions, and administer commissions. In 1870, the members of
the Artel and a group of Moscow artists headed by Nikolay Ge and Grigory
Miasoedov merged to form the Society of Traveling Art Exhibitions, better
known as the Peredvizhniki, or the Wanderers (Tovarishchestvo peredvizhnykh khudozhestvennykh vystavok). The goals of the Wanderers, at least as
they were presented in their founding statute, were threefold: to bring art to
the people in the provinces, to develop in the people a love and appreciation
for art, and to provide opportunities for their members to achieve economic
independence.10 In lieu of a clearly expressed aesthetic programme, Kramskoy and Stasov, as the unoficial theoreticians of the Wanderers, will profess
the group’s dedication to social content over formal experimentation in
letters, articles, and reviews throughout the 1870s and 1880s.11
I. I. Dmitriev. Rassharkivaiushcheesia iskusstvo (po povodu godichnoi vystavki v
Akademii Khudozhestv) (1863) // N. I. Bespalova and A. G. Vereshchagina (Eds.).
Russkaia progressivnaia khudozhestvennaia kritika vtoroi poloviny XIX veka. Moscow,
1979. P. 158.
10
For more on the history of the Wanderers and their relation to the critical realism of
the 1860s, see Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier. Russian Realist Art. The State and Society:
The Peredvizhniki and Their Tradition. Ann Arbor, 1977; Idem. The Peredvizhniki and
the Spirit of the 1860s // Russian Review. 1975. Vol. 34. No. 3. Pp. 247-265; and David Jackson. The Wanderers and Critical Realism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art.
Manchester, 2006. Carol Adlam addresses the role of art criticism in the rise of realism
in: Realist Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Russian Art Writing // Slavonic and East
European Review. 2005. Vol. 83. No. 4. Pp. 638-663.
11
This emphasis on content and immediate comprehensibility will also presumably
inspire Clement Greenberg to name Repin as an example of kitsch (as opposed to the
avant-garde). Greenberg writes that “Repin pre-digests art for the spectator and spares him
9
87
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
The Wanderers’ expressed interest in the people aligns them with a
broader populist movement, which, in response to growing discontent with
the reforms following the 1861 emancipation of the serfs, swept through
intelligentsia circles throughout the 1870s. By leaving the urban centers
and “going to the people,” the most radical populists, the narodniki, sought
to capitalize upon the natural virtues of the peasantry and to instill in them
a revolutionary fervor that would overhaul Russian imperial society. On
its face, this “going to the people” seems akin to Stasov’s call for “immersion.” However, while they may be parallel manifestations of a more
general orientation, the narodniki and the Wanderers were inscribed within
very different social groups and driven by very different ideological and
aesthetic demands. In her foundational history of the Wanderers, Elizabeth
Kridl Valkenier complicates the supposed civic mission of the early realist
painters, what another scholar has called the “Peredvizhniki myth.”12 She
explains that their traveling exhibitions were “neither intended for nor ever
reached the Russian peasantry and working class.”13 Rather than “going
to the people,” the Wanderers brought their art to a group of middle class,
provincial Russians. One of the reasons for this was, according to Valkenier,
quite practical. Themselves mostly of humble origin, the Wanderers sought
to proit from their art, to attain economic security through sales and commissions, rather than conform to a purely ideological agenda. This economic
demand, coupled with the Wanderers’ continued oficial and unoficial reliance upon the institutional structures of the academy, produced works that
would have a broader reach, aesthetically appealing but still with the lavor
of intelligentsia values. It is a more tempered populism that we see in the
paintings sanctioned by the Wanderers, one determined as much by politics
as by social status, the market, and aesthetic norms.
Although Repin will not oficially become a Wanderer until 1878, with
Barge Haulers he claims the title of painter of the people. And this narrative
of a young artist making a pilgrimage to join hands with the oppressed lower
classes, however problematic and deserving of our skepticism, was what
so ingratiated Repin to Stasov and Kramskoy, the presumptive leaders of
effort, provides him with a short cut to the pleasure of art that detours what is necessarily dificult in genuine art.” Greenberg will admit in a later edition of the famous article
that he had confused Repin with another painter. Clement Greenberg. Avant-Garde and
Kitsch (1939) // Francis Frascine (Ed.). Pollock and After: The Critical Debate. New
York, 1985. P. 28.
12
The “Peredvizhniki myth” is Evgeny Steiner’s term. Pursuing Independence: Kramskoi
and the Peredvizhniki vs. the Academy of the Arts // Russian Review. 2011. Vol. 70. P. 252.
13
Valkenier. Russian Realist Art. P. 45. See also: Pp. 3-48 and 68-73.
88
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the movement. Given the supposed causal link between proximity to one’s
subject and the “truthful” communication of a message, it should not come
as a terrible surprise that problems arose when Repin, upon receiving the
academy’s Gold Medal prize, traveled to western Europe in 1873 to study
for three years. Stasov’s ingénue was wandering, but doing so in the wrong
geographic and ideological space. How, after all, could the “immersion”
into Parisian cosmopolitan life produce anything that would further the
aesthetic and ideological goals of a native Russian realism? As it turns out,
and as others have discussed at length, Repin’s time abroad did trigger a
certain resistance to the narrative demands of Stasov’s realism and a desire
for greater formal experimentation.14 In a now famous letter to Kramskoy,
Repin asks God to “save Russian art from its corrosive analysis.” “It is a
misfortune,” he writes, “which terribly binds it to barren, technical accuracy
and rational concepts in ideas, drawn from political economy.”15 Repin’s
letter provoked a quick and sharply worded response from Kramskoy, concerned that the impressionable young painter might be straying from the
plan for national art. Stasov took a slightly different approach, publishing
an article on Repin in which he cited selective excerpts from their correspondence meant to highlight only anti-Western sentiments. Moreover, upon
returning to Russia, Repin was promptly shipped off to his native village
to purge the pernicious Western inluences so apparent in paintings such as
The Parisian Café (Parizhskoe kafe, 1875) and “regain his powers … of a
realist, a national artist.”16
14
See, for example: Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier. Ilya Repin and the World of Russian Art.
New York, 1990; David Jackson. The Russian Vision: The Art of Ilya Repin. Schoten,
2006. Pp. 42-74; and Idem. Western Art and Russian Ethics: Repin in Paris, 1873–1876
// Russian Review. 1998. Vol. 57. No. 3. Pp. 394-409. For more on the parallels between
the Wanderers and movements in Western art, see: E. V. Nesterova. Russko-frantsuzskie
khudozhestvennye sviazi vtoroi poloviny XIX veka // Andrei V. Tolstoi (Ed.). Rossiia –
Evropa: iz istorii russko-evropeiskikh khudozhestvennykh sviazei XVIII–XX vv.
Sbornik statei. Moscow, 1995; D. V. Sarab’ianov. Russkaia realisticheskaia zhivopis’
vtoroi poloviny XIX veka i ee rol’ v evropeiskom iskusstve // Idem. Russkaia zhivopis’
XIX veka sredi evropeiskikh shkol: opyt sravnitel’nogo issledovaniia. Moscow, 1980.
Pp. 107-40; Rosalind P. Blakesley. “There is Something There…”: The Peredvizhniki and
West European Art // Experiment/Eksperiment. 2008. Vol. 14. Pp. 18-50; and Rosalind
P. Blakesley and Susan E. Reid (Eds.). Russian Art and the West: A Century of Dialogue
in Painting, Architecture, and the Decorative Arts. Dekalb, 2007.
15
Repin. Letter to Kramskoi (October 16, 1874) // Jackson. Western Art and Russian
Ethics. P. 399.
16
Stasov. Letter to Kramskoi (November 7, 1876) // Elizabeth Kridl Valkenier. Opening
up to Europe: The Peredvizhniki and the Miriskussniki Respond to the West // Blakesley
and Reid. Russian Art and the West. P. 50.
89
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
This psychodrama, in addition to being one of the more outrageous
anecdotes of the period, is also quite instructive. It speaks to the spatial
quirks of Repin’s aesthetic, how dependent it is upon the tension between
proximity and distance. By leaving his studio, Repin sets into motion the
dual pressures of a journey, the way in which it is always about both an
arrival and a departure. This is not, to be sure, an aimless wandering (as
might be assumed by the imperfect English translation of Peredvizhniki), but
rather a wandering with a purpose, a wandering anchored by a point A and
a point B. Or maybe it is an imagined wandering, one that allows the artist
to dislodge himself from staid conventions and refresh his point of view. If
Repin’s journey is just as much about leaving the academy as it is about going
to the people, then once he is on the shores of the Volga, the journey’s spatial
dynamic reverses itself, becoming about leaving the site and returning to the
studio. It is this spatial conundrum – forever here and there – that shapes the
formal characteristics of Barge Haulers. Repin may discover his subject on
the Volga, but this attempt at cultural and social immersion is answered by
an opposing force that pulls the painter out of the world of the barge haulers
and into a world of formalism and even epic universalism.
The social type I have in mind here is Georg Simmel’s “stranger,” “the
man who comes today and stays tomorrow – the potential wanderer, so
to speak, who, although he has gone no further, has not quite got over the
freedom of coming and going.”17 A fusion of closeness and remoteness, attachment and detachment, Simmel’s “stranger” is conditioned by his unique
position in space and his relationships with those who are not strange but native. The in-betweenness of the “stranger” was likely even more profoundly
felt by Repin because of his own social origins – he was born in 1844 in
the small village of Chuguev to a father who was stationed in the Russian
military settlement. Repin was sensitive to his heritage and, as suggested
by an 1872 letter to Stasov, even conscious that his social status might be
a boon to the young realists.
That is why the artist has no reason to stick around Petersburg,
where more than anywhere else, the people are enslaved (narod rab);
whereas, society is confused, old, and living out its last. There are no
subjects there of popular interest (form narodnogo interesa).
The muzhik is now the arbiter of taste, and hence we must reproduce
his interests (for me this is an opportune moment since, as you know,
Georg Simmel. The Stranger (1908) // Donald N. Levine (Ed.). On Individuality and
Social Forms. Chicago, 1971. P. 143. I am grateful to Serguei Oushakine for suggesting
this link with Simmel.
17
90
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
I am a muzhik, the son of a retired private who spent twenty-seven not
very fortunate years soldiering for Nicholas).18
Having taken a break from Barge Haulers to travel to Moscow in connection with Slavic Composers (Slavianskie kompozitory, 1872), Repin
expresses the creative impetus behind leaving St. Petersburg. Once the
privileged locale of native artistic practice, not to mention the birthplace of
Russian realism, the capital city has become too oppressive for the young
artist. A truly modern realist must, according to Repin, travel to other places
where the people’s interests are more positively represented. Repin even emphasizes his distance from the cultural elite by asserting his muzhik origins.
In doing so, he casts himself in the role of an inveterate “stranger,” whether
strolling along the banks of the Neva or the Volga or the Moscow rivers.
In the remainder of this article, I consider how Repin’s unique orientation
as a “stranger” enacts a reinement of the progressive image of the “people”
in Barge Haulers on the Volga. Having sought out the authentic burlak, Repin
discovers instead the complex and often paradoxical nature of the “people,” a
concept that becomes more a composite projection of Repin’s own experience
than a relection of any exterior reality. In this, Repin participates in a larger
cultural phenomenon that accompanied the exposure of the intelligentsia
and the radical narodniki to “real” examples of the Russian peasantry. No
longer able to maintain idealized images of the people, they replace these
myths with alternative images, some negative and almost subhuman, others
still sympathetic but more precise.19 Informed by Stasov’s realist “immersion” and the remoteness of the eternal outsider, Repin’s “people” emerge
as simultaneously transparent in their narrative of oppression and revolt
and ultimately unknowable in their foreignness, in their blank looks, in the
thickly applied deep browns of their ragged clothing. They are a subject both
near and far, readable and unreadable. These two forces, I will argue, enact
their push and pull on multiple levels, social, physical, epistemological, and
ontological. And it is the tension between these opposing forces, borne of
the spatial and social realities of the painting’s production, that will in turn
supply energy to the painting’s oppositional message.
Repin. Letter to Stasov (June 3, 1872) // I. E. Repin. Izbrannye pis’ma v dvukh tomakh
1867–1930. Moscow, 1969. Vol. 1. P. 41.
19
For more on the changing images of the peasant in Russian society and culture throughout the nineteenth century, see: Cathy A. Frierson. Peasant Icons: Representations of Rural
People in Late Nineteenth-Century Russia. New York, 1993. See also: Donald Fanger.
The Peasant in Literature // Wayne S. Vucinich (Ed.). The Peasant in Nineteenth-Century
Russia. Stanford, 1968. Pp. 231-262.
18
91
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
Barge Haulers Near and Far
Repin was not the irst to ind the barge haulers a promising subject for
artistic representation. As early as 1810, Orest Kiprensky completed a small
drawing titled “Landscape with Barge Haulers,” and in 1855, Ivan Nikitin
published a poem “Barge Hauler” in Notes of the Fatherland (Otechestvennye zapiski). The most famous burlaki, however, belong to none other
than Nikolay Nekrasov, and many contemporary viewers even wondered if
Repin’s painting was an illustration of his “Thoughts at a Vestibule” (Razmyshleniia u paradnogo pod”ezda, 1858). Nekrasov’s barge haulers trudge
along the shores of the Volga, joining their voices in what becomes a “song”
of overwhelming suffering – “where there are people, there too is moaning”
(Gde narod, tam i ston).20 Given that the poet fuses the barge hauler with the
“people” in a singular image of uprising, one might think that Stasov would
have supported the association of Nekrasov’s barge haulers with Repin’s.
Instead, he takes issue with this interpretation and, in an 1874 article, makes
a point of Repin’s originality, arguing that his barge haulers have nothing
in common with those of Nekrasov. They do not moan. They do not sing.
They walk in silence, each occupied with his own thoughts and his own
worries. For Stasov, the power of Repin’s picture resides in the fact that the
subject is lifted not from “books, but from the very lives of the people.”21
Vasily Vereshchagin, on the other hand, sees no such unmediated verisimilitude in Repin’s picture. Having read Stasov’s 1873 letter to the editor
of the St. Petersburg Gazette, Vereshchagin immediately sends a response
to the newspaper, claiming that Repin should not get all the glory, since
he himself had begun a painting on the same theme in 1866. Outraged,
Vereshchagin writes another letter, this time to Stasov, in which he accuses
Repin not only of treading on his territory but also of executing the subject
poorly and inaccurately. For Vereshchagin, the main (and rather petty)
point of contention was the number of people required in a work crew. In
actuality, he writes, there would be three to four such groups, not a single
group with only ive to six men. Tracing this dispute in relation to the other
N. A. Nekrasov. Polnoe sobranie sochinenii i pisem v piatnadtsati tomakh. Leningrad,
1981–2000. Vol. 2. P. 49.
21
Stasov is polemicizing, in particular, with the critic M. P. Kovalevskii (of Otechestvennye
zapiski). V. V. Stasov. Nyneshnee iskusstvo v Evrope. Khudozhestvennye zametki o
vsemirnoi vystavke (1873 goda) v Vene (1874) // Idem. Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 1.
Pp. 91-92. In his reminiscences, Repin himself claims that he had not known Nekrasov’s
poem before Barge Haulers and read the verses for the irst time two years after the
completion of the canvas. Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. P. 274.
20
92
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
representations of barge haulers from the time (by Repin, Aleksey Savrasov,
and Fyodor Vasilyev, more speciically), Elena Nesterova argues that the
differences between the images of Vereshchagin and Repin reveal a broader
transformation in aesthetic ideology from the 1860s to the 1870s. Vereshchagin, still very much invested in the positivism of the sixties, produces an
“informative” picture, one that captures as objectively as possible the real
conditions of the workers. Repin’s painting, on the other hand, is a “relection of reality through the prism of the internal, spiritual world of man.”22
This iltering of the objective world through the subjective is, in Nesterova’s
view, what sets the Wanderers apart from their predecessors.23 While I will
recast Nesterova’s terms, emphasizing spatial and social conditions over
spiritual and psychological ones, I agree with her overall conclusion that the
status of verisimilitude in Repin’s painting not only reveals a move toward
a more nuanced aesthetics of realism but also sheds light upon the complex
negotiations between artists and their “real” subjects. In other words, I will
complicate (and even prove to be undesirable, not to mention unattainable)
the requirement that a painting, in order to be realist, must be snatched “from
the very lives of the people.”
Allow me now to turn to the painting itself and, in fact, stay with the
painting for the remainder of this article. I will enact this kind of extended
engagement out of a conviction that something quite interesting happens to
a realist painting when subjected to prolonged visual attention, something
that might be similar to what occurred when Repin observed the burlaki for
several months on end.24 We move from an initial comprehension of narrative content – those are barge haulers pulling a ship along the Volga – to a
complex recognition of the disruptions and inconsistencies in that narrative,
the way in which our diverse impressions do not always cohere into a single,
legible story. The corporeality becomes disembodied, the now becomes a
22
E. V. Nesterova. Tema burlakov v russkoi zhivopisi 1860-1870 godov // Il’ia Eimovich Repin. K 150-letiiu so dnia rozhdeniia. Sbornik statei. St. Petersburg, 1994. P. 65.
23
D. Sarab’ianov makes a similar claim in regard to Repin’s Barge Haulers, arguing
that we can see within the work evidence of the transformation from 1860s realism to
a later realism deined more by psychology and morality. D. Sarab’ianov. Narodnoosvoboditel’nye idei russkoi zhivopisi vtoroi poloviny XIX veka. Moscow, 1955. P. 122.
24
In this act of prolonged visual attention, I am following the lead of art historian Michael
Fried, whose inluential work on realism has identiied a pervasive tendency to read rather
than look at realist painting. Realist works are, Fried writes, “looked at less intensively
than other kinds of pictures, precisely because their imagined causal dependence on
reality – a sort of ontological illusion – has made close scrutiny of what they offer appear
to be beside the point.” Michael Fried. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago, 1990. P. 3.
93
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
distant past, and the picture outs itself as a carefully managed illusion. But
just as our attention undoes the image, so too does it put it back together.
This epistemological tension that is embraced by igurative painting, and
the kind of the realist variety perhaps most intensely, will be a consistent
leitmotif in my following discussion of traveling, space, self, and subject.
To begin at the beginning, we must recall that Repin packed a bag,
boarded a ship, and traveled to his subject. In Barge Haulers, Repin communicates this proximity to
the subject by establishing
direct eye contact between
one of the men and the viewer.
Although Stasov had been
most drawn to the young boy
in red, I think that the man
immediately in front of him
plays an even more critical
role in establishing a connection with the viewer. Caught
in a stare for the ages, he
makes visible (almost tactile) the pact of anonymity
between painter and subject,
and violates the supposed
unidirectional observation
of the artistic enterprise. The
preparatory sketch for this
igure testiies to the power
of the subject’s returned gaze,
at once intimate and intimidating (Fig. 2). In the inal Fig. 2. I. E. Repin, Sketch of a barge hauler, 1870
work, we cannot help but be (State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).
both attracted to and repelled from this man’s searing eyes.25 The gaze is
an outstretched hand, an invitation to make contact, and a sharp rebuke of
the voyeuristic position shared by painter and viewer.
Of the group his is the body most acutely tilted toward the ground.
Because of this awkward suspension, the man urges us to imagine his position in space and reminds us of the physics of this scene. If any two forces
Sarab’ianov writes that this man’s gaze “forces [the viewer] to shudder.” Sarab’ianov.
Narodno-osvoboditel’nye idei russkoi zhivopisi. P. 128.
25
94
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
are dominant, they are the forces of weight and of gravity. The bodies of
these men lean forward, suspended by the ties around their chests and the
heavy counterweight of the ship on the river. A bizarre study reveals how
important this counterweight is (Fig. 3). We see a man standing strapped
into the barge hauler’s harness. Behind him is not a ship caught in a powerful crosscurrent, but what seems to be a fenced-in pasture underneath the
luffy white clouds of an otherwise bright afternoon. It is an odd image,
with its background surely
illed in as an afterthought
or as a professional exercise
while in the artist’s studio,
but it reminds us that without a pull in the opposite
direction, this man becomes
weightless, a ghost, a phantom from another world.
Returning to the inal painting, we now see both the
real balance between weight
and gravity that makes this
labor possible, and the disruption of this physical
system wrought by the uncanny lotation of the barge
hauler in the study. The
labor is grounded by bodily
weight, yet disembodied
Fig. 3. I. E. Repin, Study of a barge hauler, 1870 (State and utterly implausible.
Russian Museum, St. Petersburg).
The last man in the work
crew underlines the point. His body pitched forward, has he in fact tilted
the scale? Does he participate in the balance of weight and gravity, or has
he been lifted out of the group and suspended above the glistening pool
of water at his feet? In his liminal position, hovering between heaviness
and weightlessness, this man is at once a record of the spatial dynamics
of barge hauling and a trace of the formal distortions wrought by Repin’s
status as a “stranger.”
According to Stasov, the French critic Paul Manz compared Repin’s
painting to another realist classic, Gustave Courbet’s The Stonebreakers
(1849), and even went so far as to say that Proudhon himself would have
95
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
been moved to tears by the barge haulers.26 Although separated by over two
decades, the works share more than just a theme, mode, and outsized reputation; they share a disturbance in their depiction of labor, a simultaneous
closeness to and distance from their chosen subject. Courbet’s two central
igures are situated in close proximity to the picture plane and to the space
of the viewer. And yet, their faces are turned away, preventing any direct
communion between observer and observed. This paradox is exaggerated
by the inability of the igures to fully cohere to the ground, the way in which
the men seem almost afixed to a lat surface. Referring to the simultaneous physicality and stiltedness of the representation of labor, art historian
T. J. Clark has called this “an image of balked and frozen movement rather
than simple exertion . . . an image of labour gone to waste, and men turned
stiff and wooden by routine.”27 In this, Clark sees a hallmark of the artist’s
realism, the way in which it took up “the social material of rural France, its
shifts and ambiguities, its deadly permanence, its total structure.”28 A man
of split identity, his peasantry roots not far beneath the bourgeois surface,
Courbet, or so Clark argues, paints a France with similar internal contradictions and tensions. For Michael Fried, the unusual placement of Courbet’s
igures and the nearness of their bodies are evidence of something else,
the foundation of the artist’s aesthetics in corporeality and metaphor. More
speciically, the bodies, absorbed in labor, become a metaphor of the very
process of representation. They are doubles for the painter himself, engaged
in artistic labor and, as such, become doubles too for the process of beholding
the image.29 In his more recent work on the German realist Adolph Menzel,
Fried expands upon this notion of an “art of embodiment,” an art that involves “countless acts of imaginative projection of bodily experience,” an
art that invites the viewer “to perform feats of imaginative projection not
unlike those that gave rise to the paintings and drawings in the irst place.”30
When I look at Repin’s workers, I see a productive coexistence of these
two readings. On the one hand, the strange mixture of knowability and
26
V. V. Stasov. Nashi itogi na vsemirnoi vystavke (1878–1879) // Idem. Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 1 P. 344. Igor Grabar’ writes that he was impressed by Repin’s technical
mastery in comparison to the “backwardness” of Courbet’s The Stonebreakers. I. E.
Grabar’. Repin (Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei). Moscow, 1933. P. 66.
27
T. J. Clark. Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (1973).
Berkeley, 1999. Pp. 79-80.
28
Ibid. P. 116.
29
Fried. Courbet’s Realism. Pp. 99-110.
30
Michael Fried. Menzel’s Realism: Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin.
New Haven, 2002. P. 13.
96
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
utter foreignness of the workers must have emerged, in part, as an answer
to Repin’s own conlicted position vis-à-vis his subjects. While he was
certainly a “stranger,” invited inside the circle but also kept at a remove,
he was also someone who had come from a remote village, from peasant
origins, only then to ind himself examining a version of his own identity
from the position of a distinct other.31 In this way, the picture relects the
broader social realities of the 1870s, while also capturing the peculiar
status of the realist artist within that social system. On the other hand, in
addition (and not, I would urge, contradiction) to a social reading, Repin’s
canvas also invites a Friedian embodied viewer, a viewer that projects
herself into the canvas and merges with both the subject and the artist. We
are asked to imagine what it would have taken to move that boat down
the river, and what it would have taken to project our own understanding
of the labor onto a blank canvas, miles away in an artist’s studio. Attachment and detachment, arising from the complex negotiations of social
space, now become also about observing and participating in the project
of representation.
In his memoirs, we ind Repin engaging with what seem to be the limits
of this kind of embodiment.
And yet another great nuisance made itself more and more apparent: beginning with our boots, which simply burned from our long
strolls among the hills and forests, our clothing suddenly decayed and
transformed into the most improper rags: our trousers began to split
into some kind of ribbons and lopped unceremoniously below like
picturesque paws (zhivopisnymi lapami)... Once with horror I saw
myself clearly in such beggarly rags that I was even shocked by how
quickly I had arrived at “such a life.”32
What Repin describes is not only travel taking its predicable toll, it is also
a process of assimilation. Simply imagining the bodies and clothing of the
barge haulers is followed by a transformation of sorts. Their boots decay,
their clothing turns to rags, and their bodies become “pictureseque” (zhivopisnye). It is worth emphasizing, however, that this is not a transformation
into a barge hauler, but a transformation into a depicted barge hauler. Or, to
Discussing the social distance between the artists and their subjects, Repin recalls hearing the locals say that the artists were messengers of the Antichrist. He adds that mothers
would not allow their children to sit for the artists and only the bravest of locals would
do so themselves, even when promised payment. Repin. Letter to P. V. Alabin (January
26, 1895) // Idem. Izbrannye pis’ma. Vol. 2. Pp. 90-94.
32
Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. P. 263.
31
97
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
put it still another way, rather than immersing himself in the reality of the
people, Repin immerses himself into their representation.
This transformation from artist to subject, and the luidity between art
and life that it implies, is one of the boldest conceits of a realist aesthetic
perhaps best demonstrated by Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done?
(Chto delat’? 1863), a novel meant both to capture a present reality and to
posit a future utopia that would provide a literary model for the lives of new
men and women.33 Rakhmetov, Chernyshevsky’s archetypal new man, goes
a step further than Repin and Vasilyev, working alongside barge haulers in
order to reforge his mind and body.
About a year after adopting this program, he set off on his travels
(stranstvovanie) and had even greater opportunities to devote himself
to building physical strength. He worked as a plowman, carpenter, ferryman, and laborer at all sorts of healthful trades. Once he even worked
as a barge hauler along the whole length of the Volga, from Dubovka
to Rybinsk. If he’d told the captain of the barge and the crew that he
wanted to work as a barge hauler, they’d have considered it the height
of stupidity and would never have accepted him. So he went aboard
as a passenger and became friendly with the crew and began to help
them tow the boat. In a week he buckled himself into a harness, just
like a real barge hauler.34
Rakhmetov is transformed by his “travels,” even receiving a new nickname,
Nikitushka Lomov, borrowed from a bogatyr famous from Volga folktales.
While Rakhmetov’s embodiment of a burlak may seem more genuine than
Repin’s, his adoption of a name straight out of legend reveals the vulnerability of his transformation. If we return to Stasov’s own celebration of
Repin’s immersive potential, we see similar signs of its fallibility.
Whoever looks at Repin’s Barge Haulers will immediately understand that the artist was deeply impacted and shaken by the scenes that
appeared before his eyes. He has touched these hands made of cast
iron, with their sinews, thick and strained like rope.35
In her study of the novel, Irina Paperno describes the mechanics of realist aesthetics in
the following way: “Taking its material from life, refashioning it, and then returning to
life for imitation and actualization, literature regenerates and extends contemporary life
into the future and recasts man as he is into a new man.” Irina Paperno. Chernyshevsky
and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford, 1988. P. 9.
34
Nikolai Chernyshevsky. What Is To Be Done? / Transl. Michael R. Katz. Ithaca, 1989.
P. 279.
35
V. V. Stasov. Il’ia Eimovich Repin. // Idem. Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 1. P. 265.
33
98
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Like Rakhmetov, Repin moves beyond detached observation and toward
participation, reaching out and making physical contact, tracing the signs
of hard labor etched onto another’s hands. But these hands are “poured
from cast iron” and their veins are “like rope.” The intrusion of metaphoric
language into a description of Repin’s mimetic acumen changes Stasov’s
“immersion” into something more akin to Fried’s “imaginative projection.”
In Barge Haulers, the relationship between artist and subject – which is
bequeathed to viewer and subject – repeats this fraught juxtaposition of
physical contact and metaphoric distance. We hold hands in one instant and
in the next we feel only the bumps and ridges of dried paint.
This tension between
near and far, triggered by the
continuity of the traveler’s
itinerary, is nowhere apparent than in the contrast between the extreme intimacy
of the individual portraits
and the shimmery immateriality of the background. With
the thickly applied paint and
Fig. 4. K. A. Savitsky, Repair Work on the Railroad, the rich tones of their bodies
1874 (State Tretyakov Gallery, Moscow).
and clothing, the barge haulers come together as a uniied group, while also distinguishing themselves
from the airy, light, liquid background, almost glassy in appearance.36 This
discontinuity between foreground and background becomes all the more stark
if we compare Repin’s picture with Savitsky’s Repair Work on the Railroad
(Remontnye raboty na zheleznoi doroge, 1875, Fig. 4), completed just a year
later. Savitsky’s laborers are tightly bound with their environment, connected
through the earthy greens and browns of their coloration and the way in which
they populate a majority of the visible ground plane. Although the railroad
workers are not without strangeness in their physical rendering – the central
group seems to ly in opposite directions, arms spread like wings over the
wheelbarrows – unlike Repin’s barge haulers, they make sense in this space.
This difference, I argue, is partially a result of the unique circumstances
of Repin’s ieldwork, his movement between ship and shore. Remembering
that summer, Repin recalls how striking seemed the discontinuity between
these two points of view.
36
Ol’ga Liaskovskaia discusses the uniied nature of the group in: Il’ia Eimovich Repin.
Moscow, 1962. P. 38.
99
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
What is most astounding about the Volga is the space. None of our
albums had the capacity to hold the unusual horizon.
From the middle of the river or from the steamboat you see mosquitoes of some kind along a luminescent strip on the hilly side of the
river. Lord, how they move about and just barely move forward… And
what about this hair pulling toward us? It’s the barge haulers pulling
the barge with a rope along the shore of the hilly side. We approach:
the light strip turns out to be a huge sloping incline up to the forest,
completely covered and pitted with boulders of light limestone, sandstone, and granite.37
This experience of moving between a distanced perspective and an extreme close-up comprises the central drama of a curious drawing by Repin
(Fig. 5). It is a composite image, bringing together three different sketches
from three different points of view onto a signal page. If we read the image
from left to right, we are rewarded with a
narrative of departure. From what seems
to be a relatively generalized sketch of a
vessel, we move to a full-body line drawing of Kanin, the leader of the work crew.
To the right of Kanin we see a landscape,
the dark lines of the pencil indicating the
abstracted gradations of the shore, “light
layers of limestone, sandstone, and granite.” Moving back in the other direction,
our departure is reversed into an arrival,
from the middle of the river we move to
shore, transforming the abstract view into
a real human being and, having moved
too close, back into an abstract object. In
this case, the single page of the traveler’s
sketchbook becomes an emblem of his Fig. 5. I. E. Repin, Sketch of Kanin
status as “stranger” and speaks to the towing and the Volga near the village
of Vorovskaya, 1870 (State Tretyakov
distortions rendered by this status. For the Gallery, Moscow).
traveling artist, the landscape shrinks to
the same size as a man (or does the man stretch to the enormity of the landscape?), and the ethnographic detail of a local piece of pottery becomes of
equal importance as a human face. All receive the same attention, but in the
absence of proper proportion and context, fail to cohere into a single picture.
37
Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. P. 241.
100
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Repin writes of this profound disconnect in the artists’ abilities to capture
both the details and the panoramic sweep of the Volga.
A little bit further on ... sat two ishermen with their nets: one is
cleaning and the other loading the hooks with worms – in a word, each
was at his own business. And we couldn’t stand it: we pulled out our
sketchbooks and began drawing…. All of it was amazingly painterly;
only we couldn’t work out the backgrounds: they couldn’t be contained
by any kind of dimension...38
Fig. 6. F. A. Vasilyev, Sketch of peasant and embankment, 1870 (State Russian Museum,
St. Petersburg).
Again, a page from a sketchbook echoes the story, this one belonging
to Vasilyev. The detailed proile of a isherman hovers over the tracing of
the shoreline, the pencil hastily sweeping back and forth, making the most
of the horizontal orientation of the book (Fig. 6). The problem here is apparent. Both of these visual experiences cannot be fused on paper. With
the constant mobility of the traveler comes the erasure of a ixed viewing
point, the kind that anchors the spatial system of Renaissance perspective
and that allows for the legible recording of distance and proportion. Instead,
38
Ibid.
101
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
the incessant movement from ship to shore to ship disrupts any production
of a continuous image, a “people in a landscape.” Rather than overcome
this disjunction, Barge Haulers will embrace it, and derive much of its
ideological power from it.
Before I turn to how exactly Repin makes the most of these complications,
a few more observations about the Volga are in order. The expansiveness
of the Volga – prostor seems the right word here – had posed a problem for
artists and travel writers for decades. As Christopher Ely relates in his study
of Volga River tourism, the brothers and landscape painters Nikanor and
Grigory Chernetsov, charged with exploring the Volga in 1838, had similar
trouble inding appropriate perspectives that would give them a picturesque
view. The river was just too big, with few areas of elevation or architectural
landmarks to organize the space in an aesthetic manner. The Chernetsovs
eventually produced a 2,000 ft. panorama, Travel along the Volga (Puteshestvie po Volge), a fact that only highlights the trouble that a painter would
encounter when trying to squeeze the space inside a reasonably-sized canvas. Ely links the boom in leisure travel in the 1870s–1880s with increased
attempts to make picturesque these wild Russian expanses. Referring to
Vasily Nemirovich-Danchenko’s travel guide Along the Volga (Po Volge,
1877), Ely concludes: “Along the Volga took the image of an unspectacular,
open, and lat Russian landscape and combined it with a breezy and frankly
pleasurable search for picturesque scenes and views in order to establish a
unique form of touristic vision in Russia.”39
The “picturesque” nature of landscape painting was clearly a problem
for the ideologues of a critical, even tendentious, realism, who were never
fully comfortable with the idle gazing encouraged by pretty views, or their
possible contamination of an otherwise sound narrative.40 Despite this
anxiety, landscape paintings were enormously popular among collectors
and the public and were consistently among the best-selling objects of the
Wanderers. This conlict is brought to light in the strange division between
foreground and background in Barge Haulers, a division that now reads as
that between two competing academic genres, political genre painting and
landscape. The hardworking social content pulls itself forward out of the
calm pastel waters, the sunny blue sky. Perhaps we long for a picturesque
Christopher Ely. The Origins of Russian Scenery: Volga River Tourism and Russian
Landscape Aesthetics // Slavic Review. 2003. Vol. 62. No. 4. P. 674. See also Ely’s
book on the Russian landscape: This Meager Nature: Landscape and National Identity
in Imperial Russia. DeKalb, 2002.
40
See Ely. This Meager Nature. Pp. 168-173.
39
102
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
landscape in which we can lose ourselves? Or maybe we desire an activist
stance? Either way, we are ferried back and forth along the diagonal between
these two points of view, one belonging to a tourist or the owner of a placid
landscape and the other to an ideologue, an activist, a Rakhmetov.
I would like to return for a moment to Vasilyev’s portrait-landscape
drawing, for I think that it makes yet another provocative proposition
about space and landscape in Repin’s painting. If we consider the drawing
not as two separate sketches but as a single composition, it seems as if this
peasant is looking down upon the riverscape, and we might wonder if we
are seeing this view through his eyes. What I would like to suggest is that
this drawing offers one possible resolution of the incoherencies in Repin’s
canvas. Might the glassy landscape not be a vision of the idle gazer but the
land as seen by the boy in red, head lifted, staring into the distance? One
way then to resolve the picture’s inconsistencies is to locate them within the
subjectivity of the barge hauler. This, it seems, would also be the most ethical
version of the story, for it returns the power of representation to the subject.
Of course, just as this option is dangled before us, the picture takes it back
and for good reason. After all, this is not a picture about social cohesion or
a fantasy of harmonious connection between the people and the land. It is,
rather, about social inequity, about the distance between us and them, and
artist and subject, and the multiple projections of the people (and the self)
that this space produces.
Projections of the “People”
This tension between artist and subject disrupts the picture’s embeddedness in a present reality, in one speciic moment. We occupy many moments in time – with the barge haulers, with the igures on the boat, in the
present, in the past, and in parallel versions of these spatiotemporal layers.
This interruption of a singular reality is emphasized by the nature of the
subjects themselves. By the time Repin paints his picture, burlachestvo
is already a dying profession. As of 1866, four years before Repin’s trip,
steamships transport 85 percent of all goods between ports on the Volga.41
Evidence of this technological advancement can be spotted in the distance
of Repin’s painting – a puff of gray smoke rises from a far-off boat. This
anachronism was not lost on Repin’s contemporaries. In 1880, one critic
writes that “Repin painted his Barge Haulers at a time when steamships
F. N. Rodin. Burlachestvo v Rossii. Istoriko-sotsiologicheskii ocherk. Moscow, 1975.
P. 174.
41
103
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
already scurried along the Volga and barge hauling was only legend.”42 If
we dig into the language of both Repin and Stasov, we ind that they too
were attuned to this antiquatedness of the barge haulers. In his letter to the
editor, Stasov termed the igures “sleeping Herculeses,” “bogatyrs,” and
“wandering Greeks with more or less antique features.”43 In his memoirs,
Repin will call the picture a “barge hauler epic” (burlatskaia epopeia). The
supposed contemporaneity of his chosen subject is perhaps most undermined
by a series of anachronistic associations Repin employs to describe Kanin.
He is, variably, a Roman philosopher, a saint, a Scythian statue, even Lev
Tolstoy plowing his ields.44
It may very well have been the travel to a distant locale, one that already
loomed so large in the Russian cultural imagination, that encouraged this
layering of historical and epic imagery. In an 1862 guidebook published
by Samolet, the boat company that Repin and his colleagues hired for
their trip, we encounter a similar contamination of the contemporary site.
A description of the view as seen from an elevated tower (“a marvelous
panorama opens up”) is followed by a view of the Zhiguly hills as seen
from an epic distance: “here the Volga is visible in all of its greatness and
the wild Zhiguly, so famous from the legends of ancient Volga robbers and
the history of Stenka Razin, are awash in a veil of light blue.”45 As if to
underscore the coexistence of present and past, this passage is followed by
an engraving of the Zhiguly hills and the Volga shoreline. The hills retain
their association with “ancient robbers,” but are now joined by a single
steamboat, pufing smoke into the air. Turning back to Barge Haulers, we
notice a parallel structure. The steamboat, an index of modernity but also of
touristic vision, pulls and tugs on the ancient Greeks and bogatyrs moving
in the opposite direction.
Another possible answer for the odd epic quality of the painting, what
one scholar calls its “epic breath,” can be found in the summer reading list
of Repin and his co-travelers.46 Having forgone Dmitry Pisarev’s article
A. Ledakov, cited in V. V. Stasov. Tormozy novogo russkogo iskusstva (1885) // Idem.
Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 2. P. 615.
43
Stasov. Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 1. P. 240.
44
Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. Pp. 273-274.
45
N. P. Bogoliubov (Ed.). Volga ot Tveri do Astrakhana. St. Petersburg, 1862. P. 282.
46
A. A. Fedorov-Davydov. Il’ia Eimovich Repin. Moscow, 1961. P. 21. See also:
Liaskovskaia. Il’ia Eimovich Repin. P. 38. Repin was even working on a painting of
Diogenes just a year before he irst saw the barge haulers on the Neva. This may have
contributed to the epic overtones of Barge Haulers, or perhaps even supported the artist’s
42
104
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
on Pushkin and Belinsky and Ivan Turgenev’s prose, they inally become
absorbed in reading aloud from The Iliad and The Odyssey.
Completely unexpectedly, word after word, verse after verse, we
didn’t even notice that this living fairy tale had pulled us in. We could
no longer tear ourselves away.
Vasilyev grew tired and I took it [the book, M.B.] and felt that ecstasy was grabbing hold of me, and I begin to imagine that all of it is
written about people closest to us. And from that evening on, as a result
of that neverending reading (The Odyssey was also found), wherever
we set off, wherever we sailed, the verses from those immortal, living
poems accompanied us everywhere and sang our feelings in a living
language.47
What we are given in Repin’s Barge Haulers is a projection of the
“people” that is deined not only by Repin’s realist gaze – one that records
the details of a Kanin and transforms them into the type of the burlak – but
also by the panoramic views of the tourist and the epic generalizations of
a modern-day Odyssey. Cast as a realist ethnographer, a bourgeois tourist,
and a wandering Greek, Repin projects corresponding images of the people
onto the canvas, a canvas that retains the issures between these inconsistent
images. These historical anachronisms and spatial incongruities do not,
however, constitute a failure. Instead, they save Repin’s Barge Haulers from
the fate of a rote photographic naturalism and paint a complex picture of an
artist’s discovery of his subject.
There is still another level, hinted to in the very same epic references, on
which Repin’s Barge Haulers operates. These epic gestures do not come only
from the tales of a distant past; they are also residue of Repin’s academic
training. When we read Stasov’s comparison of the burlaki to “sleeping
Herculeses,” we recall that two years earlier, he had referred to the busts of
Hercules when celebrating the Wanderers’ exodus from the studios of the
academy. In asserting their relation to epic heroes, the barge haulers thus
reveal their paradoxical roots – on the Volga, and in the marble sculptures
displayed in the foyer of the Academy of the Arts. In this way, Repin’s
painting becomes an allegorical representation of the painter’s process and
assumption of the role of “wandering Greek.” See Grabar’. P. 48; and O. Liaskovskaia
and F. Mal’tseva. Al’bom I. E. Repin i F. A. Vasil’eva v Gosudarstvennoi Tret’iakovskoi
galeree // Gosudarstvennaia Tret’iakovskaia galereia. Materialy i issledovaniia. Moscow,
1956. Vol. 1. P. 176.
47
Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. P. 276. Repin even goes so far as to say that he and Vasilyev
would act out mini epic battles for fun (P. 277).
105
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
a projection of his particular status as a young master-in-the-making, still
trying to make good copies of those marble busts.48
“It’s impossible to imagine a more painterly and more tendentious painting!” Repin recalls thinking upon irst catching sight of the barge haulers
along the shore of the Neva.49 Despite the fact that Repin writes these words
in 1914, a much different cultural climate than that of 1870, one that valued
the self-conscious aestheticism of art-for-art’s sake, I think that he is nonetheless right. Barge Haulers on the Volga is, I propose, both “painterly” and
“tendentious.” It is simultaneously about the story of these Volga boatmen
and about the nature of paint itself. As such, it renders visible the particular
pressures placed upon Repin as a young artist, to become a dutiful realist
and a good painter. Recalling the conversation with Savitsky on that irst
trip down the Neva, Repin distills the distance between these goals into the
difference between a social type and a glob of brown paint.
“What is that moving over there toward us?” I ask Savitsky. “See
that dark, greasy, some sort of brown spot….what is that crawling
toward our sun?”
“Ah! That is the barge haulers pulling a barge with a heavy rope.
Bravo! What types! You’ll see, they’re coming closer now. It’s worth
looking.”50
It will be Repin’s task to bridge this divide, to make a spot of brown oil
paint a barge hauler pulling a rope. In doing so, however, he somehow retains
the distance between the two and it is in this disjunction that we witness the
painting echo the distance between Repin and his subject.
I would like to offer the wicker basket in the center foreground as further evidence of my point. Likely discarded or lost by local ishermen, the
ishing trap surfaces in Repin’s painting as a marker of the “real.” It is also,
however, an emblem of the paradox I have been describing throughout this
article, between Stasov’s promise of realist “immersion” and Repin’s painted
projection. The basket opens toward the viewer, drawing her gaze further
into it. Like the pools of water and the unstable riverbank, it is a vehicle
of entrapment and, as such, a symbol of the supposed power of realism to
I am drawing here on Michael Fried’s conception of a “real allegory” (taken from the
subtitle to Courbet’s A Painter’s Studio), a painting that is a “sustained meditation on
the nature of pictorial realism, a meditation whose content, one might also say whose
conclusions, I ind the more compelling in that the manifest subject matter … has nothing
to do with painting.” Fried. Courbet’s Realism. P. 148.
49
Repin. Dalekoe blizkoe. P. 223.
50
Ibid. P. 222.
48
106
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
“immerse” its painters and viewers into the world depicted inside the canvas. But the ishing trap is also employed for perspectival effect. Roughly
the size of the sailboat on the left side of the painting, it exaggerates the
capacity of proportion to produce the illusion of spatial depth. Furthermore,
the regularity of the spokes, joined together to make a three-dimensional
object, mimes the way orthogonal lines are arranged to create a volumetric
“container” out of a lat picture plane. These technical associations remind
the viewer that there is no “real” space in which to immerse oneself. It is
all a projection onto a blank surface. In a short chapter of his memoirs titled
“Nature as Teacher,” Repin makes explicit how such a realist detail can
send the traveler hurtling back to the studio-lined hallways of the academy.
Among the shrubbery on Bald Hill, I comprehended for the irst
time the laws of composition, its relief and perspective. A tattered,
withered shrub in the foreground occupies a huge part of the painting;
coquettishly, beautifully it obscures a forest path, and relegates to the
background a magniicent group of trees from the middle ground. That
is the relief of a painting, much as we were busy composing bas-reliefs
at the academy.51
In this wicker trap, we discern the attachment and the detachment of
Simmel’s “stranger,” the push of the Volga and the pull of Petersburg. It is
a bit of local color, a symbol of “immersion,” an academic exercise. It is,
in sum, a composite projection of Repin’s travels, both real and imagined.
What I have been suggesting is a version of Repin’s painterly realism
that allows for, and in fact feeds off, seemingly contradictory impulses. It
demands that the painter pick up and move, become a wandering philosopher,
moving among the people in search of a higher truth. And it also demands
that the painter perfect his craft, labor over the details, delight in the tricks
of oil painting. The shimmery pool of water inishes the thought; sand caving into its watery relection, it is undoubtedly a igure, a promise even, of
“immersion.” But it is also, and this impression is undeniable, pure paint,
pooling on the artist’s palette. With the water turned paint, the twig becomes
the brush, plunging itself into the shallow pools of color. Repin writes:
The next day it dried out a little and we took a walk down a roundabout path to the Volga, in which we washed our brushes.52
Dipping the brushes into the river, Repin pulls away from the barge haulers and back to the studio. Twig becomes brush. Water becomes paint. As
51
52
Ibid. P. 250.
Ibid. P. 263.
107
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
if to render this connection utterly readable, Repin carves his name into the
sand with one of these twigs. His painted signature is tilted inward, creating a miniature diagonal trajectory, perpendicular to the one formed by the
group of boatmen, the diagonal that had initially guided us into this work.
And so the paint guides us back in, back to the Volga. This is the potential
wanderer, the stranger forever coming and going, promising connection
only to snatch it away.
Repin’s Barge Haulers is not, however, the kind of “landscape of immersion” that is the topic of Nina Lübbren’s study of nineteenth-century
rural artists’ colonies in Europe, an image in which, to quote Lübbren, “two
principles – multi-sensual immersion and visual formalism – were held in
productive tension.”53 There are certainly echoes of this ontological tension
in Repin’s painting, but there is also another critical ingredient, the social
content. Although I have emphasized the formal in this article, I do so only
to provide room for these strictly visual observations within an art historical tradition that has viewed Repin’s works largely as narratives to be read.
My formal emphasis is not meant to crowd out the ideological content,
but rather to show how this message of social unrest plays out on the level
of painterly form. In other words, Repin’s Barge Haulers is not, I think, a
clear harbinger of the medium speciicity of high modernism. Rather, its
struggle between the aesthetic and the ideological, all in a search for truth
in expression, is a marker of a mature and self-conscious realist aesthetic.
In fact, to ignore the power of the barge haulers themselves would be to
miss the point. Whether they are accurate relections of reality or the result
of overlapping projections, the people in this landscape increase the volume
of the painting’s oppositional stance. In this case, Stasov says it best:
And this entire community is silent: it carries out the work of oxen in
profound silence. Only the boy makes a noise, bubbling with fervor, with
his long blonde mane, barefoot; he is in the center of the procession, the
painting, the whole creation. Before anything else, his bright pink shirt
arrests the eye of the viewer at the very middle of the painting, and his
quick angry glance, his willful igure, as if barking at and scolding everyone, his strong young arms, adjusting the harness that causes calluses
on his shoulders – all of this is the protest and opposition of a mighty
youth against the meek submissiveness of the mature wild Herculeses,
broken down by habit and time, walking in front of and behind him.54
Nina Lübbren. Rural Artists’ Colonies in Europe 1870–1910. New Brunswick, 2001.
P. 111.
54
Stasov. Izbrannye sochineniia. Vol. 1. Pp. 240-241.
53
108
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Stasov is ultimately right that this is a work about protest and opposition, but I diverge from him in one signiicant way. The protest derives not
from the boy alone, or from the story he represents, but from the opposition between ideological content and formal expression. The boy clutches
at the harness around his chest, resisting enslavement to the forces that
surround him. In becoming the subject of an artist’s gaze, the boatmen’s
own instruments for artistic self-expression, their arms, have been tied
down. The boy’s rebellion then is a rebellion not only against the material
conditions of his place in society but also against the silencing of visual
representation. Perhaps this is why Stasov made note of the silence of
the picture, as opposed to the moaning and singing of Nekrasov’s poetry.
There does seem to be a stiling stillness about this painting. If we believe
Stasov, the boy alone makes a noise, a single sound in an otherwise dreamy,
hushed visuality.
In this struggle between
the boy and the harness,
between the story and the
silence of visual representation, we see evidence of the
social and spatial conditions
of the painting’s production.
Even though Repin claims to
have not enjoyed travel, he
embarks on a journey for the
sake of Barge Haulers and
Fig. 7. A. Lavrov, The People’s Dreams Have Come discovers something akin to
True! 1950.
what he will discover in his
trips to Moscow and Paris in the coming years. A singular space, with its
immobile point of view and its ixed social structures, is too limiting. The
artist, like the barge haulers, must struggle against convention, complicate
it, wander, but do so with conviction. Repin never does discover the people,
but he does eventually complete his painting of the burlaki. It is an imperfect
work, but in its imperfections – the embodiment and the disembodiment,
the refusal of igure and ground to cohere, the interruption of the epic and
the picturesque – is revealed a far more profound picture of the “people”
than might have been otherwise. The disjunctions interrupt and sometimes
contradict any clear ideological proposition, and force the viewer instead
to go on a journey of “imaginative projection,” following an itinerary made
up almost entirely of arrivals and departures.
109
Molly Brunson, Wandering Greeks: How Repin Discovers the People
Barge Haulers on the Volga
has enjoyed a legacy that Repin
likely would have never imagined
for his irst big splash in the art
world. In a 1950 political poster,
Repin’s painting hangs on the wall
of a Soviet steamer, visual proof
of the fulillment of the people’s
dreams seen through the window
to its left (Fig. 7). Most recently,
the barge haulers made their way
Fig. 8. Poster from protest on Novyi Arbat,
to an anti-Putin protest in Moscow. “We do NOT want to drag on for 12 more
In this poster, the ship has been years!!!” March 2012 (courtesy of Aglaya
replaced with a super yacht, but Lopata-Glebova).
the barge haulers are the same, still
laboring away while resisting the forces of oppression (Fig. 8). What is it
that makes this painting such a potent and universally applicable image so
as to appeal to both Soviet oficial culture and antiestablishment protesters?
One answer to this question can be found, I believe, in the formal and ideological incongruities of Barge Haulers that I have explored in this article.
A picture of wandering souls made by a painter in pursuit of his own truth,
Repin’s painting refuses inality. It fails to cohere into a single narrative or
structure and becomes instead a space in which to activate all manner of
personal and political struggle. Granted this freedom by the painting, the
burlaki are able to travel beyond the conines of their historical reality and
enjoy an active, sometimes parodic and sometimes profound, afterlife in
Soviet and post-Soviet culture.
SUMMARY
In the summer of 1870, the painter Ilya Repin, who, in his words, “did
not like travel or excursions of any kind,” goes against his nature and embarks on a several-month trip down the Volga River, in search of models
and inspiration for what would become his irst major work Barge haulers on the Volga. In this article, Molly Brunson proposes that this trip and
the spatial realities of the journey as such are what deine the expressive
110
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
contours and produce the formal peculiarities of what is perhaps Repin’s
most widely known realist masterpiece. Examining Repin’s sketches and
memoiristic writing in the context of an extended visual engagement with
the painting itself, Brunson considers how the artist’s unique orientation as
both an outsider and a participant – manifest in the painting’s push and pull
between distance and proximity, the epic and the contemporary, the aesthetic
and the ideological – enacts a reinement of the progressive image of the
“people.” Having sought out the authentic burlak, Repin discovers instead
the complex and often paradoxical nature of the “people,” a concept that
becomes more a composite projection of Repin’s own experience than a
relection of any exterior reality. Ultimately, Brunson argues for a nuanced
understanding of Repin’s realism, one that disrupts the mode’s supposed
commitment to verisimilitude and ideological content with the spatiotemporal and social disjunctions wrought, in the case of Barge haulers on the
Volga, by the experience of travel.
Резюме
Летом 1870 г. художник Илья Репин, вопреки своей нелюбви к
путешествиям и экскурсиям, отправился в длительную поездку по
Волге в поисках образов для своей первой большой работы “Бурлаки
на Волге” (1870–1873). В публикуемой статье Молли Брансон показывает, как это путешествие и его пространственные реалии определили
выразительные приемы и формальные особенности самого известного
реалистического шедевра художника. Автор рассматривает репинские
наброски и мемуарные заметки непосредственно в связи с его художественной техникой. Амбивалентная позиция Репина как аутсайдера
и участника проявляется на картине в динамике дистанцирования и
приближения, эпики и современности, эстетизации и идеологизации
и приводит к усложнению прогрессивного образа “народа”. Отправляясь на поиски аутентичного бурлака, Репин открывает сложную и
часто парадоксальную природу “народа”, и это открытие в большей
степени отражает его собственный опыт, нежели какую-то внешнюю
реальность. Брансон призывает к более тонкому пониманию репинского реализма, не сводимого только к идеологическому содержанию,
но учитывающему пространственно-временные и социальные смещения, которые в случае с “Бурлаками на Волге” проявлялись в ходе
путешествия художника.
111
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
Михаил РОЖАНСКИЙ
НАВСТРЕЧУ УТРЕННЕЙ ЗАРЕ:
СТРАНСТВИЯ В ПОИСКАХ НАСТОЯЩЕГО*
Толстяк. По СССР бегать не полагается. Каждый должен находиться на своем месте.
Ванечка. Абсолютно.
Мих. Булгаков. Зойкина квартира
Мы создадим в тайге моря
и вдаль уйдем,
мы бросим снова якоря
в краю глухом.
Усть-Илимская “народная” песня
Когда речь идет об “ударных” стройках и молодых городах, то тема
географической мобильности неизбежно становится одним из центральных сюжетов истории советского общества. Связь между социальным
идеализмом и мобильностью – неотъемлемая характеристика советского
Статья представляет собой версию главы из книги автора “Советские идеалисты:
поколенческий анализ”, которая готовится к изданию. Благодарю Сергея Ушакина
за внимание к моей работе по данной теме и ценные советы при подготовке статьи.
*
112
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
строя. Советский молодой человек, решаясь ехать в “неведомые края”,
“глубинку”, получал возможность “испытать себя”: смена места жительства оказывалась средством самовоспитания и этапом духовного движения (“душевным порывом”). Географическая мобильность наделялась
идейно-историческими смыслами: духовное движение – это идейный
рост плюс готовность к свершению. И такое духовное движение возможно лишь как участие в общем историческом пути.1
Советская готовность ехать “туда, где ты нужен” принципиально
отличалась от странничества, предполагающего дорогу без конца и
четкой цели. Странничество несовместимо с идеократией – по СССР
бегать не полагалось. Причины изживания странничества в сталинскую
эпоху не сводились к введению паспортного режима: странничество
воспринималось вызовом понятию “настоящего” (= советского) человека как человека целеустремленного. Романтика странничества изживалась постольку, поскольку обретение внутренней свободы через
странствие и возможность отстраненного взгляда на “другую жизнь”
с трудом совмещались с моделью духовного роста через подчинение
историческим целям. Исторический путь предполагал добровольную
зависимость от исторической необходимости и осознанное принятие
своего места в поступи поколений. Странничество видело в дороге
самоценность, условие и признак самостоятельности.
Позднесоветский период предложил модель географической мобильности, в которой осознанное участие в общем историческом пути
оказалось в неожиданном диалоге с практиками и поэтикой странничества. Образ дороги прочно связался с формулой “трудное счастье”.
Строчка, которой озаглавлена статья (“Навстречу утренней заре”),
заимствована из песни Александры Пахмутовой, написанной в 1963 г.
на слова С. Гребенникова и Н. Добронравова:
Верят девочки в трудное счастье.
Не спугнет их ни дождь, ни пурга,
Ведь не зря звезды под ноги падают
И любуется ими тайга!
Можно вспомнить, что вышедший в 1958 г. фильм Александра Столпера по сценарию Юрия Нагибина “Трудное счастье” повествовал о
1
См. подробнее: М. Рожанский. Дневник советской девушки // Интер. 2007. №
4. С. 55-70; Idem. Разномыслие в условиях добровольной несвободы: поколения
советских идеалистов // Разномыслие в СССР и России (1945–2008) / Под ред.
Б. М. Фирсова. Санкт Петербург, 2010. С. 180-206; Idem. Между настоящим и реальностью: оптика советского идеализма // Человек. 2010. № 5. С. 47-57.
113
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
судьбе цыганского мальчишки, чье детство пришлось на Гражданскую
войну, который посвятил молодость борьбе с кулаками и героически
воевал в Великую Отечественную. Через пять лет тема испытаний,
к которой отсылает формула “трудное счастье”, уже будет насыщена
радостными предчувствиями, дружелюбием суровой природы, которая
покорена не то что трудом, а даже настроением девушек – для радости
достаточно ощущения пути.2
В Сибири 1950–1970-х гг.
хорошо видно, как канализирована “энергия номадизма” –
стремление и готовность людей
решать свои экзистенциальные
и/или материальные проблемы,
перекочевав в новое, часто незнакомое место жизни и работы.
Послевоенный кинематограф Илл. 1. За окном сибирские просторы, впеначиная с эпического “Сказания реди – личное и общее счастье в Сибири.
о Земле сибирской” Ивана Пы- Заключительный кадр из к/ф “Сказание о
рьева утверждал образ Сибири Земле Сибирской” (Реж. И. Пырьев, “Мосфильм,” 1947 год).
как места настоящей жизни
настоящего человека. В кино и песенной лирике второй половины
1950-х – начала 1960-х гг. тема трудного счастья прочно сплелась с
историями о геологических экспедициях и работе на стройках Сибири.
Великие стройки сделали трудное счастье доступным и типичным для
последнего поколения советских юношей и девушек. Судьбу можно
было выстроить, а личное счастье заслужить, отправившись однажды
в дальнюю дорогу.
Феномен ударных комсомольских строек и молодых сибирских
городов в исторических исследованиях малозаметен. В советское
время он оставался в пределах фактографии, поскольку, вписываясь в
историю выполнения задач, поставленных партией, и не предполагал
включение в социальную историю страны. В современной российской
историографии также не привлекается внимание к истории сибирских
строек и молодых городов. Возможно, потому, что сделать их предметом исследования – значит пойти навстречу серьезному теоретическому вызову. Исследователи социальной истории страны неизбежно
вынуждены будут обратиться к темам энтузиазма и социального иде2
В 2012 г. поисковые программы в Интернете выдают на сочетание “трудное счастье” в первых позициях сайты одноименных служб знакомств.
114
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ализма и рассматривать гипотезу о “советском” как цивилизационном,
доказательство и опровержение которой потребует, в свою очередь,
коррекцию подходов к существующему корпусу источников и формирование новых источников. Полевая работа по сбору устной истории,
которая стала базой для данной статьи, ведется с начала 1990-х гг. в
молодых городах Сибири, ее основными проблемно-тематическими фокусами являются судьба советского идеализма и динамика социальных
миров в сибирских городах, возникших после Великой Отечественной
войны.3 Но в этой статье я хочу подойти к собранному материалу в
контексте географической мобильности и социальных смыслов (а также
социальных следствий) странничества. Такая перспектива позволяет
иначе (чем принято в постсоветской историографии) взглянуть на
природу позднего социализма, у которого имелась своя география, и
по новому подойти к деконструкции “советского”, которое, как я хочу
показать, нельзя сводить к цинизму и двоемыслию.
Нужда и романтика
Что вело людей в необжитые места, если они отправлялись туда
добровольно? Самый емкий ответ я получил от Клары Т., участницы
строительства Братской ГЭС с первого года, с “палаточной зимы”:
“Нужда гнала и романтика была”. Великие стройки в постгулаговскую
эпоху выглядели на фоне страны как горящие лампочки плана ГОЭЛРО.
Они обозначали места, где происходил прорыв в будущее – фронтир
модернизации и оазисы настоящей кипучей жизни, где все не так, как
везде.
Миллионы людей разного возраста после войны, после освобождения из лагерей или ссылки, накануне демобилизации находились
в ситуации выбора места жизни. В любом месте новый человек так
или иначе проходит через недоверие, а в советских условиях “чужак”
был особенно подозрителен. Выбор же в пользу новой стройки социально одобрялся, и все на ней, за исключением молодежи из местных
Основная источниковая база статьи – биографические интервью, собранные в
сибирских городах Ангарске, Братске и Усть-Илимске в 1994–2006 гг. В тексте
особое внимание уделено первым годам строительства Братской ГЭС, поскольку
начало строительства совпало со сменой эпох (в социально-политическом измерении – началом публичного отмежевания от репрессивных методов руководства), и
стройка оказалась “переходной”, если смотреть с исторической дистанции. Материалы, связанные с Усть-Илимском, дают возможность рассмотреть исследуемый
феномен в контексте нескольких десятилетий.
3
115
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
деревень, были приезжими. Но и для сельской молодежи стройка не
являлась чем-то навязанным, но предоставляла возможность жить не
так, как было предопределено фактом рождения в сибирской деревне:
Нас отправили на картошку в деревню, на острова. Так молодежи там было мало. Спрашиваем, где ваша молодежь? А они все
подались: кто в город, кто на стройку. В деревне не хотели. К образованию хотели. У нас в первый же год в школе открыли вечернюю
школу. Было битком забито. Стремились учиться. (Людмила З.)
Братская ГЭС занимает особое место в истории “ударных строек”.
Это была первая крупная стройка без использования труда заключенных.4 Начало ее строительства совпало со сменой эпох, с публичным
отмежеванием от репрессивных методов руководства. Строительство
Братской ГЭС собирало добровольцев, которые искали новое место
жизни. В лаборатории по испытаниям энергооборудования, где работала Клара Т., сложился небольшой коллектив людей с разными, но в
чем-то типичными биографиями послевоенного времени:
С.: …В Норильске десять лет отработал, реабилитирован.
Очень многие остались в Братске на строительстве. Почему? Ну,
вот он. Сам из Минска. Дом разбит, ничего там нет. Ну вот, он
остался.
К.: Вот как судьба человеком. Впервые встретила еврея, который работал шофером. В финскую войну работал на полуторке –
остался жив. Всю войну был сапером. Остался жив. Получилось
пять лет, и оказалось, эта служба не засчитывается и “надо еще
действительную”. После действительной восемь лет был в армии,
потом сюда.
П.: …Этот сидел уже у нас, на Вихоревке (поселок недалеко
от Братска. – М.Р.).
П.Г.: Он был рентгенолог, всю войну прошел в медсанбате.
Вернулся домой, все нормально, встретили – выпили. Он говорит:
“Неправильно, что в Германии простые люди все на помойках
живут. У них тоже все хорошо устроено. У них не колхозы, но
у них тоже кооперативы. Фермер арендует технику, заключают
соглашение о покупке продукции”. Ему дали десять лет. А были
все совершенно свои.
В. Родом из поволжских немцев. Работал электриком у Павлова – физиолога. В июне сорок первого был в деревне. Когда
началась война, был три дня на покосе. “Возвращаюсь – идет
4
На строительстве самой ГЭС и города Братска.
116
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
техника, не обратил внимания, там шли маневры. А мне ‘Хэнде
хок’. Батрачил, все делал”. Затем откатывался вместе с немцами
от наступавшей советской армии, арестован, и после пыток В.
подписал признание. “Ему в камере говорят: подпиши, отсидишь
срок в Тайшете и выйдешь, а так живым не оставят после того,
что с тобой делали”. Ну и решил: подпишу, отсижу в Ташкенте
в тепле. А его все везут и везут – в Тайшет. А жена с сыном
приехали к нему. Его мало посылали на лесоразработки – на все
руки мастер, женам начальства надо шить – машинку надо отремонтировать там. Он несгибаемый такой, выжил потому, что дал
себе приказ молчать.
Такие люди собрались у меня в лаборатории.
Приведенные свидетельства – о людях “с непростыми судьбами”,
которые были взрослыми во время войны. Но на стройке преобладали
(особенно на рабочих специальностях) те, кто во время войны были
детьми или подростками. Многие ехали сразу после демобилизации
из армии, кто-то из сибирских деревень, кто-то с других строек, проходивших не в таких экстремальных условиях, у кого-то были уже
непростые жизненные истории. У всех была способность к самостоятельному решению – во всяком случае, у тех, кто остался в Братске. Вот
свидетельство о тех, кто был занят непосредственно на строительных
работах.
Моя подружка сюда приехала из Москвы тоже по комсомольской путевке. Целый поезд был. Ну, конечно, девчонки после
окончания школы, та, например, в институт не попала. Она поступила, но подружка ее не поступила, и по этой причине она за
компанию не стала учиться. И приехали сюда. Тетка ее готовила.
Стеженки, говорит, им дали. Лето было, а думали, что мороз тут.
Удивительное дело. И вот этих девчонок потом отправили работать
на ЛЭП. Эту ЛЭП строили – не 220, а 110. Первую ЛЭП вели из
Иркутска... Они работали там на бетоне. Нужно было все опоры
бетонировать. Это кошмар. Зима, палатки, холодина. Приходили в робах в бетоне, так и плюхались на кровати. Потом утром
вставали, с себя их сдирали, что-то на себя надевали и опять шли
работать. Как можно было девчонок туда отправлять? Потом уже
удивлялись. Мыслимое ли дело. Работали наравне с мужчинами.
(Людмила З.)
Управленцы, в том числе и вполне добросовестные, обращались к
энтузиазму подчиненных как к средству, позволяющему компенсиро117
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
вать пороки хозяйственной организации. Леонид Шинкарев цитирует
начальника одного из участков строительства Иркутской ГЭС, который
именно на этой стройке – не первой в его жизни – понял, что “на стройке
успех обеспечивают не только техника и средства, а в основном энтузиазм людей”.5 Подобный, характерный для 1930х – 1960-х гг. стиль
советского управления опирался на аскетизм и стоицизм как культурную норму человека, понимающего приоритет не просто общего перед
частным, а исторических задач перед индивидуальным.6 Эта культурная
норма могла объединять командиров производства и “рядовых бойцов”.
Оне же могла быть и предметом управленческой манипуляции. Различия между первой и второй далеко не всегда были очевидны.
Историческая мобилизация
Сибирь была поприщем для социального признания и самоутверждения молодого человека. Историческая миссия становилась частью
коллективной идентичности, особенно значимой для тех, кто приехал
на стройку из больших городов, но ощущали эту миссию и выходцы
из деревни – участники строительства чувствовали себя представителями современности в таежном крае. Формула, которой определялся
главный исторический смысл стройки в Братске с конца 1950-х гг. –
“величайшая в мире” – была знаком соревнования систем, этапом гонки
в достижениях с Америкой.
Не менее важен и исторический смысл – преобразование не тронутых прогрессом просторов. Перед поколением, “мобилизованным
историей”, стояла задача не экономическая, а историческая. Основной
аргумент необходимости строительства Братской ГЭС – выполнение
планов освоения Сибири, а отнюдь не неотложная потребность в
электроэнергии.7 Ударная стройка в Братске была формой исторической мобилизации, которая оказалась достаточно емкой для тех, чья
Л. Шинкарев. Сибирь. Откуда она пошла и куда она идет. Иркутск, 1974. С. 250.
Собственно на подобной апелляции построен весь типологический репертуар
ответственности комсомольца, члена партии, любого рабочего или интеллигента.
Здесь не только сословная честь, но и ответственность страны перед историей
как фон (выявляемый или скрытый) любого события, поступка, высказывания.
Идеальное предъявлялось в модальности долженствования.
7
Ближайший возможный крупный потребитель электроэнергии Братской ГЭС (в
период ее строительства) отдален от Братска на полторы тысячи километров. И
решение о строительстве крупнейшей в мире ГЭС определялось “логикой” больших
проектов, присущей экстенсивной централизованной экономике.
5
6
118
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
социальная и трудовая активность была окрашена романтизмом, для
тех, кто проходил социальную реабилитацию, и для тех, кто стремился
собственными усилиями создать условия для самостоятельной жизни.
Героизм оставался главным и безусловным доказательством человеческой доброкачественности. Подобно тому как для предвоенной
молодежи, “опоздавшей” к Гражданской войне, смысл существования
определялся ответом на мобилизующий вопрос “А если завтра война?”,
для послевоенных подростков, “опоздавших” на войну Отечественную,
одним из главных был вопрос “А как бы поступил(а) в войну ты?”.
Между интервью, которые цитируются ниже, два дня. Клара Т. говорит об одном и том же времени. Но сказанное ею могло прозвучать
и с диапазоном в несколько минут – для нее здесь нет противоречия.
Эпизод из воспоминаний о деревне:
В сорок девятом году, конец августа, сидим, ужинаем. Говорю:
“Мама, я сбегу из колхоза”. – “Беги, не бойся. Не бойся, Клара,
тюрьмы – там кормят”.
Фрагмент из воспоминаний об атмосфере на стройке:
Время такое было. Не народ, а чудо!
– Может потому, что вы из деревни вырвались, из крепостного
права?
– Мы признавали это крепостное право, потому что война недавно кончилась. Из деревни дезертиров было полно, скрывались
в лесах. Банд сколько было. А сколько предателей было. И это всё
знали. И отношение западных украинцев, и что сделали татары
крымские.
И чуть позже об отношениях на стройке:
Задавался невольно вопрос: может предать или нет, в разведку
с ним пойдешь или нет. А сколько комиссаров стреляли в спину
и командиров. Все это знали.
Ощущение исторических сдвигов, переживания истории, с которой
связывались надежды на лучшее, как и стремление к социальным
идеалам – все это много глубже тех установок, которые формируют
пропаганда и воспитание. Участие в большом коллективном свершении
создавало ощущение “прямого” участия в истории. Суровые условия
жизни и работы могли восприниматься не просто как испытания, но
и как возможность жизненной самореализации. Отправившись “по
распределению” или присоединившись к молодежным отрядам, едущим на большую стройку, человек совершал судьбоносный выбор и
119
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
получал значимый психологический ресурс, убеждая окружающих в
своей полезности:
Я поехала на Красноярскую ГЭС, в Красноярск в 58-м году,
сразу после окончания института, я вам даже скажу опять-таки: у
меня были такие романтические завихрения... Я прочитала, была
у Анатолия Кузнецова “Продолжение легенды” – вот на этом произведении, наверное. Ну а потом приехала я в Красноярск, пришла
в крайком комсомола, опять вот мне здорово везло, что ли, у меня
денег почти не было, и я объяснилась. …Вышел первый секретарь, хороший парень, и я ему: вот так и так. Он так посмотрел
и говорит: “Школу закончила?” Ну что, я худенькая была девчоночка, не хотелось мне говорить, что я институт закончила. Это
же меня на стройку не возьмут, это меня уже по дороге научили.
“Документы какие?” Ну, аттестат-то я взяла, показываю аттестат,
и говорит: “А где еще пять лет была?” Я говорю: “В институте”. –
“Исключили?” – “Да нет, – говорю, – у меня диплом”. Он говорит:
“Да знаешь, как нам учителя нужны! Да что ты, ну бетонщицей
разве пойдешь? Да парни это сделают. Да если ты действительно по душевному порыву”. Короче так вот сказал, что мне даже
стыдно стало. Ну, думаю, и в самом деле, если им и вправду здесь
учителя нужны… Короче говоря, он набирает номер телефона в
КрайОНО и говорит: “Сейчас девушка к вам подойдет, предложите
ей все варианты, какие есть. Девчонка хорошая”. Вот так и сказал.
(Ирина К., 1935 г.р.)
В Братске 1950-х и в Усть-Илимске 1960-х гг. исторические смыслы подчеркивались сильнее, чем, например, в том же Усть-Илимске
в 1980-е, но логика Большого проекта, зов “громадной исторической
задачи” оставались в силе. Большой проект – это всегда историческое
свершение, а человек, участвующий в нем, не мог не чувствовать, что
возможности, используемые им, умножены этой вневременной значимостью. Во время строительства Байкало-Амурской магистрали эта
идея отольется в чеканные формулы песни Оскара Фельцмана на стихи
Роберта Рождественского: “Слышишь – время гудит: БАМ!” и обещания вписать “в биографию планеты… свою строку”. Самореализация
оказалась тесно связана с самовоспитанием, с переделкой себя, с тем,
чтобы соответствовать требованиям эпохи и смыслам истории – стать
настоящим.8 Клара Т. вспоминает:
8
См. о содержании конструкта “настоящий, настоящее” в анализе дневника Киры
Мансуровой, см.: М. Рожанский. Дневник советской девушки.
120
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Мой брат приезжал ко мне (из деревни в Нечерноземье) и
говорит: “Знаешь, сестра, ты не гордись, что вы строите величайшую ГЭС. Не только вы строите, и мы строим”. Отсюда он
набирал рыбных консервов, камбалы. На которые мы внимания не
обращали. Он говорил, что у них и пшена нет. “Мы ничего почти
этого не видим. У вас тут все есть… Не одни вы строите ГЭС”.
Диалог, точнее его версия и контекст, оставшиеся в памяти, ясно
свидетельствуют, что участие в стройке было предметом гордости, что
участники воспринимали ее исторические смыслы как собственное достояние. На протяжении многочасового интервью Клара Т. всякий раз
сокращала штамп “величайшая в мире” до иронического “…чайшая”,
как бы передразнивая пропаганду того времени и дистанцируясь от
своих прежних иллюзий. Братская ГЭС не перестала быть одной из
крупнейших в мире, но под сомнения попал смысл такого гигантизма и
его последствия. При этом ни в коей мере не подвергается сомнению исключительность социального мира, возникшего на гигантской стройке.
Падунские Пороги
Клара Т.,9 пятидневное интервью с которой положено в основу этого
раздела статьи, не вспоминает каких-либо веских причин, которые побудили их с молодым мужем уехать из Куйбышева в Сибирь – отдельную жилплощадь они вскоре должны были получить в своем городе,
карьерные соображения их никогда не волновали. Все версии можно
строить на свидетельствах о характерах Клары Т. и ее мужа Геннадия.
О характере Геннадия свидетельствует то, что коллеги его прозвали
“правдолюбом”. А для характеристики Клары достаточно привести
один эпизод из ее воспоминаний:
Когда мы ехали, несколько часов мы стояли в Тайшете. Поскольку был 55-й год, шла реабилитация заключенных. И вот там,
на вокзале в Тайшете, в этот мороз лежало столько скрюченных
искалеченных людей, ревматичных. Они не могли ходить, под
ними лужи, они примерзли. Меня мой еле удержал. Я бы натворила
дел. Я не могла этого… я рвалась к дежурному. Мой только держал
меня. Он говорил: “Ты пойми, ты сама угодишь туда”. Я могла
9
В базе интервью, взятых в Братске, есть пятидневное биографическое интервью
(примерно 12 часов) с Кларой Алексеевной Тимониной (далее Клара Т.). Оно стало
опорным для данной статьи. Биографическое повествование используется не как
иллюстрация, а как способ удержать антропологический фокус анализа – это возможно только через детальное видение биографии человека.
121
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
наговорить, не знаю чего. Но в конце концов: “Все, все будет… за
ними приедут и скоро их куда-то увезут… на носилках унесут”.
Понимаешь, меня, как дуру, облапошили, конечно. Уехали мы. Но
эта картина у меня стояла долго перед глазами. Я впервые увидела
эту бесчеловечность. Кошмар какой! Не приведи бог.
Пассажирский поезд идет от Тайшета до станции Падунские Пороги сейчас около шести часов. Даже с поправкой на скорости середины 1950-х можно сказать, что это впечатление Клара Т. получила
буквально перед приездом на строительство. А на Падунских Порогах
их с Геннадием ждали совсем другие впечатления и новые бытовые
заботы. Прибыли они 30 декабря 1955 г. В тот день было 56 градусов
мороза (“Оказывается, действительно, мозги замерзают – это не преувеличение”). В гостинице (“вот – две палатки стоят”) гомон, “чафир”
и горячее обсуждение вновь прибывшими, на какой именно участок
строительства надо попасть. Назавтра, когда определялись с жильем,
увидели в приглянувшейся им палатке молодую пару с двумя маленькими детьми и решили: “С детьми приехали, а мы-то уж проживем”.
Палатка, в которой зимой 1955/56 г. жила моя собеседница, – стандартная армейская двадцатиместная. В таких жили большинство приехавших в первую зиму строительства Братской ГЭС. Обустройство и
быт в этих стандартных палатках стандартными не были.
Стали ставить палатку, а я говорю: “Ген, давай походим, может
быть, где тут и есть место в старых”. Он: “Ну че, лучше давай
в новой палатке, там и запах будет свежий, и все, а че в старых
палатках!” В общем, мы в несколько старых палаток зашли, а там
уже знаете как: и прокурено, и провонено. А в одну палатку зашли,
там мужики жили одни, еще жены не приехали. А одна приехала. И
приехала с двумя ребятишками... Остальные ждали, когда приедут
супруги ихние молодые. И вот мы зашли в эту палатку, и я гляжу.
Я сразу углядела: с одной стороны стоят лавочки, и на них ведра
с водой, и бак с водой. А в другой стороне тоже такая клетушка,
прям низко двери, там дровник. Днем натаскивают, чтобы ночью
сжечь эти дрова. Я говорю: давай здесь остановимся. (Клара.Т.)
В палатке до осени, когда построили первые квартиры, проживали
пять семей, включая Клару с мужем:
В двух противоположных углах печки. Между семьями дощатые перегородки, сверху занавесочками закрытые, чтобы не
занозиться… Каждый день привозили машину дров. И за сутки
ее почти всю сжигали – буржуйка-то быстро прогорает.
122
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Дров уходило так много еще и потому, что в палатке весь день
кто-то из обитателей был – хотя бы молодая мама со своими двумя
маленькими детьми.
А вот повседневность (точнее, еженощный быт) зимы 1955/56 г. в
такой же палатке, ставшей общежитием учителей:
Жили все вместе. Сначала перегородки были, потом сломали,
чтобы теплее было. А учитель химии, мужчина, говорит Александре Ивановне (их кровати рядом стояли): давайте, говорит,
каждый в своей кровати накроемся сначала вашим одеялом, потом
одеждой, потом моим одеялом. Иногда ветер страшенный ночью –
палатку раскачивает, печку раскачивает – искры на палатку падают,
дырочки прожигает. Мне говорили: “Не мой волосы на ночь”. Ну
не могу же я так в школу пойти с головой немытой. А кровати
стояли вдоль стены. И у меня коса примерзла. Потом папа с мамой
ко мне из Кяхты приехали – днем топить стали. Корреспонденты
из “Комсомолки” приехали: как вы можете так в палатках? Живем,
другого нет, пристраивались как-то. (Людмила З.)
На большую стройку людей приводили разные жизненные траектории, мотивы приезда были различны, разными были заботы
молодых и взрослых, одиноких и семейных, разными были и требования к быту и способность обустроить его. Но даже деревенская и
практичная Клара Т., рассказывая о первых годах в Братске, определяет
свое тогдашнее состояние словами: “Эйфория была”.
Великие стройки – переплетение интереса к изменению своей биографии и изменения социальных условий. “Эйфория коллективизма”
возникла потому, что сбывались надежды и ожидания, которые предшествовали решению ехать на стройку, – радикально менялась биография, радикально иными были социальные условия. Для человека,
приехавшего в Братск, стройка была не просто сменой места и условий
жизни, а возможностью самореализации и самоутверждения. Новый
стиль человеческих отношений, собственная способность к жизни в
экстремальных условиях – необходимое и достаточное условие того,
чтобы возникло ощущение большой жизненной удачи, ставшей результатом личного решения поехать на стройку. Чтобы построить мир,
в который ты не просто получил пропуск, но в создании которого ты
участвуешь. Контуры этого мира еще не совсем определены, но он –
новый. Не только иной, но и несовместимый с тем, из которого хотелось
бежать, и, тем более, с тем, который Клара Т. с мужем видели из окна
поезда в Тайшете.
123
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
Эйфория, если и связана с трудовым энтузиазмом, то не сводится
к нему. В сегодняшних воспоминаниях он не является главной темой.
Когда речь идет о трудных условиях работы и быта, то подчеркивается
именно экстремальный характер этих условий. И способности к напряжению сил. Экстремальность условий оказывалась соразмерной
экстремальности задач. Первая зима – особенно жестокие условия быта
и труда, но и они воспринимались как то, что оказалось преодолимым,
стало повседневностью.
Все было неустроенно, страшно неустроенно. Ну и что? Палатки не смущали, не боялись. Наводнение в декабре. Ночью. Мы
из палаток перебрались в недостроенный дом. (Людмила З.).10
Народ деятельный. Гора Шанхай – врезались, делали землянку
(они теплее), и по всей горе горели огни. На ней разбивали огороды, разводили коров и свиней. (Клара Т.)
Практические жизненные возможности воспринимаются даже не как
ресурс, а как начало новой жизни, контрастно отличной от прежней:
Интервьюер: Люди были тут более непокорные, более свободные, чем на Волге?
Информант: Люди тут были более самозабвенные. Тут был
такой дух – он шел от людей, – что надо ГЭС построить, что мы
будем жить лучше, что нам дадут квартиру. Столько было открыто
учкомбинатов – люди получали специальности.
В этом коротком ответе названо, по сути, все перечисленное ранее:
историческая задача, работа, жилье, учеба. Но акцент падает на слово
“дух” – метафору общественной атмосферы, настроений, самоотверженности. Психологическую атмосферу, преобладавшую на рабочих
участках, можно описать и фразой из интервью с Людмилой З.: “Работали с какой-то легкостью”. В воспоминаниях (без исключения)
царит ностальгия по некоему общинному духу. Но только отчасти
эту ностальгию можно объяснить неудовлетворенностью сегодняшней стилистикой и качеством человеческих отношений – ни в одном
интервью не прозвучало аргументации в дихотомии раньше/теперь.
Противопоставление сегодняшней и прежней социальной атмосферы
Летом были свои, тоже экстремальные трудности: “А сколько тут было мошкары.
Я помню, ходил такой агрегат, который пускал дым с дустом. И вот этот дым на
какое-то время травил эту мошку. Через час мошка снова появлялась. А ребята все
бегут и дышат этим. Называли его ‘мошкодавка’. Потом вода поднялась, и мошки
не стало. Она на берегу в болотцах плодилась”. (Людмила З.).
10
124
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
если возникало, ни разу не касалось микросреды, коллектива – только
общей социальной ситуации. Но достаточно частый сюжет – контраст
между атмосферой стройки и тем, что человек видел и пережил до
того.
Показательно, что, в отличие от более поздних по времени строек в
Усть-Илимске и более ранней – в Ангарске, где сюжеты драк, хулиганства, агрессии воспроизводятся в устной истории наряду с рассказами
об уникальной человеческой атмосфере, в рассказах о Братске они
вытеснены настолько, что по воспоминаниям (как письменным, так
и устным) невозможно реконструировать, были ли они исключением
или все-таки повседневностью в первые годы строительства.11 Свидетельство Людмилы З. достаточно характерно:
Водки и вина было мало. Помню, была водка кориандровая,
можжевеловая. В основном настойки. На травах. Но это все было
в Братске. На Падуне12 был магазин, а так-то не было. Пьяных
было мало. Пьянки, как таковой, не было. Кто-то оставался здесь.
Кто-то собирался уезжать. А уезжать – надо заработать деньги.
Можно предположить причины такого вытеснения. Во-первых,
это значимость декларации об отсутствии заключенных на стройке
(“мы – первые, мы справимся и без лагерей!”) для исторического
смысла стройки и, следовательно, для коллективной идентичности
самих строителей. Во-вторых, это принципиальная важность признаков
обновления жизни для людей именно 1950-х гг. География стала своеобразным ресурсом этого поколения,13 и выбор собравшихся на строительстве Братской ГЭС, так же как и для их столичных ровесников,
обозначенных позднее как “шестидесятники”, был в пользу идеалов
и ценностей, которым не соответствовала социальная реальность. Но,
в отличие от “детей XX съезда” (в 1956 г. и позднее), строители Братской ГЭС были объединены не обсуждением/осуждением масштаба
репрессий и курса партии (в героических случаях – борьбой за права
человека), а практикой устройства социальной жизни, не похожей на
ту, из которой они уезжали и которая стала возможна “здесь и сейчас”.
Эта новая жизнь и была для них событием, гораздо более заметным,
чем “секретный доклад” или “бытовое пьянство”.
Задача выяснения этого в архивах органов внутренних дел мной не решалась.
Падун – поселок строителей ГЭС, а Братск в период, о котором вспоминает
респондент, – райцентр, превратившийся в начале 1950-х гг. из села в рабочий поселок (лесозаготовка) и оказавшийся впоследствии в зоне затопления.
13
См. подробнее: М. Рожанский. Разномыслие в добровольной несвободе.
11
12
125
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
Вместе с формированием коллектива на первой же стройке без
ГУЛАГа обозначилось несовпадение культивируемых коллективных
ценностей с системой идеократии и дистанция между мирами – “политическим” и коллективистским. Сферой реализации идеала человеческих отношений была приватно-публичная жизнь, которая не менее
характерна для больших молодежных строек и построенных молодых
городов, чем для больших городов, о которых в основном пишет Виктор
Воронков, впервые сформулировавший это понятие.14 Здесь она была,
по сути, синонимом “общественной жизни” и досуга, тем компонентом
жизни, который создавал и символизировал отличие “молодого города”
от остальной страны, – от тех самых городов и сел, из которых уехали
те, кто собрался на стройках Сибири.
Модернизация воспринималась не только как цель, но она становилась и повседневной практикой, бытом. Техника была одним из
символов современности.
Представьте себе – крестьянин. В любой области, крае. Это
тяжелейший труд. В Сибири он трижды тяжелей. Условия тут
такие тяжелые. И когда стройка началась, все поняли, видели. Я
бабушку Агафью сорок раз вспоминал: пришли трактор, самосвал,
бурилка, электропилы, краны и все прочее, она посмотрела на все
это и говорит: “Сейчас так работают, как мы раньше отдыхали”.
Жизнь коренным образом изменилась. Появился свет и так далее.
(Николай Д.)
Ресурсом для того, чтобы не отстать от обновления жизни, было
образование. Учительница рассказывает о буднях школы, в которой
работала.
Тогда все три этажа были забиты вечерниками. Многие отслужили уже армию. А днем там были учебные пункты. И еще
была дневная “вечерняя” школа – потому что ребята работали
посменно. (Людмила З.)
Эмоциональный настрой поддерживался и рациональным обоснованием правильности сделанного выбора. Рационализация – для себя и/
или для тех, кого нужно было убедить в этой правильности, – опиралась
на любые признаки того, что на великой стройке действительно открываются возможности обновления жизни, новой биографии, доступ
В. М. Воронков. Проект “шестидесятников”: движение протеста в СССР // Отцы
и дети: Поколенческий анализ современной России / Сост. Ю. Левада, Т. Шанин.
Москва, 2005. С. 193-194.
14
126
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
к перспективам модернизации. Получение жилья, например, было не
просто решением проблемы (появлением “своего угла”), а приобщением к новой, современной жизни.
…Когда я первый раз зашла в свою комнату из палатки – ну как
тут объяснить. Конец августа, у нас много было переселений. Отопление уже дали. Электричество провели в дом. Что вам надо еще?
Дом деревянный, пакля с верхних пазов висит на полметра – плохо
протыкнута. На первом этаже, где маляры краски свои разводили,
краска лепками – и стены просто деревянные нестроганые, окна
так вставлены. Входим: “Гена, как хорошо – батареи горячие”.
(Клара Т.)
Возникающие ассоциации со стихотворением Маяковского, написанным в 1928 г.,15 усиливаются, когда Клара Т. рассказывает подробности обживания. Ни советскую власть, ни социализм, в отличие от
героя Маяковского, она не вспоминает, но эмоции не менее глубокие,
чем в поэтическом тексте, – переживания человека, входящего в новую жизнь.
Поставили свои два чемодана, у меня были две подушки, два
одеяла ватные – мама мне подарила. Выручили очень в палатке.
Время – три, четвертый час уже, – надо и о вечере уже подумать.
Гена мигом чурок наносил, сколотили топчан из досок, газет настлали, ток есть в розетке – как хорошо! Тут же чайник на полу
поставили, вскипятили, отварили, уселись есть. А ноги мелькают
у нас в окошке, потому что еще не закрыли канавы – отопление
проводили, и поверх ходят, ноги мелькают, заглядывают. Ну ладно,
люди свои.
Каждое приобретение было событием: покупка стола, покупка
стиральной машины, которую сразу же испытали. И через пятьдесят
лет Клара Т. хорошо помнит, что для испытания рискнули кальсонами
китайского производства, которые специально принесла соседка. Событием стала и покупка туалетной бумаги, поскольку о существовании
такого блага цивилизации молодожены не подозревали до того, как
увидели товар в магазине. Детали как ступени в новый образ жизни
запечатлелись еще и потому, что они сообщались “городу и миру”.
Дочка Клары Т. дополняет эти воспоминания рассказами родителей,
которые слышала в детстве: “Когда ждали квартиру, мама не верила,
15
Вл. Маяковский. Рассказ литейщика Ивана Козырева о вселении в новую квартиру // Вл. Маяковский. Полное собрание сочинений: В 13 т. Москва, 1958. Т. 9.
С. 23-26.
127
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
что в каждой квартире собственный туалет: зачем отдельные туалеты?”
(Валентина К.)
Вместе с исключительностью трудностей всегда описывается атмосфера коллективной жизни как совместного преодоления трудностей и
акцентируется ее исключительность.16 Метафора “дух” возникает как
экспрессивная форма такого подчеркивания. Стиль отношений можно
определить двумя формулами из разных интервью: “не помню ни одного конфликта” и “ржачка все время стояла”. Первая фраза относится
к трудовому коллективу, вторая – к общему палаточному быту. Небольшие иллюстрации (которые можно множить) к этим двум формулам.
В палатке было пять семей, а кровати односпальные. Делали
из досок топчан, который клали на кровать, чтоб муж с женой мог
спать. Топчаны скрипели, конечно. Столько смеха было наутро: а
эти-то до пяти скрипели – спать не давали.
Здесь как одна семья была. Большинство жили в палатках, а
палаточный городок, как одна семья.
Народ, который работал – “скромность не скромность, ханжество не ханжество” в отношении денег – было стыдно спросить
об оплате. Мужики считали ниже своего достоинства об этом
говорить.
Народ был молодой, смеялись.
Атмосфера веселья – постоянный мотив во всех воспоминаниях.
Атмосфера эта запомнилась настолько ярко, что можно предположить
значимость ее как функции психологической разрядки, как личного
освобождения. Второй обязательный мотив воспоминаний – исключительность отношений.
Остранение системы
Вот еще о повседневности палаточного поселка на строительстве
Братской ГЭС.
Рядом с палаткой стоял репродуктор. Утром в 6 часов он начинал: “Говорит Москва…”. Мужики швыряли в него что-нибудь,
он замолкал. Потом начинал хрюкать – в него опять что-нибудь
швыряли. Днем его налаживали, и наутро опять: “Говорит Москва…” И так каждый день. (Клара Т.)
16
В последующие годы, когда Ангара была перекрыта и люди жили уже не в палатках, лишения воспринимались уже как проблема организации, как чья-то вина.
128
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Около другой палатки, в которой жили учителя, стоял энергопоезд,
который “тарахтел страшенным образом и ничего не слышно. Зато
светло”. Через шум энергопоезда доносился звук репродуктора, установленного рядом с палаткой на столбе:
Когда в 6 утра радио начинало играть гимн, соседка по палатке
(учительница физкультуры) поднимала всех. И мы все, стоя, пели
гимн. (Людмила З.)
Хочется добавить “и так каждый день”, чтобы подчеркнуть перекличку этого эпизода с рассказом Клары Т. Отличия между двумя этими
картинками можно объяснить отчасти календарно: Клара Т. прибыла
на стройку в конце декабря, а Людмила З. – месяца на четыре раньше, к началу учебного года. Конечно, отношение к идеологическому
шуму, к публичному выражению чувств было разное, и представить
коллективное пение гимна в “семейной палатке”, где проживала Клара,
невозможно, но нет сомнения, что и внутренний ритуал, описанный
Людмилой, в конце концов изжил себя. Подобные практики на ударной
стройке и затем в молодом городе не сохранялись.
Две эти картинки в воспоминаниях моих собеседниц о своих
палатках в своем сходстве и различии – воплощение формулы “семантический коллапс ‘коммунизма’”. Формулу употребили Геннадий
Батыгин и Мария Рассохина в статье, основанной на анализе источника
совершенно другого ряда – журнала “Новый мир” 1950-х годов.17 Два
десятилетия происходила тривиализация коммунистической речи – от
текста, созданного большевистским романтизмом, к “расколдовыванию” светлого будущего.18 Энтузиазм и эмфаза вытеснялись из коммунистической риторики, глоссолалии19 подвижничества вырождались.
В пятидесятые годы, констатируют авторы, “коммунистическая идея
представляла собой уже не подвиг и дерзновенную мечту, а рутинный
модернизационный проект”.20 Программа построения коммунизма (т.е.
новая Программа КПСС), которую Батыгин и Рассохина назвали образцом новой коммунистической речи – “язык техпромфинпланов” – была
Г. Батыгин, М. Рассохина. Семантический коллапс “коммунизма” // Человек.
2002. № 6. С. 61-77.
18
Дискуссию об “искренности” в литературе, начатую “Новым миром”, авторы
считают реакцией на это “расколдовывание”. См.: Там же. С. 76-77.
19
В данном контексте можно определить как риторические фигуры или словосочетания, нагруженные ритуальными и магическими функциями, но не транслирующие
смыслы и не развивающие содержание.
20
Г. Батыгин, М. Рассохина. Семантический коллапс “коммунизма”. С. 77.
17
129
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
принята “тогда, когда ‘коммунизм’ присутствовал в публичной речи
как разновидность всем известной, но необходимой лжи”.21
Илл. 2. Картина В. Ф. Жемерикина “Серебряные рельсы”, 1979
(завершение строительства стыковочного узла на БАМе).
С позиций этого анализа ударные стройки, развернутые во второй
половине пятидесятых, – особый случай для отслеживания судьбы
идеократии, с одной стороны, результат и свидетельство энтузиазма и
подвижничества, а с другой – передовая модернизации, место, где техпромплан является ежедневной целью. Было или нет здесь ощущение
коллапса, судить трудно. Возможно, для кого-то и было – в некоторых
интервью проскальзывает снисходительное (иногда слегка презрительное) “комсомольцы” по отношению к тем, кто приехал в составе
21
Там же.
130
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
разного рода “отрядов”, но не удержался на стройке. Встречается также
(причем в противоположных коннотациях) определение “правдолюб”.
Но в целом, став повседневностью, энтузиазм и подвижничество освободились от идеологического оформления без видимого напряжения. В
песне Добронравова и Пахмутовой, ставшей неофициальным гимном
строителей Братска, эта эмансипация от идеологии найдет свое выражение в интонации извинения: “так уж вышло, что наша мечта на
плакат из палаток взята…”.
Работа на “передовой” и экстремальные условия жизни давали
санкцию на то, чтобы нарушать норму, которую невозможно было бы
нарушить на “большой земле”. Например, в “палаточном Братске”, насколько могу судить, даже не прошла и общесоюзная “закрытая читка”
доклада Хрущева.22 Вспомним, что и товарищей Клары Т. по палатке не
“призвали к порядку”: “затыкать” “голос из Москвы” не мешали, хотя
порядок не пересматривали и репродуктор чинили исправно.
На передовом крае преобразования страны формировалось социальное пространство, которое было одной из зон риска для идеократии.
Конечно, здесь, в отличие от столиц, “диссидентская атака на уже
мертвый ‘коммунизм’”23 возникнуть не могла, но остранение идеологии
и системы власти, сакрализированной идеологией, было неизбежным.
Дистанция географическая оборачивалась не столкновением мировоззрений, но мировоззренческой дистанцией. Мобилизация людей на
ударные стройки как исторические свершения “родины социализма”
обернулась одним из способов разрушения идеократии. Мобильность
“советских номадов” была и поиском своего места, и формой ухода,
и способом остранения социально-политической системы. Наталья Т.
вспоминает:
Я уехала, но тоже со скандалом с Урала. Там был директор
школы – он мне не показался ни по отношению к учителям, ни
по отношению к школе. Что это за директор: в девять приходит, в
четыре уходит. Дает распоряжение в середине урока. А мне было
Съезд пришелся на первую зиму строительства (и быта строителей), и я специально спрашивал о том, как был воспринят “секретный” доклад. Собраний с зачитыванием доклада на строительстве либо просто не проводили, либо предельно сузили
круг участников такой читки. Это косвенно подтверждает, что формировавшийся
коллектив строителей ГЭС оценивался как концентрация социально-активных
людей с потенциалом социального протеста или столкновений (скажем, между
освободившимися из лагерей и бывшими сотрудниками карательной системы).
23
Выражение Батыгина и Рассохиной. Семантический коллапс “коммунизма”. С. 77.
22
131
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
двадцать пять лет, но я ему все это принародно и высказала. Ну, я
не каялась в этом, хотя мне пришлось потом очень тяжело, очень
тяжело.
Мы сюда с моей приятельницей написали письмо. Заварив
кашу на Урале, мы, в общем, решили и написали письма – куда
нас позовут. Тридцать писем отправили. Отправляли по принципу:
где есть “коричневое”. Я очень не люблю ровную местность. В
Верхоянск отправляли, ну вот в такие места из коричневых – вот
к нам пришло письмо из Усть-Илимска: ждем, приезжайте. (Наталья Т., 1949 г.р.)
Участие в исторических стройках оказывалось одновременно дистанцированием от тех, кто сохранял право озвучивать исторические
смыслы. Выразительная метафора этой социально-исторической
ситуации – эпизод торжественного запуска Н. С. Хрущевым первого
агрегата ГЭС, кинорепортаж о котором стал одним из дежурных визуальных символов курса на строительство коммунизма. За последние
годы опубликованы свидетельства участников события,24 и мы знаем,
что визит руководителя СССР не был запланированным и был кратковременным, иначе говоря, был одной из импровизаций Н. С. Хрущева,
придавшей запуску ГЭС символическое значение.25 Мы знаем и то,
что акт этот был не только символом, но и имитацией: рабочий запуск
негласно состоялся до приезда Хрущева. Свидетельство Клары Тимониной, готовившей по долгу службы ключевую часть события, делает
метафору “запуска величайшей стройки” еще более объемной:
– Так включал Хрущев первый агрегат или нет?
– Кто бы ему дал!? Представь щит управления – релейная
защита там и все. К нему подвели от постороннего источника напряжение, чтобы закрутить ротор. То есть возбуждение дали от
постороннего источника, генератор крутился, а ток не выдавал –
выхода не было. Хрущев повернул, и вольтметр показывает: ток
пошел! Приоткрыли затворы – на лопасти попáдало, закрутилась
турбина.
– А Хрущев знал, что это имитация?
– Может, и знал. Не знаю.
См., например, http://bratska.net/?doc=1946 ; http://expert.ru/siberia/2011/47/
polveka-v-stroyu/.
25
Пуск состоялся 28 ноября 1961 года, то есть всего лишь через месяц после завершения 22 съезда КПСС, принявшего новую Программу партии – “программу
построения коммунизма в СССР”.
24
132
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Степень автономности сообщества была такова, что участница событий могла не знать о том, был ли руководитель партии и правительства
в курсе имитации символического акта. Очевидно, что этот вопрос либо
не обсуждался участниками инсценировки, либо ответ на него значил
не так много, чтобы запечатлеться в памяти. Социальное пространство,
созданное людьми, решавшими историческую задачу, было настолько
дистанцировано от сакрального пространства власти, что встреча этих
двух социальных миров, их совмещение-без-подчинения друг другу,
породили одну из самых объемных метафор “вертикали власти”. Участие “вертикали власти” свелось к “ручному управлению” в крайне
ограниченных пределах. Существенной является и еще
одна метафора из кинохроники: крупный план приборов
щита управления, на котором
“задергались стрелки” (выражение Клары Тимониной)
после исторического поворота рукоятки, – выразительный Илл. 3. кадр кинохроники 1961 года: Никита
образ “обратной связи” на Сергеевич Хрущев только что “включил” перимитационное воздействие вый агрегат Братской ГЭС.
руководства.
Особенные отношения легендарных строек с властью и идеологией порождали мифы во внешнем (по отношению к этим стройкам)
мире, в генезисе которых интересны как основа, так и последующее
мифотворение. Миф, ходивший, в частности, в Иркутске в начале и
середине шестидесятых годов, повествовал о том, “как Хрущева не
пустили включать Братскую ГЭС”. Сюжет мифа: Хрущев приехал в
Братск “пускать ГЭС”, но возмущенные рабочие не пропустили его
к плотине, и знаменитые кадры, на которых Никита Сергеевич поворачивает рубильник, кинооператоры снимали на другой ГЭС. Миф обрастал версиями: уточнялось, чем именно возмущались рабочие (своим
положением или политикой в стране), где проходила киносъемка (на
Иркутской ГЭС или в Сталинграде). Но ни в одной из версий не шла
речь о каких-либо репрессиях против рабочих – миф переплетался с
героизацией строителей Братска, за ними признавалась сила настолько
серьезная, что они могли заявлять правду начальству и постоять за себя.
Эпизоды пребывания в Братске руководителя СССР Н. С. Хрущева
я пытался реконструировать на основе фокусированных интервью.
133
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
Выяснилось, миф сводил воедино эпизоды из двух разных визитов
Хрущева. Но и это удалось выяснить не сразу – эпизоды смешались и
в воспоминаниях свидетелей. Хрущев посетил Братск 8 октября 1959 г.
после своей знаменитой поездки по США и визита в Китай. Митинг,
на котором строители ГЭС предъявили советскому руководителю свои
претензии, состоялся именно тогда. А неожиданный и скоротечный
визит Хрущева, в ходе которого был зафиксирован кинодокументалистами запуск первого агрегата ГЭС, состоялся в ноябре 1961 г. Судя
по воспоминаниям о митинге 1959 г., обструкция, которой подвергли
верховного руководителя, была неожиданной для самих братчан, и
ее, пожалуй, нельзя назвать жесткой. Вот логика эпизода в памяти
участников: Хрущев не сумел найти “общего языка” с братчанами,26
собравшимися на встречу с ним, что привело его в раздражение, и, как
результат, зазвучали вопросы и реплики из толпы. Выкрикивались претензии в отношении быта и особенно снабжения, на которые Хрущев
не мог ответить.
В реконструкции митинга первый секретарь Иркутского обкома
КПСС выглядит растерянным и жалким, если не сказать, ничтожным,
а начальник БратскГЭСстроя Иван Наймушин – выдержанным и достойным на фоне приехавших “первых лиц”. При этом претензии
братчан, вызвавшие раздражение Хрущева и растерянность руководителя Иркутской области, касались снабжения Братска продуктами и
товарами первой необходимости, т.е. вполне могли быть предъявлены
и “первому лицу” стройки.
Методы руководства на самой стройке были по-советски патерналистские, но альтернативные сталинистским, поскольку не ориентировались на репрессии. Альтернативны они были и формально-бюрократическим методам, характерным для последующих советских десятилетий.27 “Свои” командиры воспринимались как культовые фигуры,
чему способствовал их демократизм (доступность) и патерналистская
забота – полная противоположность стилю аппаратчиков. Стилистика
руководителей стройки была неожиданной, но узнаваемой – в ней
26
По различным опубликованным воспоминаниям Никита Сергеевич был очень
недоволен результатами визита в Пекин, и его настроение привело к тому, что в
Иркутске он вообще отказался от участия в митинге, собранном на Иркутской ГЭС.
27
Не случайно генерация руководителей, сформировавшаяся на уральских и сибирских стройках, оказалась востребованной в период перестройки и системного
кризиса 1990-х гг. Важно также, что ситуации аврала были для этих людей не менее
привычны, чем штатные ситуации.
134
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
реализовывался идеал “отцов-командиров” и боевого товарищества,
особо значимый для подростков военного и послевоенного времени.
Однако миф о визите Хрущева противопоставлял не “народ” и
“власть”, а, подобно всей исторической мифологии Братска, – мир
“конкретного дела” и невнятный мир политических идей. Путаница в
воспоминаниях о разных визитах Хрущева очень характерна. Также
плохо запомнились визиты других советских руководителей независимо
от симпатий и антипатий, сложившихся тогда. Однако все были готовы
эмоционально и очень подробно вспоминать о приезде Фиделя Кастро.
Революционный лидер оказался явно созвучен социальной атмосфере
молодого Братска. Также созвучными ей оказались, например, Евгений
Евтушенко, Александра Пахмутова и Николай Добронравов.
После коммунизма
Поколение людей, родившихся в 1950-е гг., стало ключевым для последних всесоюзных ударных строек, в том числе для Байкало-Амурской
магистрали и промышленных объектов в Усть-Илимске (и собственно
города Усть-Илимска). Десталинизация была социальным контекстом,
в котором формировались люди этого поколения. Литература, кино,
формальные и неформальные институты воспитания транслировали
пафос революционного обновления мира, романтизировали “очищенные” идеалы. Разоблачение “культа личности” для этого поколения
не было событием, а было знанием, подтверждавшим естественный
ход прогресса. Потенциал исторической мобилизации сохранялся, и
целеустремленная личность была героем эпохи.28 В 1960-х гг. “стройки
коммунизма” и новые города были очередным воплощением антропономических29 намерений советской власти, выраженных в проекте “нового
Мир 1960-х рассмотрен П. Вайлем и А. Геннисом в их книге как мир взрослых
людей: “шестидесятников”, молодежи, покоряющей целину, Сибирь и науку. Лев
Аннинский в статье, включенной как послесловие в одно из изданий книги, передает
этот мир формулами “концентрация энергии”, “мания восхождения”, “опьянение
мировой культурой, опьянение мировой революцией”, “опьянение соперничеством
с главной державой Запада”; см.: Л. Аннинский. Пальмы на айсберге // Вайль, Генис.
60-е. Мир советского человека. С. 333, 334. Для подростков 1960-х гг. это был мир,
каким он должен быть: энергичный, восходящий, наполненный романтикой борьбы
и освобождением народов, – иначе говоря, естественным следствием революции
и разгрома фашизма.
29
Антропономическая революция – стремление изменить основы воспроизводства
человеческой жизни (термин введен Даниэлем Берто).
28
135
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
человека”. Формула “строитель коммунизма” (как синоним “нового
человека”) оставалась одним из основных звеньев пропагандистского
обеспечения “ударных строек”. Но сам язык пропаганды был чужим
для тех, кого пропаганда воспевала.
К концу 1960-х смягчился и пафос самовоспитания – такие резкие формулы как “переделать себя”, “настоящий человек”, “человек
будущего” плохо совместимы с процессами индивидуализации, с
автономизацией личной жизни. Но отстаивать право на личный выбор, утверждать достоинство самостоятельного человека, стремиться
принести “общественную пользу” – это тоже испытывать себя трудностями, искать “трудное счастье”:
Наверное, то плохое, что я получила, то с чем трудно жить
сейчас, т.е от времен “оттепели”, я получила такие вот основы
коммунарского движения, т.е они в душу-то попали, видимо,
выросли там, а окружающая действительность им не соответствовала. Т.е это нужен был какой-то риск, который как бы…
или не сталкиваться с окружающей действительностью, а если
и сталкиваться, то, может, это как-то объяснить вот эту вот привычку все брать на себя: Сделай так, чтобы другим было хорошо.
(Наталья Т., 1949 г.р.)
Представители этого поколения еще реже, чем добровольцы начала
1960-х, верили в коммунизм как общественный строй, но, как правило,
верили в свои силы и в способность жить иначе, чем живет страна
“реального социализма”.
– Получается, что вы на Тынду попали в самом начале стройки?
– Да, самое интересное время. Там такие люди собрались. Там
был такой мир, который мне напоминал студенческий шестьдесят
пятый год, когда я поступала в университет. Какие-то тусовки
своих людей интересных, споры, гитара, походы обязательно.
Там еще были люди непринятые. Как сказать? Талантливые, но
отвергнутые. Странники были там. Ребята рабочие, без образования, но образованнее образованных. И приходишь к ним – тебя
или принимают или не принимают. И если принимают, они сразу
становятся родными. (Татьяна К., 1947 г.р.)
Отстраненность от “большой земли”, остранение ее правил и норм,
рационализация своего отъезда с этой “большой земли” – все это задавало жесткую границу между миром, предполагавшим доверие и
искренность, и миром, допускавшим лицемерие. В 1970-х гг. отношения
136
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
с идеологией и с “большим обществом” были далеко не однозначны и
могли принимать форму столкновения и даже противостояния.
– А идеологический шум не мешал? “Тында – столица БАМа”
и подобное?
– Как не мешал? Меня вызывали в соответствующие органы. И
вплоть до того, что аморалку шили. Все это было, знаете, страшно.
Но именно там я поняла, что не сломаюсь ни за что. Но тогда это
было где-то на лезвии, на грани лезвия, потому что помню это
унижение. (Татьяна К., 1947 г.р.)
Молодые города не были оазисами, свободными от идеологического администрирования, но если давление или даже преследование
происходило, подобные случаи описываются как столкновение между
идеализмом, обретшим практическое поприще (интересное, полезное
дело, увлеченность и вовлеченность людей) с идеократией – абстрактной, дегуманнизированной и часто персонифицированной в неумных
функционерах.
Концептуализируя феномен “шестидесятников”, Виктор Тюпа отмечает, что это явление начиналось “с того, что у все более значительного
числа советских граждан обнаруживается, по выражению Окуджавы,
‘некоторая отстраненность’ от ролевого присутствия в мире, позволяющая ‘оставаться самим собой’”.30 Обложка книги, которую открывает
статья Тюпы, оформлена фотопанорамой молодого сибирского города.31
В книге “феномен шестидесятых” исследован как кризис советского
сознания. Статьи, составившие коллективную работу, посвящены
культурной жизни Москвы, Ленинграда, новосибирского Академгородка. Это географическое ограничение “столицами” характерно для
исследований “шестидесятых” (как и для темы разрушения советского
сознания). Основываясь на “столичном материале”, Тюпа прослеживает, как драматизм двоедушия (“официального” и “неофициального”),
столь характерный для “шестидесятых”, постепенно трансформируется
в семидесятых в циничное разделение официального и неофициального
миров, с присущими этим мирам собственными “правилами игры”.
Для Тюпы различие между десятилетиями связано с тем, что “в 1960-х
годах такая отстраненность и восстановление изгнанного из советской
В. И. Тюпа. Кризис советской ментальности в 1960-е годы // Социокультурный
феномен шестидесятых. Москва, 2008. С. 19.
31
Социокультурный феномен шестидесятых / Сост. В. И. Тюпа, О. В. Федунина.
Москва, 2008.
30
137
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
ментальности чувства собственного достоинства еще не переросли
в эгоцентризм ‘неофициального’ Я-сознания”.32 В этом пункте роль
“географической дистанции” оказывается принципиальной. Отстранение могло выражаться не только в “эгоцентризме ‘неофициального’
Я-сознания”, но и в уходе от двоедушной современности в иное пространство, к перемещению туда, где принципы жизни и общения не
напоминали игру по правилам. Туда, где можно было даже участвовать
в создании среды, не предлагающей цинизм как норму.
Смыслообразующая роль “великих строек” для человека, участвующего в них, сохранилась, несмотря на явный диссонанс между коммунистической риторикой и повседневностью. “Двойное рождение”
Усть-Илимска33 – прекрасное доказательство преемственности и различия семидесятых и шестидесятых. Можно сравнить два поколения,
два слоя социальной жизни в городе: “коллективисты”-энтузиасты
1960-х и “индивидуалисты” 1980-х.34 В обоих случаях речь идет о выработке соотношения между индивидуализмом и общинностью. Мера
индивидуального и коллективистского ищется заново, в диапазоне от
принятия ритуального коллективизма до публичного выбора позиции
“белой вороны”.
Мир молодых сибирских городов отличался от “столичных” 1960–
1970-х гг. прежде всего реализуемостью идеала. Идеал этот не стоит
путать с идеологическими целями, вечно отложенными на будущее.
Речь в данном случае идет об идеале человеческих отношений, который
реализуется в настоящем. Одновременно с большой стройкой люди
создавали социальность на микроуровне – в неформальных и полуформальных коллективах. Людям, встретившимся друг с другом на
сибирских стройках, не были чужды запросы “столичного” общества:
Там же.
Как у города, у Усть-Илимска было два рождения. Первое – в конце 1960х – начале
1970х годов – связано со строительством ГЭС, второе – на рубеже 1970-х–1980-х –
со строительством лесопромышленного комплекса (интернациональная стройка
СЭВ) и “Нового города”.
34
Основная часть исследования в Усть-Илимске проходила в 1994–1996 гг. на основе
метода истории семей. Предмет исследования – формирование и межпоколенческая трансляция городской идентичности. Город предстал через биографические
интервью, прежде всего как формирующийся человеческий мир, не согласившийся
оставаться моноградом, где жизнь была бы подчинена градообразующему предприятию и прошлым историческим смыслам “великой стройки”. См. подробнее:
М. Рожанский. Память города без прошлого // Биографический метод в исследованиях постсоциалистического общества. Санкт-Петербург, 1997.
32
33
138
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
материальное и экзистенциальное слишком плотно зависели от участия
в большом проекте. Но выбрав новую стройку, человек так или иначе
выбирал людей, которые, как и он, решились приехать сюда. “Своими”
оказывались не только те, кого ты знал в лицо и по имени. “Своими”
были все те, кто тоже выбрал настоящую жизнь.
В Усть-Илимске, Северобайкальске, Тынде 1980-х гг. эта установка на осуществимость идеала, на реализацию практического смысла
(без медиаторов-пропагандистов, но с бескорыстными и активными
лидерами) была вполне публичной и общепонятной. Циничное принятие “правил игры” не то что не было нормой, а скорее общественно
осуждалось, как и двоемыслие.
Процесс переоценки истории в конце 1980-х нанес серьезный удар
по ощущению “исторической правоты” нового, созданного вместе с
товарищами мира. Важно, однако, то, что этот удар не затронул советского прошлого и его идеологии: ни одно биографическое интервью
не дает иллюстраций к формуле “разочарование в коммунистических
идеалах”, ставшей дежурной для статей о позднем советском времени.
Разочарование связано с другим – с радикальным и публичным отрицанием исторического значения построенных ГЭС, заводов, БайкалоАмурской магистрали. Удар по стройкам был воспринят, как удар по
поколению первостроителей…
Семантика мира великих строек была бинарной: с одной стороны, ее
ядром был новый город, новая жизнь, с другой – обновление больших
и достижимых целей. Поиск своего места не обязательно означал желание укорениться в молодом городе. Некоторые становились профессиональными первопроходцами, переезжая с одной большой стройки
на другую. В середине семидесятых одной из самых исполняемых в
Усть-Илимске была песня с условным названием “Лосята”, строфа из
которой вынесена в эпиграф к статье:
На усть-илимских островах закат, закат,
И сосны в гаснущих лучах молчат, молчат,
Как стражи верные, храня покой земли,
Лосята грустные стоят, как корабли.35
Лосята – острова недалеко от места перекрытия Ангары, обреченные на затопление. Если в песне Пахмутовой и Добронравова тайга
любовалась девчонками, то в усть-илимской народной песне величественная девственная природа, которую олицетворяют грустные
35
Местный текст на мелодию песни Юрия Визбора “На Соловецких островах”.
139
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
острова и молчаливые сосны, прощалась перед уходом на дно рукотворного моря. А само будущее море представало этапом жизненного
пути, осуществленной целью, но не итогом. Человек определял “свое
место” не как обустройство нового социального мира, а как кочевье
по необустроенным местам.
Вместо заключения:
Немного о песнях, которые “придумала жизнь”
Стихотворение Михаила Светлова “Гренада” стало песней в конце
1950-х годов,36 войдя в непременную часть репертуара “под гитару”.
В 1960-х гг., когда поселок Усть-Илим еще не стал городом УстьИлимском, там было два основных очага городской культуры – ресторан
“Лосята” и Дом культуры “Гренада”. В слове “Гренада” обновление
идеалов, близкое многим из приехавших строить ГЭС и новый город,
соединялось с романтикой дальних дорог, которая тоже была растворена
в воздухе эпохи. Воплощение идеалов в образе дороги делало их “земными” и понятными: идейное воспринималось как экзистенциальное.
С киноэкрана “в народ” пошли песни из вышедших в 1958 г. кинофильмов “По ту сторону” (“Песня о тревожной молодости”, муз.
А. Пахмутовой на слова Л. Ошанина) и “Добровольцы” (“Комсомольцы-добровольцы” и “А годы летят”, муз. М. Фрадкина на слова
Е. Долматовского). “Меня мое сердце в тревожную даль зовет” и “Не
созданы мы для легких путей” – образец “сурового стиля” советского идеализма,37 для которого великие стройки стали продолжением
революции и Великой Отечественной. С начала 1960-х и в мажорном
Наиболее популярная песенная версия “Гренады” (муз. Виктора Берковского)
появилась в 1958 г.
37
Понятие “суровый стиль” сформулировано для описания тенденций и направлений в советской живописи 1960-х гг. Но более точное определение трудно подобрать, например, для большинства песен А. Пахмутовой и Н. Добронравова, в
том числе о Братске и Усть-Илимске. Алексей Бобриков противопоставляет эту
стилистику как сталинскому искусству, так и эстетскому “искусству для искусства”:
“‘суровый стиль’ может быть описан как своеобразная советская Реформация.
Он демонстрирует протестантский тип героя – взрослого и ответственного, обладающего собственным опытом, личной верой и вообще развитой внутренней
мотивацией (и потому не нуждающегося во внешнем идеологическом стимулировании со стороны партии-церкви), хотя и действующего в рамках общего
преобразовательного проекта.” См.: А. Бобриков. Суровый стиль: мобилизация
и культурная революция // Художественный журнал. № 51/52. http://xz.gif.ru/
numbers/51-52/surovo/.
36
140
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
секторе эстрады зазвучали песни, в которых сама возможность делать
биографию через географию трудовой страны представлялась приоритетом молодости, ее особым ароматом.38 Сибирские стройки в этих
песнях упоминались не всегда. Во многом это были песни “большой
земли”, точнее даже песни мегаполиса: человек “шагал по Москве”,
и мог пройти еще “и тундру и тайгу”. Для счастья оказывалось недостаточно большого города и в целом устроенного урбанизированного
мира, а случайно встреченный “настоящий парень” с сибирской стройки
пробуждал лирическую грусть в парне-метростроевце, влюбленном в
Москву. Или можно было влюбиться в “девчонку-бирюсинку” и решать,
везти ее в столицу или самому остаться в ангарской тайге.
В этих песнях можно было
услышать вызов мещанству,
миру мелких бытовых забот
или, во всяком случае, имитацию
такого вызова. Реакцией на урбанистическую революцию была
и субкультура туризма со своим
огромным “костровым” репертуаром про “щемящее чувство
дороги”. Песни могли рождаться Илл. 4. Картина В. Е. Попкова “Строители
Братска”, 1960–61 (характерный образец
и на маршруте, но родом они все “сурового стиля” в советской живописи).
же были из больших городов, где
в концертных залах “страдают в бродячих душах бетховенские сонаты”. Это была уже не героическая и общественно полезная романтика
дальних дорог, а скорее поэтика странствия, которой не было места
на эстраде. Странствие – это всегда остранение оставленного мира,
и слова о странности “большой земли” мало совместимы с историческим оптимизмом.39 Тем не менее и туристская субкультура находила
свою нишу если не на эстраде, то на всесоюзном радио и в сценариях
композиций для клубов и ДК.
“Голубые города” (муз. А. Петрова на стихи Л. Куклина), “Под крылом самолета”
(муз. А. Пахмутовой на стихи С. Гребенникова и Н. Добронравова), “Мой адрес –
Советский Союз” (муз. Д. Тухманова на стихи В. Харитонова), “Морзянка” (муз.
М. Фрадкина на стихи М. Пляцковского), “Ну что тебе сказать про Сахалин” (муз.
Я. Френкеля на стихи М. Танича), “ В Сибири далекой” (муз. А. Островского на
слова Э. Иодковского) и многие другие.
39
Не случайно из бардовских песен эстрадой тиражировалась, например, вполне
мажорная “А я еду за туманом” Юрия Кукина.
38
141
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
Сибирские стройки имели непосредственное отношение и к мажорной эстраде, и к туристской лирике. Романтика Сибири и сибирских
строек была частью социального заказа для официального культурного
репертуара, в том числе и для эстрады, так же как для литературы, кино,
живописи. Готовность сменить “тепленькое местечко” на неведомые
края была экономической необходимостью, а значит, и идеологическим
приоритетом. Это давало санкцию и на присутствие в официальном
публичном пространстве. В звуковом журнале “Кругозор” или в программе радиостанции “Юность” репертуар “от костра” и лирические
репортажи с великих строек не просто соседствовали, они были трудноразличимы в своем стилистическом единстве. В какой-то мере в эту
нишу попадали и представители авторской песни – они могли быть
авторами этих репортажей (как Юрий Визбор или Максим Кусургашев)
или просто участниками встреч в эфире с молодыми строителями, но
как субкультура авторская (или “бардовская”) песня создавалась и существовала в те же 1960–1970-е гг. в публично-приватной сфере – параллельно с эстрадой и телеэкраном, если не “перпендикулярно” к ним.
Одним из очевидных признаков этой “перпендикулярности” было
то, что традиционная для русской (и советской в том числе) песенной
лирики тема дороги, воплощаясь в поэтике духовного поиска, стала
темой внутренней независимости: “Мой друг уехал в Магадан, снимите
шляпу…” – пел В. Высоцкий. “Придут другие времена, мой друг, / Ты
верь в дорогу””, – вторил ему Ю. Визбор. Одновременно привязанность к дороге осознавалась как симптом неукорененности, как неудовлетворенное желание “настоящей” жизни: “Где же наша звезда? /
Может, здесь... / Может, там...” (В. Высоцкий), “Ненадежен твой мир и
не прочен твой дом – / Все дорога, дорога, дорога...” (А. Городницкий).
“‘Отложенная’ жизнь – это тоже способ жить”, – заметили Лев
Гудков и Борис Дубин в эссе “Интеллигенты и интеллектуалы”
(1992).40 Речь шла о том, что вечная незавершенность модернизации
в России – травма, создающая интеллигенцию. Тема странничества делала субкультуру “авторской песни“ контркультурой не в меньшей (а
возможно, и в большей) степени, чем политически актуальные тексты –
именно потому, что в этой “ностальгии по настоящему” было очевидно
переживание травмы. “Отложенной” воспринималась жизнь страны,
и воспринималась она так не только интеллигенцией. Нельзя сказать,
Л. Гудков, Б. Дубин. Интеллигенция. Заметки о литературно-политических иллюзиях. 2-е изд., испр. и доп. Санкт-Петербург, 2009. С. 145.
40
142
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
что исторический оптимизм оказался невостребованным, спрос на него
сохранялся, но предложение было неубедительным.
Через двадцать лет после песни о девчонках на палубе, формула
“трудное счастье” прозвучит в другой песне, ставшей популярной:
“Трудное счастье – находка для нас, / К подвигам наша дорога”.41 В
тексте не было ни слова о каком-либо строительстве, зато там были
упомянуты багульник (давший название песне) и кедры. Этих примет
было достаточно, чтобы песню единодушно отнесли к “БАМовской”
тематике. Не мешало, что мелодия (вопреки слову “подвиг”) звучала
элегически, если не меланхолично, и ей соответствовала интонация
стихов с явным злоупотреблением сослагательным наклонением: “Вот
бы прожить мне всю жизнь молодым, / Чтоб не хотелось покоя”.
Две песни о “трудном счастье”, написанные профессиональными
столичными авторами, вошли не только в официальную культуру
(обе – долгожители праздничных концертов), но в застольные и околокостровые песнопения. Они вполне могут служить маркерами и
рассматриваться как симптомы, с одной стороны, того, что дозволялось
и поощрялось, с другой стороны, того, что находило отклик и даже
подхватывалось. “Багульник” примечателен тем, что в нем не было и
следа от лирики исторического оптимизма, которым пронизана песня “По Ангаре”. Скорее, он выражал некое межумочное настроение,
которое можно назвать коллективно-экзистенциальным: тема преобразования далекого края, по сути, предстала возможностью странствия
по жизни вместе с такими же, как ты. Иначе говоря, познание себя
через познание пространства оказывалось значимее и ближе, чем
преобразование мира. Советское представало все более странным и
формальным. Мотивы странничества звучали гораздо более искренне,
чем исторический оптимизм.
В социальной истории страны период “великих сибирских строек”
занимает примерно четверть века: от мобилизации добровольцев на
строительство Братской и Красноярской ГЭС, трассы Абакан – Тайшет до рубежа 1970–1980-х – времени апогея строительства БАМа и
развертывания усть-илимских строек. Описание этого периода через
дихотомию оттепель/застой предельно упрощает динамику социальных
настроений, подчиняя ее политической истории.
Социальная история великих сибирских строек соединила в себе
два способа жизни: странствие в поисках настоящего и конструктивное
41
“Багульник”, муз. В. Шаинского, сл. И. Морозова.
143
М. Рожанский, Навстречу утренней заре
действие. По сути, оба эти способа жизни антисистемны, хотя в советском случае странствие осуждалось, а конструктивность – одобрялась.
В позднесоветское время эти способы организации жизни оказались
не только совместимыми, но иногда и неразделимыми, позволяя советскому человеку обретать – без помощи идеологической риторики
и реальной или имитационной борьбы с ней – ощущение целостности
и чувство “настоящего”.
SUMMARY
Mikhail Rozhanskii’s article focuses on the notion of geographical mobility in the late Soviet period. Although Soviet notions of mobility were
directly opposed to nomadism in that they required a clear and determined
path, in the late Soviet period, “joining the historical process” entered into
a dialogue with the poetics and practices of nomadism. Rozhanskii builds
his study on a wide range of sources gathered during ieldwork in “young”
cities of Siberia, where young people were seen as creating their own “dificult happiness” through participating in the construction projects of late
socialism. Some joined these construction projects as they emerged from
the Stalinist concentration camps and were looking for a “clean slate.”
Others were driven by a sense of historical mobilization. Today’s memory
of these projects often focuses on the shared experiences of euphoria and
collectivism. Due to the geographical and social liminality of these Siberian construction sites, people experienced estrangement of the ideological
system of late socialism. Rozhanskii argues that in parallel to the socialist
construction sites, people created social worlds on the micro level. Finally,
Rozhanskii analyzes songs of the late Soviet period and illustrates how
nomadism and the search for dificult happiness emerged as a social and
collective movement that allowed people to realize themselves within the
conines of the Soviet modernization project.
144
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Emil NASRITDINOV
SPIRITUAL NOMADISM
AND CENTRAL ASIAN TABLIGHI TRAVELERS*
Introduction
In the context of the general theme of the forum Unsettling Nomadism this
article uses the concept of nomadism to describe the lifestyle of people who
travel the world in its spiritual terrain. I would like to suggest that as with
terms such as pastoral nomadism, which deine the lifestyle of people moving
with their herds of animals from pasture to pasture, we can employ the term
spiritual nomadism to help us better understand the travel components of
contemporary religious movements. The terms “nomadism” and “nomad”
have expanded their meanings in the twentieth century to include concepts
such as “virtual nomads” – to identify people who regularly travel in the
online spaces, “academic nomads” – university professors and researchers,
“global corporate business nomads” and “development nomads” – professionals working for various corporate and nongovernmental organizations,
“lifestyle nomads” – who travel with their guitars and backpacks, and “labor
migration nomads” who regularly travel between countries of origin and
destination. New modes of transportation and global interconnectedness
have contributed to the creation and expansion of these new types of human
mobility. What makes these various types of travel forms of nomadism is
*
The author acknowledges the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.
145
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
the regularity of travel, signiicant time spent on journeys, and the effect of
the mobile lifestyle on many aspects of personal and communal life.
In a similar way, the number of people who travel around the world with
some spiritual purposes has also signiicantly increased. The importance of
travel is recognized in many world religions. Pilgrimages to holy places, to
graveyards of saints, and to the location of various relics, travel for purposes
of acquiring religious knowledge, for missionary purposes, and for escaping
worldly matters are found in many examples of religious practices in history
and in contemporary times. The history of monotheistic religions, such as
Judaism, Islam and Christianity, is full of stories of travels and wanderings
of many Prophets, including Abraham, Moses, and Jesus; and the history of
Buddhism is signiicantly based on the travels of Buddha and his followers.
Today, we ind hundreds of thousands of people of different religious afiliations traveling across the world for the purposes of their own spiritual growth.
The main ethnographic part of this article draws on the analysis of practices, narratives, and discourses of Tablighi travelers – participants in the
movement for the revival of Islam, which originated in India in the early
twentieth century and by now, has reached many distant Muslim communities around the world. One of the major components of Tablighi religious
tradition is regular travel. The article describes how this kind of particular
religious travel affects the lives of Tablighis individually and how it affects
the larger communities of which they are a part.
Tablighi travel is organized in such a way that it has strong transformative
effects on the traveler. Tablighi narrative describes personal transformation
as the main purpose of travel. I have been joining Tablighi jamaats on their
three-day journeys since 2002 and last year I joined them on a forty-day
journey. The journey was even more valuable because it took me to India,
where I had a chance to be in the Nizamuddin marqas (center) in Delhi and
to attend an ijtema (gathering) in Bhopal. My experience was enriched by
the chance to listen to the bayans (talks) of the veterans of the movement
and converse with Tablighis from many parts of the world. The topic of
travel was the one of most interest to me. Bayans, taalim circles, stories,
and my own observations and contemplations serve as the main material for
the sections below. I have united the main ethnographic materials into six
themes, all helping to deconstruct the travel experience: personal transformation, knowledge and experience, new perspectives on worldly matters,
socialization, correction of belief, and travel metaphors. Using the concept
of nomadism as a lifestyle and regular travel practice helps me to connect
these themes together.
146
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
The source of all of the stories and quotations used here is this forty-day
Tablighi trip to India, in which I met Tablighi participants from different
parts of the world. Therefore, the quotes refer to where the particular informant is from.
The theoretical contribution and aim of this research is twofold: (1) to
analyze and reformulate Tablighi practices in relation to the term “spiritual
nomadism” used in this article; and (2) to describe the transformative effects
of spiritual Tablighi travels. But irst, we briely discuss the importance of
travel in Islam generally, look at the origins of Tablighi travel practice, and
contextualize it on the territory of Central Asia.
Islamic perspective on travel
Although the idea of religious pilgrimage, including the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, has been discussed extensively,1 the more inclusive
subject of travel in Islam as a unifying theoretical concept has not received
suficient systematic attention from scholars. One synthesizing attempt
was made by Eickelman and Piscatori2 in their edited book titled Muslim
Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration and the Religious Imagination. The
authors deined several Islamic concepts describing the idea of travel in
Islam. These include hajj (pilgrimage to Mecca), hijra (migration), ziyara
(travel to shrines), and rihla (travel for the purpose of acquiring religious
knowledge). The authors propose that different types of spiritual travels
were often combined not only with each other, but also with other types of
travels, such as labor migration and trade and that these worldly travels,
even without a spiritual component, often had a strong effect on the spiritual
transformations of travelers.
Other relevant terms include: the concept of sirat-al-mustakim (straight
path or straight way), which we encounter in the opening surah of the Quran,
and fee-sabilillah (in the path of Allah), the meaning of which includes travel
in jihad (holy war), travel for the purpose of dawah (invitation to Islam),
and travel for various takazas (tasks) of din (religion).
Eickelman and Piscatori portray these various types of spiritual travel
as speciic forms of social action transforming the imagined communi1
Francis Edward Peters. The Hajj: the Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places.
Princeton, 1994; Michae Wolfe (Ed.). One Thousand Roads to Mecca: Ten Centuries of
Travelers Writing About the Pilgrimage to Mecca. New York, 1998; Ali Shariati. Hajj:
Relection on Its Rituals. Chicago, 1993.
2
Dale F. Eickelman and James Piscatori (Eds.). Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration
and the Religious Imagination. Berkeley, 1990.
147
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
ties of believers through shifting boundaries and creating new identities
and new meanings. They emphasize the value of various terms deining
Muslim travel as elements of a universal vocabulary that make possible
comparison and analysis of various versions of Islam that have evolved
in different parts of the world and in different periods. Travel, as one of
these smaller concepts, constitutes both religious tradition and religious
imagination and helps us to gain a richer understanding of Islam while
avoiding an essentialist stand.
In Islam, the importance of travel is recognized and emphasized in the
numerous ayahs of the Holly Quran and in the hadiths of the Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.). For example, Abdullah bin Umar
(R.A.A.) described how
Prophet Muhammad took
him by the shoulder and
said: “Be in this world like
a stranger or a wayfarer”
(Buhari).
In the more interpretive
version, this hadith might
stress the temporal nature
of the world for a Muslim
whose final abode is in
the akhirat (next world).
However, a more literate
understanding is perhaps
an instruction to people
to spend significant part
of their lives as travelers.
In a more straightforward
way, one ayah of the Quran
says: “Travel through the
Earth and see what was Fig. 1. Two Kazakh Tablighi travelers with the Taj-ul
Masajid* in the background (photo by the author.)
Taj-ul Masajid (The crown of Mosques) in Bhopal, India used to be the biggest mosque
in Asia and now is considered the biggest mosque in India. It can accommodate 100,000
worshippers. Its construction was initiated by Shajehan Begum in 1868. Since 1949 it
used to be a place of annual Tablighi Ijtimas – three-day gatherings. In the recent past,
when the number of attendees became so large that they could no longer it in the mosque
and its surroundings, Ijtima was moved to a ield outside the city.
*
148
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the end of those who rejected the truth” (6:11). The Quran itself has many
stories of how different communities rejected the message and how they
were punished. In this sentence it instructs believers to travel in order to
see for themselves.
Fig. 2. The main building of the Taj-ul Masajid (photo by the author).
Many hadiths describe the beneits of travel in relation to the rewards
that travelers receive. The following extracts were taken from the chapter
on the virtues of travel included in the book of “Selected Hadiths” compiled
by Maulana Muhammad Yusuf:
Anas (R.A.A.) narrates that Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) said:
“One morning or one day in the path of Allah is better than the whole
world and everything that it contains” (Buhari).
Aisha (R.A.A.) described that she heard the Prophet Muhammad
(S.A.W.) say: “If dust touches the body of a person in the path of Allah,
these parts of the body will be forbidden for the ire of Hell” (Musnad
Ahmad, Tabrani, Majmauz-Zavaid).
Abu Huraira (R.A.A.) narrates how Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.)
once sent a group of sahabahs to carry out an assigned task. They asked:
“Should we depart tonight or wait until morning?” Prophet Muhammad
149
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
(S.A.W.) said: “Don’t you want to spend a night in one of the gardens
of Paradise?” (Sunan Kubra).
Protection from punishment and the promise of paradise embedded in the
Islamic teaching and grounded in the amplitude of feelings ranging between
fear and hope are all very powerful abstract motivators, while a comparison
to worldly riches helps to understand the signiicance of the rewards of travel.
Movement was crucial for the success of the Islamic world. Islam spread
so fast partly because of the nomadic lifestyle and mobility of Arabs who
delivered the message of Islam to many distant corners of the old world.
But movement was important not only in its initial stage. It played signiicant role throughout Islamic history. Gellens described Islamic civilization:
“…a network of variegated societies, united by their commitment to the
shar ’ia – was one which in the fullest sense owed its vibrancy to constant
movement. Travel in all its myriad forms – pilgrimage, trade, scholarship,
adventure – expanded the mental and physical limits of the Muslim world,
and preserved and nourished the various contacts that Muslims perennially
maintained with one another.”3
This network of Muslim societies connected through various channels
was a crucial factor in preserving and strengthening the Muslim Ummah
and its economic and intellectual growth. Travels were especially important
in the lives of Suis who understood travel as both a spiritual and physical
journey. Pina Werbner describes this concept in the following way:
Suism is conceived of essentially as a journey along a path (suluk)
leading towards God. In Suism the human being is a model for the
universe, a microcosm of the macrocosm, and the journey towards God
is a journey within the person… But Sui Islam is not only a journey
within the body and person… It is also a journey in space… Beyond
the transformation of the person, Suism is a movement in space which
Islamicizes the universe and transforms it into the space of Allah. This
journey, or hijra, which evokes the migration of the Prophet to Medina,
empowers a saint as it empowers the space through which he travels
and the place where he establishes his lodge.4
Suis traveled in different places around the world not for the purposes
of worldly gain, but mostly in their spiritual realms. Suism took different
forms in different places around the world. But almost universally presSam Gellens. The Search for Knowledge in Medieval Muslim Societies: a Comparative
Approach // Eickelman, Piscatori (Eds.). Muslim Travelers. P. 51.
4
Pnina Werbner. Pilgrims of Love: The Anthropology of a Global Sui Cult. Bloomington,
2004. Pp. 41-43.
3
150
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ent was the igure of a wandering dervish, who led a very ascetic life and
continuously moved from place to place performing zikr (remembrance of
Allah) and searching for purity of heart and a connection with God. Today,
Sui practices can be found on all continents of the world, including in
Western countries, where they are called “neo-Sui” movements. But the
Sui practices that are the main interest of this article are just as global and
trace their origins to India. These are described in the next section.
Spiritual nomadism in the practices of Tablighi jamaat
Early in the twentieth century a new movement emerged in the region of
Mewat in India, where Maulyana Ilyas Zakariya, who was both a member
of a Sui order and a religious scholar, proposed that the state of affairs of
Muslim communities around the world would not improve until Muslims
improved their own religious practices and transformed themselves into
better individuals. He also proposed that a person cannot correct himself if
he is always in the environment of worldly matters. To transform, one needs
to leave his comfort zone, his work, family, and daily triles and spend more
time in the environment of din (religion). Maulyana established the regular
practice of travel performed in jamaats (groups) of eight to twelve people
and involving a stay in a mosque for two to three days before moving on to
another one in nearby. The main daily activities inside the mosque would
include: taalim and muzakirah (study circles), daily prayers, zikr (remembrance of God), bayan (talk), and gasht and ziyarah (visiting people in the
locality to invite them to the mosque). This practice became very popular
and soon spread across the Indian subcontinent.
Nearly eighty years have passed since then and the movement has become
truly global, but very little has changed in the way that Tablighi is performed
today compared to the times of Mawlyana Ilyas. Just as before – travel remains the most crucial element in the practices of Tablighi. It is believed
that only in travel are people able to completely detach themselves from
worldly matters and devote their time and energy to proper religious worship and learning.
When combined with time and space, “travel” has a special meaning in the Tablighi discourse. It is a physical movement from one’s
present space (house, city, or country) to another. It is comparable with
the concept of Hijra, in the sense of both migration and withdrawal.
In these senses, it is travel within one’s self. One temporarily migrates
from duniya (worldly pursuits) to din (religious concerns), a favorite
151
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
dichotomy among the Tablighis. It is a migration from corruption to
purity, withdrawal from worldly attachments to the Path of God.5
Why do I suggest that Tablighi practice is a kind of spiritual nomadism?
First of all, it is the regularity of travel. Tablighis are encouraged to spend at
least one three-day trip a month, one forty-day trip a year, and one four-month
trip in a lifetime. Regularity is very important and always stressed. When
the time for travel comes, one is encouraged to travel “no-matter what.” One
reason for this is that travel
thus becomes an important
part of one’s life: there is a
bit of travel every month and
more signiicant travel every
year. Many wonder about
the economic aspects of
Tablighi travel practices and
funding sources for distant
journeys and large gatherings. The main principle of
any travel is self-inancing.
There are simply no funds
that would pay for anyone’s
journey. Every participant
is expected to completely
finance his own trip. The
individual show a suficient
amount of money before
being allowed to join the
group. That is why not all
Tablighis can afford interna- Fig. 3. The group of Kyrgyz and Kazakh Tablighi
tional travel, but many try to travelers in front of the main gates of the Taj-ul
Masajid (photo by the author).
save for several years in order to make such trips. One thing that makes travel to the Indian subcontinent
easy is the local hospitality. Particularly in India, local Tablighi participants
in every mosque consider it a duty to arrange food for the visiting jamaat
(group) during its entire stay in their mosque. On my forty-day journey,
we hardly had a chance to cook for ourselves. Thus, the major cost was a
Muhammad Khalid Masud. Travelers in Faith. Studies of the Tablīghī Jamāʻat as a
Transnational Islamic Movement for Faith Renewal. Leiden, 2000. P. xvi.
5
152
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
roundtrip airline ticket from Bishkek to Delhi (about US $600), on top of
which I spent no more than $100 for various small purchases.
Second, the amount of time spent in travel is quite signiicant. Three days
a month – makes 10 percent of one’s time and forty days a year add another
10 percent. So, a committed Tablighi spends at least one-ifth (20 percent) of
his lifetime on a journey. Once in a lifetime people are encouraged to travel
for four months. However, this is a minimum. Many veterans of the Tablighi
movement at some point decide to spend four months traveling every year.
In combination with the three-day trips this totals more than 40 percent of
their lifetime. In more extreme cases, people travel for a year and in the most
extreme cases, usually in old age, people decide to spend all of their time
travelling. I spent two weeks with an elderly Indian Muslim from Mewat,
who was a retired government oficial, had a retirement pension, and spent
most of his life on a journey. He returned home between his four-month
trips, to get some rest and deal with family matters, just to depart again in
a couple of weeks. Obviously, when people spend between one-tenth and
one-half of their lives on the road it cannot help but have some major effect
on their own lifestyles and on the lives of their families.
Therefore, my third argument for calling Tablighi members “spiritual
nomads” is that their travels have a strong inluence on their lives when they
return. One of the main things they bring from journeys is an attachment to
mosques. During the short three-day trips they pray in the mosque with the
local jamaat and participate in all mosque activities. When they return, they
are encouraged to continue praying with the jamaat in their local mosques
and to start participating in the local amals (activities), such as taalim (study
circle), gasht (rounds in the neighborhoods), and mashvara (council).
During travel they also participate in activities such as cooking and cleaning. When they return, they are instructed to change their attitudes toward
their families and give more kyzmat (help) to their wives, to treat all their
family members with love and respect, and to introduce a taalim-circle at
home. They can also take their wives, mothers, daughters, and sisters on
what is called masturat (closed) jamaat. Masturat jamaats can involve
travel for three days, ifteen days, and forty days. It is recommended for a
woman to travel for three days once in three months. When only men travel,
women stay at home, sometimes for very lengthy periods. This requires new
arrangements in the organization of household activities, as in the case of
many migrant families.
Finally, regular monthly and yearly travels require Tablighis to make
special arrangements at their workplaces or to choose a kind of work that
153
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
gives them lexibility in terms of time and commitments. Many Tablighis
become engaged in trade or open their own businesses to be their own bosses.
One Tablighi I knew used to work for ten to eleven months, then quit his
job, travel for four months, and each time he returned, he would look for
a new job. That continued for almost twenty years, until he found a job at
an Islamic school with a Tablighi orientation, where he would not lose his
job because of traveling.
But perhaps the major effect of spiritual journeys on Tablighis is less
tangible – this involves their level of personal transformation and changes
in their worldviews. During these trips they build new ethical, philosophical,
and religious foundations, which then have more prominent effects on life
in general. Because these new perspectives are obtained on journeys, they
embrace many elements of the spiritual nomadic lifestyle.
Spiritual transformations
The main ethnographic part bringing together my observations, recordings of talks, and interviews with Tablighi participants is structured around
six major themes, the irst of which is personal transformation.
Personal transformation
Tablighis are often quite rightfully perceived and described as Muslim
missionaries. One of the major activities in which they engage on their travels
is to invite people to the mosques and remind them of the importance of
Islamic practices. This invitation – dawah – is in the core of Tablighi ideology. However, the Tablighi narrative sees this invitation not as a inal goal,
but more as means to a goal. The inal goal, as the Tablighi claim, is one’s
personal transformation. They propose that travel helps them to obtain new
qualities, strengthen their iman (belief), correct their yakyn (conviction), and
improve their amals (religious practices). On numerous occasions I have
heard that the purpose of going on this path is not to change other people.
Whoever thinks so, it is told, will waste his time. The purpose of going is
for one to change his own qualities.
What makes this change possible? The irst factor is distance. It is both
physical distance from home and more abstract distance from everyday
matters. One Tablighi with a background in visual arts commented:
People in their daily routines don’t have many possibilities for
looking at their life globally because they are busy with thousands
of minute details. In travel they distance themselves from their daily
triles and see a large-scale picture of their existence, just like artists
154
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
have to stand away from their drawings or paintings in order to check
proportions, balance, and the overall impression.6
This distance also produces a more abstract vision of the world that is
more detached from reality. Such abstractness of thinking is important for
comprehending many abstract religious concepts, such as ghoib (unseen),
jannat (paradise), and jahannam (hell). By disengaging from reality a traveler
can develop more utopian visions.
The second factor is an opportunity to spend time alone, which is also
an opportunity to rethink many matters in life. The regular day of a contemporary busy person involves lots of planning to maximize eficiency
and reduce time wasted in doing nothing. Time for relaxation is also used
actively for entertainment, sports, or just sleep. In travel, people lose this
control of time and become much more dependent on external events and
circumstances. People experience long pauses, during which they have
to wait and do nothing, such as when sitting in a train or at the airport. In
the interesting account of everyday life titled The Secret World of Doing
Nothing, Orvar Löfgren and Billy Ehn describe how important and rich an
experience seemingly useless times of waiting can be:
Above all it is the liminality of waiting that makes it a special kind
of doing nothing. In-between events can make people feel stuck, but
such events can also generate new possibilities. Waiting produces a
“sleepwalking” mood, in which the asylum seeker or the pregnant
woman may feel removed from the world or low of time.
Waiting also makes some people see their material surroundings,
the strangers next to them, and their own lives in a new light. Waiting
can be a source of intense boredom but also of surprising insights.7
Similarly, Tablighis on their journeys spend signiicant time by themselves “in the quiet.” That gives them the opportunity to contemplate and
make murakaba (a prominent Sui concept of remembrance of Allah with
heart and thinking about the ways He created the world). They do not have
many chances to do this in their homes and workplaces.
One elderly Tablighi compared travel with an X-ray machine. He said it
shows people’s soul sicknesses – just the way an X-ray shows their physical sicknesses – and when they realize their mistakes, they have to make
istighfar (ask for forgiveness from God). At the same time, he said travel is
like a clinic. Many people need to leave their environments in order to see
6
7
Tablighi traveler from India.
Orvar Löfgren, Billy Ehn. The Secret World of Doing Nothing. Berkeley, 2010. P. 78.
155
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
their mistakes and improve themselves by looking at life from afar – away
from the circumstances that often become the causes of their wrongs: “In
the path of Allah people cry at night over the ways they offended their family members, friends, and colleagues, and commit to living a better life.”8
The fourth factor is time. I have been joining three-day travels for several
years, but only when I went for forty days did I realize that three-day trips
were not long enough for a person to break away from worldly matters. In
a trip of forty days or longer, people really start to feel changes. During the
irst week, one keeps remembering various worldly matters. But because
the inlow of old information is almost completely absent (on the trip it is
recommended to turn off mobile phones and not to call home), the new information slowly replaces the old and gradually a person inds the rhythm
to amplify the range of feelings and thoughts.
Finally, during journeys people also become stronger physically because
they have to go through all kinds of dificulties and changes in the environments. Tablighis sleep on the loor, take daarat (partial ablution) and even
gusl (complete ablution) with cold water, and walk long distances. Because
of these dificulties, the human immune system becomes activated and people
comprehend the many abilities of the human body, and through that they
understand the kudrat (might) of the Creator.9
Therefore, when Tablighis return from their journeys, they arrive signiicantly transformed spiritually, emotionally, and physically. They become
more “nomadic” in their mindset and physical abilities. They develop
worldviews and habits that make distant travels a regular part of their life.
Travelers also obtain new knowledge that strongly affects their life after
travel. This is described in the next section.
Knowledge and exPerience
Although Tablighi practice does not require any prior training, the importance of acquiring Islamic knowledge is always stressed as farz (obligatory) for both men and women from the time of birth to the last day. Travel
provides people with numerous opportunities for obtaining new knowledge.
At least two to four hours in the daily schedule of any jamaat are devoted to
taalim (study circle) spent on learning Quran, ahadith, and basic principles
of dawat (invitation). In the afternoon there is also a daily muzakira (repetition) of various sunnahs (practices of the Prophet (S.A.W.)). Travelers are
8
9
Tablighi traveler from Kyrgyzstan.
Tablighi traveler from Russia.
156
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
destined to meet many new people and, being free from daily routines, they
have ample time to exchange ideas and share experiences. Some of these
new contacts are scholars and pious people, who teach them new ideas and
share motivational stories.
Tablighi teaching claims to give travelers a chance to connect knowledge
with practice. One Dungan Tablighi from Russia explained:
While at home, people might never come across situations in which
they can use the knowledge they have obtained from books. In travel,
such situations are plentiful. In many Muslim communities around
the world, everyday life at home is far removed from the Islamic ideal
as described in the sunnah. Because of the Soviet heritage and more
recent Western inluences, people eat at tables, use spoons and forks,
sleep in beds and sofas, watch TV, and so on. In travel, people learn
the sunnah ways of sleeping, eating, going to the toilet, all of which
are based on simplicity and assumed to aid a person with the tools
for bringing barakah (blessing) into their life, protecting themselves
against all kinds of dangers, and earning numerous savabs (rewards).10
Gellens describes rihla or talab al-alim as travel with a purpose of
acquiring knowledge, as a strong unifying theme in Islamic history. In his
reference to Campbell he describes the myth of a hero traveler, who leaves
the familiar, encounters travels and adventures, and then reintegrates into
his society with his newly acquired knowledge. The important outcome of
this historical process is new Muslim communities with blended traditions.
Far from making Muslim communities around the world homogeneous, this
blend diversiies them and enriches them with new concepts and ideas.11
In addition to the expansion of knowledge as a result of travel, we can
also talk about the special kinds of nomadic knowledge necessary for successful travel that come only with experience. On these journeys, many
people who lead fairly sedentary lifestyle learn how to be spiritual nomads.
new PersPectives on worldly matters
One of the main dichotomies present in the Tablighi discourse is between
akhirat (next world) and duniya (this world). The concept of travel reinforces
this dichotomy with new ideas and experiences. Sui ideology has always
propagated the ascetic life. Tablighi journeys can be quite ascetic too. Long
travel limits the amount of things people can take with them, and the living
10
11
Ibid.
Gellens. The Search for Knowledge. P. 56.
157
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
conditions in many mosques can be very dificult. It is mostly through these
experiences that Tablighis obtain a new understanding of worldly life. For
example, one Kyrgyz Tablighi explained:
When people travel, they understand that they are able to live without
all the conveniences they ordinarily enjoy, like soft beds, TV sets, daily
showers, and mobile phones. Travel shows that life without these conveniences is not only possible but can in fact be even more fulilling.12
During the journeys references are often made to the examples of the
Prophet Muhammad (S.A.W.) and many sahabahs (R.A.A.), who led material lives of utmost simplicity. I often heard in Tablighi talks that when the
Prophet (S.A.W.) passed away, he was the ruler of a great territory, yet all he
had in his possession was a reed mat and a bowl and when Umar (R.A.A.)
was the Khalif (leader) of the Muslim Khalifat, he used to wear clothing
that had a great number of stitches and patches.
Tablighi travels are very egalitarian spaces. They reconstruct social hierarchies. An interesting comparison was given by a Tablighi from Kazakhstan
who said that travel is a likeness of death:
Just as at the time of death people cannot take any of their possessions to the grave with them, when people travel, they also leave behind
all of their material wealth, their families, and their socioeconomic
status. All they can take with them is their personality and their beliefs.
A doctor and a taxi driver in the jamaat are in the same position, they
go through the same dificulties, and in critical situations, what matters is not one’s degree or profession, but one’s personal qualities and
relationship with the Creator.13
However, there is a difference between Tablighi teachings and traditional
Sui asceticism and other monastic forms in other religions, which renounce
the world completely. In fact, this is a very important matter stressed in
many Tablighi discussions. It is suggested that going on religious travel
does not mean rejecting worldly matters completely. The purpose of traveling is to acquire the internal power of iman (belief) and bring it back into
one’s worldly life, so that every day a person lives according to religion.
Some Tablighis have abandoned worldly matters altogether, leaving jobs
and even families. This has been a point of concern for many experienced
Tablighis, who recognize that such practices, on the contrary, can have a
negative effect on the reputation of the movement and effectiveness of its
12
13
Tablighi traveler from Kyrgyzstan.
Tablighi traveler from Kazakhstan.
158
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
work. In the Tablighi perspective, participants are always encouraged to be
active members of the community and good providers for their families.
The pointer and middle ingers are often joined together to show how the
middle inger representing religion is slightly longer than the pointer inger
representing worldly matters, yet they are together.
The worldview of a twentieth-century spiritual nomad is the one from
the “saddle.” He is not a passive observer of world events passing by his
house or workplace. He becomes an active observer, who moves through
the space and worldly events taking place in different localities. This fundamental difference embedded in two positions has a strong effect on the
change in the world perspective of Tablighi travelers.
socialization
While on the journey, Tablighis continuously move from one mosque to
another. The average length of stay in one place is two to three days. The
stay in each location is full of interactions with local residents who come
to the mosque and whom Tablighis visit in their houses. This is why when
traveling on a spiritual path one meets many new people. Some of these
encounters are very brief; others become real opportunities for becoming
acquainted, especially when members of one jamaat spend several months
together.
One Pakistani Tablighi from London pointed out that in travel people
become united and their cultural and social barriers are destroyed; travel thus
eradicates racism. International travels unite people of different nationalities.
For example, people from all over the world come to India, where one can see
Indians, Arabs, Malaysians, Africans, Americans, Australians, Europeans,
Russians, and Central Asians sharing a meal in Nizamudin marqas (center)
or during the ijtemas (large gatherings). In such meetings believers from
all over the world see the global nature of religion and start to feel like real
members of the Ummah (global community of Muslims).
In travel, people also meet many representatives of other religious afiliations and become familiar with the visual manifestations of their beliefs and
religious practices. These encounters strengthen their identity as Muslims.
My own observations show that jamaat brings together people of different
personalities. Some get along very well, others not as much, but circumstances force all people in jamaat to be together most of the time and this
teaches the travelers to be patient and to ignore the mistakes of others, in
order to protect the unity. Maulana Saad from India, the leader of the movement today, frequently emphasizes the importance of unity and the danger
159
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
of individualism. On the subject of learning from each other, one elderly
Kyrgyz Tablighi explained:
When we see the mistakes of others, we try to see our own relection in them, to correct them in ourselves, and make dua (prayers)
for our brothers. When we see some good qualities, we try to adopt
them. For a few days I have been observing how the elderly Indian
person from our jamaat wakes up every night at 2 o’clock, offers his
tahajud namaz (night prayer) and sits until morning in zikr (remembrance of Allah), and how he fasts every Monday and Thursday and
on several other days according to the sunnah. I want to learn these
qualities from him.14
Another experienced Tablighi from India said: “On this path we learn
how to get into the shoes of another person and put our needs behind the
needs of our brothers.”
correction of belief
Tablighi change in many ways when they travel. However, one transformation is given special status and importance: it relates to the correction of
a traveler’s yakyn (belief or conviction). “The main purpose of traveling is
to correct our yakyn, which is to develop full conviction in our heart that
everything that happens, happens by the will of Allah.”15
Tablighi travels are very far from luxurious or safe. A great unknown
awaits in every city, village, or neighborhood to which they travel. I heard
stories describing extreme situations, such as sleeping in the open on the
snow with a temperature of minus 20 degrees Celsius, crossing a large
mountain on foot to reach herders in their pastureland and having to crawl
in mud on the way back, or having no food for several days, to the extent
of having to eat grass to survive. Such stories describe conditions in which
supposedly nobody but God can help, and as the story goes, when such
help comes, people’s beliefs change. As has been explained by one Indian
sheikh in his bayan (talk):
This world is the world of azbabs (means), while in the next world
people will be free from them. They won’t need a cow to produce milk,
the wish will be suficient. In their daily life, people often develop
wrong beliefs: they think it is pill that kills the pain and a car that
delivers them to work; and they do not see the main power behind
14
15
Tablighi traveler from Kyrgyzstan.
Formula frequently repeated in many Tablighi talks.
160
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the means. But in numerous extreme situations during journeys, God
shows that when there are no means, only He can help. Sometimes,
God can push the situation to the utmost limits to test people’s patience
and only then show His help. After people witness who is in control of
all things, their beliefs are corrected and they return home with proper
yakyn and a new understanding of the world.16
Regular travel, which becomes a part of one’s spiritual nomadic lifestyle,
helps one to maintain and strengthen this conviction. If travel is not regular,
singular experiences quickly give way to more prominent sedentary perspectives. That is why maintaining spiritual nomadic practices is so crucial for
the long-term effect of travel.
travel metaPhors
The ive themes considered in this section and the extent to which they
are discussed could not possibly cover all dimensions of spiritual travel
and its importance for spiritual growth. Rather, they can be taken as cases
for understanding the link between travel and spirituality – a link that in
this research is blended into a speciic worldview or narrative – that of a
traveling Tablighi. Just as a medieval Sui, the twenty-irst-century Tablighi
travels without a library in his bag. He is fairly unlikely to have proper
religious education and he is almost certain to share his vision of the world
with people who also have very little religious knowledge. To deliver and
to be understood, this Tablighi is quite likely to use various allegories in his
stories. I personally ind such allegories extremely beautiful and deserving
the space of at least a separate article. The range of allegories by topics is
very broad and the idea of travel is one of them.
One allegory very frequently used by dawatchis compares traveling with
water: Dawah (invitation) is like running water. If water stays in one place
it starts stinking and all kinds of bacteria grow there; it becomes useless
and unhealthy. Similarly, when people stop traveling, their iman weakens.
In the path of Allah we renew and refresh our iman.
Another allegory compares traveling to swimming: Imagine a swimming
person. He is in the middle of the lake in his journey and suddenly he stops
swimming. What will happen? He will drown.
The third allegory emphasizes movement as the main principle of existence: When the blood stops circulating – the person dies. When the sun
and earth stop rotating – the Day of Judgment will begin.
16
From a talk given by an Indian Tablighi veteran.
161
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
Finally, an interesting allegory, which also makes a connection between
travel and the relation to duniya, compares one’s life to traveling on a ship:
Imagine a ship that stands in the harbor. If the captain is afraid of traveling,
it will never leave the harbor and it will never reach its destination. So,
we should not be attached to our possessions. If we travel, but the ship is
overloaded with merchandise, it could easily drown on the journey. That is
why we should not be afraid of traveling and engaging with worldly life,
however, we need to travel light. In this way our journey will be easy and
fast and we will reach our destination successfully.
And so, the dawatchi’s story goes, this life is a journey, which, if a person
is successful, will bring him home – to Paradise. A few of the metaphors
introduced portray some of the main elements of the spiritual nomadic
narrative in all of its seeming simplicity, yet deep meanings and multiple
possibilities also exist for the interpretation and play of nomadic imagination. We can draw parallels here with the role of metaphors in the folklore
of many traditionally nomadic people and their cultures.
Pastoral nomads of Central Asia and spiritual nomadism
In the last section of this article, I would like to make one more argument
for the link between nomadism and Tablighi practice by contextualizing
the Tablighi movement in the region of Central Asia. During Soviet times,
Islamic practices were equally restricted for all ethnic groups of Muslims
in Central Asia. With the breakup of the Soviet Union, many new religious
inluences emerged in the region, one of which was the Tablighi practice that
came from the Indian subcontinent. By the second half of the 1990s it found
fruitful ground in Kyrgyzstan and in the past ifteen years it has become the
dominant Islamic teaching there. Today, Kyrgyzstan is the only country in
Central Asia where Tablighi practice is legal and has a very large number
of active followers. In the yearly 2000s, the number of three-day jamaats
traveling only in the northern regions on weekends was nearing a thousand.
This was the period of highest popularity reaching levels of fashion. Since
then the numbers have dropped signiicantly, but there is more regularity,
experience, and formalization/legalization of the practice.
On the contrary, Tablighi practice in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan is strictly
prohibited and persecuted. A logical explanation for this situation is in the
nature of the political system. Kyrgyzstan, generally considered as an “island
of democracy’ in the “sea of authoritarian states,” has much more religious
freedom and that is supposedly why it has accepted Tablighi ideology.
162
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
However, if we look at the case of Kazakhstan, we will see that in spite of
its authoritarianism, censorship, and the illegal status of Tablighi practice,
it is still very popular among the ethnic Kazakhs. In the ijtema gathering
in Bhopal, India, Kazakh Tablighis consitutted the biggest group (by my
estimates, nearly 70 percent) from the territory of the Commonwealth of
Independent States.
Additional evidence against the political regime thesis is the unpopularity
of Tablighi practices among Uzbek Muslims in southern Kyrgyzstan. Tablighi practice has a very large number of followers in northern Kyrgyzstan.
However, it is much less popular in the south, where a large share of the
population is ethnic Uzbeks. It is easily noticeable that in the south, Tablighi
practice has a strong ethnic character – mostly Kyrgyz Muslims engage in
it, while many Uzbek scholars and congregation in the mosques reject it.
Obviously, in the case of southern Kyrgyzstan, this has nothing to do with
the political regime, since this differentiation takes place in the same country.
What can explain this difference? One seemingly logical explanation can
be drawn from a historical perspective: Uzbeks and Tajiks had a stronger
religious tradition before the Soviet period and after its breakup they simply
returned to it having little space for new inluences. Kyrgyz and Kazakh
Muslims, on the contrary, are generally perceived to have had much weaker
Islamic practices in the past and therefore they were much more open to
new inluences,17 including all kinds of Evangelical Christian missionary
organizations,18 Wahabi teachings,19 Fetullah Gullen schools,20 and very active Tablighi jamaat.21 This argument is quite strong. However, it reproduces
the stereotypical view of Central Asian nomads as “bad Muslims” and fails
to acknowledge the main historical difference between two major Islamic
Chris Hann, Mathijs Pelkmans. Realigning Religion and Power in Central Asia: Islam,
Nation-state and (post)Socialism // Europe-Asia Studies. 2009. Vol. 61. P. 9.
18
Mathijs Pelkmans. Asymmetries on the “Religious Market” in Kyrgyzstan // Chris
Hann (Ed). The Postsocialist Religious Question: Faith and Power in Central Asia and
East-Central Europe. Berlin, 2006. Pp. 29-46.
19
Bayram Balcı. Uzbek and Uyghur Communities in Saudi Arabia and Their Role in
the Development of Wahhabism in Present Day Central Asia // Birgit N. Schlyter (Ed.).
Prospects for Democracy in Central Asia. Istanbul, Turkey, 2005. Pp. 239-253.
20
Bayram Balcı. Fethullah Güllen’s Missionary Schools in Central Asia and Their Role
in the Spreading of Turkism and Islam // In Religion, State and Society. 2003. Vol. 31.
Pp. 151-177.
21
Bayram Balcı. The Rise of the Jama’at al Tabligh in Kyrgyzstan: the Revival of Islamic
Ties Between the Indian Subcontinent and Central Asia? // Central Asian Survey. 2012.
Vol. 31. No. 1. Pp. 61-76.
17
163
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
inluences in the region: irst of the traditional conservative ulama scholarship and second of the Central Asian Sui brotherhoods.
Traditional Islamic teaching in the region was spread through the oficial
institutions, such as mosques and madrasas. These were based primarily in
the larger cities of Central Asia, such as Bukhara, Khiva, and Samarqand,
but also in smaller towns and villages. As such it had more inluence on the
urban and agricultural populations of Uzbeks and Tajiks who lived in all
these settlements. On the contrary, nomadic groups of Central Asia did not
have access to these traditional Islamic institutions. Their conversion to Islam
and further Islamic practices were shaped by the traveling Sui dervishes of
Central Asian Sui orders, which were quite inluential. As discussed previously, Sui practice placed much less emphasis on proper Islamic knowledge,
but more on zikr, meditation, and journey both physical and spiritual. Suis
who traveled in Central Asia as traders, beggars, or dervishes had a nomadic
component strongly present in their lives and philosophy. That is why their
teachings were much closer to those of the Central Asian nomads than to the
teachings of urban scholars. Sui practice was also more lexible in regard
to the main tenants of Islam, such as ive-time prayer, study of the Quran,
and the attainment of proper religious knowledge. This was another reason
why it was more welcomed by the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs of Central Asia.
Therefore, we can see that from the very beginning, the nomadic and
settled cultures of Central Asia practiced different kinds of Islam and this
differentiation continued for centuries to become a tradition embedded in
lifestyle, philosophy, and social relations. When the Soviet Union broke up,
the Tablighi practice, which had many elements of Sui practice, was found
to be much closer to the religious views and practices of Kyrgyz and Kazakh
Muslims and more alien to those of Uzbeks and Tajiks.
This perspective allows us to establish some further links between nomadism as a lifestyle and cultural practice and new religious traveling practices
in Post-Soviet Central Asia. From the cultural perspective, Kyrgyz people,
who for centuries lived as pastoral nomads and retained many nomadic
practices through the Soviet period up to the present, have a lifestyle that
is much more mobile than that of the settled cultures of Uzbeks and Tajiks.
Their worldviews, family and gender roles, and even occupations are much
more accommodating of the need for frequent travel. It is partly for these
reasons, I claim, that the Kyrgyz engage much more actively than Uzbeks
in the travel practices of Tablighi jamaat. A very similar argument can be
proposed for the formerly nomadic cultures of Kazakhs. Seventy years of
Soviet rule were long enough to inluence the lifestyle of Central Asian
164
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
nomads in making them much more settled, but obviously were not long
enough to change their culture. Therefore, instead of correlating the popularity of Tablighi with the nature of the political system, I would suggest a
direct correlation with the nomadic lifestyle.
In addition, a connection can be made with the strong oral tradition of
Central Asian nomads. Kyrgyz people did not have a widespread written
language until the Soviet period, but they have the largest oral epic in the
world – Manas – and they always valued good stories and persuasive storytellers. Tablighi practice is also signiicantly based on the oral narrative
rather on extensive written sources. Only three or four main books are used
by Tablighis on their journeys. The main mode of delivering and sharing
the message is oral. This can be stated as another reason for the popularity
of Tablighi among the Kyrgyz.
One can argue against this view using examples of other sedentary cultures
around the world that embraced Tablighi practice very well. In fact, the people
of Mewat, where the practice originated, were a very settled population. To
answer this critique, I propose that Tablighi as a grassroots ideology and
practice has some basic unchangeable principles, but it is also quite lexible
and when it was spreading around the world in the past century, it built on the
speciic cultural features of every region and the peoples it encountered. In
some places it was traditional hospitality, in others communal lifestyle, and
so on. I would not argue that nomadism was the only factor that contributed
to the popularity of Tablighi, but one cannot deny its signiicance.
This regional comparison gives us another interesting perspective on
the use of the term “spiritual nomadism” for understanding the Tablighi
movement. On the example of the popularity of Tablighi practices among
the Central Asian nomads, we can propose that spiritual travels are not just
about frequent trips for spiritual purposes. Spiritual travels are, more than
anything, the relection of an explicit lifestyle that accommodates a higher
degree of mobility embedded in the culture, livelihood, and social relations
of speciic ethnic groups.
Conclusion
In this article, we employed the term “spiritual nomadism” to give a better understanding of Tablighi travel practice and its effects on the personal
transformations of its participant-travelers. We described the lifestyle and
philosophy of people who long ago traveled the world for various spiritual
purposes and who travel it extensively today as well. In their journeys,
Tablighi travel along paths that connect spiritual places, as they go from
165
Emil Nasritdinov, Spiritual Nomadism and Central Asian Tablighi Travelers
one mosque to another. These physical nodes in different places around the
world overlap with their own spiritual inner terrains – imaginary spaces
of searching for truth, for the meaning of life, and for brotherhood. In the
Tablighi perspective the two types of journeys are inseparable. As we have
witnessed in the accounts of Tablighi, physical and spiritual travels strongly
reinforce each other. The combination of these lengthy inner and outer journeys, form the lifestyle and worldview of Tablighi travelers.
The perspective of nomadism explains why Tablighi journeys cannot be
limited to only a few experiences and why they need elements of a nomadic
lifestyle to have these experiences repeated again and again on a regular basis
in order to envision life as a constant transformation, to continue expanding
one’s spiritual nomadic knowledge and one’s social networks, to reinforce
more dynamic worldviews and to maintain and strengthen one’s belief system.
In turn, this article has shown how these traveling practices of the Tablighi
then transform people from traditionally settled cultures into spiritual nomads
of the twenty-irst century and how in certain regions of the world, such as
Central Asia, it builds on an already existing nomadic tradition.
SUMMARY
This article employs the concept of spiritual nomadism as a lifestyle
and a regular traveling practice to portray and understand the contemporary
religious practices of participants in the Tablighi Jamaat movement, which
originated in India and today has become truly global. In the late 1990s the
movement reached Central Asia and Russia and found fruitful ground in Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. The article builds on an analysis of the traditional
role of travel in Islam and on a more contemporary interpretation of spiritual
travel in Tablighi ideology and practice. Its main ethnographic elements
are drawn from the author’s forty-day Tablighi travel from Kyrgyzstan to
India as part of a group of Kyrgyz, Kazakh, and Russian Tablighi and it is
structured around six main themes discussed from the viewpoint of spiritual
nomadism: personal transformation, knowledge and experience, new perspectives on worldly matters, socialization, correction of belief, and travel
metaphors. It argues that active and regular participants in the movement
acquire elements of a nomadic lifestyle and can be called spiritual nomads
of the twenty-irst century and that in some places in the world, such as
Central Asia, Tablighi practice effectively uses the already existing nomadic
practices of historically nomadic peoples such as the Kyrgyz and Kazakhs.
166
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Резюме
В статье концепция духовного номадизма используется для описания стиля жизни и регулярных путешествий участников движения
джамаата Таблиги. Зародившееся в Индии, сегодня это движение достигло глобальных масштабов, распространившись в конце 1990-х гг.
в том числе в России и в Средней Азии и завоевав особенно прочные
позиции в Киргизстане и Казахстане. Автор начинает с рассмотрения
традиционной роли путешествий в исламе и интерпретаций духовных
путешествий в идеологии и практиках Таблиги. Этнографическая часть
исследования представляет собой материалы, собранные Эмилем Насритдиновым в ходе его 40-дневного путешествия из Киргизстана в
Индию совместно с другими таблиги из Киргизии, Казахстана и России. В статье рассматриваются такие аспекты номадических практик
Таблиги, как личное преображение, новый взгляд на мир, знание и опыт,
социальные сети, укрепление веры и роль метафор как важного компонента нарратива Таблиги. Как показывает автор, активные участники
движения практикуют элементы кочевого образа жизни, а в некоторых
регионах, таких как Средняя Азия, они опираются на исторические
практики номадизма, характерные для этого региона.
167
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
Anya BERNSTEIN
ON BODY-CROSSING:
INTERBODY MOVEMENT IN
EURASIAN BUDDHISM*
In the summer of 1927, ive Buddhist pilgrims appeared in Lhasa, the
capital of Tibet. Their formidable journey, which took over a year of travel
on foot, camels, and yaks, started in the Buryat-Mongol Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic in Siberia and passed through Mongolian grasslands, the
Gobi Desert, Tsaidam swamps, and the high mountain passes of the Tibetan
plateau. The lamas enrolled in Lhasa’s famous Drepung Monastery and embarked on a multiyear curriculum in the Gomang monastic college.1 It is not
I thank Serguei Oushakine for inviting me to write this article and think about “nomadism” in new ways. His helpful and creative suggestions during the revision process
greatly improved the argument. For earlier conceptualizations of this material, I thank
Bruce Grant who helped me think through the post-Soviet context, Donald Lopez who
clariied many Buddhist concepts for me, and Giovanni da Col, who inspired me to get
interested in “kinship” again. I also thank the audiences and discussants at the following
conferences, where parts of this article had been presented: American Anthropological
Association Annual Meeting, Montreal (2011), Central Eurasian Studies Society Annual
Conference, Michigan State University (2010), and Annual Soyuz Symposium, Yale
University (2009). The writing of this article was supported by the Michigan Society of
Fellows postdoctoral fellowship.
1
Drepung, founded in 1416 by Jamyang Chöje, a disciple of Tsongkhapa, at its height,
was the world’s largest monastery with over 10,000 monks. For more on Drepung, see
Melvyn C. Goldstein. The Revival of Monastic Life in Drepung Monastery // Goldstein &
*
168
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
known whether they originally planned to stay in Tibet after receiving their
degrees; it was likely upon hearing of the severe repressions over religion
that started in Russia in the late 1920s that they made the fateful decision
to remain in Tibet. Within a few decades, almost all these men held senior
positions in the Tibetan monastic establishment. As the socialist project
migrated from Russia to China, however, some of them became victims
to Chinese repressions against Tibetan Buddhism and perished during the
Cultural Revolution.2
Little or nothing was known of the fate of these men in Buryatia until
the late 1980s, when the irst Buryat lamas newly mobilized by perestroika
began visiting Drepung again, by then relocated to and re-created in southern
India by the Tibetan exile community, and a thriving home to about 4,500
monks. To their amazement, the irst of the late socialist Siberian pilgrims
were stunned to discover four of these original ive monks alive and well
in the tropics. One of these pilgrims was now over eighty years old while
two others lived in the monastery, as they themselves professed, in their
new bodies. That is to say, they were reincarnations of the former Buryat
pilgrims. The bodies these Buryats acquired were ethnically Tibetan, one
from Nepal, and one from the region of Kham in the Sichuan province
in China. These two monks subsequently visited Buryatia, had reunions
with their Buryat “relatives,” and became active members of the Buryat
Buddhist revival.
Matthew T. Kapstein (Eds.). Buddhism in Contemporary Tibet. Religious Revival and
Cultural Identity. Berkeley, 1998. Pp. 15-53. For more on Buddhist monastic education,
see Georges B. J. Dreyfus. The Sound of Two Hands Clapping. The Education of a
Tibetan Buddhist Monk. Berkeley, 2003.
2
I have assembled the history of these early Soviet pilgrims in a somewhat piecemeal
fashion from the following four sources: oral histories with Kentrul Rinpoche (current
reincarnation of one of the pilgrims) and Yeshe Lodrö Rinpoche (a disciple of one of
the pilgrims); the autobiography of one of the participants, Agvan Nyima; and a brief
note by Buryat researcher G. N. Zaiatuev, who mentions a group of ive monks sent
to Lhasa by the Buryat lama and diplomat Agvan Dorzhiev. Nyima does not state the
year of their departure in his narrative, however, the preface written by Yeshe Lodrö
Rinpoche sets the date at 1923. Both Kentrul Rinpoche in an interview with me and
Zaiatuev in his book set the date to 1927, which I have used here. See G. N. Zaiatuev.
Tsanid-khambo Agvan Dorzhiev, 1853–1938 gg. Ulan-Ude, 1991; A. Nyima. Pereprava
cherez reku sansary. Avtobiograiia [Crossing the River of Samsara. An Autobiography].
Translated from Tibetan by Bair Ochirov. Ulan-Ude, 1996. Other discrepancies in the
sources include the number of monks who were part of this group: while Zaiatuev lists
ive, both Avgan Nyima in his autobiography and Kentrul Rinpoche in an interview state
there were about ten of them.
169
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
The fourth monk did not seem to have a recognized reincarnation,
however, during his life in Tibet, he served as a master to a young Tibetan
incarnate lama named Yeshe Lodrö (Yelo) Rinpoche. In the early 1990s,
Yelo Rinpoche, now in his sixties, had been invited to teach in Buryatia due
to his being of “Buryat ancestry” through his master. Today, Yelo Rinpoche,
an ethnic Tibetan, resides in Buryatia, speaks relatively good Buryat, and has
acquired Russian citizenship. Rinpoche’s status as a “naturalized foreigner,”
however, is contested by the distinction between Tibetan lamas with “roots”
in Buryatia and those without them, prompting a relatively new discourse
on “roots,” which might seem incompatible with the otherwise apparent
cosmopolitanism of Buryat Buddhists who have long been conscious of
their many border crossings in both time and space.
To understand the sorts of corporeal mobilities that enabled these bordercrossings, this article attempts to conceptualize the institutions of Buddhist
reincarnation and discipleship as practices of a certain kind of corporeal
motion, which includes not only traversing vast Inner Asian territories, but
also journeys and relationships between bodies across multiple lifetimes. In
the Buddhist view, no body is an isolated unit, but rather a mosaic of references to other bodies: as Buddhists like to say, “if you wish to know what
you were like in the past, look at your present body.”3 That is the very fact
of having a body of a human (as opposed to that of an animal or a hungry
ghost, which are considered unfortunate births) is a result of ethical deeds
in past life. While rebirth and reincarnation involve movement from body
to body, tantric discipleship involves transfers of certain symbolic bodily
substances that create quasi-kinship relationships between masters and
disciples. The movements and relationships between two or more bodies
produced by Buddhist corporeal technologies constitute extensive transnational somatic networks, where the meaning of individual bodies is shaped
through their relationship with other bodies in the network. Using an analogy
with the notion of intertextuality,4 in this article I look at the phenomenon
of reincarnation and discipleship as instances of “inter-bodiment” where
individual Buddhist bodies acquire sociopolitical import through referencing or evoking other bodies. In the case of reincarnation, inter-bodiment is
produced through a vertical axis that connects bodies through time, while in
the case of tantric discipleship, we have both horizontal and vertical axes,
Donald S. Lopez. The Story of Buddhism: A Concise Guide to Its History and Teachings. New York, 2002. P. 45.
4
Julia Kristeva. Word, Dialogue and Novel // Toril Moi (Ed.). The Kristeva Reader. New
York, 1986. Pp. 34-62.
3
170
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the former connecting living masters with their disciples and the disciples
to each other, while the latter refers to the relationships that these masters
and disciples had in their past lives. I argue that the signiicance of such
religiously inspired inter-body movement has subversive implications
that go beyond esoteric religious practices, as they challenge biopolitical
regimes of mobility imposed by nation-states on their indigenous populations, complicating the issues of allegiances and loyalties. This article thus
contributes to the growing ield of studies of religion, transnationalism, and
globalization5 by considering a previously neglected type of mobility – that
between bodies and bodily substances – and its role and effects in transnational religiopolitical movements.
Just as scholars have noticed that classically deined nomads do not just
“wander,” but follow strict patterns deined by their social and economic
systems,6 reincarnation does not amount to aimless wandering of souls. In
classical Buddhist theory, reincarnation is regulated by the complex and
impersonal laws of karma, often poorly understood by regular practitioners
outside of the Buddhist scholarly context. Many Buryat Buddhists view the
process of reincarnation of the lamas introduced above as an intentional act
with messianic implications: according to this view, the “return” of some of
these ive original lamas to Buryatia is a result of a preconceived grand plan
put in place by these early twentieth-century lamas with the single-handed
goal to beneit the development of Buddhism in Buryatia. The lamas were
supposed to come back to Buryatia after their training in Tibet, however, this
plan has been hindered by the Chinese and Russian revolutions, resulting in
the Buryat lamas’ death in Tibet. Their subsequent reemergence in Buryatia
in the bodies of Tibetan lamas is viewed as a part of an intentional (but now
slightly changed) mission to bring Buddhism back to Buryatia, now as part
of global postsocialist religious revival. Similarly, the institution of tantric
discipleship, which enabled these early Buryat monks to take on Tibetan
disciples, who eventually came back to teach in post-Soviet Buryatia, and
are now viewed as partially “Buryat,” is also popularly viewed as a part of
the same plan, as it is believed that masters and disciples connected in past
lives must necessarily meet again in the present. These culturally speciic
5
The literature in this ield is vast. Some notable examples include Thomas J. Csordas
(Ed.). Transnational Transcendence. Essays on Religion and Globalization. Berkeley,
2009; S. Hoeber Rudolph, J. Piscatori. Transnational Religion and Fading States. Boulder, CO, 1996; Peter Beyer. Religions in Global Society. London and New York, 2006;
Dwight N. Hopkins et al. (Eds.). Religions/Globalizations. Durham, 2001.
6
Thomas Barield. The Nomadic Alternative. Englewood Cliffs, 1993. P. 12.
171
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
practices and interpretations of somatic motion can help us rethink the
debates on religion and transnationalism and expand this ield beyond the
standard studies of migration, diaspora, and globalization.
With the exception of Agvan Nyima, the only one of the original ive
pilgrims who escaped Tibet and wrote his autobiography,7 practically no
published materials exist on these lamas or their fates, a puzzle given the
dramatic means by which their lives traversed some of the most famous
political and religious struggles of the twentieth century. To learn more about
these men, and to consider their impact on Buryat cultural politics today, I
aimed to re-create many of their same paths by traveling myself between
monasteries in Buryatia and southern India. What follows is based on ield
research and interviews between 2001 and 2008 with the three Tibetan
lamas whose lives are continued under new auspices. These extraordinary
transnational reincarnation and discipleship lineages began in 1920s Soviet
Siberia, crossed over to Tibet, Nepal, and India, and eventually came back to
postsocialist Russia. There are two types of inter-body movement involved
in these lineages: reincarnation lineages involve movement from body to
body while tantric discipleship lineages involve creating certain relationships between two or more bodies. The corporeal practices involved in these
border-crossings represent a fusion of religious and political consciousness
that allows Buryats to preserve a careful balance between a greater Asian
Buddhist universe and their loyalties to Russia.
Fig. 1. Inter-body Movement
case of reincarnation
Russian Empire
(c. early 1900s) Galsan Legden
(Buryat) born in Siberia
Soviet Union à Pre-Chinese Tibet
(c. 1927) Arrived in Tibet
(c. 1950) Became abbot of Drepung
Monastery in Lhasa
Chinese Tibet (1950 – )
(c.?) Died in a Chinese prison
7
A. Nyima. Pereprava cherez reku sansary.
172
case of disciPleshiP
(c. early 1900s) Thubten Nyima
(Buryat) born in Siberia
(c. 1927) Arrived in Tibet
(c. 1950) Became a senior lama,
served as a tutor to a young Tibetan
tulku (incarnate lama) (b. 1943)
(c. ?) Died during the turmoil in Tibet
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
case of reincarnation
China à Nepal (Via Reincarnation)
à India
(c. 1976) Reincarnation born in his
friend’s family in Nepal
India
(c. 1980) Discovered in Nepal by
Tibetan monks from the Indian Drepung, brought to India
(c. 1990) Discovered by irst postsocialist Buryat pilgrims to India,
became conscious of his “Buryatness”
case of disciPleshiP
Tibet à Exile To India
(c. 1959) Young disciple (Yeshe Lodrö Rinpoche) led to India following
the Dalai Lama
(c.1980) Yeshe Lodrö Rinpoche completed his formal monastic education
(c. 1990) Rediscovered his Buryat
“roots,” went to teach irst in Mongolia, then Buryatia, learned Buryat,
became a naturalized Russian citizen
India à Postsocialist Russia
(c. 2000) Started to visit and teach (c. 2000) Opened his own monastery
in Siberia, reunited with his Buryat in Buryatia, became a major com“relatives”
petitor to the oficial Buryat religious
establishment
Reincarnation: Bodies in Flux
Buddhists view a single human lifetime as simply one stage in a much
longer, complex project, which involves endlessly taking new forms, both
human and nonhuman. The ultimate goal of the Buddhist path is to understand the nature of reality, which, once fully realized by an individual, stops
the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth (Skt. samsara), achieving a state known
as “nirvana” (literally “extinction”). According to the Mahāyāna tradition
followed among the Buryats, the highest goal is to achieve buddhahood
oneself and then teach the path to enlightenment to others. Those who have
advanced far along the path to buddhahood, called bodhisattvas, as well as
those who have achieved buddhahood are said to compassionately appear
in the world in human form. While regular people do not remember their
previous lives and are not able to control their rebirth, these individuals,
designated in English as incarnate lamas, can choose their place of birth
and usually leave clues for the rest as to where they would be reborn after
their death.
173
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
Early Buddhist theology postulated that the Buddha had two bodies – the
physical body (rūpakāya) and the transcendent body “of virtuous qualities”
that was not subject to sickness and death (dharmakāya).8 Later doctrines
developed a tripartite scheme of the Buddha’s bodies: dharmakāya, in which
the supramundane qualities of the Buddha evolved into a kind of transcendent
principle of enlightenment, the sambhogakāya, a celestial body of the Buddha, and the nirmanakāya or “emanation” body, which might be assumed for
the purpose of instructing and saving beings in our world, most famously
in the form of the historical Buddha himself.9 In Tibetan, the Sanskrit term
for “emanation body” is translated as tulku (sprul sku), suggesting that,
at least technically, these beings are emanations of a buddha. According
to common understanding, they are also considered to include advanced
bodhisattvas. Since the fourteenth century, all Tibetan Buddhist schools
have been identifying the successive rebirths of famous teachers. Incarnate
lamas – the most famous of whom today is the Dalai Lama – are believed to
be a line of individuals, who are in a sense the same person, returning to the
world in lifetime after lifetime. The Fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682), whose
predecessor was a Mongol, was the irst Dalai Lama to assume political
control of Tibet, with the support of Mongol troops in 1642.
The most famous of these incarnate lamas are identiied with speciic
buddhas and bodhisattvas. Thus, the Dalai Lama is understood to be the human incarnation of the bodhisattva of compassion, Avalokiteshvara and the
Panchen Lama an incarnation of the buddha Amitabha. The Bogd Gegeen
(Jebdzundamba Khutugtu of Mongolia) is considered an emanation of Vajrapani. Transferring the notion of emanation into the secular realm, Tibetan
Buddhists have proclaimed sacralized historical igures to be manifestations
of deities: Genghis Khan is considered a manifestation of the ierce bodhisattva Vajrapani, the Qing emperor Qianlong an emanation of Manjusri,
while the Russian emperors are widely believed to be the emanation of the
goddess White Tara.10 Secularizing the idea of reincarnate lineages even
further by combining it with the Chinese notion of zhengtong (“political
descent”), Inner Asian rulers often proclaimed themselves reincarnations
of their charismatic predecessors, with Altan Khan identifying himself as a
Lopez. The Story of Buddhism. Pp. 61-62.
Paul Williams. Mahāyāna Buddhism. The Doctrinal Foundations. London, 1989. Pp.
167-185.
10
Alexandre Andreyev. Soviet Russia and Tibet. The Debacle of Soviet Secret Diplomacy,
1918–1930s. Leiden, 2003. Pp. 7-8; Evelyn S. Rawski. The Last Emperors. A Social
History of Qing Imperial Institutions. Berkeley, 1998. P. 248.
8
9
174
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
reincarnation of Khubilai and many other rulers claiming descent from
Chinggis Khan.11 Although, unlike Tibetans, Buryats never developed a
formal institution of reincarnation whereby a child is identiied as a reincarnation of a previous lama, some prominent lamas were posthumously
referred to as incarnates of past masters.
The identiication of the successive incarnation of high lamas, an institution that developed in Tibet as early as the eleventh century, ensured the
inheritance of leadership and property from one generation to the next at a
time when celibate monastic communities replaced noble families – previously the primary patrons of Buddhism – to became centers of Buddhist
power and governance. Taking a Weberian view of authority, Turrell Wylie
suggested that the institution of reincarnation facilitated the “transition
from charisma of person to a charisma of ofice: a change essential to the
establishment of a hierocratic form of government that could survive as an
institution regardless of the charisma of any individual.”12 Focusing on the
role of reincarnation in the transfer of property, Melvyn Goldstein demonstrated how features inherent in reincarnation transformed the Tibetan
political system itself, resulting in what he called a “circulation of estates,”
large blocks of arable land intermittently held by incarnate lamas in power.13
Besides high incarnate lamas, most dramatically exempliied by the Dalai
Lama, the Tibetan tradition had also developed hundreds of minor lineages,
in which incarnate lamas are associated with a particular monastery or local
region. The personalities whom we encounter in this essay belong to this
category of incarnate lamas.
Reincarnation has often crossed ethnic boundaries and forged political
ties, especially among Tibetans, Mongols, and Chinese, moving even to the
West in the late twentieth century.14 A folk story that I have often heard from
Buryat adepts about the origin of the lineage of Mongolian Jebdzundamba
Khutugtus tells of the Tibetan scholar Tāranātha (1575–1634) who, at the
end of his life, asked his disciples where he should be born next. One of
them, a Mongol, cried out, “Please be reborn in Mongolia!” Tāranātha was
Rawski. The Last Emperors. Pp. 210, 249.
Turrell V. Wylie. Reincarnation: A Political Innovation in Tibetan Buddhism // Louis
Ligetti (Ed.). Proceedings of the Csoma de Koros Memorial Symposium. Budapest,
1978. Pp. 579-586, here P. 584.
13
Goldstein. The Circulation of Estates in Tibet: Reincarnation, Land and Politics //
Journal of Asian Studies. 1973. No. 32. Pp. 445-455.
14
Amy Lavine. Tibetan Buddhism in America: The Development of American Vajrayana
// Charles S. Prebish, Kenneth K. Tanaka (Eds.). The Faces of Buddhism in America.
Berkeley, 1998. Pp. 105-110.
11
12
175
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
reborn in the noble Mongolian family as Zanabazar (1635–1723), who
was recognized as the irst Jebdzundamba and subsequently inserted into
the lineage of Chinggis Khan and Khubilai Khan.15 Several decades prior
to this (in 1588), in a similar diplomatic move, the Fourth Dalai Lama was
identiied in a great-grandson of the Mongol leader Altan Khan, becoming
the irst and only non-Tibetan Dalai Lama at the time when Buddhism was
once again starting to take hold in Mongolia.16 Thus, beyond the issues of
leadership and property succession identiied by Wylie and Goldstein, reincarnation appears to have been crucial for the spread of Tibetan Buddhism
to new regions, most notably its transmission into Mongolia. Transnational
reincarnation lineages are produced through somatic networks, which interlink individual bodies into a chain of cosmic relatedness.
Discipleship: Lineages in Motion
If reincarnation can be understood as a movement between bodies, which
produces extra-kin and extraterritorial lineages in Tibetan Buddhism, another
quasi-kinship practice, known as a master–disciple relationship,17 creates
a relationship between two or more different bodies through the symbolic
transfer of bodily substances. Incarnate lamas inherit not only property but
also disciples with whom they enter into a special ritual relationship through
which the master’s power is transmitted to the student. One of the central
rituals of tantric Buddhism is the process of the transmission of ritual power
known as “initiation” or, literally, “empowerment” (Tib. dbang). Through
“empowerments” the disciple is initiated into the practice of a particular
deity and becomes a part of a certain “buddha-family,” which sometimes
includes a ritual rebirth and going through the stages of childhood, such as
obtaining a new name and getting one’s irst haircut and bath. During this
For more on the lineage of Jebdzundamba Khutugtus, see Charles R. Bawden. The
Jebtsun Dampa Khutukhtus of Urga, Text Translation and Notes. Wiesbaden, 1961;
Caroline Humphrey. Remembering an “Enemy.” The Bogd Khaan in Twentieth-Century
Mongolia // Rubie S. Watson (Ed.). Memory, History, and Opposition Under State
Socialism. Santa Fe, 1994. Pp. 21-44; Fabian Sanders. The Life and the Lineage of the
Ninth Khalkha Jetsun Dampa Khutukhtu of Urga // Central Asiatic Journal. 2001. No.
XLV. Pp. 273-303.
16
David Snellgrove, Hugh Richardson. A Cultural History of Tibet. Boston, 1995 [1968].
Pp. 184-185.
17
On tantric discipleship as a quasi-kinship practice, see Martin A. Mills. Vajra Brother,
Vajra Sister: Renunciation, Individualism and the Household in Tibetan Buddhist
Monasticism // Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. 2000. No. 6. Pp. 17-34.
15
176
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ritual the disciple must imagine his master as the deity, and fellow disciples
who attended the initiation led by the same master are called “vajra brothers”
and “vajra sisters” (Skt. vajra, or thunderbolt, being the central symbol of
indestructibility), and are often viewed as “children” of the lama. In some
initiations, such as the Kalachakra cycle, disciples must visualize the master
in sexual union with a female consort, subsequently visualizing themselves
as entering the mouth of the lama, passing through his body to the vagina
and then on to the womb of his female consort, from where they are ritually
reborn.18 There is also a point at which a drop of yogurt is placed on each
person’s tongue. This represents the sexual luids that have emerged from
the vagina of the tantric consort after intercourse with the tantric master. In
the higher initiation, one is then supposed to have intercourse with a consort.
Tantric initiation rites involve symbolic transfers of bodily substances
to link different bodies into a web of somatic networks. While it might appear that these networks are arbitrarily constituted by previously unrelated
bodies, Buddhists believe that these bodies were already bound by these
relationships in previous lifetimes and the fact that they meet now is a result
of karma and good deeds in past lives. The Buddhist view excludes the element of randomness from movements and relationships between bodies. In
this light, many contemporary tantric initiations that today increasingly take
place in lay, urban, transnational contexts acquire subversive potential as they
refuse to accommodate the logics of nation-states. Kalachakra initiations,
for example, fairly regularly conferred by the Dalai Lama in India (as well
as Europe and North America), are gigantic public spectacles attended by
thousands of believers from all over the world.19 Since the Dalai Lama is
not allowed to visit Russia due to China’s objections, such initiations often
become a focal point for lay Buryat adepts to escape the purview of both
Russia and China by conducting pilgrimages to India, Europe, or even as
far as the United States, where they become parts of Buddhist networks as
new “vajra brothers and sisters” (Rus. vadrzhnye brat’ia i sestry) along with
thousands of fellow coreligionists from Brazil to South Africa.
For those who cannot afford distant travel, Tibetan émigré lamas living
in Russia and visiting lamas from India regularly conduct other tantric ini18
The Dalai Lama. Kalachakra Tantra: The Rite of Initiation. Somerville, MA, 1999. Pp.
94-95. See also Mills. Vajra Brother, Vajra Sister.
19
For a behind-the-scenes ethnographic account of the staging of a Kalachakra initiation
in New York, see Meg McLagan. Spectacles of Difference: Cultural Activism and Mass
Mediation of Tibet // Faye D. Ginsburg, Lila Abu-Lughod, Brian Larkin (Eds.). Media
Worlds. Anthropology on a New Terrain. Berkeley, 2002. Pp. 90-115.
177
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
tiations in Buryatia. Since Buryatia does not have its own currently living
lamas, who would be qualiied to conduct such rituals, in the postsocialist
period initiations have become the domain of Tibetan incarnates. Their
authority, however, is not uncontested, and certain lamas are considered
by some Buryats to be more suitable than others to confer empowerments.
Enter a new kind of a contemporary Tibetan teacher: the Tibetan of “Buryat
ancestry” (literally, of Buryat “roots,” Rus. s buriatskimi korniami). Those
Tibetan lamas who happen to be either the reincarnations or disciples of an
important past Buryat master, are considered better for this role than those
with no direct ties to Buryatia.
In order to understand why Buryats today might prefer to receive empowerments from their own “kin,” let us irst consider the practices that
make Tibetan lamas of “Buryat ancestry” possible, forging transnational ties
between the two peoples. While the notion of reincarnation may have been
developed in order to ensure the proper succession of religious authority,
it also became a means of social mobility. Highly educated and talented
monks sometimes became great masters, and after their death, a search for
a successor might be initiated, thus founding a new lineage. This was the
case with the two lamas, who were originally part of the group of the ive
Buryat pilgrims to Tibet: by having achieved high status in their previous
lives, they forged the beginning of two new transethnic lineages, further
expanding the networks of interrelated Buddhist bodies.
The biographies of two incarnate Tibetan lamas with “Buryat roots” demonstrate how bodily technologies of reincarnation and tantric apprenticeship
enabled Buddhist subjects, whose mobility was restricted by the modern
biopolitical regimes of Russia and China during the socialist period, to create
somatic networks that transgress boundaries between nation-states, but also
between bodies, between life and death and conventionally deined lines of
kinship and ethnicity. This unauthorized inter-body movement complicates
issues of allegiances both within the Russian Federation and within the Republic of Buryatia, where these nomadic hybrid bodies present challenges
to the current nationalist Buddhist establishment.
Buryats in Tibet: The Story of Galsan Legden
One of the most prominent among the ive lamas who arrived in Tibet
in 1927 was a Buryat named Galsan Legden (Buryat name, Galsan Arzhigarov). He quickly rose to prominence, becoming an abbot of the Drepung
Gomang monastic college, the irst Buryat ever to head an important religious
178
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
institution in Tibet. He was later imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution
in China and is reported to have died in custody. The present incarnation of
Galsan Legden is now known as Kentrul Rinpoche (“ken” means “abbot,”
and “tul” signaling “tulku”) was born in 1976 in Nepal. As is very common
in reincarnation narratives, since the time he started talking, he always said
he wanted to join the monastery.20 When he saw monks, he tried to follow
them and when he saw red or yellow fabric, he often tried to grab it and put
it on himself. When he was four, monks from Drepung monastery appeared
on his doorstep, claiming that the boy was a reincarnation of their former
abbot. It turned out that when Galsan Legden was imprisoned in China, he
shared his prison cell with a Tibetan monk who was planning to escape to
Nepal. Knowing that his death was near, Legden asked his fellow inmate if
he could visit him in Nepal. Thinking that he was talking about coming to
his house in Nepal after the release from prison, Legden’s friend responded,
“Yes, of course, you can visit me, and I will do everything to make your
stay comfortable.” Thus, two lifetimes got conlated in the same conversation. Galsan Legden died in prison and was reborn into his friend’s family
in Nepal.21
While notions of rebirth are widespread in various cultures and usually
happen within ethnic groups, and most often within the same genetic kin
groups, reincarnations are not impeded by national borders.22 From 1977 to
1980, Agvan Nyima, one of the original ive Buryat pilgrims and the only
one to escape Tibet, served as the abbot of the Gomang college of the Indian Drepung.23 During his term, in the late 1970s, he initiated a search for
the reincarnation of his old friend. Following all the standard procedures,24
For accounts of reincarnation and procedures related to the identiication of tulkus
written by incarnate lamas themselves, see The Dalai Lama. My Land and My People:
The Original Autobiography of His Holiness the Dalai Lama of Tibet. New York, 1997
[1962]; Thubten Jigme Norbu. Tibet Is My Country: Autobiography of Thubten Jigme
Norbu, Brother of the Dalai Lama, as Told to Heinrich Harrer. London, 1986 [1960];
Chögyam Trungpa. Born in Tibet. Boston, 2000.
21
Interview, Drepung, Karnataka, South India, February 2008.
22
Anthropological literature abounds with references to notions of rebirth in various
cultures, from Native North America to Africa to Melanesia. For a synthesis of many of
these sources, see Gananath Obeyesekere. Imagining Karma. Ethical Transformation in
Amerindian, Buddhist, and Greek Rebirth. Berkeley, 2002.
23
After retiring from his post of the Gomang College abbot, Agvan Nyima taught and
worked in Switzerland and Holland. For more on Agvan Nyima (1907–1990), see his
autobiography (Nyima. Pereprava cherez reku sansary).
24
The standard procedures for the search of a reincarnation include performing a series of
divinations to determine the location of the candidates and then examining the candidates’
20
179
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
Fig. 2. Galsan Legden conducting an empowerment. Russia, 2008. Photo courtesy of
Igor’ Iancheglov.
the search party from Drepung identiied a Tibetan boy in Nepal as Galsan
Legden, a Buryat from the Tunka region of southern Siberia, who served as
the abbot of the Gomang college of the Drepung in Lhasa during the time
of the Chinese takeover. Thus, due to the efforts of his countryman Agvan
Nyima, Legden became the originator of a new lineage, which has so far
spanned four countries and two nations. What might such ethnic luidity,
resulting from transnational reincarnations, signify? In 2008, I lived in the
South Indian Drepung monastery for several months and sought out this
young man to ask how he himself understood this reincarnation process.
When I was told I was a reincarnation of Legden, I was glad, but
I didn’t feel anything special. It was only when they showed me his
picture, I felt something . . . unusual. When they told me my predecessor
was a Mongol – I did not know about the difference between Mongols
and Buryats at the time – I felt a sense of “us” and “ours.” A sense of
pride for being a Mongol, even a feeling of some kind of patriotism.
A Mongol patriotism.
ability to demonstrate some knowledge of their predecessors’ identities. The tests include
having young boys choose objects belonging to the past incarnation among various
objects presented to them.
180
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
It was only in the late eighties, when Kentrul Rinpoche saw the irst
Buryat monks and pilgrims who started arriving at Drepung from Russia,
that he learned about this difference. The irst postsocialist Buryat pilgrims
who arrived in Drepung, having heard of the reincarnation of their celebrated
Legden, immediately treated him as a high lama, although he was only a
teenager at the time. The word about the reincarnated master spread, and
eventually, visiting and getting blessings from Kentrul Rinpoche and another
former Buryat incarnate living in India, Zhibalha lama, became part of the
pilgrim routine on visits to Drepung.
Fig. 3. Kentrul Rinpoche (Galsan Legden) with Buryat pilgrims in India. Drepung
Monastery, Karnataka, India, 2008. Photo by the author.
Routine rituals in which Buryat pilgrims engage while visiting Indian
monasteries also contribute to the creation of bodily networks that go beyond
nation-states, ethnicities, and borders. One of the most important activities
sought by pilgrims is securing audiences with as many incarnate lamas as
possible. While seeing the Dalai Lama is of utmost importance but not often
possible, it is considered especially valuable to visit their fellow “Buryats,”
Tibetan lamas Legden or Zhibalha, while in southern India. (In the North,
getting an audience with the traditional leader of Mongolian Buddhists, the
181
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
ethnic Tibetan Jebdzundamba Khutugtu the Ninth, used to be another major
goal).25 Although not nearly as elaborate as formal initiations, these visits
also provide brief instances of inter-body movement, namely, the transfer of
ritual power from the master to his disciples. During such brief audiences,
power is transferred as a blessing through a simple touch by the incarnate to
the devotee’s head, a gentle blow on the face, or the holding and reciting of
consecrating verses over various souvenirs purchased from street vendors.
After these haptic engagements, the pilgrims are viewed as spiritually charged,
and on their return home, many people, in turn, want to touch them to partake
of their accreted power. The distribution of consecrated souvenirs, from more
elaborate altar pieces bought for close friends and kin to simple threads blessed
by the lamas to be worn on the wrists and necks given as tokens of attention
to other acquaintances, is often the central ritual upon a pilgrim’s return.
Fig. 4. Zhibalha Rinpoche, another Tibetan lama with “Buryat roots,” with Buryat pilgrims
in India. Drepung Monastery, Karnataka, India, 2008. Photo by the author.
Jebdzundamba Khutugtu the Ninth or Bogdo-Gegen, as Buryat and Russians adepts
like to call him, passed away in March 2012, as I was preparing this article for print.
For the ethnographic description of the community of his Buryat followers in India, see
Anya Bernstein. Religious Bodies Politic: Rituals of Sovereignty in Buryat Buddhism.
Upcoming from the University of Chicago Press in 2013.
25
182
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
When asked of his impressions of Buryatia, Legden said he was surprised
by how many people wanted him to conduct the rituals of tantric empowerment. His surprise is understandable, for, until recently, most rituals of
this kind have been restricted to the monastic establishment. It is with the
spread of Buddhism to the West and modernization of Tibetan Buddhism in
exile by the Fourteenth Dalai Lama that it became common practice for lay
people to be initiated into the tantric “families.”26 Legden bemoaned the fact
that some lay Buryats seemed to be more interested in receiving high-level
initiations than getting a good grasp on Buddhist fundamentals, which he
addressed in his public lectures. While he ascribed it to the “shamanistic”
Buryat obsession with ritual, I would suggest the Buryat interest in receiving empowerments from a Tibetan lama with “Buryat roots” hinges on their
belief in its greater eficacy precisely because it expands their inter-body
networks from the local to transnational level. On the one hand, through
empowerments, lay people become incorporated in the global Buddhist
“families” of deities, incarnate lamas, and monks. On the other hand, by
receiving empowerments from someone whose body itself acts as a link
to the Buryat prerevolutionary “golden age,” they gain additional power
through reconnecting with speciically Buryat Buddhist kin and ancestors.
To revisit the central premise of this article, then: reincarnation presents
a type of inter-bodiment, where certain people acquire sociopolitical power
via their capacity to reference their previous bodies. Nomadic personae of
the incarnates cross geopolitical borders, as well as transcend the borders
between life and death and between classically ethnic identiications while
involving their lay followers into complex webs of corporeal networks.
These networks challenge biopolitical regimes of mobility, producing
complex transnational allegiances based on beliefs and values often incompatible with the logics of the larger nation-states and local nationalist
politics. Since the eleventh century, the existence of incarnate lamas who
were able to transcend site-speciic allegiances or, in more recent times,
literally “think and feel beyond the nation”27 has played the crucial role
in making Tibetan Buddhism a translocal religion, reaching far beyond
its Himalayan homeland. During the early Soviet socialist period, these
transnational lows were mostly unidirectional, lowing outward from the
USSR to allow Buryat pilgrims to cross borders and perhaps even recruit
coreligionists into the Soviet fold. These ties were discontinued at the turn
One exception are the Kalachakra initiations, which were public in traditional Tibet.
Pheng Cheah, Bruce Robbins. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling Beyond the Nation. Minneapolis, 1998.
26
27
183
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
of the 1930s, when Soviet internationalists abandoned their efforts to draw
Tibet into its orbit.28 Today this Buddhist transnationalism has resumed in
both directions, with the locus of authority for Buryat Buddhists relocated
from Lhasa to Dharamsala, the current seat of the Dalai Lama and Tibetan
government in exile and to South India where three main Geluk monastic
seats have been re-created. While thousands of Buryat pilgrims visit Tibetan
communities in India every year, since the mid-1990s, Buryatia has become
the center of Tibetan emigration to Russia. Tibetan lamas have had great
success in postsocialist Buryatia as religious teachers, promoting an array of
cosmopolitan subjectivities in an already pluralist Siberian republic. Below,
I consider how another type of inter-bodiment, that of the master–disciple
relationship, creates relationships between different bodies via the transfer
of symbolic substances, complicating religious and ethnic politics in postsocialist Buryatia. This process is well illustrated by Yelo Rinpoche, whom
we met earlier, the Tibetan incarnate lama residing in Buryatia.
Tibetans in Buryatia: The Story of Yelo Rinpoche
Yelo Rinpoche was born in Litang in eastern Tibet in 1943. At the age
of three, he was recognized as a fourth incarnate lama in his lineage. One
of his early teachers was the Buryat lama Zhibalha, one of the original ive
lamas mentioned earlier in this article. When Yelo was thirteen, he entered
the original Drepung in Lhasa where one of his main masters was Thubten
Nyima, one of the ive original Buryat pilgrims. Later he escaped to India
where he completed his monastic education under Agvan Nyima, who
proved to be his next major Buryat teacher. After the collapse of socialism,
he expressed interest in being sent to teach in Mongolia, where he spent a
year mastering the Mongolian language. When Yelo Rinpoche irst arrived
in Mongolia, he attempted to locate the birthplace and ind relatives of his
“root” teacher, Thubten Nyima, who, he thought, was a Mongol. It is at that
time, in Mongolia, he was told, that his teacher’s native land was across
the border to the north, in Siberia, and that his late teacher was, in fact, a
Buryat.29 Subsequently, when, in the early 1990s, Buryats started asking
the Dalai Lama to send them a master to teach at the Ivolginsk Monastery,
Andreyev. Soviet Russia and Tibet. Pp. 385-395.
Interview, Ulan-Ude, Buryatia, Russia, July 2001. See also my ethnographic documentary devoted to his life in Buryatia, where he personally narrates his story. Anya
Bernstein. Join Me in Shambhala (videorecording, 30 min.). USA: Documentary Educational Resources, 2002.
28
29
184
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
which houses the largest monastic university in Buryatia and serves as the
seat of the Khambo Lama, Yelo Rinpoche gladly accepted.
Yelo Rinpoche arrived in Buryatia with his Tibetan disciple Tenzin,
received Russian citizenship, and permanently settled in Ulan-Ude. He
was initially sponsored by the oficial Buryat Buddhist establishment to
teach at Ivolginsk; however, due to the ongoing conlicts with the local
religious establishment, he dropped out and opened his own monastery on
the outskirts of the city in 2004, along with several lay “dharma centers”
in major Russian cities.
The cornerstone of the tensions between these two major igures in
Buryatia lie in the Buryat relationship with the Tibetan world and the Buddhist world in general. As I have discussed elsewhere, there is currently
a deep schism between religious
leaders in the republic over issues of the identity and future of
Buryat Buddhism.30 While some
are convinced that it should be
modeled as much as possible on
contemporary Tibetan Buddhism,
others vehemently resist any foreign involvement or inluence. The
oficial leader of Buryat Buddhism,
Khambo Lama Damba Aiusheev
famously advocates “indigenous”
Buryat Buddhism, which, in his
view, is equal to (or in some versions of this argument, even supeFig. 5. Yelo Rinpoche with his disciple Tenzin. rior to) but separate from Tibetan
Buryatia, 2001. Photo by the author.
and Mongolian Buddhisms. Other
leaders, in contrast, resist the appellation of “Buryat,” arguing that there
is only one Buddhism and that such distinctions are based on erroneous
nationalist feelings, incompatible with true Buddhist doctrine. To make matters more complicated, the Russian central government, from Catherine the
Great to President Medvedev had always fostered notions of ecclesiastical
self-government, since having a religious community on the former empire’s
30
Bernstein. The Post-Soviet Treasure Hunt: Time, Space, and Necropolitics in Siberian
Buddhism // Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2011. Vol. 53. No. 3. Pp. 632653; Bernstein. More Alive Than All the Living: Sovereign Bodies and Cosmic Politics
in Buddhist Siberia // Cultural Anthropology. 2012. Vol. 27. No. 2. Pp. 261-285.
185
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
borderlands subordinated to foreign leadership would complicate borders
and loyalties. As we shall see, the ways in which these political allegiances
manifest themselves through religious forms are manifold and complex.
Being one of the most powerful and respected religious igures in contemporary Buryatia, Yelo Rinpoche’s extraordinary status as an incarnate
lama presents challenges for the Khambo Lama, who, on many occasions,
has expressed resentment of the fact that Tibetans open their monasteries
in Buryatia. While both Yelo Rinpoche and the Khambo Lama are widely
popular religious leaders in the Republic, interestingly, the Khambo Lama
emerged as a truly populist leader who works and speaks for the nation and
evokes feelings of Buryat pride, while Yelo Rinpoche is mostly favored by
Buryat intelligentsia in search of esoteric teachings. Due to his status as the
only incarnate lama residing in Russia (the Khambo Lama, on the contrary, is
not a reincarnation but an elected leader), Yelo Rinpoche is in high demand
for conducting tantric empowerments. Because Buryatia does not have an
institutionalized tradition of incarnate lamas, the status of Yelo Rinpoche
is technically higher than anyone else in the Republic, which intensiies the
tensions already present in Buryat religious politics.
While tulkus have an extraordinary status everywhere in the Tibetan Buddhist world, in Buryatia, even regular Tibetan lamas are usually viewed by
lay people as charismatic, possessing special powers via a certain fetishization of Tibetan mystical “otherness.” Tibetan lamas in Buryatia often enjoy
a strong following, even if their reputation becomes questionable.31 Unlike
lay people, some members of the Buryat clergy, especially those who have
spent many years in India with Tibetans, sometimes express skepticism and
even cynicism regarding their fellow coreligionists. These views, passed
unoficially through rumors and private conversations, which in a tightly
knit Buddhist community of Ulan-Ude quite quickly become public, creating
a resentment that undermines Tibetan monastic emigration in Buryatia. A
common view of some of the monks is that Tibetans “failed” in Buryatia,
Perhaps the most famous Tibetan lama in Russia, Geshe Jampa Tinlei, was recently
the subject of a number of scandals regarding “inappropriate” behavior, money, and relations with women, ending up disrobing and losing all his priestly privileges (according
to unconirmed rumors he was disrobed by the Dalai Lama himself during his visit to
Kalmykia in 2004). This, however, did not affect his enormous following with dharma
centers set up almost in every major city in Russia, as he is believed to be intrinsically
holy and continues to be venerated as a teacher despite his recently lay and married
status. See Anonymous. Otreksia ot sana. Sopernichestvo sredi tibetskikh lam v Rossii
vylilos’ v aktsiiu protesta [Disrobed. Rivalry Between Tibetan Lamas in Russia Ended
Up in a Protest Action] // Inform-Polis. 2005. December 15. P. 4.
31
186
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
understanding “failure” in terms of the impossibility of introducing the
Tibetan model of monastic education in Buryatia and educating the public
appropriately. Celibacy and monastic discipline are usually at stake, and the
absence of these in Buryatia is often explained by the incompatibility of
Buryat and Tibetan “mentality” with Buryats being incapable of subduing
their “nomadic” and “wild” temperament into the rigid monastic structures
of Tibetan Buddhism. But perhaps most crucially and most commonly,
Tibetans are thought to be bound to failure in Buryatia because they do not
have “roots” there. In other words, Tibetans in Buryatia who are not part of
common somatic networks are often thought of not as great teachers and
bodhisattvas, but alien intruders inherently incapable of understanding local realities, and out to proit from the ever-growing religious marketplace.
The pervasiveness of the biologistic discourse on “roots” is especially
striking, given that the Buddhist transnational and transcultural model of
kinship is speciically designed to undermine this very ideology. To demonstrate how inter-body movement is being negotiated in local religious
politics, in the remainder of this essay I examine how the debates around
one particular ritual during the summer of 2008 became an arena through
which competing notions of “roots” were expressed. In this context, Yelo
Rinpoche’s “Buryat ancestry” through his master Thubten Nyima placed
him in a special position in the “roots” debate, thus exemplifying how corporeal networks created by the master–disciple relationships can play into
the complex cultural politics in the region.
Buddhist Ritual Wrought Anew
Some of the central seasonal rituals in Buryatia are ritual offerings called
oboo. An oboo refers to a cairn usually built on mountain tops to mark
the residence of the so-called land master spirits.32 Land master spirits are
linked to both kinship and territorial groups, with all residents of adjacent
villages often gathering for a communal ritual. Oboo rituals are rarely missed
by Buryats, even the ones not actively involved in any kind of religious
practice. Many, especially those who reside outside Buryatia, time their
summer vacations to coincide with these events. During the months of May
and June, Buryats come back to their native villages to attend the ritual and
See L. L. Abaeva. Kul’t gor i buddizm v Buriatii. Moscow, 1991; Caroline Humphrey.
Marx Went Away – But Karl Stayed Behind. Ann Arbor, 1999 [1983]. Pp. 422-423;
Caroline Humphrey, David Sneath. The End of Nomadism? Society, State, and the
Environment in Inner Asia. Durham, 1999. Pp. 123-134.
32
187
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
reconnect with numerous relatives. While oboo rituals can be performed by
shamans and knowledgeable elders, here I focus on the rituals performed
by Buddhist lamas.
Fig. 6. Oboo ritual. Buryatia, 2008. Photo by the author.
The lama is supposed to perform a certain tantric visualization, generating himself as the Buddhist wrathful buddha Yamantaka or the wrathful
bodhisattva Vajrapani and then, as Yamantaka or Vajrapani, address “land
master” spirits, asking them for protection, help in worldly affairs, and
various blessings. People attending the ritual bring copious offerings of
various foods and drinks, which are offered to the deities according to an
established ritual scenario and are consumed during the communal feast
that follows while the remainders of sacriiced foods are taken home and
given to the relatives and friends who were not able to attend. It is widely
believed that successful oboo rituals bring rain, much needed during the
usually dry months of May and June. Yet what happens if a ritual fails?
During the summer of 2008, when I was in Buryatia, June was extremely
dry despite all of the oboo rituals that had been performed.
The “pro-Tibetan” faction immediately declared that the oboo rituals
performed by Buryat lamas failed because they made the wrong kinds of
188
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
offerings, offerings that were not considered to correspond to “true” Buddhism. Meat and alcohol as food sacriice became the most contested issues
in this debate. Both personal and ritual consumption of meat and alcohol had
always been controversial in Buddhism and vary widely between different
schools and national traditions. As far as monastic rules go, while alcohol is
explicitly prohibited in the early vinaya, meat eating is not prohibited as long
as the animal was not slaughtered to feed the monk.33 Despite the fact that
there is no direct prohibition of the use of meat in early sources, there is a
contemporary tendency to view those who abstain from meat as “better Buddhists,” particularly widespread in modernized and Western interpretations
of the “nonviolence” doctrine.34 Although offerings to wrathful deities, both
in Tibet and Mongolia, typically include meat and alcohol, some modernist
Buryats seem unaware of it and think of this as only a Buryat tradition that
somehow perverted more authentic forms of Buddhism due to the inluence
of native shamanism. This particular construction of Buddhist authenticity
built on an imagined earlier, purer version recently provoked controversy
regarding the ritual use of meat and vodka in Buryatia (including animal
sacriice in shamanic rituals). Oboo rituals, especially notorious for the copious amounts of vodka brought, offered as libations, poured on the ground,
and consumed in what often turns into a post-oboo ritual drunken revelry as
soon as the presiding lamas leave, became the highest stake in this debate.
“When Bakula Rinpoche,35 a famous Buddhist master from India, came
here, he was stunned to see all this vodka poured into the ground. He said,
‘Look, your spirits are all drunk! No wonder you cannot get any help from
them. How can a drunken spirit help anyone?’” one Buryat Buddhist lama
related to me. Similarly, a Buryat nun who currently lives in India commented that when she attended such an oboo ritual, she had a vision, in
which she was able to communicate with the land master spirit to whom
the offerings were being made. “The spirit told me that he was a vegetarian since Buddhism was established in this area, however, no one brought
Tibetan monasteries never served any food to monks, other than tea and tsampa. In
the Indian Drepung, this is still the case, except that they now also serve noodles, rice,
vegetables, and yogurt. Meat is not proscribed, however: monks who have the means to
buy it from local vendors sometimes cook it in their dormitory kitchens.
34
For an informative overview of the various Buddhist attitudes to vegetarianism, see
Brian Peter Harvey. An Introduction to Buddhist Ethics. Cambridge, 2000.
35
The late Bakula Rinpoche, a prominent incarnate Buddhist lama from Ladakh in
northern India, worked as a minister for the Indian government under Indira Gandhi. In
1990, he had been appointed an Indian ambassador to Mongolia, which enabled him to
visit the USSR and later, postsocialist Buryatia.
33
189
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
him his favorite cottage cheese (Rus. tvorog) for a long time. The spirit
complained that all they brought him was meat, which he did not eat.” The
spirit asked the nun to kindly call her relatives who were going to attend an
oboo during this season and make sure that the rules of vegetarianism be
more strictly followed.
Fig. 7. Oboo offerings. Buryatia, 2001. Photo by the author.
The “anti-Tibetan” faction represented by some lamas whom I interviewed
during this period, however, insisted that offering meat and alcohol was a
“Buryat tradition.” They claimed that unlike shamanist oboos, what they offered was not “really” vodka, but a special substance referred to as “nectar”
into which vodka is transformed through appropriate prayers and visualizations.36 The real reason for the failure of the ritual, they claimed, was that
local spirits would not “take instructions” from “foreigners” (Tibetans) who
tried to meddle in their affairs. (The obstacles here are constructed speciically
in blood kinship terms as opposed to those of spirits’ linguistic competence,
since the ritual is almost always conducted in classical Tibetan). Interestingly,
the Tibetan incarnate lamas with Buryat roots discussed above were perhaps
36
Although lamas invoke this fact as a “Buryat tradition,” this is true for Tibetan Buddhist tantric ritual in general.
190
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the only ones who have been somewhat exempt from these accusations,
because, according to the Buddhist view of kinship, they “are” Buryat via
their quasi-kinship relationship with their respective Buryat predecessors.
Indeed, the ability to establish peaceful relationships with local spirits
is central to any lama’s legitimacy in Buryatia, both Buryat and foreign
alike. When Zhibalha Rinpoche, another Tibetan lama with Buryat “roots”
mentioned earlier in this article, visited Buryatia and the Aga region in
2004 (the native region of his previous incarnation), the elders informed
him of the lack of rainfall. He conducted several offerings to local spirits on
the mountaintop and near the river, and within a couple of days there was
a heavy downpour. “I felt that the local spirits were favorably inclined to
me,” he said when I interviewed him in his residence in Drepung Gomang
in India in 2008.37 Buryat elders also took Zhibalha’s capacity to pacify the
local spirits to be a sign of his legitimacy to act as a lama in Buryatia. Thus,
his journey has been locally understood not as a visit by a foreign lama but
by a “Buryat” lama inally arriving in his “homeland.”38 While Zhibalha
Rinpoche (who still resides in Drepung Gomang in India and only visited
Buryatia once) is still relatively unknown to the wider Buryat public, Yelo
Rinpoche is a very public igure and his every step is subject to scrutiny.39
Thus, exempt from blame on the oboo front, Yelo Rinpoche was still
reproached by his detractors for doing too many “lashy” tantric empowerments as opposed to the unglamorous work of spreading the dharma through
regular teachings. However, since there are currently no Buddhist teachers of
such high status in Buryatia with all the appropriate initiations (a lama must
have received an initiation in order to confer it), Yelo Rinpoche remains the
most qualiied lama for these empowerments. As mentioned above, Kentrul Rinpoche from India, another incarnate lama with Buryat “roots,” was
surprised by how many people approached him to conduct empowerments
37
Interestingly, he used Tibetan terms for locality spirits, such as yul lha and gzhi bdag,
to refer to Buryat “landmaster” spirits. Interview with Zhibalha Rinpoche, Drepung
Gomang monastery, India, January 2008.
38
Ibid.
39
Interestingly, Zhibalha Rinpoche became a key igure in the Buddhist revival in
Tuva, regularly visiting the Tuvan Republic since 2004. His “Buryat” connection is
very important for Tuvans, who also view his as “ours” (Ksenia Pimenova, personal
communication, 2011). Although Tuvans are a Turkic group with strong Mongolian
inluences, Zhibalha himself (similarly to other Tibetan lamas familiar with the Buddhist
peoples of the Russian Federation) believes Buryats, Kalmyks, and Tuvans to be “people
of Mongolian ethnicity” (Tib. sog po mi rig) (Interview with Zhibalha, 2008). Similarly,
Kentrul Rinpoche now also regularly visits Kalmykia.
191
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
when he visited Buryatia. Since empowerment rituals structure the Buddhist
community in kin-like ways,40 I suggest that these lamas are sought out by
Buryats not only because they are internationally renowned and qualiied
masters but also because by acquiring these Tibetan lamas as their symbolic
kin, Buryats also reclaim and reincorporate their own past masters into their
somatic networks and the current body politic. In other words, these incarnate Tibetan lamas with “Buryat” roots are in particularly high demand in
Buryatia not only for their “reproductive” ritual capacity, but because they
evoke and reference, via inter-bodiment, their Buryat predecessors. Yelo and
Kentrul Rinpoches’ bodies serve not only as the crucial links in bringing
Buryats into the new transnational and pan-Asian “vajra families,” forging
post-Soviet religious ties and transforming geopolitical imaginaries; these
bodies also reconnect Buryat believers with speciically Buryat key religious
personalities of the past.
Inter-body movement enabled by the practices of reincarnation and tantric discipleship blurs the lines of political
and ethnic alliances. Despite
being an ethnic Tibetan, the
present Kentrul Rinpoche, by
virtue of being a reincarnation
of a Buryat monk, has become
an important figure in the
post-Soviet Buryat Buddhist
Fig. 8. The Dalai Lama with Buryat monks studyrevival. He is also a source of ing in India. Drepung Monastery, Karnataka, India,
considerable pride for Bury- 2008. Photo courtesy of Igor’ Iancheglov.
ats. Not only was he the sole
Buryat to preside over a famous Tibetan monastic college, he mastered the
process of death and rebirth to be reincarnated outside of Chinese-occupied Tibet in order to eventually engineer his “return” to Buryatia, relinking ordinary
Buryats with Buddhist deities. Incarnation here emerges as an empowering
technology for mobility and border-crossing, which challenges state-imposed
regimes of mobility and reinterprets the notions of life and death. In the case
of Yelo Rinpoche, who is an apprentice of not one but three Buryat lamas,41
Mills. Vajra Brother, Vajra Sister.
As a young boy in Litang, Yelo Rinpoche received basic Buddhist instruction from
Zhibalha Rinpoche. He also received teachings from Agvan Nyima at the Indian Drepung
Monastery (Interview, 2001, Ulan-Ude).
40
41
192
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the Buddhist institution of master–disciple relationship, which creates kinlike corporeal networks between the master and his disciples through tantric
ritual, similarly unsettles the issues of loyalties and allegiances. While some
nationalist-leaning Buddhist leaders resent their superior status as detrimental
to indigenous self-determination, others view them as “ours” (Rus. nashi),
descendants of the great Buryat lamas Galsan Legden and Thupten Nyima,
who intentionally transcended both death and Soviet and Chinese controls of
mobility only to reemerge in postsocialist Buryatia to renovate the religion
in these troubled times.
SUMMARY
The article by Anya Bernstein is based on ield research conducted in
post-Soviet Buryatia, focused on the history of the cohort of Buryat monks
who left Buryatia in 1920 to achieve positions as grand lamas in Tibet. The
author traces the lives of this cohort, which were complicated by reincarnation and tantric discipleship to the point of “return” of the cohort to postSoviet Buryatia. Based on this research, the article attempts to conceptualize
the institutions of Buddhist reincarnation and discipleship as practices of a
certain kind of corporeal motion, which includes not only traversing vast
Inner Asian territories, but also journeys and relationships between bodies
across multiple lifetimes. The movements and relationships between two
or more bodies produced by Buddhist corporeal technologies constitute
extensive transnational somatic networks, where the meaning of individual
bodies is shaped through their relationship with other bodies in the network.
The author argues that such religiously inspired interbody movement has
subversive implications that go beyond esoteric religious practices, as they
challenge biopolitical regimes of mobility imposed by nation-states on their
indigenous populations, complicating the issues of allegiances and loyalties. This article thus contributes to the growing ield of studies of religion,
transnationalism, and globalization by considering a previously neglected
type of mobility – that between bodies and bodily substances – and its role
and effects in transnational religiopolitical movements.
Резюме
В статье Ани Бернштейн рассматривается феномен буддистской
реинкарнации и тантрического ученичества. Авторский подход со193
Anya Bernstein, On Body-Crossing
вмещает исследование религиозного верования с историей телесности
и транстелесности (мобильности) в разных социальных и культурных
контекстах XX в. В основе статьи лежит история исхода буддистских
послушников бурятского происхождения из советской Бурятии в Тибет
в 1920-х гг., где они стали ламами и заняли высокие посты в духовной
иерархии. Автор прослеживает процесс реинкарнации и тантрического
перехода этой группы бурятских лам в истории тибетской религиозной
иерархии и в контексте Юго-Восточной Азии, их вполне реальное возвращение в постсоветскую Бурятию и влияние на развитие буддизма
в этой республике. История “возвращения” бурятских лам в постсоветскую Бурятию позволяет автору проследить, как “номадические”
практики, укорененные в буддистских верованиях, становятся инструментами распространения буддизма, сопротивления границам гражданства и биополитики современного государства и переопределения
национальной идентичности на постсоветском пространстве.
194
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Жанна КОРМИНА
НОМАДИЧЕСКОЕ ПРАВОСЛАВИЕ:
О НОВЫХ ФОРМАХ РЕЛИГИОЗНОЙ ЖИЗНИ
В СОВРЕМЕННОЙ РОССИИ*
В сущности, нет религий, которые были бы
ложными.
Все они по-своему истинны: все они, хотя
и по-разному, соответствуют данным условиям
человеческого существования
Эмиль Дюркгейм
Согласно данным ВЦИОМ на март 2010 г. 75% россиян считали себя
православными.1 Оценить количество “настоящих” верующих среди
них довольно сложно; обычный для подобных опросов вопрос “были
*
В статье использованы результаты, полученные в ходе выполнения проекта №
11-01-0126, реализованного в рамках Программы “Научный фонд НИУ ВШЭ”
в 2012–2013 гг. Я благодарна анонимным рецензентам и редакции Ab Imperio
за их критические замечания, заставившие меня четче обозначить собственные
методологические позиции (см. раздел “Современное православие: реставрация
традиции”). Хочется также поблагодарить Сергея Ушакина за центральную для
статьи концептуальную метафору номадизма и интеллектуальную щедрость.
Сергею Штыркову моя благодарность за внимательное чтение текста на разных
этапах и строгое комментирование.
1
Пресс-выпуск ВЦИОМ №1461. Верим ли мы в Бога? 30 марта 2010.
195
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
ли Вы на богослужении в прошлое воскресенье?” в России не задают,
поскольку положительных ответов оказывается меньше значимой для
таких исследований величины.2 Все это большинство, с точки зрения,
преобладающей среди клириков и иерархов Русской православной
церкви, являются номинальными православными или “прихожанами”,
поскольку не удовлетворяют норме, традиционно предъявляемой ею
к своей пастве: регулярно участвовать в литургической жизни своей
локальной православной общины. Однако такое требование, уходящее
корнями в крестьянскую историю российского православия, оказывается неприемлемым для современных урбанизированных верующих.
Они, перефразируя Бурдье, более не “принадлежат земле”,3 не только
сознательно выбирая приход, куда предпочитают ходить (или ездить),
но и практикуя иные, альтернативные общинному способы проживания
своей религиозной жизни. “Структурные”4 православные, выбирающие регулярную религиозную жизнь в церковной общине – своем
локальном приходе или монастыре, – стали в современном российском
православии экзотическим меньшинством. Большинство же выбирают
иные способы аффилиации с церковью, оставляющие существенное
место пространству личного выбора и минимизирующие контроль
институции за их религиозной жизнью.
Происходящие изменения можно сопоставить с разными агрегатными состояниями вещества: “твердые тела” церковных общин, с их
относительно стабильной формой и структурой, текучие, не имеющие
собственной формы массы, и “газообразные”, слабо связанные между
собой и трудноуловимые частички православной паствы являются разными способами существования одного и того же. В этой статье пойдет
речь о том, какие культурные практики вырабатываются верующими,
стремящимися избежать жестких традиционных форм социальной
организации, но все же испытывающими потребность переживания
принадлежности группе единоверцев.
Было бы преувеличением сказать, что “антиструктурные”, или “текучие”, тенденции в религиозной жизни являются чем-то совершенно
новым. Их легко обнаружить во вполне традиционной практике паС. Филатов, Р. Лункин. Статистика российской религиозности: магия цифр и
неоднозначная реальность // www.archipelag.ru (последний просмотр 11.01.2012).
3
П. Бурдье. Практический смысл. Москва, 2001. С. 123; и далее.
4
Т.е. проводящие свою религиозную жизнь в рамках церковной общины, которая
в терминах В. Тернера является “структурой” в отличие от “коммунитас” паломнических групп. В. Тернер. Символ и ритуал. Москва, 1983. С. 170.
2
196
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Илл. 1. У часовни Ксении Блаженной. Верующие читают акафист. Санкт-Петербург,
2010 (фото С. Штыркова).
ломничества, т.е. путешествия, предпринимаемого с целью посещения
святых мест, точнее контакта со священным, которое аккумулируется
в таких особых локусах. Первыми, кто стал писать об этом, были
Эдит и Виктор Тернеры, предложившие в своей книге о католическом
паломничестве5 рассматривать этот вид путешествия как временное
и добровольное пребывание участников в лиминальном состоянии.
Сами католики, совершавшие паломничества, Тернеры писали, что,
так же как юноша, проходящий инициацию в традиционном обществе,
паломник теряет на время свой “мирской” социальный статус, удаляется
из стратифицированного мира в сообщество равных (communitas) и
претерпевает телесные страдания. Концепция лиминальности применительно к “антиструктурным” состояниям до сих пор остается вполне
продуктивной, особенно если задаваться вопросом о том, какими смыслами наделяет свое добровольное страдание паломник. Кроме того, как
мы увидим далее, лиминальность как социальный модус сознательно
выбирается разными необщинными православными, предпочитающи5
Edith Turner and Victor Turner. Image and Pilgrimage. New York, 1978.
197
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
ми в организации своей религиозной жизни движение – стабильности,
а одиночество – коллективизму.
Спустя некоторое время был предложен альтернативный тернеровскому метод анализа паломничества, сформулированный в сборнике
статей под редакцией двух других британцев, Джона Иде и Майкла Солноу.6 Составители и авторы сборника рассматривают паломничество
как сферу конкуренции разнообразных религиозных и секулярных дискурсов. Они обращают внимание на то, что разные группы посетителей
и другие участники паломничества (например, “хранители святыни”)
могут приписывать различные значения как почитаемому месту, так и
самому путешествию к нему. Эти различия обнаруживаются в предпочитаемых разными группами нарративах, подтверждающих священный
статус почитаемого места, в репертуаре религиозных практик, а также
оценке своего опыта паломничества.7
В своем предисловии к сборнику “Contested the Sacred” Иде и
Солноу выделяют три составляющие, которые необходимо, с их точки
зрения, учитывать при анализе паломничества: почитаемое место, сам
паломник (его статус, признаки этого статуса и т.п.) и тексты, легитимирующие почитание святыни, как нарративные (письменные и устные),
так и визуальные. К этим трем перспективным направлениям анализа
паломнических практик Джон Иде в соавторстве с другим британским
антропологом Саймоном Коулманом добавляют еще одно – движение.8
Под движением ими понимаются, во-первых, специфические паломJohn Eade and Michael Sallnow. Introduction // Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology
of Christian Pilgrimage. London, 2000. Pр. 1-26.
7
Мое собственное исследование на сельской святыне Псковской области Пещорка, где, согласно местной традиции, явилась Богородица, оставив след на
почитаемом ныне камне, показало, что городские паломники, священник и его
окружение и местные жители используют разные способы, чтобы легитимировать почитание этого места. Паломники рассказывают о чудесных исцелениях,
купаются в речке, где лежит камень, и стараются увезти с собой сувениры – воду,
песок, камни, растения. Священник составил “документальную” историю появления следа (предполагающую, впрочем, чудесное явление Богородицы) и
регулярно организует крестный ход к святыне, куда, в отличие от его пустующей
церкви, приходят верующие. Местные жители рассказывают мемораты о наказании святотатцев, пытавшихся в советское время осквернить камень (перевернуть, взорвать и проч.) и лечат у следка свои больные ноги. Они остаются
глухи и равнодушны к историям друг друга. Jeanne Kormina. Pilgrims, Priests
and Local Religion in Contemporary Russia // Folklore. 2004. Vol. 28. Pp. 25-40.
8
Simon Coleman and John Eade. Introduction: Reframing Pilgrimage // Idem (Eds.).
Reframing Pilgrimage: Cultures in Motion. London and New York, 2004. Pp. 1-25.
6
198
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
нические техники тела (подползание к святыне на коленях, целование
священных объектов, обход святыни определенным образом, купание на
святыне). Во-вторых, это способы передвижения паломников: велосипед
(типично для современных католических паломничеств), мотоцикл,
автобус и, конечно, традиционное пешее путешествие.9 Наконец, движение сближает паломничество с туризмом и позволяет рассматривать
паломника как своего рода временного рекреационного мигранта, а
паломничество – как специфический миграционный процесс.
Однако движение может анализироваться не только с точки зрения
его этнографических характеристик, как определенная культурная
практика, но и как своего рода идеология. Иными словами, нас будет
интересовать не то, каким способом передвигаются верующие (т.е. их
тела), а траектории их перемещений и то, почему они это вообще делают.
Модели православной мобильности
Вообще, можно, видимо, говорить о разных моделях православной
мобильности в географическом пространстве, взяв за основу предварительной типологии отношение движения vs статичности применительно к сакральному центру, вокруг которого тем или иным образом
объединяются верующие, и этими верующими. Можно обнаружить
две базовые модели – или траектории – отношения между святыней
и верующими. В первом случае верующих притягивает определенное
святое место, точка в ландшафте (монастырь, церковь, иная локальная
святыня), куда они приезжают или даже временно переселяются. Во
втором случае сакральный центр сам постоянно мигрирует (чудотворные иконы, частицы мощей, иногда – священник или старец), вслед за
ним перемещаются и верующие.
Эти модели отчасти соответствуют режимам православной социальности среди современных российских православных, т.е. предпочитаемым способам аффилиации с группой, описанным мной в другой
работе.10 Я предлагаю выделять четыре таких режима: общинный
См. напр. прекрасную этнографическую работу Нэнси Фрей о паломничестве
в Сантъяго де Компостела (Испания), автор анализирует в том числе велопаломничества. Nancy L. Frey. Pilgrim Stories. On and Off the Road to Santiago. Los
Angeles, 1998.
10
См. подробнее: Ж. В. Кормина. Режимы православной социальности в современной России: прихожане, паломники, сетевики // Приход и община в современном
православии: корневая система российской религиозности / Под ред. А. Агаджаняна, К. Русселе. Москва, 2011. C. 189-211.
9
199
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
(приходской); паломнический; сетевой; режим флэшмоба.11 Принципиальное различие между этими религиозными режимами коренится
в разном понимании верующими того, где локализована религиозная
харизма, чем она легитимируется и как обеспечивается доступ к ней
верующих. “Структура”, или церковь, по классическому определению
Макса Вебера, является бюрократическим институтом по распределению харизмы, которая освящается и легитимируется традицией. Харизма присутствует в священных предметах, но прежде всего в самом
священстве и церковных таинствах. “Антиструктуре” (паломникам)
претит риторика харизмы, поддерживаемая официальной церковью,
предполагающая безусловный контроль со стороны общины и священника над жизнью и доступом к святости верующего; они пытаются
найти способы пережить религиозный опыт вне церкви. Сетевики –
это церковные альтернативщики; креативные, ищущие живой веры,
они нуждаются в новых святых людях и местах, чудесах и деятельной
работе по спасению души в ожидании скорого конца света. Для них
носителями религиозной харизмы являются в первую очередь старцы,
своего рода “живые святые”, обладающие, с точки зрения их почитателей, рядом духовных даров – предвидения, излечения и утешения.
Православный “флэшмоб”, связанный с феноменом путешествующих
святынь, делает событием прибытие в город, в определенную его точку,
артефакта, который и является материализацией религиозной харизмы.
Различия между этими религиозными режимами можно схематично
описать при помощи двух пар оппозиций, построенных по признакам
“локальность” и “историчность”. Структура, представленная в первую
очередь институтом церковного прихода, локальна и исторична. Антиструктура (коммунитас), ярче всего выраженная в практике группового
паломничества, нелокальна и неисторична. Социальная сеть, примером
которой является описанная А. В. Тарабукиной “прихрамовая среда”
1990-х годов, нелокальна и исторична.12 Локальность и историчность
здесь, конечно, понимаются схематично и упрощенно. Под локальностью
подразумевается устойчивая идентификация верующего или группы верующих (прихода) с определенным церковным зданием или местностью, где
оно расположено, с их историей, инфраструктурой, социальным окружением и т.п. Историчность здесь – это прежде всего устойчивость “совокупВ статье этот режим не описан; его идея возникла во время обсуждения моего
доклада о религиозных режимах в МАЭ РАН в ноябре 2011 года.
12
А. В. Тарабукина. Фольклор и культура прицерковного круга / Дисс. ... канд.
филол. наук. Санкт-Петербург, 2000.
11
200
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ности социальных взаимосвязей” во времени.13 Так, группа паломников,
собравшаяся в паломническом автобусе по объявлению, услышанному по
православному радио или прочтенному в рекламном листке с православной ярмарки, на время поездки становится временным квазиприходом, или
“общиной на колесах”. Это временное сообщество верующих возникает
с момента посадки в автобус, который на время поездки станет ее общим
пространством, и прекращает существование в момент возвращения из
паломничества. Иными словами, период существования такого сообщества ограничен временем поездки, оно “неисторично”.
Социальные сети не локальны по определению. Хотя их сгущения
имеют локальные привязки, т.е. участники сети где-то встречаются или
имеют повышенные шансы встретиться, их религиозная идентичность,
как правило, не имеет локального выражения. Отсутствует локальная
привязка и в легитимации этого типа религиозной социальности. При
этом социальные сети относительно устойчивы во времени, поскольку
связаны обычно с реализацией какого-то долговременного проекта (например, канонизацией того или иного святого, прославлением иконы
и т.п.), а солидарность внутри них поддерживается на основе нонконформистской религиозности того или иного извода.14
Наконец, толпы почитателей, которые собирают путешествующие
святыни: мощи святого, чудотворные иконы и другие священные предметы, например собиравший в ноябре 2011 г. в разных городах России
грандиозное количество верующих афонский пояс Богородицы,15 –
представляют последний случай религиозного режима: локальный и
неисторичный. Святыня, приезжающая в город М., собирает местных
Идею религиозных режимов я заимствую у голландского антрополога Марта
Бакса, автора работ о знаменитом месте католического паломничества Междугорье. См. напр.: Mart Bax. Religious Regimes and State-Formation: Towards a Research
Perspective // Anthropological Quarterly. 1987. Vol. 60. No. 1. Pp. 1-11.
14
Наиболее яркие примеры православных социальных сетей – православные
фундаменталисты и церковные либералы-кочетковцы. Представители совершенно
разных сегментов политического спектра православного мира, и те и другие, тем
не менее, похожи в том, что являются последовательными религиозными нонконформистами и находятся в опале у официальной церкви.
15
Пояс Богородицы был привезен в Россию из Афонского монастыря Ватопед при
поддержке фонда Андрея Первозванного, попечителем которого является глава
ОАО “Российские железные дороги” Владимир Якунин. Святыня собрала почти
4 миллиона верующих; в Москве поклониться ей пришли около 800 тыс. человек,
при том что на рождественскую службу в столице пришли почти в 10 раз меньше –
90 тысяч (Новый “антирекорд” посещаемости рождественских богослужений в
Москве, см.: www.portal-credo.ru, последнее посещение 10.01.2012).
13
201
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
жителей, считающих себя православными (и посчитавших нужным
прийти к святыне), так что, оказываясь в одной общей очереди, они
становятся на несколько часов своеобразным сообществом. У этого сообщества нет прошлого и будущего, разве что прибудет новая святыня
и образуется новая очередь. Другой пример: пользующиеся большой
популярностью православные ярмарки, куда также приходят верующие,
потому что они верующие и для того, чтобы побыть верующими. На
такой ярмарке можно купить разнообразную православную продукцию от молебнов за усопших, которые будут читаться в отдаленных
монастырях, до меда с монастырских пчельников, а также поклониться
привезенным откуда-либо чудотворным иконам.
Илл. 2. На православной ярмарке: беседа со священником. Санкт-Петербург, 2011
(фото Ж. Корминой).
Итак, очевидно, что, наряду с традиционным способом проживания религиозной жизни в своем местном православном приходе под
руководством священника, существуют иные нормы или режимы проживания религиозной жизни. Этот конфликт между традиционными
и новыми нормами может быть описан как усиление номадических
тенденций, свойственных обществу постмодерному и постсекулярному,
каковым является современная Россия.
202
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Современное православие: реставрация традиции
Номадические практики в российском православии (как, видимо, и
в любой другой религии) не являются чем-то совершенно новым. Так,
паломничество к святыням предпринималось православными верующими в разные исторические периоды, включая советский,16 путешествия
святынь, прежде всего чудотворных икон, также были распространены
в дореволюционной России. Однако смыслы этих религиозных практик
в современной России настолько отличаются от своих досоветских прототипов, что заставляют анализировать их не в парадигме культурной
преемственности, а, наоборот, – в терминах культурного разрыва. И
действительно, трудно представить, каким образом могла бы передаваться религиозная традиция в условиях, когда предназначенные
для этой цели социальные институты, отвечающие за социализацию
(семья, приходская, т.е. локальная и соседская, община), перестают
выполнять функцию трансляции религиозных ценностей и практик,
как это произошло в советское время. При этом вполне очевидно, что
советская насильственная секуляризация была своеобразной локальной
интерпретацией глобальных процессов “естественной” секуляризации,
охватившей значительную часть западного мира. Иными словами, результат советской “секуляризации сверху” вполне сравним с аналогичными, но “естественными” социальными трансформациями глобального
масштаба: это прежде всего рождение нового постсекулярного субъекта,
ориентированного на неолиберальные ценности. Ему претит такой вариант религии, при котором она принимает формы тотального института;
он стремится минимизировать контроль общины или церкви над своей
религиозной жизнью; он находится в поисках аутентичности (практик,
идей, текстов, опыта) и поэтому с готовностью верит в преемственность “своей” национальной/этнической/религиозной традиции; для
O православном паломничестве в России XIX в. см.: Chris J. Chulos. Religious
and Secular Aspects of Pilgrimage in Modern Russia // Byzantium and the North (Acta
Byzantica Fennica. Vol. IX.). Helsinki, 1999. Pp. 21-58; Roy R. Robson. Transforming
Solovki: Pilgrim Narratives, Modernization, and Late Imperial Monastic Life // Sacred
Stories. Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Bloomington, IN, 2007. Pp. 44-60;
Christine Worobec. The Unintended Consequences of a Surge in Pilgrimages in Late
Imperial Russia // Russian History. 2009. No. 36. Pp. 62-76. О паломничестве более
позднего времени см., напр.: Х. В. Поплавская. Паломничество, странноприимство и
почитание святынь в Рязанском крае. XIX–XX вв. Рязань, 1998; Laura Stark. Peasants,
Pilgrimage and Sacred Promises: Ritual and the Supernatural in Orthodox Karelian Folk
Religion. Helsinki, 2002; А. Л. Беглов. В поисках “безгрешных катакомб”. Москва,
2008. С. 177-187.
16
203
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
него участие в религиозной жизни – это способ организации досуга,
приносящего интеллектуальное и социальное удовлетворение. Такого рода “ищущие” (religious seekers) появляются в СССР не позднее
1960-х гг.;17 показательно, что нередко последователи нью-эйдж движений (например, рериховцы) могут считать себя и православными.
Примером обсуждаемого культурного разрыва может служить утрата
современными паломниками обычая завета, или обета, центрального
для такого религиозного предприятия. Согласно этому обычаю, паломник совершает свое путешествие к святыне, делает приношения, занимается ее благоустройством или некоторое время остается там (если это
монастырь) в качестве трудника в благодарность, например, за чудесное
исцеление или же таким образом просит о чудесном вмешательстве в
трудной или мало предсказуемой ситуации (к примеру, уход на войну).18
Современные городские паломники не знакомы с практикой обета, что
свидетельствует о серьезной трансформации культурных паттернов и
социальных функций этой религиозной практики.
То же можно сказать и о традиции “кочующих” икон. В дореволюционное время визит чудотворной иконы, прибывающей с крестным
ходом из монастыря или храма, где она хранится, был регулярным событием годового календарного цикла деревни, города или городского
квартала. Встреча иконы была коллективным действием всего сообщества. В настоящее время изменился и масштаб, и степень, и способ мобильности святынь. Нынешние православные узнают о привозе мощей
или икон из Интернета и по радио, и являются туда не в дополнение к
своей обязательной приходской жизни, а в качестве альтернативы ей.
Итак, говоря о религии в постсоветском обществе, мы имеем дело
с разрывом (а не преемственностью) традиции. Однако правила игры
17
О. В. Чепурная. Независимые религиозные объединения в Ленинграде в 1960–80-е
годы / Дисс. ... канд. культурологи. Москва, 2004.
18
Выполнение индивидуального обета (завета) становилось причиной паломничеств
в дореволюционной России, см., напр., приведенную в недавней статье Кристины
Воробец о чудесных исцелениях историю о том, как крестьянин из Архангельской
губернии прошел тысячу верст пешком, чтобы в исполнение обета поклониться
могиле Серафима Саровского (Christine D. Worobec. Miraculous Healings // Sacred
Stories. Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia. Bloomington, IN, 2007. P. 25). O
традиции заветов в крестьянской культуре XX в. см.: А. А. Панченко. Исследования
в области народного православия. Деревенские святыни Северо-Запада России.
Санкт-Петербург, 1998. С. 82; Т. Б. Щепанская. Кризисная сеть (Традиции духовного
освоения пространства) // Русский Север. К проблеме локальных групп. СанктПетербург, 1995. С. 118-120; Jeanne Kormina. Pilgrims, Priests and Local Religion in
Contemporary Russia. Pp. 28-29.
204
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
заставляют всех ее участников верить, что все происходит, как прежде,
поскольку сертификат аутентичности является наиболее убедительным
способом легитимации этого института. В таком случае задача исследователя состоит в том, чтобы, учитывая факт и формы этой веры,
анализировать их как деятельность по конструированию традиции.
Однако в случае с современным российским православием знаменитая хобсбаумовская метафора “изобретения” традиции не вполне
передает смысл происходящего; в данном случае мне представляется
более удачным говорить о “реставрации традиции”. Под реставрацией
традиции я понимаю такую деятельность “социальных архитекторов”
и “дизайнеров”, которая направлена не просто на то, чтобы придать
“древние” формы современным явлениям, когда для них строятся
разного рода “изобретенные” генеалогии. “Реставраторы”, используя
самые разные средства убеждения, настаивают на непрерывной преемственности традиции, на том, что нынешнее здание православия ровно
то же, что было всегда. При этом внешние формы и очертания этого
здания вроде бы сохраняются, но все остальное – социальные функции,
механизмы контроля, собственно верующий субъект и понимание того,
что значит быть верующим, принципиально изменяется. Если вернуться к метафоре реставрации – и адрес, и даже цвет фасада вроде бы те
же, что сто лет назад, но в оконных проемах – пластиковые пакеты, а
внутри, вместо жилых помещений, – офисы. У социального явления,
называемого тем же именем, что век-полтора назад, принципиально
меняются функции. При этом и вовлеченные в реставрационные работы
люди, и арендаторы помещений, и случайные прохожие поддерживают
идею аутентичности этой конструкции, ее древности. Так что задача
исследователя и состоит в том, чтобы обнаружить эту социальную
мимикрию и не принять культурный “новодел” за действительную
древность. Социальные явления меняются, а тот, кто делает вид, будто они остались теми же, мистифицирует окружающих. Наша задача
состоит в том, чтобы разбираться в культурной логике и социальных
причинах этих мистификаций.
Материалами для этой статьи стали результаты этнографического
исследования, интервью и включенное наблюдение среди паломников, прихожан и других православных верующих, в основном СанктПетербурга и Северо-Запада России, но также Свердловской области
и Москвы, собиравшиеся мною, иногда при помощи коллег, в течение
последних десяти лет. Анализируя религиозную жизнь современных
православных верующих, я намеренно не обращаюсь к историческим
205
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
работам об аналогичных явлениях в дореволюционной или же советской России. Далеко не всегда диахроническое исследование помогает
ответить на исследовательские вопросы о современности. В случае с
православием – определенно это так. Выше бегло обсуждалось полное
вымывание из практики паломничества когда-то смыслообразующей
для нее идеи обета; сравнивать паломничество вековой давности и нынешнее имеет смысл, только если есть задача выяснить, как изменилась
эта религиозная практика. Но вот объяснить нынешнее паломничество
данными или выводами о практиках вековой давности, по моему
глубокому убеждению, нельзя. В самом деле, когда паломник конца
позапрошлого века решал отправиться в дальнее паломничество или
даже выбирал путь странника в качестве “профессии”, он имел опыт
приходской жизни. Теперь же паломник-автобусник во многих случаях
выбирает поездки как способ быть (почувствовать себя) православным,
потому что отказывается быть прихожанином. Это иной, новый, постсекулярный религиозный субъект.
Номады на приходах
Некоторые исследователи уже отмечали такой любопытный факт
современной православной жизни, как предпочтение горожанами
сельских храмов, куда они регулярно ездят на службы или приезжают
для совершения обрядов жизненного цикла – крещения или венчания.19
Вероятно, отчасти эта своеобразная временная миграция может объясняться простыми практическими соображениями, такими как нехватка
церквей в новых спальных районах мегаполиса или более низкая плата
за требы (т.е. услуги клира, предоставляемые верующим) в сельских
храмах. Однако дело тут, вероятно, не только в простой рациональности,
заставляющей верующих выбирать более комфортные условия, прежде
всего экономические. Предпочитая дальний храм своему местному, верующий либо хочет избежать контроля со стороны локальной общины,20
См. напр.: К. Сергазина. “Паломничество” или “воцерковление”: о разных типах
православных приходов на примере трех церквей северо-восточного Подмосковья //
Приход и община в современном православии: корневая структура российской
религиозности. Москва, 2011. С. 37-57.
20
Примеры, когда верующий хочет скрыться от контроля локального сообщества,
могут варьировать от таких случаев, когда решил креститься взрослый человек и,
стесняясь сделать это в своей деревне, специально едет в другую или в городской
храм, до сознательного избегания контактов с местным священником из-за политических, соседских или иных разногласий.
19
206
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
либо перемещается в более низкостатусное социальное пространство
(из города в деревню), чтобы, используя существующую социальнопространственную асимметрию, занять там позицию “элиты”, либо
является частью “свиты” (другом, родственником, духовным чадом и
т.п.) служащего там священника, что также позволяет ему стать частью
приходской элиты. Три эти резона могут быть как исключительными,
так и взаимодополняющими причинами для предпочтения территориально отдаленного прихода “своему” локальному.
Значительное присутствие горожан в сельских церквях было мне
известно по экспедициям в один из северо-западных регионов, полный
“дачных” деревень, где жизнь вообще, в том числе и церковная, происходит благодаря приезжающим на летний сезон горожанам. Однако
и в других регионах, с “живыми” деревнями и селами, наблюдается
похожая ситуация. Так, летом 2009 г. мне довелось проводить полевые
исследования на Урале, в Каменском районе Свердловской области,
где я наблюдала жизнь двух православных приходов, расположенных
в довольно крупном селе и большой деревне с населением приблизительно 3000 и 800 человек соответственно. В обеих церквях (они были
закрыты в советское время) фактически существуют две церковные
общины: “литургическая”, формирующаяся вокруг фигуры священника
и литургического действа, и “хозяйственная”, существующая вокруг
собственно церкви и объединенная разного рода бытовыми заботами
о церковном хозяйстве – состоянии построек, церковного интерьера,
чистоты в церкви. Костяк литургической общины в обоих случаях
состоит из регулярно приезжающих на службы или мигрировавших
из города (но так и не социализировавшихся в местное сообщество)
людей. В селе, например, эту общину составляет семья женщины-нотариуса (ее так и называют за глаза Нотариус) из ближайшего города и
переехавшая оттуда же выпускница медучилища Ирина, работающая в
отделении скорой помощи местной больницы. Брак Ирины с местным
жителем оказался неудачным, социализация – неуспешной. У нее нет
друзей и подруг, и только в церкви она (обучившаяся церковному чтению и пению) чувствует себя уверенно; там ценность ее навыков (и ее
как личности) несомненна.
Даже регулярно приезжая в сельские церкви, такие люди не становятся там своими; напротив, выполняя обычно функции, требующие
некоторых специальных навыков (пение в хоре, церковное чтение и
т.п.), они формируют что-то вроде группы религиозных специалистов,
приближенных к священнику. Местные жители на таких богослуже207
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
ниях становятся скорее зрителями, чем участниками. Эти группы
придерживаются (конечно, вряд ли осознавая это) разных концепций
церковного прихода: прихода как сообщества посвященных верующих, активных участников богослужения и прихода как локального
сообщества, состоящего из всех местных жителей независимо от их
церковной активности. Местные активисты прихода могут не знать
самых простых молитв и пропускать воскресные службы, но с энтузиазмом, скажем, будут собирать деньги на новую церковную ограду,
и никто из односельчан не откажет им в помощи, как не откажет дать
деньги, например, на помощь погорельцам, для которых организуют
точно так же обходы дворов. Иными словами, для местных жителей
их церковь служит прежде всего символом локальной идентичности
и является локальной res publica, т.е. той “общей вещью”, до которой
есть дело каждому местному.
Сосуществование местных и приезжих (или приезжающих) далеко
не всегда протекает мирно; история развития их отношений может
быть историей захвата “нашей” церкви “горожанами”, прибывшими
после героического периода восстановления храма силами местных
энтузиастов.21 Именно так она была рассказана мне Валентиной, 60
лет, этнической немкой. Церковь в их деревне была открыта, первой
в районе, стараниями председателя сельского совета и ее, тогда заведующей клубом и депутата. Возвращение церковного здания было
выполнением ее депутатского наказа, т.е. требования своему депутату
от местных избирателей, которое Валентина рассматривала как акт
возвращения культурного наследия:
Я, наверное, не скажу, чтобы я, допустим, была какая-то
верующая. Была я далека от веры. Но во мне просто, вероятно,
жило… вложенные какие-то чувства… патриотизм к родине. И
поэтому вот эта не вера, а возрождение… боль вот именно за свое,
российское… русское, российское.22
Любопытно, что возрождение церкви для Валентины не было восстановлением местной религиозной традиции и происходило оно не под
лозунгом возврата исторического прошлого местному сообществу. И
сама Валентина, и председатель сельского совета не коренные жители.
См. об этом, напр.: Д. Тошева. От восстановления храма к созданию общины:
самоограничение и материальные трудности как источники приходской идентичности // Приход и община в современном православии. С. 277-297.
22
Интервью с Валентиной, 60 лет, этнической немкой, уроженкой Казахстана.
Свердловская область, 2009, июль.
21
208
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Так что для нее выполнение ее депутатского наказа было знакомой по
предыдущей воспитательной деятельности патриотической работой,
прежде всего с детьми и подростками:
…Когда я директором работала, мы начали вот это возрождение.
То есть я молодежи так объяснила: что это наше, русская, российская традиция. То есть это память. И верим мы, не верим – мы
должны как-то…
Накануне православных праздников Валентина стала отменять субботние дискотеки и водить вместо этого подростков в храм, показывая
им альтернативную возможность проведения досуга и тем самым проводя воспитательную работу:
…Мы отменяли дискотеки. Но мы собирались в клубе. И вот
эти 60, 70, 80 человек – мы массово шли в храм. Но, во-первых,
шли трезвые…
Первое богослужение в церкви состоялось на Пасху 1991 г. без священника, под пластинки, имевшиеся в личной фонотеке председателя
сельского совета, агронома по образованию, получившего в детстве,
прошедшем в Тамбовской области, кое-какое домашнее религиозное
воспитание. По его эскизам был устроен первый алтарь художникомоформителем, из тех, что раньше писали транспаранты. Первый священник появился в церкви полгода спустя и надолго не задержался.
Потом священника не было еще три года, и церковные службы какимто образом совершались прихожанами самостоятельно. Служивший
в церкви в 2009 г. настоятель выполнял эту работу уже семь лет, но
продолжал жить в городе (как многие сельские священники), примерно
в часе-полутора езды на машине. С ним в этот сельский приход стали
приезжать городские прихожане. В престольный праздник 2009 г., по
оценке местного жителя, не более 20% пришедших в церковь были
местными.23 Валентина была постепенно потеснена городскими пришельцами и перестала, например, выполнять функции алтарницы, но
все же ключи от церкви она удержала в своих руках.
Кроме горожан, приезжающих на службы со священником, есть
при этом сельском храме несколько женщин, переехавших в деревню,
чтобы жить поближе к церкви. По рассказам Валентины, их ссадили с
электрички за безбилетный проезд, они увидели церковь, “пришли вот
сюда и так и остались”. Такие мигранты из города есть, пожалуй, при
Сам информант единственный из своей большой семьи пришел туда, чтобы причаститься накануне крещения своего восприемника.
23
209
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
любом сельском храме. Если в 1990-е это были главным образом молодые мужчины, нередко скрывавшиеся от закона или долгов, выполняя
работы по обустройству храмов и церковных построек в глубинке за
кров и пищу, то в 2000-е такими церковными мигрантами стали женщины, обычно пенсионного возраста, решающие посредством такого
дауншифтинга одновременно проблему досуга, социальной поддержки
и экономического обеспечения своего существования. Пенсии, а иногда и арендной платы за сдаваемую в городе квартиру вполне хватает,
чтобы безбедно жить в экономически депривированной деревне.24
Структура приходской общины, с точки зрения распределения ролей
между местными и горожанами, может быть иной, если настоятель
храма – местный. Такое случается исключительно редко, но если происходит, такой священник, особенно если он молод, умен и энергичен,
становится залогом процветания церкви, общины и даже деревни. Его
локальность придает и церкви ареол аутентичности, исключительно
высоко ценимый в современной России и опять-таки привлекает внимание приезжих, у которых, впрочем, принципиально меньше шансов
стать религиозными специалистами в такой церкви – эти роли будут,
скорее всего, выполнять местные.
Итак, во многих сельских православных приходах можно наблюдать “структурные” и “антиструктурные” тенденции, однако дело
запутывается тем, что в устройстве приходской общины, локальной и
историчной, центральное место часто занимают чужаки, своего рода религиозные номады, которые легко могут сменить эту общину на другую
в случае, например, ухода устраивающего их священника. Как точно
заметила Валентина (несмотря на прожитые в этой деревне 30 лет воспринимаемая местными как чужая – в деревне ее за глаза называют по
девичьей немецкой фамилии), “каждый ищет своего батюшку”. Иными
словами, носителем святости и средоточием харизмы, притягивающей
к себе мобильных верующих, становится не храм, а священник.25 В то
Иногда старшие члены семьи переезжают в деревню, чтобы решить тем самым
квартирный вопрос младшего поколения, т.е. оставляют свои квартиры детям.
25
Яркий пример реализации этого принципа – перемещение всей литургической общины вслед за священником. Так произошло, например, в случае с о. Александром
Суховым, перебравшимся в 2007 г. из петербургского храма в сельскую церковь в
Ленинградской области. Значительная часть его паствы перешла вслед за ним из старого прихода и продолжает ездить к нему, многие еженедельно, за две сотни километров от города. За несколько лет, прошедшие с момента исхода этой общины из городской церкви, на новом месте ими была реконструирована старая церковь, построены часовни и даже здания для будущего монастыря (приход перешел в подчинение
24
210
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
же время локальная церковная община, занятая стиркой половиков и
починкой церковной ограды, ориентирована как раз на свою церковь и
может в общем жить и без священника. Как сказала та же Валентина об
активной православной христианке из села, долгое время ездившей в
церковь в их деревню, “я довольна тем, что она наконец-то решила, что
ее храм – это ее храм”. Принципы “своего храма” и “своего батюшки”
(мы назвали их выше принципами организации общины – территориальной vs литургической) противоречат друг другу, и, одобряя решение
своей знакомой, Валентина очевидно отдает предпочтение первому: ей
хорошо известно, что священники приходят и уходят, а церковь остается.
Итак, православные номады часто становятся религиозными специалистами, необходимыми локальным православным сообществам
для нормального функционирования их храмов. Они создают условия
для проведения церковных служб, образуя литургическую общину
храма. Местное сообщество нередко относится с подозрением к их
религиозному рвению: “видимо, есть, что замаливать”. Местные рассматривают и храм и себя как “принадлежащих земле”, т.е. в каком-то
смысле продолжающих традицию территориального, оседлого ведения
религиозной жизни. Однако с точки зрения Русской православной
церкви члены территориальной общины, взаимодействие которых с
церковью часто ограничивается участием в обрядах жизненного цикла
(особенно в похоронах) и заботами о сохранении церковного здания
как, прежде всего, символа местной идентичности, не являются настоящими прихожанами.
Паломничество как практика религиозного номадизма
Активисты литургической церковной общины, в отличие от членов
территориальной общины, живейшим образом участвуют в православных социальных сетях, простирающихся за пределы района, области.
Они могут, например, приезжать друг к другу в гости на престольные
праздники; важным способом поддержания таких сетей являются
коллективные паломнические поездки, инициируемые “сверху” –
епархией – или устраиваемые самостоятельно. Социальные сети и
паломнические поездки – своего рода нормальное существование для
одной из альтернативных РПЦ МП православных церквей). Община, обустраивая
свое хозяйство, становится в каком-то смысле территориальной и локальной, напоминая какую-нибудь транснациональную семью, идентичность которой поддерживается представлением об общем доме и генеалогии, а также общей памятью.
211
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
таких индивидуалистов, как православные кочевники. Сама идея индивидуальной ответственности за собственное спасение должна делать
их такими – стремящимися к свободе от институциональных условностей. Обе эти тактики образования социальной солидарности – сети и
сообщества паломников – эксплуатируют возможности лиминального
статуса, делая его не промежуточным, а постоянным, т.е. не временным состоянием, как полагал в своей ранней работе Виктор Тернер, а
удобной социальной позицией.
Вообще групповые паломнические поездки стали распространенной
практикой среди россиян с середины 1990-х гг. Такие поездки преследуют одновременно рекреационные, просветительские и религиозные
цели, причем функции паломничества, с точки зрения разных участников – организаторов поездки, разных групп паломников, местных
“хранителей святынь”, включенных в паломнический маршрут, и
официальной церкви часто не совпадают.
Под паломничеством я буду понимать кратковременные организованные коллективные поездки обычно на автобусе с целью посещения
заранее определенных святых мест. Каждая часть этого определения
может быть оспорена: кроме коллективных демократических, бывают
паломничества индивидуальные представительские, такие как паломничество президента России В. В. Путина на Афон в 2005 г.;26 бывают
индивидуальные приватные; бывают элитные – специально организованные для особой группы, как паломничество на Афон руководителя
сектора социологии Института общественного проектирования Михаила Тарусина в 2006 г.27 Вероятно, элитным, хоть и в несколько другом
масштабе, можно назвать паломничество в Иерусалим, организованное
священником для активных прихожан благочиния, в котором приняла
участие Валентина.28
Впервые В. В. Путин пытался посетить Афон в 2001 г., но ему помешал шторм.
Это неудачное паломничество живо обсуждалось апокалиптически настроенными
православными “ревнителями”. В частности один диссидентский православный
ресурс писал: “Что касается вопроса о том: ‘Почему Пресвятая Богородица не пустила Владимира Путина на Афон?’, – то ответ на него напрашивается сам собой:
‘по грехам’”. А. Мазуркевич. Ответ на письмо А. Потупина “Поездка Путина на
Афон” // http://apocalypse.orthodoxy.ru/letter/2001_12_13.htm (последнее посещение
16.11.2011).
27
М. Тарусин. Афонские будни // Фома. 2006. № 11 (43), http://www.foma.ru/article/
index.php?news=3655; № 12 (44), http://www.foma.ru/article/index.php?news=3658;
2007. № 1 (45), http://www.foma.ru/article/index.php?news=1886.
28
Это единственная поездка за рубеж в жизни Валентины.
26
212
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Вряд ли можно дать универсальное определение паломничества,
которое устроило бы всех, – поскольку даже среди исследователей
православного паломничества нет согласия в том, каковы границы этого
явления. Некоторые авторы считают “настоящими” паломничествами
организуемые официальной церковью крестные ходы на большие
расстояния, такие как Великорецкий крестный ход. Во время таких
религиозных практик вне церковных стен, по мнению, например, Инны
Налетовой, участники паломничества создают “kenotic community”, т.е.
религиозное сообщество, “члены которого участвуют в аскетических
и общинных практиках, напоминающих самопожертвование Христа
и его любовь к человечеству”.29 Правда, признание автора в том, что
“кенотические сообщества” трудно описать при помощи теоретического инструментария современной антропологии,30 т.е. они не могут
анализироваться методами социальных наук, ставит вопрос об эвристической ценности вводимого понятия, заимствованного из православной теологии, и адекватности предлагаемого в работе определения
православного паломничества.
Ориентируясь главным образом на британскую антропологическую
традицию анализа паломничеств, в настоящем разделе я попытаюсь
поставить вполне традиционный вопрос о латентных функциях этих
практик и показать, что паломничество в России служит своего рода
“внутренней колонизации” страны. Вообще под внутренней колонизацией принято понимать процесс освоения отдаленных или пустующих территорий своего государства. В случае с Россией, например с
Северо-Западом, куда в основном ездят в кратковременные поездки
паломники Санкт-Петербурга, такими территориями является сельская
местность, опустевшая или маргинализированная в ходе послевоенной
урбанизации.
Генетически сама идея совершать организованные коллективные
поездки выходного дня определенно восходит к советским практикам
организации досуга трудящихся профсоюзами. Об этом мне сообщали
самые разные информанты – от доктора наук из московского академического института до сотрудницы бухгалтерии на петербургском предприятии “Адмиралтейские верфи”. Действительно, от того времени
осталось, во-первых, представление о достойном проведении досуга
людьми с определенными культурными запросами: досуг должен быть
Inna Naletova. Pilgrimages as Kenotic Communities beyond the Walls of the Church //
Eastern Christians in Anthropological Perspective. P. 254.
30
Ibid. P. 263.
29
213
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
полезным, что значит прежде всего познавательным. Люди присоединяются к паломническим группам ради приращения знания и расширения культурного кругозора, как они сами это объясняют. Естественно,
“удовлетворение культурных потребностей” может вступать в конфликт
с религиозными установками, как это случилось с доктором наук Еленой, в советское время возившей в поездки выходного дня группы от
своего академического института. Во время паломничества в Нилову
пустынь она решила помочь водившему группу монаху, который плохо знал историю монастыря. Она провела трехчасовую экскурсию по
монастырю в сопровождении этого монаха, прокомментировавшего
рассказ Елены так: “Это все стили, это не духовное”. По ее словам,
группа была довольна ее вмешательством, потому что хотела знать
историю, “но нет другой формы сейчас”, кроме паломничеств.31
Кроме представления о престижности
культурного досуга,
современное паломничество унаследовало
от советского времени
способ организации
путешествия. Нередко поездки устраивает
предприятие, например
районная больница,
представляя коллегам
по работе возможность
общения вне привычной иерархии. Конечно, и пространство автобуса предоставляет
достаточные условия,
чтобы воспроизвести Илл. 3. Объявление о паломнической поездке на доске
иерархию, или, по Тер- объявлений библиотеки РАН. Санкт-Петербург, 2006
неру, структуру; однако (фото Ж. Корминой).
Интервью с Еленой, 60 лет, 2004 г., Москва. Одна моя коллега рассказывала,
что во время, как она полагала, светской поездки в Псков, наступил момент, когда
группу повели в храм – не для экскурсии, а для отправления религиозных надобностей, в существовании которых экскурсоводы не сомневались, как и в том, что
все туристы в группе – православные верующие.
31
214
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
здесь обладающая экспертным знанием в религиозных делах санитарка
имеет все шансы временно стать “выше”, чем главврач.
Паломнические службы могут организовываться при храмах или
монастырях, а могут существовать как независимые индивидуальные
инициативы. В последнем случае снимается офис в каком-нибудь
офисном центре или же организатор вообще обходится без специального помещения, осуществляя менеджмент поездки по телефону.
Руководитель одной из самых старых в Санкт-Петербурге паломнических служб Лариса (в советское время работавшая экскурсоводом)
обходится подручными средствами и собственными социальными
сетями. Она развешивает объявления о поездках в местах, куда ходят
верующие (например, у Смоленского кладбища, где находится почитаемая часовня святой Ксении Блаженной), указывая там телефоны для
связи – свой и нескольких своих помощниц, согласившихся отвечать
на такие звонки. Хотя все игроки рынка паломнических услуг так или
иначе сообщают о своей легитимности через, например, утверждение
о получении благословения на эту деятельность от какого-то официального представителя РПЦ, епископа или настоятеля какого-то храма,
очевидно, что контролировать такие инициативы церкви крайне трудно.32 В упоминавшемся селе в Свердловской области организатором
таких поездок занимается, например, невоцерковленная, но энергичная
женщина, обладающая некоторыми организаторскими способностями.
Отправляясь в паломничество, прихожанки этой церкви спрашивают
благословения у настоятеля храма, но это лишь жест вежливости, поскольку не дать разрешение на поездку он просто не может:
Куда-то мы поехали… ой, мы поехали до Верхотурья.33 А был
праздник Воздвиженье креста Господня в сентябре. И он как был
против – нельзя же в праздники, что прихожане уезжают из своей церкви. Так кое-как благословение у него выпросили. Он не
очень-то благословляет. Кое-как. Чуть не со слезами (смеется).34
Под благословением в православной среде понимается разрешение представителя
церкви на какое-то действие или деятельность. Помню свое удивление, когда на
мою просьбу показать, как выглядит письменное благословение на ее деятельность
по организации паломнических поездок, руководитель одной из паломнических
служб показала мне поздравительные открытки на ее имя, кажется к Рождеству,
присылаемые из канцелярии петербургского митрополита.
33
Имеется в виду Верхотурский Свято-Николаевский монастырь, где хранятся
мощи Симеона Верхотурского, одно из наиболее популярных мест паломничества
в Свердловской области.
34
Интервью с Верой, 60 лет, прихожанкой церкви. Свердловская область, 2009, июль.
32
215
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
Паломнические поездки являются своего рода альтернативой регулярной приходской жизни, привлекательной как для тех, кто такую
жизнь ведет, так и для тех, кто хочет быть православным, но лишь в
свободное от работы и семейных забот время. Для них паломничество
оказывается привлекательной рекреационной практикой. Свечница в
местной церкви заметила:
Вот кто в церковь не ходят, они ездят в паломничество. Они
в паломничество ездят. Ну, ходят они как – может, в год раз-два
придут. Я считаю, что это все равно, что не ходят.35
Паломники: опыт лиминальности
В большом городе человек, пожелавший отправиться в паломническую поездку, звонит по телефону из рекламного листка, записывается
сам и, если едет не один, записывает кого-то еще, а затем приходит в
назначенное время к месту, обычно у станции метро, от которого будет
отходить автобус. Позвонившему сообщают, какая ему (чаще всего – ей)
нужна экипировка: удобная обувь на низком каблуке, юбка, платок на
голове, одежда для купания в святом водоеме и тара для святой воды.
Некоторые руководители поездок с момента посадки в автобус начинают говорить паломникам “ты” и активно использовать православный
социолект, предполагающий, в частности, обращение “матушка” к
девушке или женщине. Представляясь друг другу, паломники называют
только свое личное имя, независимо от возраста, что необычно для
современной городской нормы, и, как правило, не стремятся завести
новые знакомства.
Как правило, и организаторы поездки не прилагают усилий для того,
чтобы сделать из паломников группу: вероятно, все предпочитают оставаться анонимными, скрывающими или специально не предъявляющими
знаки своего “мирского” социального статуса. Равенство в группе предопределяется структурными условиями: все одинаково терпят неудобства
длительного путешествия в обычно довольно старом автобусе, мокнут
под дождем или страдают от жары и духоты. Иными словами, во время
паломничества возникает социальная ситуация, обозначенная Виктором
Тернером термином “коммунитас” — сообщества людей, пребывающих
в лиминальном состоянии, без имен, статусов, отделенных от остального сообщества физически и символически, к тому же переносящих
определенные физические испытания. К последним, кроме собственно
35
Интервью с Ниной, 70 лет, свечницей церкви. Свердловская область, 2009, июль.
216
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
неудобств пути, относится купание в святом водоеме, обязательно
включаемое в программу паломнической поездки в любое время года.
Илл. 4. Паломники из Санкт-Петербурга у купальни. Псковская область, 2010
(фото Ж. Корминой).
Такие временные сообщества верующих, объединенных общим
маршрутом путешествия, транспортным средством и личностью
руководителя поездки, старательно избегают самой возможность
превратиться в общину. Один из симптомов идеологии коммунитас –
бесконечное избегание любой возможности реципрокности во время
паломнических поездок, которая, как предположил еще Марсель Мосс
в своем “Эссе о даре”, и является социальным клеем, строящим связи
между людьми. Это избегание выражается в нежелании идти на какоелибо сотрудничество внутри группы паломников: никто не уступит
более удобное место матери с ребенком-инвалидом, не вызовется мыть
посуду после “трапезы” на приходе и т.п. Отказ от сотрудничества,
видимо, показатель нежелания превращать “антиструктуру” в “структуру”. Паломники – во всяком случае, в коротких паломничествах выходного дня – чужие друг другу люди, взыскующие личного спасения
и алкающие индивидуального религиозного опыта.
217
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
Объясняя свой выбор в пользу “нерегулярной”, или внеприходской,
религиозной жизни, паломники обычно описывают мир приходской
религиозности как слишком требовательный, несовместимый с повседневностью современного человека, закрытый и недружелюбный. Вот
типичная критика нормативного приходского религиозного режима:
физически трудно выстоять службу; непонятен язык и смысл происходящего в церкви; памятен негативный опыт первого контакта внутри
церкви (в частности, со свечницами, исполняющими роль привратниц у
входа в этот мир). Именно так описывала свой опыт воцерковления Мелитина, организатор первого паломнического агентства в Петербурге:
Я пришла в церковь поздно, я пришла в 60 лет в церковь. Ну
что, пришла… стою… ноги устали. Что-то читают, что-то поют,
а стоишь, и понять что-то очень трудно.
Только после своей первой поездки в монастырь она поняла,
что такое наша православная вера. …Я почувствовала, что такое
православная вера. Я подумала: “Господи, да таких дур, как я,
полцеркви стоит, если не больше”. И вот поэтому я первая в нашем
городе решила образовать [паломническое агентство].36
Иными словами, Мелитина видит в паломнических поездках способ
воцерковления, минуя регулярную приходскую жизнь, поскольку, по
ее мнению, аутентичная “православная вера” локализуется не в приходских церквях под руководством настоятелей, – либо неопытных,
либо имеющих подозрительный предыдущий светский опыт, либо обладающих другими недостатками мирских людей, – а в святых местах,
выделенных из профанного мира, прежде всего в монастырях. Замечу,
что у Мелитины, весьма просвещенной православной христианки, поддерживающей дружбу со многими священниками, нет своего прихода
и “своего” священника. Она сама выполняет функцию руководителя
своеобразных временных общин паломников, не перерастающих ни в
постоянно поддерживаемую сеть, ни, тем более, в устойчивую религиозную общину.
Другая, кроме просветительской, функция паломнических поездок,
о которой не упомянула Мелитина, – рекреационная. Многим паломникам такие поездки видятся как качественный и дешевый вариант
проведения досуга,37 с пользой для ума (приобретение новых знаний),
Интервью с Мелитиной, 76 лет, февраль 2007 г., Санкт-Петербург.
Посещение, например, Италии в составе группы паломников (обычно едут в г.
Бари, где хранятся мощи св. Николая Мирликийского) обойдется дешевле светского
36
37
218
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
души и тела (пребывание в экологически чистых, удаленных от города
местах). Признание в паломничестве рекреационной составляющей
необязательно предполагает преобладание в нем мирского вместо
священного. Отделить “истинное” паломничество от неистинного
(т.е. религиозного туризма) не проще, чем, скажем, разграничить так
называемую народную и официальную религиозность. Сближает их,
например, типичная для обоих типов путешествия практика фотографирования на фоне достопримечательностей. До появления индустрии туризма для некоторых социальных групп (женщин, например)
паломничество было едва ли не единственной легитимной причиной
путешествия, так что паломничество, по-видимому, всегда было своеобразным отдыхом от повседневной рутины.38
Что, по-видимому, делает паломничество паломничеством, а паломника паломником, так это чаяние чуда (прекрасная иллюстрация –
фильм Джессики Хауснер “Лурд”, 2009) и стремление пережить
собственный личный религиозный опыт, т.е. индивидуальное мистическое общение со священным. Вообще под религиозным опытом понимают обычно откровение, пророчества и тому подобные практики,
доступные немногим религиозным виртуозам. Однако в современном
демократичном российском паломничестве и религиозный опыт – иначе говоря, лиминальное состояние – хочет пережить каждый. Один из
способов – купание в святом водоеме (особенно в неподходящий для
этого сезон). Вот как описывает свой первый опыт купания в святом
источнике Людмила:39
Я тогда первый раз окуналась. Было холодно, снег падал. ...А
окунаться надо три раза с макушкой. И вот удивительно: войти,
просто все не твое, ужасно тяжело. Ледяная вода. А [надо] второй
раз и третий. Ты паришь, как в космос, наверное, слетать!
Тактильный контакт со священным оказывается у паломников своеобразным необходимым минимумом мистического опыта, который
тура туда же. Собственно паломничества отчасти и выполняют функцию туризма
“эконом-класса”.
38
Можно вспомнить хотя бы “Кентерберийские рассказы” Чосера. Впрочем, и в
православном паломничестве России позднеимперского периода не последнюю
роль играл как будто совершенно секулярный рекреационный мотив проведения
досуга. См., напр.: Chris J. Chulos. Religious and Secular Aspects of Pilgrimage
in Modern Russia // Byzantium and the North. Acta Byzantina Fennica. 1999. No. 9
(1997–1998). Pр. 21-58.
39
Интервью с Людмилой, 55 лет, 2004 г., Санкт-Петербург.
219
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
позволяет им, как правило, не практикующим “нормативное” православие приходского извода, указать на то, что они – верующие.40
Людмила, здравомыслящая женщина, бухгалтер, мать семейства и
бабушка, ни за что не согласилась бы купаться в водоеме под падающим снегом. Однако во время религиозного путешествия она отсекает
от себя все свои светские, “структурные” идентичности – здесь она
православная христианка и паломница.
Номадизм как идеология: православные сетевики
Если в паломничестве лиминальный социальный статус является, в
соответствии с антропологической классикой, временным, то в режиме
социальных сетей он становится принципом организации социальных
отношений – эгалитарных, оставляющих место для анонимности или,
вернее, жизни иной, отличной от мирской личности.
В социальной сети нет ни очевидной иерархии, которая обязательна
в социальной структуре, кроме иерархии репутаций, ни явных центров
власти, ни способов подчинения и контроля. При этом, в отличие от
весьма разношерстных паломников, участники одной сети разделяют
определенный габитус и могут опознать друг друга, не будучи лично
знакомыми. Так, когда мы вместе с коллегой в 2004 г. впервые приехали
на остров Залита (Псковская область), где за два года до того скончался
Николай Гурьянов (1909–2002), сельский священник, почитавшийся
в последние годы жизни как старец,41 и пришли вместе с другими
паломниками в его домик, то были безошибочно идентифицированы
следившими за порядком в доме “охранниками” как чужие. Поводом
для такой идентификации был неправильный ответ на вопрос о том,
что нового творится в мире: мы стали говорить о военных действиях
на Кавказе, а они ожидали услышать вести о “происках глобалистов”.
Кто такие старцы и что такое старчество – это большой вопрос, пока
недостаточно изученный, поскольку немногие пишущие на эту тему
авторы, как правило, занимают довольно жесткую апологетическую
или критическую позицию по отношению к предмету своих изысканий,
Подробнее см.: Ж. В. Кормина. “Святая энергетика намоленного места”: о языке
православных паломников // Natalesgratenumeras?: Cборник статей к 60-летию
Георгия Ахилловича Левинтона. Санкт-Петербург, 2008. С. 252-266.
41
Подробнее о Гурьянове и современной концепции старчества см.: Jeanne Kormina.
Portrait and Icon of Starets Nikolay // Archives de sciences sociales des religions. 2012
(in print).
40
220
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
что, конечно, мешает спокойному, взвешенному исследованию этого
явления. Так, историк Ирина Пярт в своей недавней книжке Spiritual
Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy занимает позицию
защитника старчества, видя в нем специфический, выработанный в недрах русской культуры “мост” между культурой элиты и народа, между
церковью и сектантством (ортодоксией и гетеродоксией).42 В такой
защите старчество нуждается, поскольку подозревается официальной
церковью в стимулировании “сектантских” настроений. Николай Митрохин, наоборот, занимает гиперкритическую позицию и говорит о
старцах как об альтернативном теневом управлении РПЦ, воспроизводя
тем самым популярную в “сетевых” кругах риторику теории заговора.43
Не вдаваясь в подробности внутри- , около- и антицерковных споров
о старчестве, я отмечу только, что старец, с точки зрения верующих
и сочувствующих, – это живой носитель религиозной харизмы, или,
говоря их языком, святости и/или благодати.
Впрочем, в настоящей статье нас интересует не старец, а люди,
которые, переселяясь на остров или регулярно приезжая, образуют
своего рода социальные сети, сгущающиеся вокруг его фигуры – или,
вернее, его имиджа, самими же сетевиками создаваемого.
В один из моих приездов на остров вместе с питерскими паломниками я стояла в очереди в покрашенный в зеленый цвет домик старца
и прислушивалась к беседе двух женщин, обсуждавших икону Николая
Гурьянова, на которой он держит в руках икону Григория Распутина.
Большой стенд с изображением этой иконы был установлен перед
входом в домик. Женщины сомневались в том, канонизирован ли Распутин и, следовательно, можно ли его изображать с нимбом. Я решила
поддержать беседу и тут же получила неожиданно агрессивную отповедь от другого своего соседа по очереди, мужчины лет сорока. Он
сказал мне, что я сомневаюсь, потому что ничего не понимаю “своим
маленьким умишком”; он же знает всю правду, потому что одна монахиня, которую он встретил на могиле митрополита Иоанна Снычева
в Петербурге, дала ему видеокассету с фильмом, где рассказывается
о почитании Гурьяновым Григория Распутина. В конце концов мы с
ним договорились встретиться в городе, и я получила этот фильм из
Irina Paert. Spiritual Elders. Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy. DeKalb,
IL, 2010.
43
Н. М. Митрохин. Архимандрит Наум и “наумовцы” как квинтэссенция современного старчества // Религиозные практики в современной России. Москва, 2006.
С. 126-148.
42
221
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
рук нового знакомого. Надо сказать, что место нашей встречи было
весьма символично – это была машина, на которой он подъехал к Европейскому университету в Санкт-Петербурге. На мои предложения
встретиться в его храме он сообщил, что своего прихода у него нет:
“мой приход – вся Родина!”
Одна из особенностей религиозного режима сетевого православия
состоит в том, что в его рамках не происходит делегирования права на
легитимацию религиозных практик, представлений и т.п. формальному
институту (церкви). Вместо этого легитимация той или иной практики
(например, почитание такой сомнительной во многих отношениях фигуры, как Григорий Распутин) базируется на принципе репутации, т.е.
нечто признается легитимным, если обладает рядом высокостатусных, с
точки зрения членов социальной сети, признаков. Так Распутин, например, объявляется “старцем”, что делает его в глазах многих верующих
носителем неконтролируемой церковью несомненной святости. В случае с сетевым православием такими характеристиками, с точки зрения
урбанизированных мирян, являются, с одной стороны, локализация
источника информации в воображаемом мире монашества,44 идеализированном и анонимном, и, с другой стороны, “документализация”
такой информации в православном самиздате, в доступных только для
посвященных видео- или печатных источниках.
Итак, характерные особенности сетевого православия – экстерриториальность и претензия на причастность к узкому кругу избранных,
иными словами, элитарность. При этом социальные сети, по-видимому,
могут существенно различаться идеологически и стилистически. Особенность сети, “сгущающейся” вокруг фигуры старца Николая, – ее
погруженность в специфическую православную субкультуру, где воспроизводятся (и производятся) конспирологические теории, эсхатологические слухи и связанные с ними социальные фобии. Релевантная
для этой сети информация, обмен которой формирует маркеры сетевой
идентичности, это слухи о происках “глобалистов” вроде введения
Именно поэтому домик отца Николая именуется келлiей, а ухаживающие за старцами – келейниками; по этой же причине его последняя келейница, москвичка с
высшим филологическим образованием, объявила его монахом, тайно принявшим
постриг в 1940-е годы, и даже схиепископом, доверившим тайну своего сана только
ближайшему кругу избранных. Сама эта келейница объявила себя схимонахиней
Николаей; под этим именем она публикуется в националистических изданиях
“Русский вестник” и “Русская линия”. Тем же именем она подписывает свои книги и “документальные фильмы” об о. Николае. См. напр.: Схимонахиня Николая.
Царский архиерей. Москва, 2004.
44
222
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ИНН и штрих-кодов, о “сильных” старцах и старицах, распространение
разнообразных пищевых фобий (например, о дрожжах-убийцах) и т.п.
Временные и пространственные точки сгущения этой сети – день памяти о. Николая на острове Залита (24 августа) и ежегодные Николаевские
чтения “Николаевская Русь”, проводимые в Москве в мае ко дню его
рождения все той же схимонахиней Николаей.45 В 2010 г. они прошли
в девятый раз. При этом важно отметить, вслед за Тарабукиной, что
с исследовательской точки зрения описанные выше сетевики – это не
“суеверие” или “сектантство”, а одна из норм в рамках православной
культуры, оказывающая огромное влияние на всю эту культуру, т.е. на
другие ее нормы.46
Такие сети, однако, необязательно имеют яркие идеологические
характеристики как формы протестной религиозности – неважно,
либерального, как последователи и симпатизанты о. Георгия Кочеткова, или праворадикального, как почитатели Распутина или Иоанна
Грозного толка. Ирина, которая приехала из города работать в село в
районную больницу и стала членом маленькой литургической общины
в местной церкви, тоже включена в православные сети и тоже ощущает
превосходство над соседями, коллегами и другими людьми, не принявшими ее. Как она сама говорит, после воцерковления она потеряла
старых друзей, которые развлекались бесовским образом, празднуя,
например, 8 Марта, и теперь у нее нет друзей, только сестры и братья,
с которыми она встречается на службах и в паломничествах. Иными
словами, Ирина подчеркивает принцип равенства во взаимоотношениях
со своим духовным братством. Ощущение же собственной элитарности
поддерживается в ней не только убежденностью в том, что она владеет
особым знанием, но и в том, что ценность этому знанию придает мощный православно-государственный дискурс, в соответствии с которым
быть русскому православным – правильно.
45
К сожалению, мне пока не довелось побывать на этом собрании почитателей
старца Николая, поэтому трудно оценить его многочисленность. Если верить информации заинтересованной стороны, на юбилейные Чтения в 2009 г. собралось
около трех тысяч человек, см.: К. Варб. Вечер столетия Николая Гурьянова // Журнал “Самиздат” http://zhurnal.lib.ru/a/arbow_k_w/vesper.shtml (последний просмотр
31.01.2011). Думаю, впрочем, что цифра завышена.
46
Вполне вероятно, что генетически многие идеологические и культурные черты
православных сетевиков восходят к катакомбному церковному подполью советского
времени, описанному в книге Алексея Беглова: А. Л. Беглов. В поисках “безгрешных катакомб”. Москва, 2008.
223
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
Православные флэшмобы
Социальный режим православных сетей производит своего рода
нормализацию лиминальности. Духовные сестры и браться вовсе не
стремятся съехаться в одно место и вести общее хозяйство, вместе
ходить на богослужения и т.п., т.е. осесть где-то и стать общиной – приходской или монастырской. Они, как правило, не готовы отказаться от
своих мирских профессиональных и семейных обязательств, от своего
дома, предпочитая поддерживать отношения при помощи мобильной
связи или интернета и встреч в местах, обладающих харизмой святости.
Их “кочевье” пролегает от их домов и квартир к монастырям, церквям
или святым местам, где содержится эта харизма.
Однако такие “контейнеры святости” необязательно сами остаются
неподвижными. В последние несколько лет в России приобрели невероятную популярность “гастроли” святынь. О феномене поклонения
путешествующим святыням, названном мною православными флэшмобами, пойдет речь в этом последнем разделе статьи.
“Их много тут, и все чудотворные”, – со вздохом сказала девушка
из молодежного отдела епархии, собиравшая пожертвования на программу по ранней поддержке детей с синдромом Дауна при входе на
православную выставку одному из посетителей, спросивших, где тут на
втором этаже чудотворная икона. Такая реакция на невинный, казалось
бы, вопрос красноречиво говорит о том что, во-первых, его задают регулярно (шел последний день пятидневной выставки) и, во-вторых, эта
молодая православная христианка не разделяет одержимости собратьев
по вере желанием приобщиться к материальному носителю святости.
Участники православных флэшмобов встречаются в определенное
время в назначенном месте, где ведут себя по заранее условленным
правилам, меняя тем самым временно семантику этого локуса. Поводом для образования православной очереди становится приезд в тот
или иной город какого-либо материального объекта, обладающего,
согласно разделяемой верующими и сочувствующими конвенции,
способностью совершить чудо или харизмой. В православии такими
объектами являются прежде всего чудотворные иконы, но также мощи
святых и некоторые другие реликвии (например, упоминавшийся пояс
Богородицы). Их привозят из мест постоянного хранения, чаще всего
монастырей, в большие города, чтобы люди могли, не отправляясь в
паломничество, поклониться православной святыне. Иными словами,
святыня сама отправляется в своеобразное паломничество. Так, в 2010 г.
было организовано путешествие по стране ковчега с частицами мощей
224
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Матроны Московской, прославленной к всероссийскому почитанию
в 2004 г. и стремительно ставшей невероятно популярной. Ковчег с
мощами святой привозили в Нижнекамск, Санкт-Петербург, Екатеринбург, Сочи и многие другие большие и малые города России, а также в
Украину (Донецк) и Беларусь (Гродно). Совершенно очевидно, что это
паломничество мощей святой, репрезентирующей столицу Российского
государства, имеет политический подтекст. На символическом уровне
ее паломничество объединяет всех православных людей страны, давая
им возможность пережить, не покидая родных городов, чувство причастности большой православной державе с центром в Москве. Посещая Украину и Беларусь, небольшой золоченый ковчег становился
своего рода “агентом Москвы”, актуализируя прорусскую идентичность
тех, кто пришел поклониться этой святыне. Вполне возможно, что
устроители путешествия из Архангельской епархии не имели в виду
ничего подобного, попросту занимаясь монетизацией символического
капитала святыни (способность к чудотворениям) – частицы мощей
Матроны Московской, переданной патриархом Кириллом в собор
Северодвинска в 2009 г.
В городах ковчеги с мощами или чудотворные иконы могут выставлять не только в церквях или монастырях, но и в светских помещениях,
обычно используемых как выставочные площадки. Так, чудотворные
иконы обязательно привозят на православные ярмарки – с недавних пор
чрезвычайно популярные мероприятия, куда выстраиваются очереди из
желающих купить разнообразную православную продукцию: от видеодисков до длинных платьев из натуральных материалов, обычно плохо
пошитых, послушать песни православных авторов, пожертвовать на
строительство церкви или монастыря, купив “именной кирпичик” и т.п.
О популярности этой формы православной жизни говорит статистика:
в 2010 г. прошло 107 православных 4–7-дневных ярмарок в 51 городе
Российской федерации.47 Само явление православных ярмарок роднит с
путешествующими святынями, во-первых, их ориентация на локальное
сообщество и, во-вторых, констатация существования такого – православного – сообщества во всех пунктах маршрута святынь или местах
организации ярмарок. Однако эти сообщества оказываются таковыми
только в момент флэшмоба православной очереди к чудотворной иконе
или на вход в выставочное пространство, где проводится ярмарка. Оно
локально как в пространстве ландшафта, так и времени.
47
Статистические данные взяты с сайта Православные выставки-ярмарки, www.
idrp.ru. В 2009 г. их было, согласно тому же источнику, 67 в 33 городах страны.
225
Ж. Кормина, Номадическое православие
Илл. 5. Очередь на православную ярмарку. Санкт-Петербург, 2011 (фото С. Штыркова).
Заключение
В настоящей статье я попыталась показать, что идеология номадизма является доминирующей нормой в современном российском
православии. Эта норма, очевидная при изучении современных религиозных практик, не артикулирована в каких-то документах; наоборот,
формально нормальной считается организация религиозной жизни
по генетически крестьянскому принципу прописки, вокруг своего
локального храма, своей территориальной общины. Именно такого
рода соображениями, видимо, руководствовались инициаторы недавно
запущенного проекта строительства “храмов шаговой доступности” в
спальных районах Москвы. Этот проект лишний раз доказывает применимость метафоры реставрации традиции к современному российскому православию.
При этом большинство православных проводят свою религиозную
жизнь вне стен отреставрированного здания, предпочитая любоваться
им издалека. Приведенные выше типы номадической, т.е. не привязан226
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ной к определенной локальности и связанной с нею истории, религиозности описывают большинство религиозных практик вне стен церкви:
паломничество, сетевое православие, православные флэшмобы. Вряд
ли от этого они перестают быть православными или теряют “градус”
православности. Очевидно, происходит выработка новых форм православной социальной жизни (религиозных режимов), соответствующих
постмодерному общественному устройству, или, как изящно сформулировал Зигмунт Бауман, состоянию “жидкой”, или “текучей”, модерности. Новые религиозные номады пытаются “утечь” от домодерной
структуры, заложенной в самой концепции церковного прихода, с ее
жестким контролем и ясной иерархией. Такого рода уклад становится
выбором религиозных профессионалов – монастырских и аналогичных
закрытых общин, – в которых верующие занимаются традиционным
для православных людей делом – спасением души и проповедуют
жесткий моральный ригоризм в отношении окружающих и общества
в целом. Большинство же руководствуется иным пониманием религии,
рассматривая ее как источник личного морального закона и руководство
по приписыванию смыслов своей земной жизни.
SUMMARY
In contemporary Russian Orthodoxy, alternative regimes of religiosity
are developing alongside traditional modes of organizing religious life
within the framework of parishes. All alternative regimes are united by a
common ideology of Orthodox nomadism that caters to the demands and
habits of the urbanized Orthodox majority. Those who compose this majority prefer pilgrimages and visits to Russian Orthodox fairs to a regular
religious life in their local Orthodox communities. Thus, they try to evade
a premodern structure inscribed in the very concept of a church parish
with its strong control over the parish’s members and explicit hierarchy.
The article by Zhanna Kormina offers an in-depth analysis of different
forms of such avoidance and escape. It is based on the author’s long-term
sociological-anthropological study carried out in the regions of the Russian
Northwest and Sverdlovsk.
227
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Michael KUNICHIKA
“THE SCYTHIANS WERE HERE...”:
on nomadic archaEology, modErniSt form,
and
Early SoviEt modErnity*
In June of 1919, in the aftermath of the Revolution and amid the Civil
War, two igures, an archaeologist and a writer, arrive independently of
one another at the excavations of Uvek, one of the fortiied cities of the
Golden Horde. The archaeologist was F. V. Ballod, who would devote an
extensive section to Uvek in his work The Volga “Pompeiis”: An Attempt
at an Artistic-Archaeological Examination of the Right Bank of the SaratovTsarinsk Volga Strip, which he published in 1923.1 Throughout the work,
*
I would like to express my gratitude to Serguei Oushakine for his keen and sympathetic reading of an earlier version of this article. I would also like to thank the two
anonymous reviewers for their valuable conceptual and bibliographic recommendations.
This article is drawn from a longer paper on Pil’niak and steppe archaeology. I have
modiied its argument to focus primarily on how the archaeology of nomadism proved
a powerful aesthetic and conceptual resource in Naked Year, enabling Pil’niak to think
through the relationship of the archaic and the modern in the immediate aftermath of
the Revolution.
1
F. V. Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei”: opyt khudozhestvenno-arkheologicheskogo obsledovaniia chasti pravoberezhnoi Saratovsko-Tsaritynskoi privolzhskoi polosy. Moscow,
1923. Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are mine. For contemporary scholarship on Uvek, which is also known as Ukek, see, for example, L. F. Nedashkovskii.
Zolotoordynskii gorod Uvek i ego okruga. Moscow, 2000.
229
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
Ballod’s archaeological perspective upon the landscape was a way of reading
the traces of the past still present within it, serving as indices of both the
passage of peoples and the passage of time. “Through the ‘Great Gates of
Peoples,’” Ballod begins The Volga “Pompeiis,”
between the Urals and the Caspian, innumerable waves of tribes have
passed since the most ancient of times into the Volga steppes, and
stopped, awaiting laggards at those natural barriers to carefree travel
at the Volga. There, having gathered their strength, they crossed the
river and established fortiied sites on its right bank, and from there
they fended further into the West and into the Southern-Russian
steppes. The path of these movements was clear: from the Urals
to the Volga, from the Volga to the Don and Dnepr: it lay partially
through the forests and partially through the steppe; it went along the
steppe rivers, where horses and herds are not threatened by drought
or thirst during the summer heat.... An observer, moreover, would
not need to search out this path. Traces of the presence of man point
toward it: sites with broken wares lung about, and landmarks of the
road in the form of kurgans. The path is clear even to this day, for
the chains of kurgans have stood in their places despite the work of
later agrarian peoples, the ierce steppe wind, and the whole destructive hand of time.
Sometimes lat and eroded, а barely perceptible elevation of soil;
sometimes stone mounds (kamennye mary); sometimes superbly intact
hills (sopki) in the shape of turned-over bowls, with characteristic sepulchral stones at the top: these are the landmarks of the Transvolga
path that present themselves as both the landmarks of time (vekhi vremen) and as monuments of the various cultures that have successively
replaced one another.2
These “landmarks of time” mark the movements of peoples along the
Transvolga path, while registering the movement of time, either through
erosion or destruction. Whether in the form of kurgans, or burial mounds,
which mark passage through space and through life, or in smaller forms
such as bestrewn wares, the artifacts the archaeologist discerns within the
landscape refer to a variety of pasts, made by different people at different
times. What we catch glimpse of here is a hermeneutic, a way of reading the
landscape to discern a story of temporal supersession of nomadic peoples one
by the other, but which are simultaneously perceptible to the archaeologist,
enabling him to thereby traverse multiple times at a standstill.
2
Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei”. P. i.
230
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
The other igure at Uvek that June was Boris Pil’niak, who arrived just
a few days after Ballod. Pil’niak found in the archaeological excavations a
model for modernist aesthetics and a way to perceive the experience of the
revolutionary moment. In 1919, Pil’niak was still several years away from
becoming the “irst celebrity of Soviet letters,”3 a status he achieved with
the publication in 1922 of Golyi god, or Naked Year, the irst major literary
work of the postrevolutionary period, whose inluence on the literary style
of the period would eventually be labeled Pil’niakovshchina, as his works
and inluence provoked greater critical scorn.
We ind in the pages of Naked Year an elaborate description of the excavations of Uvek in an extended sequence that begins much like what transpired
that June of 1919: two characters arrive at the “bald, stony mount” of Uvek,
one is an artist, Gleb Ordynin, whose surname refers us to the Zolotaia Orda;
the other is an archaeologist named Baudek:
On the summit of Uvek, people had noticed ruins and kurgans
(razvaliny i kurgany) – the archaeologist Baudek and the artist Ordynin
had come to excavate them with a detail of muzhiks. The excavations
were in their third week and centuries were emerging from the earth. On
Uvek they found the remnants of an ancient town, stone ruins of aqueducts lay in layers, the foundations of buildings, a sewer system – what
was hidden by the loamy soil and black earth had remained not from
the Finns, nor the Scythians, nor from the Bulgars – some unknown
people came here from the Asiatic steppes in order to found a city and
to disappear from history forever. But after them, after those unknown
people, the Scythians were here, and they left their kurgans.4
The themes found in this remarkable passage are the central concerns of
the present essay. Much like the landscape described by Ballod, where the topography contains a story of peoples superseding one another, what Pil’niak’s
characters confront here is the vertical articulation of that supersession, with
various temporal epochs layered upon one another. Each uncovered stratum
tells a story as much about layering as it does about accumulation and of
dispersal, whether of people or things, with each stratum marking a cultural
Katerina Clark. Petersburg: Crucible of Cultural Revolution. Cambridge, 1995. P.
52; citing Peter Alberg Jensen. Nature as Code: The Achievement of Boris Pil’niak.
Copenhagen, 1979. P. 65.
4
Boris Pilnyak. Naked Year / Trans. A. R. Tulloch. Ann Arbor, 1975. P. 93. I have amended
the translation. The irst page reference will be to the Tulloch translation, the second to
the edition: Boris Pil’niak. Sobranie Sochinenii v shesti tomakh. Vol. 1. Moscow, 2003.
References to other works by Pil’niak are to the volumes of this edition as “SS.”
3
231
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
deposit by a people whom another displaces. Each unearthed vertical layer
makes multiple times simultaneously perceptible, while also reaching back
out horizontally through space.
Fig. 1. “Diagram of Uvek”. From Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei”. P. 72.
Uvek forms an emblem for a general feature of Naked Year, in which
artifacts from the deep past are perceived alongside a host of other times
simultaneously present within the revolutionary moment. The Scythian, their
burial mounds, and Uvek, are among the deepest of the pasts found represented in Naked Year, but belong to a gradient of temporalities embodied
by wizards and Bolsheviks, syphilitic aristocrats and anarchists, pagans and
Orthodox, burial mounds and factories; monks’ cells and cinemas; incantations and chastushki, dead cities such as Uvek and moribund cities such
as the work’s imagined “Ordynin-Town.” It was this multiplicity of times
and their juxtapositions in Naked Year that provoked broad debate about its
representation of the revolutionary epoch – just as so many of Pil’niak’s later
works would similarly do (albeit to ever more strident reception). Trotsky,
for example, highlighted this feature in a long essay on Pil’niak, in which he
observed that Naked Year relected the pervasive dilemma of the persistence
of the past into the present, but faulted him for not differentiating between
what Trotsky termed “historical planes”:
232
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
And although in present-day Russia, a sorcerer’s incantations exist
next to the Gviu and Glavbum, they do not exist in the same historical
plane (v odnoi istoricheskoi ploskosti). The Gviu and the Glavbum,
however imperfect, tend forward, while the incantations, no matter
how “folk like,” are the dead weight of history (mertvyi gruz istorii).5
In failing to explicitly delineate the differences between the vital and the
moribund, the historical and ahistorical, the living and the dead, Pil’niak
created what Trotsky found a spurious vision of the revolutionary period;
spurious, in Trotsky’s view, because Naked Year founders in a synchronic
perspective on “present-day Russia,” that reveals multiple times existing
simultaneously, while refusing to articulate them within a framework structured by a telos. The work revealed all the “particularities of the historical
development of Russia,” to borrow a phrase Trotsky famously used elsewhere, but left out the development. Not only did some of its characters
repudiate modernization, they also thought the revolution would jettison
Western inluence upon Russia: a perspective that meant that technological development, Peter the Great, even Bolshevism were part of the same
paradigm: “And everything is dead, sheer machinery, technology, comfort”
says Gleb Ordynin, the character who accompanies Baudek to Uvek, in
a lengthy conversation with the Archbishop Sylvester that represents the
philosophical core of Naked Year: “The path of European culture lead to
war, ’14 was able to create this war. The culture of the machine has forgotten about the culture of the spirit” (72/74). These were the views that have
typically led scholars to link the work to parallel intellectual currents in
the 1920s such as primitivism, Eurasianism, and Scythianism, with which
several characters of Naked Year espouse analogous views that Russia
would have to maneuver its own historical path, pitted between East and
West, and that it would have to recuperate its own aesthetic and spiritual
sources in the pre-Petrine past.6 The multiple perspectives vying with each
other over the nature of the revolution, however, meant that views such
as Gleb’s are constantly held in tension with others: the Archbishop, for
example, responds: “Russia, you say? – but Russia is a iction, a mirage,
because Russia is the Caucasus, and the Ukraine, and Moldavia!... Great
Russia, it must be said is the Oka, Volga, Kama regions [Poochie, Povolzhe,
Pokamie]” (73/75). This is the space in which Uvek is located. The primary
Leon Trotsky. Boris Pil’niak (1923) // L. Trotsky. Literatura i revoliutsiia. Moscow,
1991. P. 75.
6
For more on this subject, see, for example, the chapter “Nep Gothic” in Eric Naiman.
Sex in Public. The Incarnation of Soviet Ideology. Princeton, 1997.
5
233
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
question animating these pages is how those “historical planes” that were
emphatically dead – that is, those planes represented by the Scythian burial
mound and Uvek itself – it within the work’s variegated picture of Russia
and the Revolution. Given that both the encounters of Ballod and Pil’niak
with the archaeological take place in 1919, how does the deep past function
when time and space are upheaved?
The scholar E. B. D’iachkova once observed that Pil’niak “loves the
metaphor of archaeological excavations, the immersion in another time
(pogruzhenie v drugoe vremia).”7 I want to extend this observation by demonstrating how archaeology served as a conceptual and aesthetic resource
for Pil’niak as he sought to account for the revolutionary moment, but also
as a disruptive force, routinely challenging the constitution of a historical
telos by continually calling attention to archaic sites and artifacts whose
relation to the present was indeterminate, but whose presence within, or
upon the landscape was unavoidable.
To demonstrate this, the following pages focus on two episodes in
Naked Year: the excavation of Uvek; and a sequence involving a train
station named after a burial mound, “Mar-Loop Station” (Raz”ezd-Mar).
The two episodes are respectively structured according to two aesthetic
principles of modernist stratigraphy and modernist topography, which
highlight the range of times, historical planes, and forms of life, simultaneously found in “present-day Russia.” With Uvek, we see the continual
layering of temporal epochs one over the other, which enable these epochs to be perceived simultaneously, which gives way as the sequence
continues to confront the various temporalities, or in the terms of Ernst
Bloch, nonsynchronisms, discernible within the country.8 In the sequence
of “Mar-Loop Station,” and its various appearances throughout the work,
we ind a reliance on a set of topographic juxtapositions in which the
archaic and the modern enter into proximity. What this scene offers is a
way of thinking about archaeology not in terms of its standard afiliation
with metaphors of depth (which is, to be sure, emphatically evidenced in
the Uvek sequence), but rather in terms of contiguity and adjacency; not
a “poetics of depth,” but one of surface, which enables him to juxtapose
archaic and modern mobility.
E. B. D’iachkova. Problema vremeni v proizvedeniiakh B. Pil’niaka // Boris Pil’niak:
opyt segodniashnego prochteniia. Moscow, 1995. P. 66.
8
Ernst Bloch. Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics / Transl. Mark Ritter //
New German Critique. 1977. No. 11. Pp. 22-38.
7
234
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
To focus on these two sequences might seem myopic given the complexity (some have claimed incoherence) of Naked Year.9 I pursue this approach
with the hope that the pages to come might have some relevance to this
cluster’s thematic focus on nomadism and mobility by examining how the
archaeology of nomadism enabled one Russian modernist to think through
the revolutionary moment and, in particular, the Civil War as it was waged
within the steppe. Pil’niak’s insistent attention to these various forms of
mobility and of endurance thereby impinges upon several commonplaces
of the Russian landscape, and in particular of the steppe landscape.10 On the
one hand, we ind the usual commonplaces of the steppe recorded in Naked
Year – “Steppe. Emptiness. Boundlessness. Darkness. Cold” (148/146) – but
those commonplaces are now confronted by various archaeological artifacts.
Pil’niak negotiates between these commonplaces and the various forms by
which that space is constituted by multiple temporalities, both within the
ground and upon the surface.
“The Scythian Plane,” the Kurgan, and the Tabula Rasa
To include the detail that “the Scythians were here, and they left their
burial mounds” was to confer mimetic accuracy to the scene, but also to
encode a whole cultural image and ideology coalescing around the Scythian
during the Russian modernist period. “The Scythian” could often serve as
counterimage to prevailing attitudes about “civilized” life, whether positively
For other accounts of Naked Year, see: Kenneth Brostrom. Pilnyak’s Naked Year: The
Problem of Faith // Russian Literature Triquarterly. 1979. Vol. 16. Pp. 114-153; Gary
Browning. Boris Pil’niak: Scythian at a Typewriter. Ann Arbor, 1985; Clark. Petersburg;
Jensen. Nature as Code; Robert Maguire. Red Virgin Soil. New York, 1968. Pp. 101-128.
See also the volume Boris Pil’niak: opyt segodniashnego prochteniia. Moscow, 1995.
Especially the essays by M. M. Golubkov. Esteticheskaia sistema v tvorchestve Borisa
Pil’niaka 20-kh godov. Pp. 3-10; and the essay by D’iachkova cited above.
10
The literature on the subject of Russian landscape is vast. The following works have been
valuable in helping to formulate the ideology and poetics of space in Russian culture: Mark
Bassin. Russia Between Europe and Asia: The Ideological Construction of Geographical
Space // Slavic Review. 1991. Vol. 50. No. 1. Pp. 1-17; Mikhail Epstein. Russo-Soviet
Topoi // Evgeny Dobrenko and Eric Naiman (Eds.) The Landscape of Stalinism. The
Art and Ideology of Soviet Space (Studies in Modernity and National Identity). Seattle,
2003. Pp. 277-306; Susan Layton. Russian Literature and Empire: the Conquest of the
Caucasus from Pushkin to Tolstoy. New Haven, 1997; William Sunderland. Taming the
Wild Field: Colonization and Empire on the Russian Steppe. Ithaca, 2004; Harsha Ram,
The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire. Madison, 2003.
9
235
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
or negatively evaluated at a given historical moment.11 In that capacity, it
operates as other civilizational “mirrors” such as the noble or ignoble savage, the nomad, the Gypsy, or the Caucasian mountaineer. One feature that
distinguished the Scythian in Russian culture is that it served as an archaic
mirror, in which contemporary issues and cultural and aesthetic values were
relected by, or indeed projected into the deep past.
In 1918, the year before Pil’niak arrives at Uvek, we ind a remarkable
conjunction of Scythianism, as both ideology and archaeology, in three
major works that form the immediate background for Pil’niak: the irst was
Alexander Blok’s long poem, “The Scythians” (Skify),12 the second was
Evgenii Zamiatin’s essay, “Are We Scythians?” (Skify li?),13 which was a
review of the journal Skify, edited by Ivanov-Razumnik, whose irst issue appeared in 1917;14 and, lastly, the noted scholar of classical antiquity Mikhail
Rostovtsev’s Iranians and Greeks in South Russia (Ellinstvo i iranstvo na
iuge Rossii), which devotes several sections to the archaeology of various
ancient nomadic peoples.15 Each work consolidated particular facets of the
image of the Scythian: it could represent a quintessential predecessor of
the modern artist, forever pursuing new aesthetic territory (Zamiatin); a
quintessential predecessor of Russia, invoked as the model for a struggle
with the West (Blok); a predecessor of the avant-garde and revolutionaries,
who could ind common cause with their most ancient antagonists, the Hellenes, in a struggle against the bourgeoisie (Ivanov-Razumnik). Alongside
On the basic structure of the discursive construction of the “noble savage,” see Hayden
White. The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea // Edward J. Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak (Eds.). The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the
Renaissance to Romanticism. Pittsburgh, 1972. Pp. 3-38. The range of afiliated images
of the “other” in Russian cultural history is too vast to cite here. Those works that have
been central to my thinking on the subject include: Layton. Russian Literature and Empire;
Yuri Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small People of the North. Ithaca, 1994.
See also Francois Hartog. The Mirror of Herodotus: The Representation of the Other in
the Writing of History. Berkeley, 1988. I take the concept of the “image” from White;
and the concept of the “mirror” from Hartog and Slezkine.
12
A. A. Blok. Dvenadtsat’, Skify. St. Petersburg, 1918.
13
E. Zamiatin. Sochineniia. Moscow, 1988.
14
Ivanov-Razumnik (Ed.). Skify. Sankt-Petersburg, 1917–1918.
15
M. I. Rostovtsev. Ellinstvo i iranstvo na iuge Rossii. Petrograd, 1918. Following
Rostotsev’s emigration, N. Ia. Marr published Rostovtsev’s monumental appraisal of
the Scythians as: Skiiia i Bospor: kriticheskoe obozreniie pamiatnikov literaturynykh i
arkheologicheskikh. Leningrad, 1925. The longer version of this essay tracks Rostovtsev’s interaction with igures such as Viacheslav Ivanov, who also devoted several essays
to the Scythians; and of Rostovtsev’s delineation of the steppe as a space of antiquity.
11
236
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
these images, moreover, the Scythian was also an object being reconstituted
archaeologically: its various artifacts, primarily found in kurgans, served to
evidence how the South of Russia had been a space of continual interaction
and the locus of an antiquity hitherto unrecognized (Rostovtsev).
In light of the Ballod–Pil’niak connection, I want to emphasize these
twin features – the cultural myth and the archaeological object – because
previous accounts of Scythianism during the modernist period, which have
rightly emphasized the cultural mythologies surrounding the image, can also
be supplemented by the story of Scythian archaeology.16 One reason to do
so is that there is some dispute over Pil’niak’s relationship to Scythianism
as a cultural ideology: the image of the Scythian Pil’niak inherits and promulgates, in other words, partakes in both of these currents, and moreover
grapples with the artifactual remnants within the Russian landscape.17 It is
this particular facet of the Scythian story – namely, how its archaeological
status impinges upon the image of the Russian landscape, and, in particular
the topos of Russia as a tabula rasa – that I want to use here to delimit the
scope of the Scythian theme, and to add an additional dimension to previous scholarship on Pil’niak’s relationship to Scythianism and that of his
immediate predecessors, in particular Blok.
For more on Scythianism, see E. Bobrinskaia. Skiftstvo v russkoi kul’ture nachala
XX veka i skifskaia tema u russkikh futuristov // Rannii russkii avangard v kontektse
ilosofskoi i khudozhestvennoi kul’tury rubezha vekov: ocherki. Moscow, 1999. Pp. 5482; Stefani Hoffman. Scythian Theory and Literature, 1917–1924 // Nils Ake Nilsson
(Ed.). Art, Society, Revolution: Russia 1917–1924. Stockholm, 1979. Pp. 138-64; Ibid.
Scythianism: A Cultural Vision in Revolutionary Russia / Ph.D. dissertation; Columbia
University. New York, 1975. For Scythianism is relation to music of the period, see,
Richard Taruskin. The Great Fusion // Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions: A Biography of the Works Through Mavra. Vol. 1. Berkeley, 1996. Pp. 849-966. For an excellent
examination of its image in avant-garde art, see Jane Sharp. Russian Modernism Between East and West: Natal’ia Goncharova and the Moscow Avant-Garde, 1905–1914.
Cambridge, 2003. Pp. 157-173.
17
Peter Jensen, for example has argued that Pil’niak’s representation of “Skifstvo” was
“half-hearted and frivolous”: he was happiest with the Scythian’s pagan semantics [...]
the izba was no shrine as it was for [Nikolai] Kljuev, and did not share the “skify’s”
Messian dreams of the Revolution as the gateway to a peasant paradise (Jensen. Nature
as Code. P. 315). Gary Browning, whose title Scythian at a Typewriter, perhaps immediately indicates his differences from Jensen, has argued that “Pil’niak crafted his
themes, style, composition, and narrative manner with a few, rapid, powerful strokes
of his Scythian axe. [In Naked Year] he irst produced a successful work parallel to the
time-worn pitted burial mound fertility statues and the rough, soaked oak of his artistic
ideal” (Browning. Boris Pil’niak. P. 114).
16
237
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
To sense what was radical about the possibility that an archaeology of
nomadism could generate such complex temporal and spatial dimensions,
we can begin by citing Russian cultural thought at its most agonized. It
was Chaadaev, in “The First Philosophical Letter,” who linked his sense
of Russia as transcendentally homeless to an accursed nomadism evident
in Russian life:
Everything passes, lows away, leaving no trace either outside or
within us. We seem to camp in our houses, we behave like strangers in
our families; and in our cities we appear to be nomads, more so than
the real nomads who graze their locks in our steppes, for they are more
attached to their desert than we are to our towns.18
Even when Chaadaev recanted the views he espoused here in his later
“Apology of a Madman” (Apologie d’un fou, 1837), what he left unchanged
was his view of the Russian landscape. His famed philosophical maneuver
that reevaluates Russia’s alleged privation into the very basis for its future
achievement, will nevertheless take place within a still barren ield:
Yes, there was some exaggeration in this type of indictment against a
great people, whose only crime, in the last analysis, consisted in having
been relegated to the extremities of the civilized world... there was some
exaggeration in not acknowledging that we came into the world upon
a sterile soil upon which empires did not lourish, which generations
did not venerate, where nothing spoke to us about the ages gone by.19
Chaadaev, moreover, already had his sights on the efforts of his contemporaries to recuperate artifacts testifying to a Slavic past. He deemed
these efforts both fanatical and vainglorious, and supplied another powerful
maneuver that effectively transposed the trope of emptiness from the realm
of geography into that of the soul and the mind: “From time to time in their
The letter was published in French in 1836 in the journal Teleskop. Peter Chaadaev.
Letters on the Philosophy of History: First Letter // Marc Raeff; Isaiah Berlin. Russian
Intellectual History: An Anthology. New Jersey, 1992. Pp. 160-173; P. 163. My reading
of Chaadaev relies on Mikhail Gershenzon. P. Ia. Chaadaev: Zhizn’ i myshlenie (1908).
Rpt. edition. Hague, 1968; Dale Peterson. Civilizing the Race: Chaadaev and the Paradox of Eurocentric Nationalism // Russian Review. 1997. Vol. 56. No. 4. Pp. 550-63;
Andrzej Walicki. The Paradox of Chaadaev // The Slavophile Controversy: History of a
Conservative Utopia in Nineteenth-Century Russian Thought / Trans. Hilda AndrewsRusiecka. Notre Dame, 1975. Pp. 83-117.
19
Peter Chaadaev. Apologia of a Madman // Major Works of Peter Chaadaev. A Translation and Commentary. Notre Dame, 1969. P. 217; P. Ia. Chaadaev. Apologie d’un fou
// Polnoe sobraniie sochineii i izbrannye pis’ma (PSS). Vol. 1. Moscow, 1991. P. 302.
18
238
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
diverse excavations our fanatic Slavicists will, of course, still be able to
exhume curios for our museums, for our libraries, but one may doubt if out
of the depths of our historical soil they can ever draw something to ill up the
emptiness in our souls, something to condense the vacuity in our minds.”20
Not even these “Fanatic Slavicists” (Slavons fanatiques) – a reference to the
nascent Slavophiles21 – could exhume enough “curios” to ill this alleged
void of the Russian soul and mind. It was in this bleak light that Chaadaev
conferred to Russian cultural mythology the metaphor of the “sheet of white
paper,” a variant of the topos of the tabula rasa, upon which Peter stamped
“Europe” and “The West,” which encompasses both the idea of the alleged
vacuity of the Russian soul and the barren nature of its soil, but also the
possibility for the country to realize its “great historical mission.”
It was this commonplace of the “white sheet” that the historian I. E. Zabelin challenged in the opening pages of his History of the Russian Life from
the Most Ancient Time (1876).22 “The Russian man,” Zabelin observed,
“...in the consciousness of educated society appears as an empty place
(pustym mestom), a clean sheet of paper, upon which many people have
inscribed their regulations and rules, customs and morals, industries and
arts, even their epic folk songs” [italics mine].23 Chaadaev, to be sure, might
still have seen a igure such as Zabelin as an offspring of those “Slavons
fanatiques” he had disparaged several decades earlier in The Apology. What
Chaadaev. Major Works. P. 206
Chaadaev. PSS. Vol. 1. P. 744, fn. 12. The footnote is to the Russian translation, as
a gloss of “fanaticheskie slaviane”: “Nos Slavons fanatiques pourront bien dans leurs
fouilles diverses exhumer de temps à autre des objet de curiousité pour nos musées,
pour nos bibliothèques; mais il est permis de douter, je crois, qu’il parviennent jamais
à tirer de notre sol historique de quoi combler le vide de nos âmes, de quoi condenser
le vague de nos esprits.”
22
I. E. Zabelin. Istoriia russkoi zhizni s drevneishikh vremen. Moscow, 1876. Rpt. Edition. The Hague, 1969.
23
Ibid. P. vi. Zabelin raises the study of the past to a new responsibility of “an educated
country”: he includes in the preface to the volume the “golden words” of two scholars
K. M. Ber and A. A. Shifner: “If Russia does not study its own most ancient past, then it
shall not fulill its task as an educated state. The matter has already ceased to be national
(narodnym): it is become a general concern of man” (P. x). The passage is from their
Severnye drevnosti Vorso (St. Petersburg, 1861), on the work of the Danish academic
Worseau, who revitalized his own compatriots’ study of their antiquities. For more on
Ber, see N. I. Platonova. Karl Maksimovich Ber i nachalo issledovanii pervobytnykh
drevnostei Rossii // Chelovek i drevnost: pamiati Aleksandra Aleksandrovicha Formozova
(1928–2009). Moscow, 2010. Pp. 611-622, see http://www.archaeology.ru/Download/
Platonova/Platonova_2010_Ber.pdf (last visit: May 27, 2012).
20
21
239
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
is notable about Zabelin’s invocation of Chaadaev’s metaphor for the story
here is the artifact he uses to challenge this prevailing assumption: the
kurgan. “The kurgan antiquities,” he writes, “that are bestrewn upon our
land hide within themselves the true, and genuine cradle of our national life
(istinnuiu, podlinnuiu kolybel’ nashei narodnoi zhizni).”24 It is a remarkable
claim for the kurgan that it was not only a site of antiquity and potential
site for Russia’s national past, but that the burial mound, in effect, becomes
metaphorically a cradle.
But there was a problem. Who was actually buried inside them? “With
great zeal,” Zabelin writes, “we have opened, and continue to open the
graves of the ancient inhabitants of our country, but nevertheless we do not
reliably know, are these our forefathers, or are they foreign?”.25 Although
Zabelin was after his own forefathers, his views did not preclude a positive
evaluation of several of the peoples with whom the kurgans were afiliated,
most notably, the Scythians:
...the southern border extended as the boundless steppe, in which lived
the Scythians, a renowned people (slavnyi narod), wise, invincible, and
possessing a miraculous art of warfare, for it was impossible to catch
or to ind them in the steppe, just as it was impossible to escape them.
In this brief sketch of Scythian warfare, it was fully and very clearly
expressed, so to say, the martial essence of our steppes, indeed of our
entire country, from which neither Darius the Persian, who went to
battle with the Scythians, was able to escape with glory, nor Napoleon,
the leader of the Gauls, battling with the Russians.26
We ind here of a form of analogical thinking that will become an identity
claim made by modernists such as Blok. But with Zabelin, we are still far
from appropriation, much less from an identiication with an archaic model.
But the analogy does point to the question of whether a particular historical moment could be seen to recapitulate a given paradigm, with each, in
a sense, iterations of this greater paradigm of the “martial essence of our
steppes”: the Scythians defeated an outside invader; those who defeat an
outside invader are Scythians; the Russians defeated an outside invader:
could that mean, syllogistically, the Russians are Scythians?
Not with Zabelin, but in 1918, when Alexander Blok proclaimed – “Yes,
we are Scythians” (Da, Skify my!) in his poem “Skify” (The Scythians) – he
Zabelin. Istoriia russkoi zhizni. P. xi.
Ibid. P. xii
26
Ibid. P. 2.
24
25
240
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
marked a high point in the identiication of Russia with both the barbarian
and the nomad, in an admixture of apocalyptic Eurasianism aimed at the
West. Blok’s “Scythians” were more of a general category, a paradigm for
other Asiatic nomads – “Yes, we are Asians!” (Da, Aziaty my), the line
continues – including the Huns and the Golden Horde. Their shared characteristic apart from being Asian and nomadic was that they had posed threats
to the West. In this regard, Blok was not only reevaluating the image of the
Scythian and other asiatic nomads, but also breaking from recent elaborations of the nomadic theme. The reference point in this regard was Vladimir
Solov’ev, whose poem “Panmongolism” (1895) was written in a paroxysm
of yellow terror provoked by the Boxer Rebellion in China,27 and cast Russia
again as under the threat from the East. Blok, who cites as an epigraph for
“The Scythians” the irst two lines of Solov’ev’s poem – “Panmongolism!
Although the word is savage, it caresses my ear,” (Panmongolizm! Khot’
slovo diko, / No mne laskaet slukh ono”) – deiantly embraced the image
of a threatening East, and enfolded Russia into the paradigm of the martial
Scythians in a struggle against both the West and Westernized Russia.28
A particular line of attack in “The Scythians” is germane to the pages
to come, which is a version of Chaadaev’s metaphor of the “page of white
paper.” Blok’s Scythians directly aimed at European antiquities, which, as
Olga Matich has characterized it, expressed a “Eurasian apocalyptic fantasy
[that] erases ancient historical sites.”29 “And the day shall come,” Blok
proclaims “that there will be not even a trace of your Paestums!” (I den’
pridet – ne budet i sleda ot vashikh Pestumov). Paestum, which contained
both Greek and Roman antiquities, is destroyed in this vision by Blok’s
Russo-Scythian barbarians, who shall emerge to complete the job of their
ancestors. With Blok, then, we also see the recapitulation of Chaadaev’s
tabula rasa, but which is igured here as a desire for renewal through wiping
the slate clean, rather than as a horrorvacui. As Matich observes, moreover,
On Solov’ev’s “Panmongolism,” see the section “Panmongolism and the Crisis of
Empire” in Ram. The Imperial Sublime. Pp. 221-225.
28
A particularly illuminating point of comparison with the reevaluation of the Scythian can
be seen in the general career of the category of the “primitive” during Russian modernism.
The discursive features have been admirably assessed by Sharp. “Orientalism.” Russian
Modernism Between East and West. I touch on a similar body of concerns regarding the
various evaluations of “primitivism,” in The Penchant for the Primitive: Archaeology,
Ethnography, and the Aesthetics of Russian Modernism / Ph.D. dissertation; University
of California, Berkeley. Berkeley, 2007.
29
Olga Matich. Erotic Utopia: The Decadent Imagination in Russia’s Fin de Siècle.
Madison, 2005. P. 159.
27
241
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
the tabula rasa is manifest as part of Blok’s Eurasianist fantasy, which seeks
to wipe away not only the motley palimpsest of Europe’s own antique sites,
but also the effects of Westernization in Russia.
The question that arises in light of this recapitulation of the tabula rasa
as an idea tied to Eurasianism is what might one do with all those sites that
archaeologists had been pointing out belonged to the nomads themselves,
whether in the form of Uvek or kurgans? To do so requires jettisoning the
igure of tracelessness and considering instead how Eurasia itself had its
own Paestums and Pompeiis, or more appropriately here, Volga “Pompeiis.”
There is a gesture to this already in Ballod’s title – Volga Pompeiis. To invoke
Pompeii was not only to see the story effectively relocated and recapitulated
along the Volga steppe, and thus to register the threats of destruction both
past and present; it was also to claim that the discoveries, whether large or
small, evidenced that these cities were indeed comparable to that paragon
of the destroyed city, not that it was inhabited by barbarians (see igs. 2-3):
The beautifully equipped furnaces for the iring of ceramic wares;
the homes with a complex system of central heating made of marble
and decorative tiles; the water supply system, the geometrically arrayed
streets and squares; the caravan sheds; the mosques and grandiose
mausoleums, the silks and brocades from interments, the silver ladles,
and the Venetian and Persian glass: all portray the population of the
cities of the Golden Horde not as savages, but as a cultured people,
occupied with manufacture and trade: they were not alien to dealings
with the peoples of the East and West, and they broadly developed
the applied arts.30
The Volga “Pompeiis” were thus bounded by these multiple cultural arguments, just as they were being encircled in 1919 by various forces that would
be the latter-day iterations of those earlier forces that had destroyed them. It
was precisely the kind of structure of repetition and temporal overlay – where
a geographic site transects multiple historical epochs – that Pil’niak, as we
will see in the next section, used as the basis for thinking through the archaeological site in relation to contemporary events. This presents one of the
essential differences between Pil’niak and Blok: for Pil’niak the Scythians
and other nomads were perceived not only as a mythology, a precursor that
could be appropriated in a ight against the West, but also as an archaeology,
and the space of the Russian steppe was a site where archaeology would
enter into a confrontation with the Revolution.
30
Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei.” P. 131
242
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Ballod and “Baudek” at Uvek
“I am already terribly bored
here,” Pil’niak wrote in a letter
during his sojourn to Saratov in
June of 1919. “But, if you don’t
get sick, I think I’ll return toward
July, so that I can perhaps gather
more impressions. In a few days,
I’ll head to the excavations, the
archaeological ones, and shall write
a story – ‘Wormwood.’”31 It was
a day after Pil’niak sent his letter
(June 9, 1919) that Ballod set off Fig. 2. Example of a Mosaic. From Ballod.
for the various excavation sites, in Privolzhskie “Pompei”. Table 5.
the company of ifty people, which
included participants from the Historical–Philological Department of
Saratov University.32 It is this team
that likely served as the model for
Pil’niak in his description of the
excavation scene in “Wormwood,”
which, as planned, he inished the
following month and published
in his collection Grasses (Byl’e), Fig. 3. “Earthenware form” found on Uvek.
which he reworked and included in From Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei”. P. 95.
Naked Year: “At the top of Uvek people had noticed ruins and kurgans, the
archaeologist Baudek with a group of Tver muzhiks, who had earlier been
barge haulers on the Volga, had arrived to excavate them.”33
Letter to M. A. Sokolovaia. June 9, 1919 // B. A. Pil’niak. Pis’ma. V 2-kh tt. Moscow,
2010. Vol. I. Pp. 303-304.
32
Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei”. P. 5.
33
Boris Pil’niak. Polyn’ // Idem. Byl’e. Revel, 1922. P. 43. Pil’niak scholarship, to my
knowledge, has not linked “Wormwood” or Naked Year to the actual excavation practices of the period. But scholars of archaeology in Russia have, albeit only in passing:
the archaeologist A. A. Formozov observed that “Baudek” was based on Ballod.
A. A. Formozov. Russkie arkheologi v period totalitarizma: istoriograicheskie ocherki.
Moscow, 2004. P. 315; Cited in N. M. Malov. Sovetskaia arkheologiia v Saratovskom
gosudarstvennom universitete (1918–1940): organizationnoe stanovlenie, razvitie i
represii // Arkheologiia vostochno-evropeiskoi stepi. 2006. No. 4. Pp. 4-28. P. 13, fn. 49.
31
243
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
To judge by the description we ind in “Wormwood”, which Pil’niak
reworked for Naked Year, what he found at Uvek was more than a relief from
boredom, but also a space were chronos striated topos. Perhaps the name
Uvek itself, which contains the Russian word for “age” and “century” (vek),
already promised such signiicance to an “ornamental” prose writer always
weaving together verbal patterns to highlight multiple levels of linguistic
signiication: “And the centuries preserved for it its name: Uvek.” (I veka
sokhranili za nim svoe imia – Uvek.):
The summit of Uvek, all in stone, had grown bald; like silvery,
dusty bristle, wormwood had grown upon it, and it smelled bitterly.
The centuries. The centuries teach just as the stars do and Baudek knew
the joy of bitterness. Тhe concepts of the archaeologist Baudek were
mixed up with the centuries.34
Vek, veka, Uvek, Uveka: by virtue of an interlingual pun, Uvek is a toponym that is as much a reminder of time as it is a remnant of a bygone time.
No wonder, then, that Baudek’s thoughts are “mixed up with the centuries”:
to be in Uvek is to ind oneself facing a multiplicity of times, and to require
that one locate oneself in space and in time.
Critics and scholars have frequently observed, and frequently complained about the stylistic elements of Naked Year we ind typiied in this
passage. The editor of Krasnaia’ nov’, A. K. Voronskii, who was initially
supportive of Pil’niak and published sections from Naked Year in the
journal, objected: “the reader has to overcome the pages and persistently
connect [them] for himself.”35 Faced with an absence of a plot and the use
of various orders of discursive, ethnographic, and archaeological material –
from eighteenth-century decrees to pagan incantations – critics have called
Naked Year “a patchwork counterpane,” “a regular anti-system,” “a literary
Other historians of the Volga Germans have noted Pil’niak’s close association with various archaeologists, especially with a certain Paul Rau, who is the eponymous protagonist of Pil’niak’s story “German History” (Nemetskaia istoriia, 1928). Natalie Kromm.
Povolzhsko-nemetskii sled v zhizni i proizvedeniiakh pisatel’ia Borisa Pil’niaka” //
Die Geschicte der Wolgadeutschen. http://wolgadeutsche.net/biographie/Pilnjak_WD_
Spuren_rus.htm (last visit: April 9, 2012). See also N. M. Malov. Paul Rau // Nemtsy
Rossii: Entsiklopediia. Moscow, 2006.
34
The Russian original:
Вершина Увека, в камнях, облысела, серебряной пыльной щетиной поросла
полынь, пахнула горько. – Века. – Века учат так же, как звезды, и Баудек знал
радость горечи. Понятия археолога Баудека спутались веками. (93/94)
35
A. K. Voronskii. Boris Pil’niak (1928) // Idem. Izbrannye stat’i o literature. Moscow,
1982. P. 88.
244
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
montage,” “mosaic,” or “cubist collage,” which deied the conventions
of the realist novel and further radicalized the Russian modernists’ own
experimentation with literary form. Most relevant to Pil’niak were Andrei
Bely’s Petersburg (Peterburg, 1913–16) and Alexander Blok’s The Twelve
(Dvenadtsat’, 1918) both of which seem plot heavy in comparison to the
radical attenuation of plot in Naked Year. Comparisons, moreover, to both
these works were offered to indicate not only Pil’niak’s sources for his formal experiment and cultural ideology, but also the models in light of which
he was deemed a maladroit, slavish epigone. As Victor Erlich summarizes
this position, Naked Year proceeds with a “montage-like accumulation
of heterogeneous detail, often resulting in a virtual orgy of enumeration
and apparently designed to mimic the bewildering multifariousness of the
new reality.” But, he goes on to note, this “should not be mistaken for a
pluralistic vision or a genuine sense of complexity.”36 Scholars who have
tried to make a case for genuine complexity rather than incoherence have
followed the terms of this argument about the multifariousness of details,
but have offered a different mode of linking them. Robert Maguire, for
example, extrapolates a general principle from Naked Year’s verbal patterning and repetition of themes and motifs: “Pil’niak works... through
‘associations of parallels and antitheses,’ not through the unfolding of a
story line in time and space. We must therefore read him as we read so
much modern poetry – vertically, as it were, piecing together a picture
from scattered clues.”37
Where “verticality” is metaphorical in Maguire’s account, it forms the
basic structure of the description of Uvek, where time acquires shape and
substance – “and from the earth the centuries were exiting” (i iz zemli vykhodili veka). Multiple epochs are registered here stratigraphically, and that mode
underpins the entirety of the excavation, which begins with Pil’niak detailing
various layers descending back to the very origin of Uvek:
someone unknown came here from the Asiatic steppes in order to
found a city and disappear forever from history. But after them, after
those unknown people, the Scythians were here, and they left their
kurgans. (92/93)
Each of these layers for Pil’niak reveals that Uvek is constituted by
multiple nomadic pasts, rather than being solely a settlement of the Golden
Victor Erlich. Two Pioneers of the Soviet Novel: Konstantin Fedin and Boris Pilnyak //
Idem. Modernism and Revolution. Cambridge, MA, 1994. P. 139.
37
Maguire. Red Virgin Soil. P. 117.
36
245
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
Horde, with each becoming simultaneously perceptible to Baudek. As the
excavation sequence descends into the deeper and deeper pasts, moreover,
so too will it enter into various other juxtapositions occurring contemporaneously with the excavation itself, namely, those of the Civil War. Indeed,
so many temporal frameworks coalesce within the excavation sequence
that a reader might feel somewhat like Baudek in trying to parse them.
For all the possible confusion this might entail, one reason to track these
various frameworks is that they exhibit in a condensed form the greater
crisis of thinking through the Revolution and the question of history that
haunts Naked Year. It does so not only because the Revolution means that
time and space are being everywhere upheaved within the landscape but
also because archaeology is destabilizing the ground, by pointing toward
the deeper pasts contained within in, or calling attention to those artifacts
upon its surface.
One initial way to diagnose this dilemma is to say, following Mikhail
Bakhtin, that Baudek cannot inhabit a stable chronotope. Bakhtin provided
a particularly germane account of verticality as a literary category that he
linked to the synchronization of diachrony. Unlike Maguire, for whom the
igure of vertical reading is a quintessential aesthetic mode of the modernist
text, Bakhtin found it underpinning Dante’s Inferno: “the stretching-out of
the world – a historical world, in essence – along a vertical axis ... everything that on earth is divided by time, here, in this verticality, coalesces into
eternity, into pure simultaneous existence.” The tension of “the synchronization of diachrony,” Bakhtin further wrote, is that “the images and ideas
that ill this vertical world are in their turn illed with a powerful desire to
escape this world, to set out along the historically productive horizontal,
to be distributed not upward but forward.”38 “To synchronize diachrony”
was a version of what Trotsky saw as the chief failure of Naked Year: in
this regard, Pil’niak should have diachronized the synchronic, inasmuch
as Trotsky, in Bakthinian parlance, sensed the absence of a “historically
productive horizontal.”
In a similar vein, Peter Jensen argues that Pil’niak’s “chuvstvo istorizma
meant the replacement of history as a chronological sequence with a historical space in which all stages of the life of mankind met and recognized
one another. From being a sequential syntagm – a chain of events – history
became a paradigm, – a class of simultaneously available, mutually and
Mikhail Bakhtin. Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel // Idem. The Dialogic
Imagination. Austin, 1981. Pp. 155-57.
38
246
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
equally related situations. The epoch was experienced as a panchrony.”39
One modiication of this account in regard to Baudek’s experience of the
excavation is that Baudek encounters various stages of life, but also various ways that life is temporally organized. In light of the terms we ind in
Bakhtin and Jensen, one notable feature of the excavation sequence is that
when Pil’niak turns toward the horizontality, he does so to transform the
excavation into a ritual space. Rather than generating a “historical productive
horizontal,” horizontal is the plane along which we ind various disruptions
of the articulation of historical progress. In the concluding passages of the
excavation scene, Baudek, in the company of another character Natal’ia,
whose views on Russian history take up the rest of the excavation sequence,
witnesses a pagan ritual enacted by women circumambulating the excavation:
They stopped to say goodbye and noticed: from the gully toward
the excavations, from the other side, from Nikola [church], naked
women were running, in single ile, with broad, unhurried gait, with
disheveled hair, with the dark hollows of their pubic regions, with
brooms of feather grass in their hands. The women ran silently to the
excavations, ran around the circular ruin on the high point and turned
to the ravine, the gully, raising wormwood dust. (93/94-95)
In face of this scene, Baudek proclaims:
Somewhere there is Europe, Marx, scientiic socialism, but here a
superstition has been preserved that’s a thousand years old. The girls
run about their land, they cast spells with their bodies and their purity.
This is the week of Peter Summer Solstice. Who will invent the Peter
Summer Solstice? This is more beautiful than excavations! Now it is
midnight. Perhaps they are the ones casting spells on us. This is the
girls’ secret. (94/95)
Since we know of Trotsky’s criticism of Naked Year, Baudek’s proclamation “somewhere there is Europe, Marx, scientiic socialism” must surely
have struck him as part of the problem of the work, since Baudek actually
celebrates what Trotsky likely would have labeled “the dead weight of history.” Where the archaeological excavation indicates an artifactual endurance, the women introduce another form, namely, that of pagan belief. We
later learn why the women might be running around Uvek, when the wizard
Yegorka comes to the excavation and says, “you have no business digging
these places. Because this place, Uvek, is mysterious, and it always smells
39
Jensen. Nature as Code. P. 308.
247
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
of wormwood” (104/104). He then proceeds to tell a story of a Persian
princess who had been locked away in one of the towers: “the girls at times
jump naked for the Persian beauty, at night, at the solstice, in this season,
but that is not known... (104/105). Not only do the women embody a form
of endurance, they also signal a particular interconnection between the Russian folk and archaeological sites: in fact, it is likely more accurate not to
call Uvek archaeological from the perspective of Yegorka or these women,
inasmuch as they remind us that archaeology is itself a practice identiied
in the sequence with modernity.
Taken together, both the excavation and the ritual represent the various
temporalities coalescing in and around Uvek, indicating, by extension, the
multiple temporal modalities available to Pil’niak’s characters. The force
of Baudek’s gesture, then, marks a more complicated temporal scheme than
what Jensen observed in “Wormwood.” One way to account for that scheme
is to consider it in relation to one way that premodern and modern time have
been distinguished from one another. Benedict Anderson, for example, once
asserted that the idea of “simultaneity-in-time” is the quintessential temporality of modern life: a term that means “[a] homogeneous, empty time, in which
simultaneity is, as it were, transverse, cross-time, marked not by preiguring
and fulillment, but by temporal coincidence, and measured by clock and
calendar.”40 This modern temporality stands in opposition to a “simultaneityalong-time,” which characterizes premodern temporalities, for which Anderson relies on Erich Auerbach’s concept of igura. The sacriice of Isaac,
for example, is structured as a igura whereby the sacriice “preigur[es]
Christ, so that in the former the latter is, as it were, announced and promised
and the latter ‘fulills’… the former … a connection is established between
two events which are linked neither temporally nor causally,” but rather
“vertically linked to Divine Providence, which alone is able to devise such
a plan of history and supply the key to its understanding.”41 In contrast to
this conception of preiguration and verticality, Anderson argues that the
conditions of modernity are constituted by a new form of “simultaneity.”
Where Auerbach’s premodern time represents a “simultaneity-along-time”
(the preiguring of a future event by one in the past), this sense of modern
time inds its expression in the word “meanwhile,” which juxtaposes two
simultaneously occurring events, not necessarily related to one another, but
conceptually apprehensible together. “Every essential modern conception,”
Benedict Anderson. Imagined Communities. London, 1991. P. 37.
Ibid. Pp. 22-23; citing Erich Auerbach. Mimesis / Trans. Willard R. Trask. Princeton,
1953. Pp. 73-74.
40
41
248
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Anderson argues, “is based upon this concept of time.”42 Anderson’s terms
help to illuminate the particular models of time at work at the excavation
scene. In proclaiming “Somewhere there is Europe,” Baudek makes what
Anderson would call a “transverse, longitudinal comparison,” juxtaposing
two simultaneously occurring events. Rather than constituting a “homogeneous, empty time,” however, Baudek’s juxtaposition compares two distinct
temporalities: Scientiic Marxism and the pagan rite; the clock and calendar
of modernity, the ritual time of the premodern.
These transverse comparisons will only continue as the excavation scene
is subsequently set in relation to the events of the Civil War. Following the
excavation, for example, another character later reports on the events of the
Civil War occurring elsewhere: “The woods and ravines are swarming with
bandits. You can hear it – a deathly silence! Death. In the steppes there are
villages, which have died out completely. Nobody buries the corpses... The
Russian nation” (95/96). This is another transverse comparison, presenting
a subtle juxtaposition of the excavation scene with the story of revolutionary
violence. Essentially the juxtaposition asks us to consider the signiicance
of not burying the dead, when the excavation scene reveals how archaic
peoples had buried their own. These villages are, in effect, becoming Uveks,
dead cities, but without the archaic depth. In contrasting these two spaces,
what Pil’niak reveals about the current state of the Russian nation is that it
is gradually becoming a mass, open grave. In the terms Jensen provides, for
example, we might consider the transverse comparison of Uvek and other
sites of warfare as a syntagmatic extension of Uvek outward throughout the
steppe, where the story of the dead city preigures those continually being
repeated. In so doing, Pil’niak, perhaps unwittingly, ironizes Chaadaev’s
“First Philosophical Letter” to bleak effect, while also recapitulating Zabelin’s sense of the “martial essence of the steppe”: revolutionary Russia
is more nomadic than other archaic nomads because during the time of the
Civil War, it is both the agent and the victim of plunder. As the narrator recounts, “The Reds and the Whites had been in the village of Staryi Kurdyum
several times each, whole side streets lie burnt and plundered” (153/151).
In view of all of this destruction, the character Natal’ia perceives the
events of the Revolution as a fairytale: “Natal’ia understood: the wormwood,
its bitter, fairytale smell, like the smell of the living and dead water, is the
Anderson. Imagined Communities. P. 24, fn 34. Anderson further reines this point in
later pages of Imagined Communities, when he posits that print made possible “wholly
new ideas of simultaneity,” after which “communities of the type ‘horizontal-secular,
transverse time’ become possible” (P. 37).
42
249
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
smell not only of these July days, but so smell all of our days.” Smell, in the
sequence, is both a mnemonic and a transformer of historical phenomena
into paradigms:
Look around, a fairytale is in Russia now. People are creating
fairytales, the people are creating the Revolution, and the Revolution
has begun as a fairytale. Isn’t hunger like a fairytale, isn’t death? Are
cities dying like they would in fairytales, departing for the eighteenth
century? Look around – it’s all a fairytalе. It smells like wormwood
bеcause it’s a fairytale. (98/99)
It is this account of the Revolution that furthers our sense that the characters are pulled between a variety of chronotopes, wavering between a historical and mythological account of the Revolution. Even a characters such as
Baudek and Natal’ia may feel the pull towards mythological thought, they
evince an awareness of historicity itself. As such, the excavation sequence
indicates how the work operates with multiple chronotopes, perceived by
various characters, and which are all equally available and embodied. That
is to say that Pil’niak offers here an inversion of the Bakhtinian framework,
inasmuch as the panchronic vision he adopts at this moment of the Revolution are various chronotopes elaborated along geographic space.
It is in this light that we can now turn to the second emblem of the “MarLoop-Station.” Like the transverse comparisons that enabled Baudek’s
comparison of the excavation scene with events occurring simultaneously
elsewhere, the train sequence furthers the shift already evidenced in this
section toward the topographical, rather than the stratiied temporality of
Uvek. This turn toward the horizontal, in light of igures such as Bakhtin and
Anderson, might suggest that we will also ind the restoration of historicity,
but as Pil’niak coordinates it, modern movement through the steppe entails
the continual encounter with the vestiges of nomads.
“Mar-Loop Station”: The Burial Mound and Modernist Topography
Toward the end of the Uvek sequence, Natal’ia, through whose perspective that whole sequence was told, asks: “A people without a history – For
where is the history of the Russian nation?” (Narod bez istorii – ibo gde
istoriia Russkogo naroda?) (96/97). What prompts the question is the sight
of two peasants and a child, all wearing bast sandals, starving, pitiable, louse
ridden, but whom she identiies as embodiments of “the Russian nation.”
And then Natal’ia recalls: “The very station, where she met them for the
irst time, was called ‘Mar-Loop Station’” (97/98). Three signiicant ele250
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ments are here – the archaeological, in the form of the kurgan (for which
mar is a synonym); modernity, in the form of the train; “the Russian nation,” in the form of peasants wearing bast sandals – and their conjunction
gives rise to the desire to locate the history of Russia. What is it about this
conjunction of the stations of modern mobility and the vestiges of archaic
mobility that compel this desire for the historical, and how is “the Russian
nation” triangulated between the archaic, on the one hand, and the modern,
on the other?
“Mar-Loop Station” recurs at several points within Naked Year, and testiies to the way that Pil’niak sought to lace the work with patterns requiring
the reader to compare those various appearances in order to delineate their
signiicance. After serving as the setting for Natal’ia’s search for Russian
history, its most signiicant appearance is during one of the most famous
sequences in the work, the train ride of “Mixed train no. 57” through the
steppe. It is also one of the work’s most gruesome, registering the privations
suffered by the dispersed populations of the provinces as they lee encroaching armies or suffer the consequences of the Civil War: “Mixed Train no. 57
crawls along the black steppe. People, human feet, arms, heads, stomachs,
spines, a human cargo” (145/144). Pil’niak’s fragmentary style practically
dismembers the human igure into its constituent parts, just as they seem
to devolve as the passage continues, as though they were not traveling in a
train, but a mobile abattoir. As Gary Browning observes of the sequence,
“one inds the most intensive negation of humanity – of man’s capability
to govern himself, to provide for his basic needs, and to establish a climate
proper for love and children.”43 This “human cargo” is at once bound to
modernity, and a product of it: their complete privation causes them to lose
the rudiments of civilization, and so they are zoomorphized as they learn to
sleep like livestock: “The people journey for weeks. All these people have
long since lost the distinction between night and day, between ilth and
cleanliness, and had learned to sleep sitting, standing, hanging” (145/144).
The train is a symbol of industrial modernity, but insofar as it is crisscrossed by peoples for millennia, the question is what the possible relationship between these two forms of mobility might be:
Mar-Loop Station, at which trains never stop and where they
don’t change the signaling rod, disappears at once in the darkness. All
around is emptiness and steppe. The station agent wаlks past the mar:
the steppe kurgan is deathly and silent, – who, when, which nomads
43
Browning. Boris Pil’niak. P. 121.
251
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
raised it here, and what does it protect? – the withered feather grass
rustles at the kurgan (143/143).
Why would a station agent at a train station ponder the kurgan and its
provenance? The reemergence of the kurgan in this late section of Naked
Year marks the reemergence of the archaeological theme in the work, but
unlike the excavation, archaeology is here distributed horizontally across
space, and registers the intermingling of various temporalities along a horizontal axis throughout the steppe. The cumulative effect of this sequence
is to reveal how a persistent awareness of the archaeological dimensions of
the steppe generates a concomitant awareness to the archaic precedent of
mobility, one that Pil’niak uses to transform the Civil War into the repetition
of this paradigm of steppe violence.
“Mar” is a curious word, with its own etymological tale of supersession and the disappearance of nomads. According to Dal’, mar was used
primarily in the Southeast, and was synonymous with words such as bugor,
nasyp, prirodnaia sopka, and kurgan.44 The etymologist Fasmer, moreover,
indicates that mar was used by the Mordva, a Finno-Ugric people, for their
“burial mounds.” We ind, for example, in Ballod, descriptions of a variety
of mary: “White Mound” (Belyi mar), which locals called, “Van’ka Kain”;
or the “Stone Mound” (Kamennyi mar), which was also known as “Grishka
Rasstrizhka.”45 Given how Pil’niak uses it in the passage (“the station
agent walks past the mar: the steppe kurgan is deathly and silent”), he irst
highlights the locale toponym of “mar” and then provides a translation of
the term. Beyond accuracy, the etymological history of the word forms a
parallel story to what we have seen in the excavation scene, descending
into etymological rather than archaeological origins. One of the cryptic
features of the sequence is that Pil’niak eventually focuses on the Mordva,
but leaves for investigation the etymological story that underpins the selection of the term mar: shortly after the passage, the duty man says: “Asia.
Not a country, but Asia. The Tatars, Mordva, Poverty. Not a country, but
Asia” (145).
These minute details stand on the opposite end of Pil’niak’s other descriptive mode throughout his description of the steppe, which views the
scene from two angles. The irst is the station in close-up, and then it shuttles
out into a panoramic view onto the entirety of the steppe: “Night moves
over the steppe. Stately swishes the sward of the mown grass. At the burial
44
45
V. I. Dal’. Tolkovyi slovar’ zhivogo velikorusskogo iazyka. S.v. “mar.”
Ballod. Privolzhskie “Pompei.” P. 112.
252
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
mound [mara] the feather grass rings. The microscopic station ‘Mar-Loop
Station’ is not seen” (145/144). In this mode, he recapitulates some of the
standard commonplaces by which the steppe has been construed in Russian
cultural mythology. As Harsha Ram has observed, “horizontality lacks the
grandeur of height and the authoritative vision that height affords; it awakens
instead a fear of boundlessness, or, at the very least, the duller anxiety of
monotony. In the most extreme case of Bely’s symbolist novel Petersburg,
the horizontal axis contracts to a ‘point’ where center and periphery collide
and intermingle.”46 We ind Pil’niak registering this sense of the steppe
explicitly when the train has stopped at the station: “Steppe. Emptiness.
Boundlessness. Darkness. Cold” (148/146). One challenge the kurgan poses
to this pervasive sense of horizontality, however, is that it offers many such
points, forming an archaic network within the space of the steppe, which
Pil’niak uses to conjoin not center and periphery as would Bely, but the
archaic and the modern.
Pil’niak partially reveals the signiicance of the conjunction of the archaic
site of the kurgan – the site where nomadic mobility comes to an end in the
form of a monument to the dead – with the loop station, when he writes,
Behind the loop-station in the steppe lies the kurgan after which the
loop-station is named. Once a man had been killed near the kurgan,
and on the gravestone somebody etched out in clumsy letters:
“I was what you are –
But you will be what I am.”
The boundless steppe, the burial mound, are all buried under snow,
and of the inscription on the gravestone only two words remain.
“I was....” (154/154)
Here, the kurgan is compounded by another grave, whose inscription
transforms the entire scene into a hyperbolized memento mori, which indicates that everything is bound to endless repetition. The Mar-Loop Station,
in this sense, forms a perfect, if grim emblem for the various oppositions
within the work, inasmuch as it contains the modern, which is afiliated
with trains and the West, and the archaic, which is afiliated here with the
mar and the East. To be at the the loop station is to be bounded within the
two conditions that have so long structured Russian cultural history, the
East and the West, the archaic and the modern, two untenable, and crushing
paradigms, which leaves Russia in the hyphenated middle ground between
them. Pil’niak does gesture to a way out: the inscription is being covered by
46
Ram. The Imperial Sublime. Pp. 231-32.
253
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
snow: “The boundless steppe, the burial mound, are all buried under snow,
and of the inscription on the gravestone only two words remain. I was.”
Perhaps the snow, which is a metaphor for the elemental forces associated
with the revolution, will form a new ield upon which things can be inscribed
all over again: another tabula rasa. Since the snow has not entirely erased the
inscription, however, it leaves legible a sign of the past, while symbolically
leaving the future indeterminate.
What this inal emblem suggests is that Pil’niak, like his modernist forerunners such as Blok, sought a way out of time and space that would steer
between the archaic Asia and the modern West, that would take place upon
a tabula rasa. Over the course of the 1920s, however, archaeology will serve
Pil’niak as a way to continue this powerful myth of renewal.47 He writes
in a letter of June 16, 1927, about his plans for another story, which would
be called “A German History”: “I am thinking about a new tale, about the
steppe, about the desert, about a lost kurgan (poteriannom kurgane) and
about how some pioneer-colonizers (pionery-kolonizatory) dig a well and
stumble upon the skull of a Sarmatian.”48 The problem is that as the ground
is readied for the future, the chances increase that some deep shock of the
archaic will be unearthed. What is indicated already in Naked Year, and
what will continue throughout his writing of the 1920s, is the impossibility
of achieving the tabula rasa, since at any moment a reminder might emerge
that one is always located in a space riven by time.
One reason Naked Year warrants sustained attention is Pil’niak’s keen
attention to the multiple temporalities he perceived as simultaneously existing in the present; a variegation of time and space to which he sought to
give aesthetic form. Pil’niak was by no means the only igure to be interested in this particular conjunction of themes. Therefore, to indicate other
trajectories that the archaeology of nomadism could take at the beginning
of the twentieth century, I want to conclude with just one example from the
vast literature that Russian writers and thinkers produced on the Scythians.
We ind the Scythian and the kurgan enshrined in the overall development
At this stage of his career, Pil’niak will not explore this proximity between archaeological practice and industrial modernity to the degree that he will do so later in the decade, as,
for example, in The Volga Falls into the Caspian Sea (Volga vpadaet v kaspisskoe more,
1930), which some critics consider his capitulation to the regime, and the irst production
novel of the irst ive-year plans. This conjunction of archaeology and modernization in
the early Soviet period is the focus of my article, “Area of Deformation: Dziga Vertov
and Salvage Archaeology” (Under Review).
48
Letter of 16 June 1927 to O. S. Shcherbinovskaia // Pis’ma II. P. 324.
47
254
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
of Russian art in Grabar’s The History of Russian Art (Istoriia russkago
iskusstva), from volume 5, which was written by N. N. Vrangel:
For two and half thousand years the Scythians, Kherson masters,
Genoese visitors, Germans, Italians, Dutch, and French all vying with
each other brought their treasures to the history of Russian culture
and the relections of their creations have come to us from ancient to
modern times. The kurgany of southern Russia, the Crimea, Georgia,
Novgorod, Kiev, Rostov, Vladimir and Moscow preserve the monuments of the beauty of the past. The mixture (smes’) of various cultures
gave in the end a new worldview, a new beauty. Artistic traditions were
inherited from the Greek colonies from the banks of the Black Sea to
Kiev, from Persia to eastern Russia, from the depths of Central Asia
to Siberia and to the banks of the Dunai.49
How different this view from that of Chaadaev: “We belong to none of
the great families of mankind, we are neither of the West nor the East, and
we possess the traditions of neither.” Rather than an orphaned culture, or
one bound between that slim margin of the “Mar-Loop Station,” Russia is
imagined here as a syncretic one, who is heir to the various traditions that
left their traces (to borrow from Chaadaev’s terminology, but obviously
against his spirit) and who could fashion these artifacts and inluences into
a “new worldview, a new beauty.” The respective views of Chaadaev and
Vrangel chart the basic poles by which the same terrain was evaluated, with
one representing the most agonized assessment, and predominated by the
metaphor of orphanage, and the other the most optimistically syncretic, predominated by Russia as an heir or even a home. What is eminently notable
about the Istoriia is that it uniies the vast temporal and spatial extensions of
Russia’s imperial geography into a history underpinned by aesthetic values
and temporal continuity. Russia, in this view, is a repository of untouched
riches and home to a variety of peoples, not a series of endless hordes and
yokes that laid waste to the country. This vision effectively transforms the
prevailing conception of the Russian landscape as a barren waste – “Steppe.
Emptiness. Boundlessness. Darkness. Cold” (148/146) – and marks the
concomitant promotion of a range of artifacts of different provenance and
of varying degrees of prestige to a shared rank in an aesthetic hierarchy that
generates some curious bedfellows: the pagan Scythians and their kurgans
can now be as esteemed in the same breath, and in the same history, as Orthodoxy and its churches, and the peoples from the depths of Central Asia.
49
I. Е. Grabar’ (Ed.). Istoriia russkago iskusstva. Moscow, 1910–1914. V. 5.
255
Michael Kunichika, “The Scythians Were Here....”
SUMMARY
In 1919, the archaeologist F. V. Ballod arrives at Uvek, a former city of
the Golden Horde, where he conducts excavations of the site and inds artifacts of various peoples located within it. A few days later, the writer Boris
Pil’niak also arrives at Uvek, having heard about the excavations, and inds
there a model by which to think through the aftermath of the Revolution.
Taking this conjunction of archaeological excavation and modernist literary
experiment as its departure point, this article considers how archaeology
serves as a conceptual and aesthetic resource for Pil’niak’s account of the
aftermath and promise of the Revolution in his Naked Year (Golyi god, 1922).
Focusing on Pil’niak’s representation of the Uvek excavation and on the
recurrent igure of the kurgan, or burial mound, Michael Kunichika proposes
to read these episodes as structured by two descriptive modes – modernist stratigraphy and topography – which enable Pil’niak to coordinate the
encounter between the deep past and the present day. This close proximity
of the archaic and the modern in Naked Year indicates the work’s ascription
to the steppe landscape of a spatiotemporal structure far more complex than
the commonplace of the steppe as a proverbial void. This structure of the
landscape is made legible by Pil’niak’s attendance to archaeology generally
and to the archaeology of nomadism in particular. It is this juxtaposition
between the deep past and the contemporary situation of Revolution that is
central to understanding one of the work’s central questions, namely, “where
is the history of the Russian nation?
Резюме
В 1919 г. археолог Ф. В. Баллод прибывает в Увек, древний золотоордынский город, начинает его раскопки и находит ценные артефакты,
относящиеся к проживавшим там разным народам. Несколькими днями
позже писатель Борис Пильняк, узнав про раскопки, также приезжает
в Увек и обнаруживает там модель, с помощью которой пытается осмыслить постреволюционную жизнь. Отталкиваясь от наложения археологических раскопок и модернистского литературного эксперимента,
автор рассматривает археологию как концептуальный и эстетический
ресурс, который Пильняк использует в описании послереволюционного
времени и ожиданий, рожденных революцией, в “Голом годе” (1922).
Майкл Куничика сосредотачивается на репрезентации раскопок Увека и
символизме кургана в тексте Пильняка и предлагает интерпретировать
эти сюжеты как структурированные двумя описательными модусами –
256
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
модернистской стратиграфией и топографией, с помощью которых
Пильняк координирует отношения между глубокой древностью и
сегодняшним днем. Близость архаического и современного в “Голом
годе” и обращение Пильняка к археологии кочевников позволяет Куничике говорить о том, что Пильняк приписывал степному ландшафту
гораздо более сложную пространственно-временную структуру, нежели
привычный образ степи как пустоты. Именно противопоставление
глубокой древности и революционного настоящего принципиально для
понимания главного вопроса “Голого года”: где проявляется “история
русской нации”?
257
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Алексей ПОПОВ
“МЫ ИЩЕМ ТО, ЧЕГО НЕ ТЕРЯЛИ”:
СОВЕТСКИЕ “ДИКАРИ”
В ПОИСКАХ МЕСТА ПОД СОЛНЦЕМ*
Солнце светит ярким светом
Над Москвою и вокруг.
Почему же люди летом
Отправляются на юг?1
В советских конституциях 1936 и 1977 гг. утверждалось, что “граждане СССР имеют право на отдых”.2 Под этой достаточно размытой
формулировкой понимались все возможные циклы отдыха/рекреации
*
Автор благодарит Сергея Ушакина и анонимных рецензентов Ab Imperio за ценные
замечания и рекомендации, позволившие значительно улучшить текст и определить приоритетные вопросы дальнейшего исследования темы. Часть материалов
для публикации была собрана благодаря поддержке Gerda Henkel Stiftung. Также
хочется поблагодарить Алексея Голубева и Людмилу Кузнецову, без помощи которых появление данной статьи было бы невозможно.
1
Куплет из песни “В Подмосковье водятся лещи” (муз. В. Шаинского, слова
Э. Успенского, мультфильм “Старуха Шапокляк”, 1974).
2
Ст. 119 Конституции СССР 1936 г. и ст. 41 Конституции СССР 1977 г.
261
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
(от лат. recreatio – “восстановление”): ежедневный (после рабочего
дня), еженедельный (после рабочей недели), ежегодный (очередной
оплачиваемый отпуск) и даже жизненный (пенсия). Ежегодный отпуск,
продолжительность которого не могла быть меньше 14 дней, имел для
советского человека особое значение. И дело здесь было не только
в физиологическом и психологическом восстановлении организма.
Располагая фиксированным количеством свободных от работы дней,
а также определенным запасом денежных средств (отпускные + накопления), человек получал реальную возможность быть мобильным:
навестить престарелую бабушку в вологодском селе, повидать закадычного друга детства в Киеве, махнуть по путевке в многодневный
тур по ленинским местам. Кстати, текст “брежневской” конституции
(1977) прямо указывал на то, что одним из инструментов реализации
права на отдых является развитие в стране массового туризма. Правда,
отдых не означал получение человеком аванса экзистенциальной
свободы. В советских реалиях он должен был быть таким же общественно полезным и организованным, как и ударный труд на благо
страны. Особенно если это касалось отдыха по санаторно-курортным
или туристическим путевкам.
Однако в период “оттепели” зарождается, а в период “застоя”
получает массовое распространение феномен неорганизованной рекреационной мобильности, действующие лица которой получили название “дикари”.3 На рубеже 1950–1960-х гг. это понятие стало широко
использоваться по отношению к тем советским гражданам, которые
путешествовали и/или отдыхали на курортах самостоятельно, без
путевок каких-либо организаций. Так, на страницах “Литературной
газеты” от 28 мая 1966 г. констатировалось:
Слово это (дикарь. – А.П.) настолько вошло в обиход, что его
уже можно употреблять без кавычек. А вошло оно в моду потому,
что дикари – наиболее многочисленная из категорий отдыхающих,
выбирающих маршрут по своему вкусу.4
Первые известные нам упоминания слова “дикари” в данном контексте относятся
к 1956 г., когда в журнале “Крокодил” (№ 18) был опубликован фельетон “Записки
дикаря” – об отдыхе без путевки на Кавказских Минеральных Водах, а советский
писатель и драматург Сергей Владимирович Михалков завершил работу над комедийно-лирической пьесой “Дикари”.
4
Цит. по: Н. Б. Лебина. Энциклопедия банальностей: Советская повседневность:
Контуры, символы, знаки. Санкт-Петербург, 2006. С. 126. Иногда “дикарей” называли также “индусами” (сокращение от “индивидуально устраивающийся”).
3
262
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Популярность “дикого” туризма росла очень быстро. В СССР на
протяжении 1960–1980-х гг. неорганизованным способом ежегодно
путешествовали десятки миллионов людей, что дало основание современникам говорить о “рекреационном буме” и “рекреационном
взрыве”.5 Неорганизованные формы рекреационной мобильности в той
или иной степени проявлялись на всей территории Советского Союза,
но нами будет охарактеризовано самое популярное, магистральное
направление летней миграции “дикарей” – направление “на юг”.6
Фактологической основой для исследования преимущественно стали
материалы Крыма, поскольку именно Крыму еще с 1920-х гг. принадлежал статус “всесоюзной здравницы”, а в 1960-е гг. добавился еще
один значимый титул – “рай для дикарей”. “Все хотят в рай. А рай – это
Крым”, – с известной долей сарказма вынужден был констатировать
автор одного из фельетонов на страницах журнала “Крокодил”.7 И это
оценочное суждение подтверждали данные проведенного в 1975 г. всесоюзного социологического исследования. Самым популярным среди
граждан СССР вариантом ответа о желаемом способе проведения летнего отпуска (21% респондентов) оказалось проведение его именно в
Крыму, а вторым по популярности направлением (16 % респондентов)
было названо Черноморское побережье Кавказа.8
Чем же манил юг советских людей послевоенной эпохи? Кто и почему отдыхал “диким” способом на юге в поздний советский период?
Как выстраивались отношения “дикарей” с жителями черноморских
курортов и органами власти? Попытке ответить на эти вопросы посвящено данное исследование.
На данный момент наиболее подробно тема массового приморского туризма в
СССР (в основном на материалах Черноморского побережья Кавказа) представлена
в работе: Christian Noack. Coping with the Tourist. Planned and “Wild” Mass Tourism on
the Soviet Black Sea Coast // Anne Gorsuch, Diane Koenker (Eds.). Turizm: The Russian
and East European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism. Ithaca, 2006. Pp. 281-304.
6
Подробно о “построении” Юга как дискурсивного конструкта в европейской
гуманитаристике см.: Einleitung // Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Martina Winkler (Hrsg.).
Der Süden. Neue Perspektiven auf eine europäische Geschichtsregion. Frankfurt am
Main. 2007. S. 7-20.
7
В. Митин. К северо-востоку от рая // Крокодил. 1968. № 18. С. 13.
8
В. И. Переведенцев. Путешествие с путевкой. Летний отдых в зеркале социологии // Литературная газета. 1977. 20 июля.
5
263
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Летняя миграция на юг: масштабы и причины
Один из зарубежных друзей Советского Союза, датский писатель
Мартин Андерсен-Нексе, после своего посещения Крыма писал,
что “весь полуостров обрамлен голыми, коричневыми, как терракот,
телами”.9 Этот, безусловно, гиперболизированный образ из года в год
все более приближался к истине. В период “развитого социализма”
Крым, население которого составляло около 2 млн человек, ежегодно
посещало до 7–8 млн туристов и рекреантов. Увеличение количества
туристов и рекреантов в Крыму с 1958 по 1988 г. почти в 12 раз (на
других приморских курортах СССР наблюдалась сходная динамика) и
дало основание современникам говорить о “рекреационном взрыве”.
Причем не менее 75% от общего количества отдыхавших здесь советских граждан были именно “дикарями” (табл. 1).
Таблица 1. Динамика численности рекреантов, посетивших Крым в советский
период, млн чел. (%)10
Отдыхавшие 1928 1958 1960
Организованно
Неорганизованно
Всего отдыхавших
0,09
0,4
0,46
82% 57% 38%
0,02
0,3
0,74
18% 43% 62%
0,11
0,7
1,2
100% 100% 100%
Годы
1970 1980
1,2
1,5
24% 21%
3,8
5,7
76% 79%
5,0
7,2
100% 100%
1985
1,6
23%
5,4
77%
7,0
100%
1987
2,0
25%
5,9
75%
7,9
100%
1988
2,1
25%
6,2
75%
8,3
100%
Что же заставляло миллионы людей проводить бесценные недели
ежегодного отпуска на юге, выбирая преимущественно неорганизованный формат отдыха? Советские авторы объясняли причину
“рекреационного бума” прежде всего социально-экономическими,
отчасти социокультурными факторами. Статистика тех лет показывала
позитивную картину увеличения количества свободного времени у
населения при одновременном улучшении уровня его материального
благосостояния, а неуклонный рост культурно-образовательного уровня
Л. И. Горьков. Вписано рукой Ильича // Дворцы здоровья – трудящимся. Симферополь, 1970. С. 20.
10
Курортно-рекреационное хозяйство Крыма: сезонность, занятость населения:
Информационный материал. Симферополь, 1990. С. 13.
9
264
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
советских граждан должен был способствовать формированию у них
потребности в познании родной страны.11
В исследованиях постсоветского периода обращается внимание
на некоторые дополнительные факторы, оказавшие влияние на рост
масштабов неорганизованного отдыха в 1960–1980-е гг. Один из
факторов – это увеличение на руках у населения денежной массы при
весьма ограниченных возможностях ее использования. Если в 1960 г.
размеры денежных вкладов в сберегательных кассах СССР составляли
10,9 млрд рублей, то в 1985 г. – уже 220,8 млрд рублей.12 В советских
реалиях были чрезвычайно ограничены возможности людей инвестировать свои сбережения в развитие собственного бизнеса, покупку
недвижимости. Потратить накопленные средства на приобретение
автомобиля, мебели, бытовой техники также было проблематично по
причине дефицита этих товаров, а возможности совершать туристские
поездки за границу были существенно ограничены. В итоге свои накопления советские граждане либо “откладывали на сберкнижку”
(отсюда более чем 20-кратное увеличение размеров вкладов), либо
тратили на отдых и путешествия по стране (что и стало финансовым
фундаментом для “рекреационного бума”).13 Причем право на отдых реализовывалось преимущественно в неорганизованной форме,
поскольку путевки на популярные курорты также были в дефиците
и зачастую доставались по льготной цене работникам с невысоким
уровнем дохода, в то время как более высокооплачиваемые сотрудники
уходили из профкома ни с чем.14
В обеспечении рекреационной мобильности “дикарей” важную
роль играло наличие личного автотранспорта, поэтому рост количества легковых автомобилей, находившихся в собственности граждан
СССР, также имел большое значение в контексте рассматриваемой
темы. Например, за 15 лет количество легковых автомобилей, нахоВ. И. Азар. Отдых трудящихся СССР. Москва, 1972. С. 6-12.
Народное хозяйство СССР в 1960 году: Стат. ежегодник. Москва, 1961. С. 854;
Народное хозяйство СССР в 1985 году: Стат. ежегодник. Москва, 1986. С. 448.
13
С. І. Попович. Соціально-економічні передумови розвитку туризму в України
та розширення його інфраструктури в 60-х – першій половині 80-х рр. // З історії
вітчизняного туризму: Зб. наук. статей. Київ, 1997. С. 115-118.
14
В одном из изданий 1980-х гг. приводится характерный рассказ женщины, приехавший отдыхать без путевки в Ялту: “…в нашей организации если и бывает
профсоюзная путевка, то всего одна в год, и ее всегда отдают уборщице, как малооплачиваемой. Остальные устраиваются, кто как может”, см.: С. Суханова. Ялта:
город чудный, город бедный. Симферополь, 1989. С. 15.
11
12
265
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
дившихся в собственности советских граждан, увеличилось в 7,5 раза.
Если в 1970 г. этот показатель составлял шесть автомашин на 1000
человек, то в 1985 г. – уже 45 автомашин на 1000 человек.15 Среди западных авторов на проблему взаимосвязи между “автомобилизацией”
населения СССР и ростом “дикого” туризма впервые обратил внимание Льюис Сигельбаум (Lewis Siegelbaum).16 Не случайно практически
одновременно с новым рекреационным значением слова “дикарь” в
русский язык вошли такие новообразования, как “автотуризм”, “автотурист” и “автостоп”.17
Существовала еще одна причина, лежавшая в социально-психологической плоскости. Неорганизованная рекреация предоставляла
возможность не только выбирать время, направление, продолжительность поездки на юг, но и отдыхать в том круге лиц, который участники
вояжа считали оптимальным. В частности “дикий” способ рекреации
мог обеспечить весьма редкую для граждан СССР возможность семейного отдыха и туризма, потому что в Советском Союзе профсоюзная путевка обычно предоставлялась лишь одному из членов семьи.
Внутренние правила большинства санаториев и турбаз долгое время
вообще не предусматривали размещения здесь детей, а семейные пары
если и принимались, то без гарантии получения отдельного номера.
Удивительно, но только в 1972 г. в СССР появились первые дома отдыха и пансионаты для родителей с детьми.18 В последующие годы
их количество постоянно росло, но не могло удовлетворить огромный
спрос на семейный отдых. Советский демограф и публицист Виктор
Переведенцев так характеризовал данную проблему:
Большинство из нас – об этом говорят социологические исследования – желает отдыхать семейно. Многие едут на море (а это
самый популярный сейчас вид отдыха) ради ребенка, его здоровья.
Для некоторых семей совместный отдых чуть ли не единственная
возможность относительно продолжительной нормальной семейной жизни: для тех, например, кто работает на Севере, а семья
живет “на материке”…
Народное хозяйство СССР в 1985 году: Стат. ежегодник. Москва, 1986. С. 446.
Lewis Siegelbaum. Cars for Comrades: The Life of the Soviet Automobile. Ithaca,
NY. 2008. Pp. 228-229.
17
Новые слова и значения: Словарь-справочник по материалам прессы и литературы
60-х годов. Москва, 1971. С. 34-35, 157-158.
18
Подробнее о семейном отдыхе в СССР послевоенного периода см.: Diane Koenker.
Whose Right to Rest? Contesting the Family Vacation in the Postwar Soviet Union //
Comparative Studies in Society and History. 2009. Vol. 51. No. 2. Pp. 401-425.
15
16
266
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Между тем возможности организованного семейного отдыха
незначительны. Недостаток мест для отдыха семьей – самое узкое
место всей системы нашего организованного отдыха.19
Однако уже на этапе своего зарождения движение советских “дикарей”, ставшее реальной альтернативой организованному (плановому, путевочному) отдыху, приобрело и некоторую идейную основу.
Экзистенциальную сущность “дикого” туризма отдельные его адепты
выразили чрезвычайно емкой по своему содержанию фразой, якобы сказанной неким “палаточным мудрецом”: “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”.
Это выражение стало и неофициальным девизом участников полевых
экспедиций советских геологов и археологов, которые действительно
искали залежи полезных ископаемых или оставленные предыдущими
поколениями артефакты.20 Но именно в случае с туристами эти “искания” обретали не утилитарный, а мировоззренческий, по-настоящему
философский смысл.
Зигмунт Бауман (Zygmunt Bauman) в своей работе “От паломника
к туристу” достаточно подробно охарактеризовал архетипы “человека путешествующего” в их исторической динамике. В частности он
концептуально разграничил образы Бродяги и Туриста, которые могут
быть использованы и при анализе ценностных установок “дикарей”:
Подобно бродяге, турист находится в движении. Подобно бродяге, он всюду вхож, но нигде не свой. Однако между ними есть
некоторые весьма существенные отличия.
Во-первых, у бродяги равновесие между “толкает” и “манит”
достигается сильным перекосом в сторону “толкает”, а у туриста
центр тяжести смещен к “манит”. Туристом движет цель (или, по
крайней мере, он(а) так думает). Он(а) двигается прежде всего
“для” и только потом (если вообще) “по причине”.21
Используя терминологию Баумана можно утверждать, что человека в путешествие обычно “толкает” нечто, связанное с его основным
местом жительства и привычным образом жизни, то, что в начале поездки он склонен оценивать негативно и чем готов, хотя бы временно,
В. И. Переведенцев. На курорт – с женой и сыном // Литературная газета. 1977.
28 декабря.
20
“Мы ищем то, что не теряли. / Бывает – изредка – найдем”. См. Борис Эфрос.
Держись, геолог! [1980-е] // Б. Д. Эфрос. Мы ищем то, что не теряли... Стихи разных лет. Апатиты, 2007. С. 7.
21
З. Бауман. От паломника к туристу // http://sj.obliq.ru/article/198 [сохраненная
копия]. Дата обращения – 10 мая 2012 г.
19
267
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
пожертвовать. Даже в “причесанных” советских текстах тяга на юг
связывалась с попыткой бегства от негативного воздействия антропогенной среды большого города, желанием избавиться от рутинного
быта и профессиональных обязанностей, стремлением изменить и
расширить сложившийся круг общения.
Поездка в Крым пробуждает надежды: обещает исцеление
недугов, радость общения с новыми людьми, соприкосновение
с красотой природы. Благодатный климат, жажда новых впечатлений влекут сюда миллионы людей. Отдых от обыденности…
необходимый в наш век постоянных стрессов и преследующего
человека однообразия – здесь (в Крыму. – А.П.) кажется обеспеченным в полной мере.22
А главной “манящей” категорией, устойчиво ассоциирующейся с
югом, являлась свобода, возможность по собственному усмотрению
распоряжаться своим временем, телом и мыслями. Не случайно сюжет советского фильма “Будьте моим мужем” (1981, режиссер Алла
Сурикова) начинается с диалога: “На море еду, нервишки подлечить.
– Дикарем?.. – Что ты! Свободным человеком”.
Однако почему объектом для отпускного эскапизма чаще всего
становился именно Крым или Черноморское побережье Кавказа? На
наш взгляд, во многом это было обусловлено особым статусом юга
на ментальной карте русского/советского человека, который был обозначен задолго до начала “рекреационного бума” в СССР. Например,
еще классик поэзии Серебряного века Игорь Северянин стал автором
стихотворения “Тяга на юг” (1929). В нем поэт говорит о неотрефлексированном стремлении в далекий край, который не только отличается
природно-климатическим своеобразием (здесь “ласковей воздух и ярче
волна”), но и способствует погружению путешественника в особое
экзистенциальное состояние “грёз без предела и чувств без оков”.
Однако рубеж 1950–1960-х гг. стал переломным в том смысле, что
экономическое развитие и социальная политика в СССР впервые позволили миллионам людей практически воплотить в жизнь мечту о
путешествии на юг, реально совершить то, что раньше было возможно
преимущественно на уровне воображения, метафор и символов. В
известной книге Петра Вайля и Александра Гениса “60-е. Мир советского человека” говорится о том, что для поколения “шестидесятников” было характерно чрезвычайно сильное, хотя и недостаточно
22
А. Опочинская. Невзгоды старой Ялты // Архитектура СССР. 1989. № 1. С. 102.
268
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
рационально обоснованное стремление к совершению миграций по
территории страны. Целью преодоления иногда весьма значительных
расстояний была романтика, которая в большой степени стала синонимом слова “свобода”.23 При этом имела место романтика труда и
подвига, вектор которой был ориентирован на восток – по направлению
к расположенным за Уралом ударным стройкам. Этот вектор нес в себе
более выраженное коллективистское начало и во многом основывался
на традициях “великих строек” эпохи первых пятилеток. Однако все
большее влияние обретает романтика отдыха и свободы, которая по
своей природе была более индивидуалистской (личной, интимной) и
наиболее успешно реализовывалась за пределами места постоянного
проживания. Географически такой романтизированный отдых ассоциировался с югом, сезонно – с летом, символически – с морем.
Достижение глубокого рекреационного эффекта (особенно на
психологически-эмоциональном уровне) основано на трех основных
составляющих: смена окружающей среды; смена привычного вида
деятельности; смена круга общения и/или переход отношений со старыми знакомыми на качественно новый уровень.
Поездка на юг давала хорошую перспективу для решения всех этих
задач:
1. природно-климатические условия побережья Черного моря, как
правило, заметно отличались от тех, что были характерны для
большей части территории СССР;
2. “дикий” отдых у моря предоставлял большие возможности для
самореализации, а также пространство для различных социальных и индивидуальных экспериментов (в идеале максимально
отдаленных от основного вида деятельности отдыхающих).
Например, в фильме “Три плюс два” (1963, режиссер Генрих
Оганесян) доктор физико-математических наук Степан Сундуков
упорно отказывается говорить на темы, связанные с физикой,
с удовольствием заменяя расщепление атома “расщеплением”
только что пойманной морской рыбы. В этом контексте интересно отметить, что большое распространение среди убежденных
“дикарей” получил ренейминг, т.е. присвоение неорганизованным рекреантам разнообразных прозвищ, которые заменяли их
имена в повседневной жизни (что достоверно отражено в том
же фильме “Три плюс два”);
23
П. Вайль, А. Генис. 60-е. Мир советского человека. 2-е изд. Москва, 1998. С. 126.
269
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Илл. 1. “Дикий” отдых у моря как пространство для экспериментов (постановочное
фото 1970-х гг.).
3. как пишет Анна Роткирх, в Советском Союзе летние поездки к
морю предоставляли возможность сбежать от конвенциональной сексуальной морали, выбраться из-под надзора родителей,
супругов или детей. Вдобавок путешествия могли обеспечить
приватное физическое пространство, было ли оно туристской
палаткой, купе поезда или гостиничным номером. В глазах
мужчин и особенно женщин поездки на юг рассматривались
как хороший способ найти нового партнера.24
А. Роткирх. Мужской вопрос: любовь и секс трех поколений в автобиографиях
петербуржцев. Санкт-Петербург, 2011. С. 150-152.
24
270
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Ипостаси советского “дикаря”
Многочисленность и неоднородность ежегодного потока “дикарей”
значительно затрудняла классификацию представителей этого направления рекреационной деятельности. В книге публициста А. Н. Кузнецова
“Дорогами Крыма” (1976) говорилось лишь о трех типах “дикарей”. К
первому типу он относил студентов, стремившихся найти максимально дешевое пристанище в непосредственной близости от моря, в том
числе они могли довольствоваться походной жизнью в палатке. Второй
тип – люди среднего и пожилого возраста, имевшие показания к санаторному лечению, но не доставшие путевки. Приехав в приморские
города Крыма, они останавливались на частной квартире и пытались
приобрести курсовку, дававшую право на получение амбулаторного
лечения в санаториях или курортных поликлиниках. Третий тип –
супружеские пары (или один из родителей) с несовершеннолетними
детьми, которые обычно также размещались в арендованных у местных
жителей помещениях. По наблюдениям А. Н. Кузнецова именно последняя категория “дикарей” на протяжении 1960-х – первой половины
1970-х гг. имела наиболее заметную тенденцию к росту.25
Ниже нами будет предложена авторская модель типологизации неорганизованных отдыхающих Крыма и Черноморского побережья Кавказа,
основанная на сопоставлении двух ключевых параметров: 1) оценочное
отношение самих рекреантов к “дикому” формату отдыха; 2) степень
их мобильности/автономности. Для большей наглядности в качестве
типичных примеров будут использованы киногерои из популярных
советских фильмов 1960–1980-х гг., в которых ярко представлена тема
летнего отдыха у моря без путевки: “Три плюс два”, “Будьте моим
мужем” и “Спортлото 82” (1982, режиссер Леонид Гайдай).
Таблица 2. Типологизация “дикарей”
мобильный “дикаРь” по выбоРу
Бродяга
Пример: Степан Сундуков
(“Три плюс два”)
оСедлый “дикаРь” по выбоРу
Мечтатель
Пример: Вадим
(“Будьте моим мужем”)
мобильный “дикаРь” по пРинуждению
Прагматик
Пример: Павел, жених Татьяны
(“Спортлото 82”)
оСедлый “дикаРь” по пРинуждению
Мученик
Пример: Наталья Костикова
(“Будьте моим мужем”)
25
А. Н. Кузнецов. Дорогами Крыма. Москва, 1976. С. 57.
271
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Итак, по оценочному отношению к неорганизованному формату
рекреации мы выделяем “дикарей по принуждению” и “дикарей по
выбору”. Первых советская система распределения социальных благ
обделила вожделенной путевкой на юг, несмотря на желание ею воспользоваться.26 Для вторых отдых без путевки был осознанным и
самостоятельным выбором, а различные блага цивилизации не всегда
желанным багажом. Именно о таких романтиках, своеобразных “диссидентах от рекреации” советский географ Борис Родоман писал:
“Сколько бы прекрасных гостиниц и приютов мы ни построили… все
равно останутся любители палаток и нехоженых троп”.27
С другой стороны, можно разделить “мобильных дикарей” и
“оседлых дикарей”. Важной особенностью первых было наличие
собственного автомобиля и/или походного снаряжения. Это избавляло
их от жесткой привязки к конкретному месту рекреационной локации.
Определенный набор “номадических предметов”28 (например, палатка,
легкая складная мебель, походный инвентарь для приготовления пищи,
радиоприемник), а также запас продуктов питания долгосрочного хранения позволял им поддерживать достаточно высокую автономность
на протяжении нескольких отпускных недель. Поскольку советская
промышленность чрезвычайно медленно подстраивалась под нужды
автотуристов, то значительное распространение получили самодельные приспособления, облегчавшие походный быт: переносные плиты
различных конструкций, разборные столы и стулья, “бензиновые
самовары” и т.п.29
“Оседлые дикари” добирались до места отдыха без использования
личного автотранспорта. Отсутствие автомобиля затрудняло переИменно вынужденный характер “дикого” туризма подчеркивается в работе об
истории советского туризма канадской исследовательницы Anne Gorsuch. См.:
Anne Gorsuch. All This is Your World: Soviet Tourist at Home and Abroad after Stalin.
New York, 2011. Pp. 33-34.
27
Б. Б. Родоман. Географические проблемы отдыха и туризма // Территориальные
системы производительных сил. Москва, 1971. С. 325-326.
28
Термин французского интеллектуала Жака Аттали (Jacques Attali). См.:
Жак Аттали. Кочевники // http://www.neonomad.kz/styleneonomad/moda/index.
php?ELEMENT_ID=2347.
29
См., напр.: Автолюбители на юге. Походная кухня туриста // За рулем. 1961. №
7. С. 19. Пример приспособления к путешествию самого транспортного средства
в советских реалиях см.: О. Смоляк. Сделай сам. Несколько замечаний о комфорте
и изобретательности советского человека в 1960-е годы // Ab Imperio. 2011. № 4.
С. 251-256.
26
272
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
мещение по рекреационной территории, а также практически лишало
возможности брать с собой на отдых громоздкий походный инвентарь
и продуктовый запас. В результате заметно снижалась степень автономности таких рекреантов, потребность в ночлеге и питании привязывала
их к сервисной инфраструктуре конкретного населенного пункта. В
Крыму неорганизованные отдыхающие размещались в 140 приморских
городах и поселках, причем более 70% из них сознательно выбирали
самые крупные рекреационные центры – Ялту, Евпаторию, Алушту и
Феодосию.30 Быт “оседлых дикарей” в достаточно большом курортном
городе очень колоритно показан в фильме “Будьте моим мужем”, в то
время как кинокартина “Три плюс два” посвящена преимущественно
отдыху “диких” автотуристов.
Характеризуя условные типы неорганизованных рекреантов, следует начать с Бродяги – мобильного “дикаря” по выбору, во многом
похожего на участника самодеятельного туристского движения в СССР.
“Походный туризм” (пешеходный, лыжный, водный, велосипедный)
был широко распространен на всей территории Советского Союза и
не имел выраженной сезонности, как приморский “дикий” отдых.31
Однако Бродягу крымского или, например, алтайского, роднили борода,
песни у костра под гитару, постоянное употребление консервов (когда
каждый прием пищи стандартно начинается с вопроса “В томате или в
масле?”). Примером Бродяги является герой кинокартины “Три плюс
два” Степан Сундуков (“Сундук”, “Доктор”). Именно он, в отличие
от своих спутников, на протяжении всего отпуска/фильма остался
верен “клятве дикаря”: не бриться, не пить и не курить. Бродяга, безусловно, отличался склонностью к натуризму в сочетании с некоторым
аскетизмом. Так, в сценарии пьесы Сергея Михалкова “Дикари” есть
характерный диалог, не вошедший в киноверсию произведения:
– Да! Хорошо все-таки вот так отдыхать в полном отрыве от цивилизованного мира! Отдых так отдых! Давайте, давайте, друзья,
растворимся в природе и оградим себя от всех внешних раздражителей! И по сему случаю предлагаю вообще на время оставить
все разговоры о ресторанах, об удобствах гостиничного бытия...
30
Е. А. Сергеева. К вопросу снижения притока неорганизованных отдыхающих в
приморские города-курорты // Наука и техника в городском хозяйстве. Киев, 1989.
Вып. 70. С. 98.
31
Более подробно о феномене “походного туризма” в позднем СССР см.: Борис
Родоман. Досуг вне государства: самоорганизация походных туристов // http://www.
strana-oz.ru/?numid=27&article=1183.
273
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
– И о женщинах!
– Да. И о них тоже.
– Меня женщины вообще не интересуют. Вы это знаете.32
В образе Павла, жениха Татьяны из фильма “Спортлото 82”, мы
видим Прагматика, который имеет лишь внешнее сходство с Бродягой.
Как и Сундуков, он владеет собственным автомобилем, переносным
примусом, складным столом и стульями. Он тоже остановился на отдых на живописном берегу крымской бухты. Но для него это лишь
вынужденный рациональный выбор той альтернативы летнего отпуска,
которая на данный момент более доступна, а в каком-то смысле еще
и удобная, модная, экономная. Прагматик также обычно не разделяет
аскетизма Бродяги (вспомним, с каким вожделением Павел ожидает
приезда своей невесты Татьяны в лагерь автотуристов).
Характеризуя ипостаси “оседлых дикарей”, сразу следует отметить,
что четко разграничить Мечтателей и Мучеников достаточно сложно.
Ведь после столкновения с суровыми реалиями летнего приморского
города некоторые любители “индивидуально устраиваться” могли резко
поменять свои взгляды. “Предлагали дураку путевку, а я отказался. Домой хочу, к маме!” – вполне искренне сокрушается отдыхающий в шляпе,
обращаясь к главному герою фильма “Будьте моим мужем” Виктору.
Однако на примере Виктора и Натальи из того же фильма мы все же
можем увидеть разницу между Мечтателем и Мучеником. Первый даже
не попытался получить в профкоме путевку к морю, а вторая пыталась,
но безуспешно. Первый во многих случаях философски умиротворен,
а вторая постоянно раздражена. Первый приехал на отдых ради себя, а
вторая – ради оздоровления ребенка. Мечтатель Виктор идет на общественный пляж с надеждой, а Мученица Наталья – с тревогой.
Впрочем, любой шаблон классификации является условным и не
передает всего многообразия жизненных комбинаций, особенно когда
речь идет о многомиллионном племени “дикарей”. Это хорошо видно
на примере молодого офицера КГБ Владимира Путина, который вместе
со своей будущей супругой Людмилой Шкребневой (Путиной) летом
1981 г. отдыхал “дикарем” в Судаке. В книге Олега Блоцкого “Владимир
Путин: дорога к власти” (2002) цитируются воспоминания супруги
С. В. Михалков. Дикари. Водевиль-шутка в трех действиях // http://lib.ru/TALES/
MIHALKOW/dikari.txt. Интересно, что в фильме “Будьте моим мужем” озвучен
своеобразный девиз женского курортного аскетизма, согласно которому дама на
отдыхе должны быть “непокобелима” (в смысле “непоколебима”).
32
274
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
президента Российской Федерации, которая так характеризует будни
отдыхающих без путевки на берегу Черного моря в эпоху “застоя”:
Помню, я там готовила, потому что Владимир Владимирович
напрочь отказывался ходить в столовые общепита. В то время в
магазинах было шаром покати, и продукты приходилось покупать
на рынке, где цены были достаточно высокими. Приходилось
ухитряться, что-то там покупать и не сильно тратиться при этом.
Готовила я на двоих, но время от времени заходили ребята [приятели]. Хозяйка была страшно недовольна, так как обычно комнаты в
квартирах сдавались без права стряпать на кухне... В поездку Владимир Владимирович взял подводное ружье, ласты, маску и матрас.
Море находилось далеко от дома – примерно в получасе ходьбы.33
В данном случае речь однозначно идет об оседлом “дикарстве”,
однако сложно определить, что же побудило будущего президента проводить свой отпуск именно таким способом: невозможность достать
путевку на юг или нежелание отдыхать организованным способом?
Интересно, что Людмила Путина вскользь упоминает еще об одной
совместной поездке в Крым (в Ялту), уже на личном автомобиле. Эта
поездка стала их свадебным путешествием после заключения официального брака летом 1983 г., однако никаких крымских подробностей
этого вояжа, к сожалению, не приводится.34 Данный пример показывает,
что классификация неорганизованных рекреантов может быть затруднена дефицитом информации, особенно касающейся внутренней мотивации к совершению поездки. Тем более что даже у путешествующих
вдвоем близких людей мотивы и оценки отдыха могли существенно
отличаться. Кроме того, мы видим, что одна и та же пара (семья) могла
в разное время практиковать как оседлую, так и мобильную стратегию
“дикого” отдыха, а впоследствии в силу изменения своего социального
статуса вообще отказаться от него.
Говоря о количественном соотношении разных категорий неорганизованных отдыхающих, следует также отметить, что для “дикого” отдыха
на юге в период “позднего социализма” была характерна определенная
эволюция. Как устоявшаяся практика приморский отдых без путевки
занимал существенное место в системе рекреационных ценностей представителей двух советских поколений – поколения “шестидесятников”
и так называемого “позднего советского поколения”, тех, кто родился
Цит. по: http://dobrokhotov.livejournal.com/510436.html?thread=15674084&format
=light [сохраненная копия]. Дата обращения – 15 мая 2012 г.
34
Там же.
33
275
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
между серединой 1950-х и началом 1970-х гг.35 Первое воплощало в
себе социокультурные ценности “оттепели”, а второе – эпохи “застоя”.
Ранние советские “дикари” (“дикари-шестидесятники”), на наш
взгляд, в большей степени были одержимы идеей свободы. Для неорганизованных рекреантов конца 1950-х – первой половины 1960-х гг.
был характерен бόльший романтизм, натуризм, а также несомненная
интеллигентность. Несмотря на попытки некоторых авторов начала
1960-х гг. представить советских “дикарей” как “запоздалых недочеловеков, которые из всего походного снаряжения знают только топор”,36
очень скоро выяснилось, что приверженцами такого отдыха могут
быть успешные, социально активные, высокообразованные люди.37
Автор интернет-публикации о советском “диком” туризме Zverozub
(Игорь Русанов) отмечает, что, в отличие от творческой интеллигенции (писатели, художники, театральные деятели), научно-техническая
интеллигенция в Советском Союзе не имела развитой сети специализированных здравниц, в силу чего вынуждена была реализовывать свое
право на отдых неорганизованным способом. Он также указывает на тот
факт, что многие крымские местности, чрезвычайно популярные среди
первого поколения “дикарей” (район Балаклавы, Симеиза, Алушты,
Нового Света, Феодосии), соседствовали с узкоспециализированными
исследовательскими учреждениями и высокотехнологичными предприятиями. Якобы благодаря этому инженерно-технические работники из
крупных городов СССР получали первичную информацию о местах,
прекрасно приспособленных именно для отдыха без путевок, при
максимально возможной гармонии с природой.38
Поздние советские “дикари”, судя по обработанным нами источникам, в гораздо большей степени являлись “дикарями поневоле”.
Для многих из них, особенно тех, кто путешествовал с семьей, самостоятельное путешествие на юг не было способом дистанцирования
от организованного отдыха. “Дикий” сценарий проведения летнего
отпуска в 1970–1980-е гг. чаще всего являлся альтернативным спосо35
Alexei Yurchak. Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet
Generation. Princeton, 2006. Pp. 31-32.
36
В. Жуков. Впереди еще не один перевал // На суше и на море: Путешествия,
приключения, фантастика. Москва, 1963. С. 109.
37
В этом контексте можно вспомнить профессии главных героев фильма “Три плюс
два”: Вадим – дипломат, Роман – ветеринар, Степан – доктор физико-математических наук, Зоя – артистка цирка, Наталья – киноактриса.
38
Zverozub. Дикий туризм: 40 лет спустя // http://www.zverozub.com/orgforum.
php?show=theme&id=216.
276
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
бом реализации тех рекреационных потребностей, которые не могла
удовлетворить негибкая бюрократизированная система распределения
путевок. По данным социологического исследования, проведенного в
начале 1970-х гг., лишь около 25% отдыхающих имели путевки, хотя
общее число лиц, желающих отдыхать организованно, составляло
примерно 80%.39 Следовательно, число “дикарей по принуждению”
(около 55%) заметно превышало число убежденных адептов неорганизованного отдыха (около 20%). Основная масса представителей
вынужденной неорганизованной рекреации тяготела к курортной
оседлости. Материалы аналитических отчетов 1980-х гг. также подтверждают, что на одного “дикаря” в палатке тогда приходилось 4–5
“дикарей”, размещавшихся в частном секторе.40
В сознании неорганизованных отдыхающих, представлявших “позднее советское поколение”, большое значение имели мода и престиж.
Провести отдых летом на Черном море всей семьей, согласно уже приводившимся выше данным социологических опросов, мечтали более
трети советских граждан. Летняя приморская рекреация стала не только
важным социальным маркером, свидетельствующем о благополучии
среднестатистической советской семьи, но и социально ожидаемым
проявлением заботы о детях (хотя стремление родителей “оздоровить”
детей на юге любой ценой нередко приводило к обратному эффекту).41
Поэтому совокупный общественный спрос на летний отдых у моря
(формируемый законом “демонстративного потребления”) постоянно
возрастал, охватывая более широкие социальные слои и группы, нежели в эпоху “шестидесятников”. Неорганизованный способ рекреации,
который первоначально позиционировался как индивидуально-ориентированный и в какой-то степени даже элитарный, приобрел подлинную
массовость. Несмотря на некоторый флер романтизма, уходивший своими корнями во времена зарождения “дикого” туризма, в 1970–1980-е гг.
он стал гораздо прагматичнее. Теперь, отправляясь летом без путевки
на юг, многие советские люди всего лишь пытались обмануть систему,
самостоятельно обеспечить себя дефицитным и малодоступным в “застойных” реалиях благом. В этом контексте миграции “дикарей” стали
несколько напоминать рейсы пассажиров “колбасных электричек”,
устремлявшихся из провинции в Москву за дефицитными товарами.
Азар. Отдых трудящихся СССР. С. 15-16.
Научные предложения к разработке и реализации ОЦКП “Курорт” на XIII пятилетку. Симферополь, 1989. С. 1.
41
См., напр.: Суханова. Ялта: город чудный, город бедный. С. 7-9.
39
40
277
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Борьба за место под солнцем/тентом: курортные локации и
коммуникации
Зимой шофер-любитель, как правило, маскируется под пешехода, но с наступлением солнечной поры… мчится вперед, преимущественно
к морю. Там он, на манер Робинзона, надеется
освоить пустынный берег. Но берег обитаем, им
уже завладели тысячи таких же представителей
общества любителей солнца.42
По прибытии на юг каждый “дикарь” должен был определиться с более конкретным местом/местами отдыха, при этом обычно
учитывался личный опыт и рекомендации знакомых. “Мобильному
дикарю”, путешествующему на собственном автомобиле, добраться
вместе с вещами до места назначения было, конечно, легче. По некоторым подсчетам на протяжении второй половины 1970–1980-х гг.
в Крым ежегодно прибывало свыше 150 тыс. единиц личного
автотранспорта, перевозивших до 500 тыс. автотуристов,43 однако
на территории полуострова действовало всего несколько автотурбаз
и кемпингов, которые основное внимание уделяли обслуживанию
иностранных автотуристов либо туристов с путевками. В 1970-е гг.
на крымском побережье также существовало 15 специально организованных автостоянок, способных одновременно принять лишь 5 тыс.
автомобилей,44 причем условия пребывания здесь едва ли можно было
назвать комфортными. Вот как описывалась одна такая автостоянка,
расположенная возле Симеиза:
Автостоянка… ограждена проволокой, не спланирована, недостаточно освещения и воды. Под одним краном умываются, моют
посуду и стирают белье. Не отведено место для приготовления
пищи. Имеют место факты, когда приготовление пищи производится на керогазах, примусах или костре непосредственно возле
автомашин.45
Ю. Кривоносов. У самого Черного моря // За рулем. 1968. № 8. С. 33.
См., напр.: В. Костецкий, Г. Кожемяченко. Автотуризм и автосервис // За рулем.
1971. № 2. С. 18.
44
А. Щербаков. Турист на обочине // Крымская правда. 1974. 26 февраля.
45
По декрету Ильича: Курортное строительство в Крыму, 1920–1989: Сб. документов и материалов. Симферополь. 1989. С. 160-161.
42
43
278
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Налицо было несоответствие между спросом на различные услуги
для автотуристов и возможностями их удовлетворения советскими
службами сервиса, что особенно остро ощущалось в летние месяцы.
Даже элементарные солнцезащитные навесы оказывались недоступной
роскошью для “автокочевников”.
Владелец автомобиля в состоянии уплатить за ночлег, за чашку
чая и вкусный обед. Но ночует он чаще всего под стогом соломы
возле дороги… или просто так – в степи, ест всухомятку. Он
бы, конечно, не возражал уплатить за какие-то дополнительные
удобства, даже за тень. Но ни на одной из крымских стоянок вы
не найдете ее.46
В условиях, когда даже самые примитивные автостоянки
могли вместить лишь малую
часть желающих, сотни тысяч
людей вынуждены были самостоятельно искать места для отдыха на берегу моря. Особенно
притягательный для “дикарей”
1960-х гг. участок побережья
от Алушты до Феодосии в поИлл. 2. Автостоянка “дикарей” в Рыбачьем следующие десятилетия уже не
(1978 г.).
мог вместить всех желающих.
В этих условиях росла популярность западного побережья Крымского
полуострова, например участок береговой линии от Сак до Евпатории,
а также окрестности курортного поселка Николаевка. Для защиты от
солнца и дождя автотуристы устанавливали палатки и шатры из брезента, собственными руками мастерили шалаши и навесы. В таких
стихийно возникающих лагерях часто отсутствовало водоснабжение,
туалеты и контейнеры для сбора мусора, не говоря уже о столовых
или магазинах.47 Торговая сеть Крыма обычно оказывалась слабо
подготовленной к сезонному спросу на отдельные группы товаров,
обусловленному наплывом “дикарей”. Например, летом 1969 г. на
страницах газеты “Правда Украины” было опубликовано коллективное
письмо группы туристов, в котором они жаловались на отсутствие в
крымских магазинах продуктов питания, удобных для приготовления
46
47
Л. Шувалов. У самого синего моря // За рулем. 1976. № 5. С. 34.
А. Ляпидевский. Собрался в путь автолюбитель // Турист. 1968. № 5. С. 20.
279
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
в походных условиях (тушенка, рыбные консервы, гречка), а также
веревок, пленки, спортивной одежды и обуви.48
Впрочем, для “дикарей по выбору” отсутствие разлагающего влияния благ оседлой цивилизации могло восприниматься не как недостаток, а как достоинство. Сложнее было обеспечить другую компоненту
подобного формата отдыха – уединение в гармонии с живописной
южной природой. В 1970–1980-е гг. стихийные автостоянки “дикарей”
обычно вмещали сотни и даже тысячи автомобилей, окруженных причудливыми самодельными конструкциями для сна, приготовления и
приема пищи. Там, где позволял рельеф местности (например, вдоль
трассы Саки – Евпатория или в районе так называемого Золотого пляжа
под Феодосией) в пик сезона подобные рекреационные агломерации
растягивались вдоль береговой линии на много километров. На этом
фоне притязания двух микрогрупп “дикарей” начала 1960-х гг. на
уединенный отдых в отдельно стоящей бухте (“Три плюс два”) могут
показаться абсурдными.
В таких хаотично разрастающихся лагерях, переполненных копошащимися, как муравьи, “дикими” автотуристами далеко не всегда
можно было созерцать роскошную субтропическую растительность
или наслаждаться видом живописных Крымских гор. Ведь на западном
побережье Крыма или на Керченском полуострове, где располагалось
огромное количество “мобильных дикарей”, вдоль берега моря часто
можно увидеть лишь достаточно унылый степной ландшафт. В этих
условиях прекрасным было только море, а самым радостным – близость
к нему, ради чего, видимо, и стоило преодолеть тысячи километров
дороги.
Утром проснулся – и ВОТ..! Вместо беленых стен перед глазами, в 10 метрах – МОРЕ. Не надо вставать, одеваться, идти 1020-30 минут до моря. – Оно вот, перед глазами. Лежи и смотри...
Вместо зарядки – искупался. Позавтракал – опять искупался….
А МОРЕ – оно по-прежнему рядом, в двух шагах... Только тогда
пришло ощущение, что ты на МОРЕ, а не в ПОСЕЛКЕ, который
только находится рядом с морем...49
Говоря о времяпрепровождении “мобильных дикарей” нельзя
обойти вниманием тему флирта, секса, любви во время отдыха. Целомудренность советских фильмов про неорганизованный отдых резко
48
49
На то он и турист [коллективное письмо] // Правда Украины. 1969. 22 мая.
Цит. по: http://nl.irtafax.com.ua/2008-08-18-24.html.
280
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
контрастирует с содержанием российского фильма “Дикари” (2006,
режиссер Виктор Шамиров), который с существенными оговорками
можно считать сиквелом советской кинокартины “Три плюс два”. Оголенная женская грудь появляется в кадре через минуту после начала
фильма, слово “трахал” впервые звучит спустя полторы минуты, а непосредственно половой акт демонстрируется уже на 19-й минуте почти
двухчасовой картины. Изображающие “дикарей” актеры старательно
пытаются казаться “пьяными, грязными, бестолковыми тварями”.50
Интересно, что обсуждение этого фильма интернет-сообществом
было достаточно бурным и в основном свелось как раз к субъективной
оценке роли секса, алкоголя и наркотиков во время неорганизованного
отдыха у моря в Крыму. Приведем лишь два характерных комментария:
Для кого-то водка и легкодоступный секс является предметом
счастья… для кого-то – секс втроем со свежей студенткой. … Если
режиссер хотел показать именно это – что ж, ему это удалось. А
прелесть отдыха в палатках, вдали от цивилизации, имеет, на мой
взгляд, две основные составляющие – полное слияние с природой
и встречи с интересными людьми.51
Фильм понравился! Очень! Напомнил наш отдых начала 80-х в
Гурзуфе, Крым. Почти тридцать лет назад... А посмотрел фильм,
как будто вернулся туда, в молодость... Отрывались почти так же.
…Также купались по ночам, справляли дни рождения, танцевали, курили... …Допускаю, что кого-то коробит разговорная речь,
обилие выпитого в фильме, сексуальные сцены... Но ведь это
правда! Без дураков, без ханжества. Ведь именно так и говорили
(или почти так), и пили, и с девчонками кувыркались. Ну, конечно,
не вся молодежь так отдыхала. …Я с удовольствием посмотрел
фильм, побывал в своей молодости, взгрустнулось, что это уже
никогда не повторится.52
Эти полярные комментарии дают основание предположить, что
наличие и интенсивность секса, а также романтические любовные отношения прямо не зависели от формата отдыха. Гораздо большую роль
играла система ценностей, возраст, круг спутников и новых курортных
знакомых – участников путешествий на юг. Одиночная поездка в “край
Вырванная нами из контекста фраза, произнесенная действующим лицом по прозвищу Ай-Яй (Гоша Куценко), который изображается как некий “дикарский гуру”.
51
Цит. по: http://kino.otzyv.ru/opinion.php?id=1400 [сохраненная копия]. Дата обращения – 10 мая 2012 г.
52
Там же.
50
281
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
встреч и разлук” всегда грозила перерасти в курортный роман с более
или менее серьезными последствиями. Сюжеты упомянутых выше
советских фильмов о неорганизованном отдыхе содержат истории
романтической любви, рождающейся на берегу теплого моря, хотя в
реальной жизни пляжно-курортные отношения могли выглядеть намного прозаичнее.53
Если “мобильные дикари” пытались органично вписаться в природный ландшафт, то “оседлые дикари” стремились найти себе комфортное место в антропогенной среде курортного населенного пункта.
Но поскольку рядом находились тысячи и тысячи таких же искателей
“благоустроенной койки” и “места под тентом”, курортные будни превращались для них в нелегкое испытание.
Первым испытанием было так называемое “заселение”, когда неорганизованные рекреанты арендовали место для проживания. Летом
на приморских курортах Крыма и Кавказа всегда наблюдался острый
дефицит пригодных для ночлега койко-мест, что заставляло значительную часть отдыхающих соглашаться на самые спартанские условия, в
противном случае им приходилось ночевать на вокзале или на скамейке
в парке.
Когда я вижу на каменном полу автовокзала (в Ялте. – А.П.)
спящих вповалку людей, которые не смогли устроиться на квартиры, вспоминается кошмарный военный Красноводск, ставший
перевалочной базой в перемещении сотен тысяч эвакуированных
с запада на восток. …И мне непонятно, что заставляет сейчас отпускников обрекать себя и свои семьи на такие муки.54
Ситуацию с плотностью заселения частного сектора курортных
населенных пунктов весьма достоверно передает монолог квартирной
хозяйки тети Клавы (“Спортлото 82”), озабоченной проблемой обустройства прибывшего к ней на отдых племянника Кости: “Комнаты
сданы… Терраска тоже сдана… Во флигилечке небольшая семья живет,
под навесом студентики спят. А летнюю кухню я молодоженам сдала.
Например, жительница Киева Елена вспоминает: “Мой брат, будучи студентом,
очень даже шикарно отдыхал в Крыму… становился на симферопольскую трассу
с ‘трояком’ в кармане и ‘червонцем’ в плавках – на всякий пожарный. В Крыму
находил одинокую добрую повариху с турбазы или из санатория – и в ус себе не
дул аж до августа! Обратную дорогу загоревшему ловеласу любезно оплачивали
временные дамы сердца”. Цит. по: Диана Каминская. “На недельку до второго…”
http://novaya.com.ua/?/articles/2010/07/07/143103-15.
54
Суханова. Ялта: город чудный, город бедный. С. 11-12.
53
282
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Уж очень просились”. В этих условиях иногородний родственник чувствует себя баловнем судьбы, расположившись в переоборудованном
под отдельные апартаменты курятнике. Не случайно среди владельцев приморского жилья очень распространенным стало выражение
“держать отдыхающих”,55 по аналогии с крестьянским “держать кур”,
“держать поросят”.
Воспоминания тех, кто отдыхал на юге без путевки, подтверждают
и дополняют картины курортного расселения, показанные в советском
кинематографе.
Частники просили за койку в фанерном сарайчике рубльполтора в сутки. Летняя кухня, веранда или комната в жилом доме
обходилась в два-три рубля. Некоторым хозяйкам даже удавалось
сдавать душевые на ночь или двор под палатки.56
В 1970-е на юге в сезон сдавались не квартиры… а койки.
Стоимость койки – рубль в сутки. …Цена была твердой на протяжении нескольких десятилетий. … Хозяева переделывали сараи
и летние времянки для курортников, “уплотняли” кур, оборудуя
часть курятника под жилье, ставили кровати на чердаках, в коридорах. Сдавали места под фруктовыми деревьями. И даже стоявшую
посреди двора беседку, увитую плющом, – “проживание” в ней
стоило 50 коп. с человека.57
Хозяева арендуемого жилья были той категорией местного населения, с которой “оседлые дикари” контактировали наиболее активно. В
советское время подавляющее большинство жителей курортных городов владели одним пригодным для проживания объектом недвижимости
(квартирой или частным домом), поэтому сосуществование на одной
территории арендодателей и арендаторов на протяжении нескольких
недель было неизбежным. В фильмах “Будьте моим мужем” и “Спортлото-82” образ хозяйки жилья у моря – колоритный и узнаваемый
образ женщины средних лет, почему-то бездетной, с неопределенным
семейным положением. Она доминировала над постояльцами, которые
часто превосходили ее по социальному статусу и уровню образования. Власть курортной хозяйки основывалась на праве распоряжаться
маневренным фондом принадлежащих ей койко-мест разной степени
комфортности. В привилегированном положении обычно оказывались
Т. Браткова. Город Солнца? // Дружба народов. 1987. № 6. С. 198.
Д. Каминская. “На недельку до второго…”.
57
Курортная арифметика 1970-х // http://narkisgu.livejournal.com/4442.html.
55
56
283
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
постоянные клиенты (Сан Саныч) и родственники (племянник Костя),
а к заведомым аутсайдерам относились, например, одинокие матери
с малолетними детьми (на чем построен сюжет фильма “Будьте моим
мужем”):
Трудно себе представить существо более бесправное, чем “дикарь”, он, по существу, полностью зависит от произвола хозяйки.58
Одни хозяйки не брали постояльцев с малышами (много шума),
другие не пускали молодежь (будут поздно приходить), третьим не
нравились чисто мужские компании (будут выпивать и резаться в преферанс до утра). В самом невыгодном положении оказывался тот, кто
приехал отдыхать один.59
Материалы курортной прессы и анализ воспоминаний тех, кто отдыхал на крымских курортах в 1960–1980-е гг., показывает, что между
хозяевами и арендаторами жилья постоянно велась негласная борьба.
Это было более или менее скрытое противоборство за право мыться
в ванной комнате, готовить на кухне (вспомним случай Людмилы
Путиной), пользоваться хозяйским телевизором, холодильником или
утюгом, громко слушать музыку и т.д.60 Причем в местных крымских
источниках сами сдатчики жилья зачастую изображались как жертвы
и мученики:
Если вы живете в Ялте, вы меня поймете. У меня довольно
хорошая квартира, и в ней три кровати и тахта. Но все лето я сплю
на полу. Просто некуда деваться в собственном доме.
На тахте вдвоем спят мои дети, прежде чем уснуть, они дерутся и брыкаются. А в спальне на наших кроватях, и в кухне, и в
столовой на раскладушках спят родственники и друзья. …Перед
отъездом они берут у меня взаймы деньги, которые я, в свою очередь, тоже у кого-то занимаю, и приглашают, если мне – чем черт
не шутит! – придется когда-нибудь попасть в Караганду, чтобы я
обязательно остановилась у них.61
Когда проблема с поселением была решена, начинались ежесуточные испытания, связанные с удовлетворением насущных социальнофизиологических потребностей отдыхающих, важнейшими из которых
были потребности в еде, морских купаниях, развлечениях. Именно
Браткова. Город Солнца? С. 199.
Курортная арифметика 1970-х // http://narkisgu.livejournal.com/4442.html.
60
См., напр.: Путешествие дилетанта. После обсуждения // Советский Крым. 1987.
4 сентября.
61
С. Суханов. Квартира для курортников // Курортная газета. 1963. 19 мая.
58
59
284
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
многочисленные трудности курортного быта дают основание для обозначения “оседлого дикаря поневоле” использовать слово Мученик.
На ужасной солнечной жаре они подолгу стоят в очередях в
столовые, к почтовым окошечкам, к киоскам с газированной водой,
к билетным кассам. Они ютятся по пять человеко-коек в одной
комнате, едят жесткие шашлыки и вообще терпят всевозможные
лишения ради того, чтобы в оставшиеся от очередей часы лежать
под жгучими прямыми лучами солнца на раскаленных камнях…62
Центральным местом притяжения “оседлых дикарей” был общественный пляж, где концентрация людей была колоссальной. Например,
Массандровский пляж в Ялте при длине 700–800 метров и ширине
около 20 метров за день мог принять до 30 тыс. человек. При норме
5–6 кв.м. на 1 человека в пик сезона на одного посетителя общедоступного пляжа приходилось фактически 0,1 кв.м.63 Чтобы занять
место под солнцем, а еще лучше под тентом, некоторые отдыхающие
приходили на рассвете или же за определенную плату договаривались о
“бронировании” места с обслуживающим персоналом пляжа. Тяжелые
деревянные топчаны, владение которыми считалось верхом комфорта,
тоже были в дефиците, нередко они становились предметом ожесточенных конфликтов и тайных договоренностей.64
Экипировка посетителей пляжей, особенно в 1960-е гг., также оставляла желать лучшего. В 1969 г. спецкор газеты “Правда” так описывал
увиденное им на одном из черноморских пляжей:
Сижу на берегу моря и приглядываюсь к отдыхающим…
Большинство мужчин в этот жаркий день приходит в шерстяных
брюках. Многие прикрывают головы от солнца газетой. Редко
отыщет глаз яркое пятно солнцезащитного зонта. Кто не достал
деревянный топчан, лежит на полотенцах.65
Помимо собственно купания в грязной морской воде огромное
значение имели солнечные процедуры. Однако из-за недостатка мест
под тентами и навесами многие отдыхающие обгорали “до дыма”, а
затем пытались реанимировать кожный покров, натираясь сметаной
или кефиром.
В. Солоухин. Чем отличается лето от зимы? // Крокодил. 1968. № 18. С. 2.
И. Семеняка. Градостроительные тревоги Большой Ялты // Архитектура СССР.
1989. № 1. С. 14.
64
М. Львовски. Ялта-1975: Советский рай с частичными удобствами // Сегодня.
2010. 14 мая.
65
Л. Почивалов. “Дикари” у моря // Правда. 1969. 12 августа.
62
63
285
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Илл. 3. Городской пляж Алушты (1968 г.).
Такой отдых (или даже “отдых”) был особенно утомителен для женщин, приезжающих на юг с детьми. Нередко можно было услышать:
“чтобы отдохнуть неорганизованно, надо иметь хорошее здоровье”.66
Проведенное в 1969 г. на курортах Крыма социологическое исследование показало, что среди “дикарей” женщины составляли 59,9%.
Не состояли в браке 27,8% неорганизованных рекреантов, 14,4% составляли семейные пары без детей, доминировали именно семьи с
детьми – 54,5%.67
Массовый и стихийный наплыв “дикарей” в приморские населенные пункты становился важным источником сезонных доходов
для местных жителей. По некоторым подсчетам, во второй половине
1980-х годов совокупный “теневой” доход хозяев жилья только лишь
в Большой Ялте ежегодно составлял 12–15 млн. руб.68 В то же время
именно под влиянием “дикого” туризма сформировался полускрытый
аборигенный шовинизм:
Ехали к нам профессора, солидные дамы в лисах, – говорили
мне недавно в одном крымском городке, – а теперь?! Кто у нас
Переведенцев. На курорт – с женой и сыном.
Азар. Отдых трудящихся СССР. С. 46.
68
Браткова. Город Солнца? С. 199.
66
67
286
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
только не бывает! Жизни нет от этих “дикарей”. Ни проехать
нормально, ни на пляж сходить!69
Существовало еще одно действующее лицо курортных коммуникаций – отдыхающие с путевками. Приведем цитату из монолога
героя фильма “Три плюс два” Романа Любешкина: “Говорили мне:
Рома, поезжай в санаторий. ВЦСПС, МИД, ВТО, ДДТ, УКАКА…
Пижама в полоску!” Здесь упомянут предмет гардероба, который в
туристском фольклоре являлся ассоциативным символом организованного отдыха по путевкам: традиция выдавать просторные пижамы
всем прибывшим по путевкам лицам мужского пола существовала в
советских санаториях довоенного периода. Впоследствии ироничнопрезрительным прозвищем “пижамники” “дикие” туристы нередко
называли отдыхающих в санаториях и домах отдыха.70 Не останавливаясь подробно на данном вопросе, лишь отметим, что “дикари по
выбору” всегда высокомерно относились к “пижамникам”, в своем
фольклоре изображая их слабохарактерными и недостаточно физически развитыми.71 Что же касается “дикарей по принуждению”, то
они в большей степени завидовали отдыхающим с путевками, мечтая
когда-нибудь влиться в их ряды.
Однако в случае конкретной семьи “водораздел” между организованным и неорганизованным отдыхом зачастую мог быть весьма
условным – имели место случаи смешанной, гибридной формы рекреации. Например, мать с ребенком отдыхала по путевке в пансионате
или профильном санатории, а отец снимал койку в частном секторе
на территории того же курортного населенного пункта. В стремлении
проводить больше времени вместе, члены семьи, разделенные забором
здравницы, обычно нарушали санаторный режим и установленные
правила пребывания.72
В. И. Переведенцев. На птичьих правах // Литературная газета. 1984. 25
апреля.
70
Л. Жуховицкий. Письма из Планерского // Турист. 1976. № 3. С. 21.
71
См., напр., текст туристской песни “Голубая пижама”: http://prielbrusie.narod.ru/
library/trdryzby/index9.html.
72
См., напр., “Лишний” ребенок, или Путевка, деленная на три // Советский Крым.
1987. 1 апреля.
69
287
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
“Дикари” и Система: стратегии взаимодействия
“Оседлая” культура порождает и производит
кочевников, диалектически самоутверждаясь в
противопоставлении им.73
Начиная с 1920 г., после подписания ленинского декрета “Об использовании Крыма для лечения трудящихся”, органы власти всех
уровней постоянно декларировала заботу об отдыхе и оздоровлении
советских людей. Наиболее часто тиражируемым символом “всесоюзной здравницы” послевоенного периода стала ротонда с надписью “Граждане СССР имеют право на отдых”, расположенная на
набережной Алушты. Очевидно, что в советских реалиях эта забота
имела не филантропическую, а прагматическую основу. В условиях
огосударствления экономики СССР одной из задач, стоящих перед
административно-командной системой управления, была организация
эффективного рекреационного восстановления трудовых ресурсов. И
проблема рекреации годового цикла (отдыха во время отпуска) играла
здесь огромную роль, ведь хорошо отдохнувший трудящийся лучше
работал и меньше болел.74 В этих условиях курорты Крыма с начала
существования советской власти рассматривались как неотъемлемый
элемент общесоюзной социально-экономической системы, функционально обозначенный как “фабрика оздоровления”, “кузница здоровья”, “лечебный конвейер”.75 До последних лет существования СССР
на железнодорожном вокзале в Симферополе всех приезжих встречал
актуальный лозунг: “Здоровье каждого – богатство всех!”
Именно для обеспечения организованного отдыха советских граждан, который официально был объявлен “полноценным” и “рациональным”, в благоприятных с природно-климатической точки зрения регионах СССР была создана масштабная система санаторно-курортных и
туристско-рекреационных учреждений (далее СиСКиТуР76). К ней же
с определенными оговорками можно отнести также сеть государственА. В. Дьяков. Человек кочующий: Номадизм как средство от тоталитаризма //
Компаративистский анализ общечеловеческого и национального в философии /
Под ред. А. С. Колесникова. Санкт-Петербург, 2006. С. 46-47.
74
Л. Денисова. Отдых в СССР // Родина. 2007. № 9. С. 125.
75
См. у Маяковского: “Людей ремонт ускоренный / В огромной крымской кузнице”
(Владимир Маяковский, “Крым”, 1927).
76
Авторство аббревиатуры принадлежит Сергею Ушакину.
73
288
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
ных предприятий сферы обслуживания, которые в период курортного
сезона активно оказывали различные бытовые услуги приезжим (от
гостиниц и столовых до общественных бань и экскурсионных бюро).
Илл. 4. Ротонда на набережной Алушты (1970-е гг.).
Если в 1960 г. емкость санаторно-курортных учреждений Крыма составляла около 43 тыс. мест, то к 1970 г. эта цифра достигла 100 тыс. мест,
в 1980 г. – более 171 тыс. мест.77 Однако даже при таком динамичном
росте СиСКиТуР не могла, как уже говорилось выше, удовлетворить
всех желающих организованно отдохнуть на берегу Черного моря в
летний период. Ведь в июле-августе на территории Крымского полуострова одновременно находилось около 1,2 млн отдыхающих из других
регионов страны.78 Именно на неравномерность спроса на рекреацию
обычно списывались все проблемы в функционировании СиСКиТуР.
Подавляющее большинство населения желает отдыхать…
только летом. Подавляющее большинство семейных – только
семьей. Большинство – только на морских берегах. Выполнить
все эти условия, как правило, не удается.79
Трудовые ресурсы курортов Крыма и их использование: Справочно-аналитический обзор. Симферополь, 1983. С. 27.
78
Научные предложения к разработке и реализации ОЦКП “Курорт”. С. 1.
79
В. Переведенцев. В отпуск с рюкзаком // Смена. 1984. № 21. С. 6.
77
289
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Символическое указание на несостоятельность СиСКиТуР мы можем наблюдать в советских художественных фильмах о неорганизованном отдыхе, снятых в 1980-е гг. В отличие от кадров документальной
хроники, мы не видим монументальных лозунгов о праве на отдых и
общественной значимости здоровья каждого. Их заменяют самодельные таблички из кусков фанеры или картона, на которых помещены
одинаковые по содержанию, но различающиеся по интонации надписи:
скупо информирующие (“Мест нет”), полуграмотные (“Мест нету”),
притворно вежливые (“Извините, мест нет”, “Очень жаль, но МЕСТ
НЕТ”). Для “общества тотального дефицита” такой визуальный ряд
был привычен и естествен.
При этом “оседлые дикари” доставляли СиСКиТуР не меньше
проблем, чем “мобильные дикари”. Последние игнорировали ценности системы на идейно-мировоззренческом уровне, однако меньше
требовали от нее удовлетворения своих материальных потребностей,
во многих случаях идя по пути самообслуживания. “Оседлые дикари”
предъявляли к СиСКиТуР именно материальные притязания в части
качественного сервиса и бесперебойного снабжения. Когда же эти
ожидания не оправдывались, их разочарование также могло иметь
идеологические последствия.
Проблема неудовлетворенного спроса на организованный отдых в
Советском Союзе неожиданно приобрела международное значение.
Зарубежные издания время от времени помещали материалы о “диком” отдыхе в СССР, сопровождая их фотографиями переполненных
черноморских пляжей. Интерес к этой теме во многом был вызван
конъюнктурой “холодной войны”. Подробно описывая злоключения
“дикарей”, западные журналисты иллюстрировали несостоятельность
взятых советской властью обязательств по обеспечению своим гражданам права на достойный отдых.80 Иностранные туристы, посещавшие
курортно-рекреационные регионы страны, также становились свидетелями очевидных острых проблем неорганизованного отдыха. Так,
в информационном письме “Интуриста” за 1982 г. сообщалось, что
туристка из Великобритании выразила удивление тем обстоятельством,
80
Вот лишь отдельные примеры, взятые из немецкоязычной западной прессы 1970–
1980-х гг.: Kampf um den Platz an der Sonne. In der Sowjetunion wächst die Zahl der
“wilden Urlauber” // Handelsblatt. 1978. 23 Februar; Rudolph Chimelli. Familien können
nur als “Wilde” kommen. Massenerholung an der Krim-Riviera // Süddeutsche Zeitung.
1979. 30 Juni; Elie Siegl. Der sozialistische Alltag ist immer dabei. Wie Sowjetbürger
in Sotschi auf der Krim Urlaub machen (müssen) // Frankfurter Rundschau. 1984. 7 Juli.
290
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
что “в Ялте существуют трущобы”: “Квартиры не имеют удобств – воду
берут из колонок во дворах. Район перенаселен, люди живут на верандах, в пристройках”, – так она описала свои впечатления о прогулке
по одной из ялтинских улиц.81
Таким образом, неорганизованные туризм и рекреация представляли
для СиСКиТуР определенную проблему, для решения которой использовалось несколько разных стратегий. Разумеется, желание ликвидировать “дикарей” как рекреационный класс или “перевоспитать” их не
занимало в деятельности советских функционеров такое же большое
место, как борьба с нетрудовыми доходами, идолопоклонством перед
Западом или, например, бытовым алкоголизмом. Рекреационный фронт
идеологической борьбы не был основным, и, наверное, именно поэтому
нам не удалось обнаружить каких-либо решений общесоюзного или
республиканского уровня, прямо указывающих на вредность и недопустимость неорганизованной рекреации. Однако на местном крымском
уровне, мы можем увидеть примеры реализации временных мер, даже
претендовавших на долгосрочность программ, явно направленных
против тех, кто отдыхал “диким” способом.
Административно-командная (агрессивная) стратегия сводилась к
попытке ограничения свободы передвижения отдыхающих и туристов
без путевок. На заре становления массового неорганизованного отдыха
в стране среди его приверженцев периодически возникали слухи о том,
что доступ на территорию Крыма для “дикарей” в скором времени
будет административно ограничен. В 1968 г. фельетонист “Крокодила”
рассказал об этом читателям журнала в достаточно неожиданной “библейской” интерпретации: “…все время муссируется кошмарный слух:
Чонгарский мост якобы перекрыт, и два милиционера у врат рая, Петр
и Павел, звеня ключами, сортируют отпускные души на праведников
с путевками и грешников без таковых”.82
Следует отметить, что эти слухи имели документальную базу. В
частности, сохранился документ с красноречивым названием “Предложения по ограничению въезда в Крым неорганизованных туристов”,
который был составлен в ноябре 1970 г. Крымским областным советом
по туризму и экскурсиям и адресован партийному руководству области.
Составители документа, в частности, предлагали:
81
Государственный архив в Автономной Республике Крым (ГААРК). Ф. П-1. Оп.
4. Д. 2527. Л. 52.
82
В. Митин. К северо-востоку от рая. С. 13.
291
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
•
разрешить въезд в Крым только тех туристов, которые имеют
путевки на всесоюзные туристские маршруты;
• автотуристам и отдыхающим самостоятельно без путевок разрешить въезд только после получения вызова-разрешения на
пребывание в Крыму;
• разрешить въезд в Крым самодеятельным туристам по въездным
учетным карточкам, исходя из наличия мест и возможностей
их приема на турбазах.83
Есть и другие свидетельства того, что местные власти курортных
населенных пунктов периодически возвращались к идее о том, что отдыхающие и туристы должны попадать сюда лишь при наличии соответствующего документа (вызов, путевка, пропуск, талон).84 Особенно
эффективной оказывалась периодически используемая в 1970–1980-е гг.
схема запрета на въезд в курортные населенные пункты иногороднего
автотранспорта. Подобные запреты чаще всего применялись именно в
местах, наиболее популярных на заре развития советского автотуризма
(район Большой Ялты, Новый Свет).85 Практика показала, что свободу
передвижения “автокочевника” можно достаточно эффективно ограничивать с помощью шлагбаумов и запрещающих знаков, мобильных
патрулей ГАИ и сезонных пропускных пунктов.
Ассимиляционная (воспитательная) стратегия. Как для тоталитарной, так и для авторитарной системы нежелательно любое отклонение
от нормы, нарушение установленных стандартов. В 1960-х гг. только
еще зарождающийся “дикий” туризм воспринимался властью как некая
довольно безобидная “рекреационная девиация”, в основном сводимая
к внешней непохожести на традиционный образ отдыхающего, вальяжно фланирующего по набережной в легких летних брюках. И во многих
приморских населенных пунктах была начата резонансная кампания,
направленная против тех пионеров курортной демократизации, которые
осмеливались посещать общественные места в шортах. Занимательная хроника борьбы за введение дресс-кода на крымских набережных
приведена в произведении Василия Аксенова “Таинственная страсть.
Роман о шестидесятниках” (2007).
Сезон 1966 года был довольно накаленным по части шортов.
Всех прибывающих сурово оповещали: на набережной никаких
шортов, только бруки. Только лонги, что ли? – злился московский
ГААРК. Ф. Р-3512. Оп. 1. Д. 299. Л. 33.
В. И. Переведенцев. На птичьих правах.
85
См., напр. С. Ворушилина. У заставы // За рулем. 1978. № 12. С. 27.
83
84
292
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
народ. Вот именно, как положено. Таково решение поселкового
совета, принятое в свете решения Феодосийского горкома. Всякий,
кто выйдет с пляжа не как положено, будет осужден за вызывающую форму одежды и весь отпуск проведет на исправительных
работах с метлой.86
Однако эта абсурдная кампания имела тот же результат, что и попытки отучить несознательных советских людей от ношения джинсовых
брюк или от увлечения западной музыкой.
Впоследствии попытки ассимиляции “дикарей”, их постепенное
приближение к общекурортной норме (под которой понимался организованный отдых по путевкам) стали прагматичнее. В курортных
местах появились специализированные институции, функционально
предназначенные именно для упорядочения отдыха “оседлых дикарей”.
Во-первых, это были квартирно-посреднические бюро (КПБ), которые
по официально утвержденным ставкам сдавали отдыхающим предварительно законтрактованное у местного населения жилье. Однако в тех
курортных населенных пунктах, где действовали КПБ, регистрацию в
них проходило не более 20–30% приезжих,87 что оставляло огромные
возможности для “теневого” рынка сдачи жилья. Во-вторых, существовали хозрасчетные курортные поликлиники, которые могли обслужить
некоторую часть неорганизованных рекреантов, нуждающихся в профильном лечении или оздоровительных процедурах. В-третьих, следует
упомянуть так называемые курсовки – продаваемые за наличный расчет
“недопутевки”, которые давали “дикарю” право пройти на базе санатория только курс лечения, без предоставления других услуг.88 Впрочем,
в летнее время приобрести курсовку было почти так же сложно, как и
полноценную путевку.
Инновационная (структурно-системная) стратегия. В 1970-е гг.
советские ученые сделали так и не реализовавшийся впоследствии
прогноз, согласно которому к 2000 г. число туристов и рекреантов в
Крыму должно было достигнуть 16–20 млн. Причем предполагалось,
что большинство их (98%) будет охвачено именно организованными
формами отдыха, а удельный вес “дикого” туризма будет доведен до
ничтожных 2%.89
86
В. Аксенов. Таинственная страсть. Роман о шестидесятниках // http://knizhnik.
org/page/vasilij-aksenov-tainstvennaja-strast-roman-o-shestidesjatnikah/2.html.
87
Трудовые ресурсы курортов Крыма. С. 152-153.
88
С. С. Северинов. В Крым на отдых: Справочник. Симферополь, 1988. С. 114.
89
См., напр.: Я. К. Трушиньш. Перспективы формирования Крымской объединенной рекреационной системы // Строительство и архитектура. 1976. № 6. С. 11-12.
293
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
Решение этой сверхсложной задачи связывалась с реализацией
концепции Крымской объединенной рекреационной системы (КОРС).
Создание КОРС должно было обеспечить наивысшую пропускную способность туристско-рекреационного комплекса Крыма с достижением
максимально возможного рекреационного эффекта, а также сгладить
территориальные и сезонные диспропорции, характерные для миграции
рекреантов.90 Руководителем научно-исследовательской группы, которая занималась разработкой концепции КОРС, являлся архитектор Якаб
Карлович Трушиньш. Он предложил принципиально новое для того
времени решение, по которому гигантские туристско-рекреационные
комплексы должны были быть построены не на береговой линии, а в
глубинных районах Крымского полуострова (окрестности Симферополя, Бахчисарая, Белогорска, Старого Крыма). Именно здесь планировалось разместить миллионы туристов и отдыхающих с путевками, их
тягу к морю предполагалось реализовывать за счет кратковременных
выездов на пляжи по принципу организованной “маятниковой” миграции с использованием скоростного транспорта.91
В инновационной схеме развития курортного Крыма “дикий” туризм
и рекреация практически не были предусмотрены. Некоторое время
работавший в команде разработчиков КОРС крымский географ Игорь
Русанов вспоминает:
В КрымНИИпроекте и в целом в рекреационной географии
и планировании отдыха и туризма господствовал административно-командный стиль. Курс был на 100%-ное оздоровление
по путевкам, борьбу с дикарями и сугубо научно-обоснованное
нормирование. Померили тебе давление, пульс и анализы, нарисовали путевку, и будь добр оздоравливайся по режиму, а потом
покажи прирост производительности труда и напряженности социалистических обязательств.92
Действительно, знакомясь с научными публикациями 1970–80-х гг.
мы видим стремление авторов концепции КОРС не только “привязать”
подавляющее большинство туристов к определенному рекреационному объекту, но и разработать типичные программы (сценарии)
Там же. С. 11.
Н. Петров, М. Соколов, Я. Трушиньш. Организация глубинных рекреационный
комплексов в Крыму // Архитектура СССР. 1976. № 5. С. 26.
92
И. Русанов. Дерево целей формирования территориальной системы кратковременного отдыха населения Симферополя // http://www.zverozub.com/index.
php?r=54&a=452&l=1.
90
91
294
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
времяпрепровождения на отдыхе в зависимости от возраста и других
социально-демографических характеристик.93 Теоретиками была даже
предложена специальная единица измерения рекреационного эффекта
от отдыха – “рекреон”. Однако концепция КОРС оказалась слишком революционной для своего времени и не была реализована даже частично.
* * *
Призрак “дикого” туризма сопутствовал летним миграциям советских людей на юг со времен “оттепели”, когда неорганизованная рекреация впервые стала заметным социокультурным фактом. Появление
советских “дикарей”, в том числе на черноморских пляжах, являлось
одним из следствий постсталинской либерализации советского общества. “Дикари-шестидесятники” зарекомендовали себя как “диссиденты
от рекреации”: они осознанно отдали приоритет походной палатке, а
не санаторной койке, предпочли морские купания до изнеможения и
ночные бдения у костра размеренной жизни по распорядку дня, установленному администрацией здравницы. Во всяком случае именно
таких “дикарей”, романтиков отдыха ради свободы, мы видим в популярном советском фильме “Три плюс два”.
Однако со временем, когда ежегодное количество неорганизованных рекреантов в одном лишь Крыму превысило 5–7 млн человек,
стала очевидной их пестрота и неоднородность. Помимо “дикарей по
выбору” появилась и постоянно увеличивалась категория “дикарей поневоле”, тех, кто был равнодушен к номадическому антуражу и тяготел
к антропогенной среде курортных населенных пунктов. Для многих
неорганизованных рекреантов, принадлежавших к “позднему советскому поколению”, летние поездки на юг без путевки были в большей
степени связаны с “демонстративным потреблением” и преодолением
острого дефицита путевок (особенно предназначенных для отдыха всей
семьей). Мать с несовершеннолетним ребенком, похожая на Наталью
из фильма “Будьте моим мужем”, стала главным действующим лицом
“дикого” туризма на юге в 1970–1980-е гг.
Массовое желание граждан СССР отдохнуть у моря, реализуемое в
основном неорганизованным способом, в определенной степени привело
к девальвации рекреационной ценности черноморских курортов. Сотни
тысяч “мобильных дикарей” на личных автомобилях создали колоссальную нагрузку на наиболее привлекательные участки морского побережья,
93
Петров, Соколов, Трушиньш. Организация глубинных рекреационный комплексов в Крыму. С. 26.
295
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
а миллионы “оседлых дикарей” заполонили курортные города, своим
скоплением в пик сезона доставляя массу неудобств таким же, как они,
любителям солнца и моря. В результате, помимо дефицита койко-мест
в частном секторе и отсутствия так называемых товаров курортного
спроса в местных магазинах, возник и дефицит моря (в виде невозможности найти место на общественном пляже для себя или площадки для
установки палатки на “диком” пляже). Свобода, романтика, релаксация
в гармонии с южной природой также оказались в остром дефиците.
Массовость движения “дикарей” усложняла и их отношения с другими действующими лицами курортной коммуникации, в первую очередь
с местными жителями. Отношение местных к неорганизованным рекреантам зачастую стало напоминать знаменитое московское “понаехали
тут”, мол, “Ялта не резиновая!”. Эти настроения, несколько десятилетий
проявлявшиеся лишь на бытовом уровне, в годы “перестройки” стали
высказываться открыто. “Все не могут жить в Москве. Все не могут
проводить отпуск в Ялте”, – рассуждала в 1980-е гг. на страницах своей
книги ялтинская публицистка Светлана Суханова.94 Очень популярной
среди местного населения стала идея ценового регулирования потоков
неорганизованных отдыхающих. В первую очередь она исходила от
ялтинцев, ведь они считали свой город курортной столицей Советского
Союза. Поэтому именно Ялта, по их мнению, должна была принимать
самую состоятельную публику. А менее платежеспособным “дикарям”
следовало выбирать более демократичные курорты либо осваивать
курортную целину на берегах Азовского моря.95
Возникнув как альтернатива отдыху по путевкам, неорганизованная
рекреация противоречила патерналистскому представлению советской
власти о “правильном” отдыхе (rational recreation). Многомиллионное
племя “дикарей” с трудом поддавалось учету и контролю, было непредсказуемо в своем движении (“spontaneity of movement” у Льюиса
Сигельбаума).96 Благодаря этим свойствам оно постоянно испытывало
СиСКиТуР на устойчивость, стало для нее вызовом и испытанием. В
отличие от самоорганизуемой на рыночных принципах западной “индустрии гостеприимства”, плановая и централизованная СиСКиТуР не
была готова к удовлетворению того огромного количества запросов,
которое в разгар сезона ежеминутно и ежесекундно генерировалось
Суханова. Ялта: город чудный, город бедный. С. 129.
См., напр.: Сергеева. К вопросу снижения притока неорганизованных отдыхающих. С. 100; Суханова. Ялта: город чудный, город бедный. С. 12.
96
Siegelbaum. Cars for Comrades. P. 229.
94
95
296
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
неорганизованными рекреантами. Соответственно у миллионов добравшихся “через тернии к морю” людей формировалось критическое
отношение к тезису о неустанной заботе государства о простом советском человеке. Это была война за качественный курортный сервис,
которая велась без четкой линии фронта. Ведь определить траекторию
перемещений и все возможные потребности путешествующего без
путевки человека было чрезвычайно сложно. Данная ситуация очень
напоминала конфликт двух миров, разных систем ценностей, описанных в работе Зигмунта Баумана “От паломника к туристу”:
В бродяге пугала его кажущаяся свобода передвижения, а
следовательно, свобода от тенет некогда сосредоточенной на местах власти. Но самое ужасное, что передвижение бродяги было
непредсказуемым: в отличие от паломника, у бродяги нет пункта
назначения. Вы не знаете, куда он двинется дальше, потому что он
сам этого не знает, да и не хочет знать... В любом месте он может
сделать привал, но он никогда не знает, надолго ли задержится…97
Подобный характер противостояния, когда война без установленных
правил и четко обозначенной линии фронта приводила к беспомощности сильнейших государств перед лицом кочевников, описывают
также французские интеллектуалы Жиль Делёз и Феликс Гваттари в
своем “Трактате о номадологии” (1980).98
Впрочем, несмотря на все противоречия, неорганизованное рекреационное движение “дикарей” успешно пережило Советский Союз и
по-прежнему остается самым распространенным форматом летнего
отдыха в Крыму. Так, по официальным данным за 2010 г. в Автономной
Республике Крым отдохнуло 5,72 млн человек, из них организованно –
всего лишь 1,16 млн (20,28 %), а неорганизованно – 4,56 млн (79,72 %).99
И это несмотря на появление отечественной “индустрии гостеприимства”, ликвидацию перманентного дефицита путевок и системных
препятствий для отдыха всей семьей. Следовательно, в притягательной
романтике “дикого” юга все-таки есть что-то устойчивое и глубокое.
То, что ежегодно заставляет миллионы людей стремиться к морю. То,
что нельзя потерять, но можно попытаться найти.
Бауман. От паломника к туристу.
Ж. Делёз, Ф. Гваттари. Трактат о номадологии // http://www.situation.ru/app/j_
art_1022.htm.
99
Программа развития и реформирования рекреационного комплекса Автономной Республики Крым на 2012-2013 годы // http://crimea.gov.ua/programmarazvitiya-2012-2013.
97
98
297
А. Попов, “Мы ищем то, чего не теряли”: советские “дикари”
SUMMARY
The article analyzes the “wild tourism” in the post-1950s’ Soviet Union as
a cultural, lifestyle, and economic phenomenon. It scrutinizes the social, economic, and psychological reasons for the spread of “wild” vacations at Soviet
resorts. Individual accounts and oficial documents are analyzed together
with popular Soviet ilms such as 3+2, Be My Husband, and Sportlotto-82.
The author studies infrastructural policies in the Crimea that emerged in
response to the growing tourist and vacation boom, on the one hand, and
values, aspirations, and strategies of accommodation and communication of
different groups of “wild” travelers to popular Soviet resorts, on the other.
The article also deals with the oficial Soviet ideological discourse of care
and control of the population, and offers information on different oficial
strategies directed at decreasing the number of uncontrolled “wild tourists.”
The metaphor of nomadism provides a general framework for discussing
the multifaceted phenomenon of Soviet “wild tourism.”
298
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Aimar VENTSEL
ENTRAPPING HISTORY IN SPACE:
ON TUUNDRA AND ITS MASTERS*
On a sunny day in late summer 2000, I was taking a short walk in the
tundra with my host Vassili Kyltashov, the brigadier of the 3rd reindeer brigade of Il’ia Spiridonov MUP (Municipal Unitary Enterprise [munitsipal’noe
unitarnoe predpriiatie]). We were looking for sick reindeer calves left behind
as the herd moved on. After walking for some time, we ascended a hill where
I saw an object that one often sees in the tundra. It was a huge log lying on
the ground, surrounded by small sticks stuck into the earth. I asked Vassili
what this was. “This is an arctic fox trap (paas),” he explained. He went to
the log, lifted it and quickly demonstrated how the trap worked. The main
principle of the paas is simple: the sticks form a corridor and when the fox
enters the corridor to get a small piece of meat, the log falls and breaks the
fox’s neck. I asked Vassili about who was hunting with these traps. “Moigo,
the old man from Tiistaakh,” he said. We were not far from the hunting base
of Tiistaakh, it was maybe 7 km away.
“Could you put your traps anywhere you want?” was my next question.
“No, the land where your traps stay is yours. No one else can put their traps
here! And no one can touch your traps!” answered Vassili. This example
*
This research was supported by the European Union through the European Regional
Development Fund (Centre of Excellence in Cultural Theory; CECT) and the Max Planck
Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle (Saale), Germany. I am also very grateful to Serguei Oushakine, Brian Donahue, and the anonymous reviewer for their valuable comments.
299
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
Fig. 1. A reindeer herder cleans his fellow hunter’s polar fox trap from grass. Photo by
the author.
contains the principal elements of land entitlement as understood among
the native people of Anabar. The hunting territory of Spiridon Ivanovich
Tuprin, also known as Moigo, is his “possession” (vladenie in Russ.). He
is the master (khoziain) of these lands and has the moral legitimacy to hunt
there. The borders of his lands are ixed and marked. This tie to a particular
area organizes social relationships between people and gives certain people
the power to decide who has access to local resources and who does not.
The focus of this article is the institution of the “master” (khoziain in
Russian, and kus’aain in Dolgan1), how such land entitlement is established,
and the basic features of “moral possession” of the land. The legitimacy of
the institution of the “master” is embodied in narratives and meanings that
make his presence visible in his hunting territory – family stories, the history
of material objects, and place names. Moreover, beside immaterial symbols
like toponyms, some of the narratives are concrete artifacts such as ancestors’ graves and trap lines that symbolize the presence of a strong family. In
the context of this article, the narrative is a set of symbols that gives people
“authority over the local resources.”2 One feature of the narrative is that the
E. I. Ubriatova. Iazyk norilskikh dolgan. Novosibirsk, 1985. P. 35.
Anja Nygren. Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production: Nature-based Conlicts in Rio San Juan, Nicaragua // Development and Change. 2000. Vol. 31. Pp. 807-830, 828.
1
2
300
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
narrative contains symbols3 that actively construct realities4 or help people to
express and transmit these realities.5 Narrative is often studied as the way in
which people make sense of their environment.6 I approach the narrative as
a set of symbols used to construct and maintain social relations.7 Elements
of the narrative can be seen as subplots, not unlike in Hayden Whyte’s idea
of “emplotment,” where a particular fact makes sense only in relation to
other constellations of facts (or “plots”), thereby constituting a historical
narrative.8 In the Dolgan legal framework of landownership, the history and
ownership of arctic fox traps occupy a privileged position.
Traps are powerful tools in the narrative of land. The Dolgan land use
regime is an “entrapment” where the arctic fox trap becomes a “total social
fact”9 that embodies and regulates complex cultural, social, economic, and
legal relationships. The institution of the “master” demonstrates that the
traditions of a nomadic culture are rooted in the perception of land entitlement and that despite being in a state of constant movement, people of the
David Turton. How to Make a Speech in Mursi // Peter Ian Crawford and Jan Ketel
Simonsen (Eds.). Ethnographic Film Aesthetics and Narrative Traditions. Aarhus, 1992.
Pp. 159-175.
4
For example, Jerome Bruner. The Narrative Construction of Reality // Critical Inquiry
1991. No. 18. Pp. 1-18; Idem. Life as Narrative // Social Research: An International
Quarterly. 2004. No. 71. Pp. 691-710.
5
Elliot G. Mishler. Research Interviewing: Context and Narrative. Cambridge, MA, 1991;
Donald E. Polkinghorne. Narrative Knowing and the Human Sciences. Albany, 1988.
6
Minal Hajratwala. Intimate History: Reweaving Diaspora Narratives // Cultural Dynamics. 2007. No. 19. P. 73; Peter Hopkins. “Blue Squares,” “Proper” Muslims and Transnational Networks: Narratives of National and Religious Identities Amongst Young Muslim
Men Living in Scotland // Ethnicities. 2007. No. 7. Pp. 61-81; George Mavrommatis.
The New “Creative” Brick Lane: A Narrative Study of Local Multicultural Encounters //
Ethnicities. 2006. No. 6. Pp. 498-517; Ron Scollon, Suzann Scollon. Narrative, Literacy,
and Face in Interethnic Communication. Norwood, NJ, 1981.
7
Fredric Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative As a Socially Symbolic Act.
London, 1981.
8
Hayden White. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe.
Baltimore, 1973.
9
“These phenomena are at once legal, economic, religious, aesthetic, morphological and
so on. They are legal in that they concern individual and collective rights, organized and
diffuse morality; they may be entirely obligatory, or subject simply to praise or disapproval. They are at once political and domestic, being of interest both to classes and to
clans and families. They are religious; they concern true religion, animism, magic and
diffuse religious mentality. They are economic, for the notions of value, utility, interest,
luxury, wealth, acquisition, accumulation, consumption and liberal and sumptuous expenditure are all present.” Marcel Mauss. The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange
in Archaic Societies. New York, 1990. Pp. 76-77.
3
301
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
Arctic tundra acknowledge the existence of social bonds that determine or
limit access to the region’s resources.
Field Site
My ield region is the Anabarskii district (or Anabar) in the northwest
of the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Far East. This is a small
district of about 40,000 square km, populated by about 4,000 people. My
main ield site was the most northern village of Uurung Khaia,10 which
has about 1,200 inhabitants, mainly Turkic-speaking Dolgans. It is a large
topic of discussion whether the Dolgan language is a dialect of Sakha or
an independent language. I can only add that the languages are extremely
similar, especially the eastern Dolgan spoken in the Anabar district and in
the neighboring eastern part of Krasnoiarsk krai. Dolgan people are traditionally hunters of wild reindeer and arctic foxes, reindeer nomads who still
hunt for their income and subsistence.
Within the territory of the Republic of Sakha, the Anabar region has
historically been dificult for the state institutions to control. From the
seventeenth century onward, nomadic Tungus (who later became known
as Evenki) went to Anabar to avoid paying tax (yasak) or to escape punishment for their rebellion.11 In addition, a group of rebellious Tungus lived in
Anabar, the so-called children of Kokui (Kokuevykh deti), who numbered
thirty adult men in 1643. The head of the clan group (rod), Kokui, was taken
hostage by Russian servicemen in neighboring Olenek, and two of his sons
were taken hostage by other servicemen. But the group continued to resist
paying yasak. The Tungus from Anabar freed their kinsmen and attacked
the Russians in 1644. In 1646 the “children of Kokui” were attacked by
Tungus from Olenek, and were then deported to the south and forced to live
and pay yasak in Olenek.12 Russians established a few outposts in Anabar
The system of transliteration (especially toponyms) I have used in this article is a
combination of my own system, a system applied by Tatiana Argunova-Low (in Scapegoats of Nationalism: Ethnic Conlicts and Silence in Sakha (Yakutiia), Edwin Mellen,
forthcoming) and the Library of Congress (ALA-LC) romanization tables. The aim was
to maintain toponyms in the way they are pronounced by people in the district and not
in the way they are used in Russian maps. Due to Sakha phonology I use umlauts, which
should be pronounced as the umlauts in German.
11
B. O. Dolgikh. O naselenii basseiniv rek Oleneka i Anabara // Sovetskaia etnograiia.
1952. No. 2. Pp. 86-91, P. 83; I. S. Gurvich. Kul’tura senernykh yakutov-olenovodov.
Moscow, 1977. P. 10.
12
B. O. Dolgikh. Rodovyi i plemennyi sostav narodov Sibiri v XVII v. Moscow, 1960.
Pp. 447-449.
10
302
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
and these settlements became bases for the irst collective enterprises or
tovarishchestva after the revolution.13 In this period, the Anabarskii district went down in the history of Sakha as the place where the last battle
with the “white bandits” on the territory of the freshly established Yakut
Autonomous Socialist Soviet Republic (YASSR) took place in February
1931.14 Although the collectivization of the Dolgan people was reported
to be successfully completed in 1938, the eastern fringes were a few years
behind.15 It was only in the 1940s that the tovarishchestva in the Anabar
region were reformed and turned into four collective farms.16 During the
war, many men who had been conscripted into the army escaped into the
northern districts, including Anabar. Tokarev’s remark that in the Arctic
districts the enrollment lists were virtually nonexistent shows that the
Communists were not able to control the population until the end of the
1940s.17 I believe that the tradition of resistance to the state has been one
reason why formal and informal land use regimes existed in the district in
the Soviet era.
Although Dolgans were collectivized into Soviet collective farms (kolkhozy) during the 1940s and 1950s, the radical change in their life occurred
in the 1960s when collective farms were absorbed into the big state farms
(sovkhozy). Part of the state farm policy was to sedentarize people, which
succeeded in the 1980s. Since then, two-thirds of the people now live in
the village and only a small segment of Dolgans of the Anabar district are
professional hunters and reindeer herders, that is, “people of the tundra” or
tundroviki. Nevertheless, hunting as a means of subsistence remains highly
important for all the population and most people from Uurung Khaia regularly spend their time in the tundra during the hunting seasons.
In 1991 the former YASSR declared sovereignty as the Republic of
Sakha. In 1992 the republic passed the law on “clan-based communities”
or rodovaia obshchina, becoming the forerunner of indigenous reorganization in Russia. The obshchina was granted tax freedom and subsidies
and the number of institutions increased to 400 in a few years, only to dry
Aimar Ventsel. Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity: Kinship and Property Relations in
a Siberian Village (Vol. 7. Halle Studies in the Anthropology of Eurasia). Berlin, 2005.
Chapter 2.
14
I. M. Neustroeva (Ed.). 65 let Anabarskomu ulusu. My darim severnoe siianie. Saskylakh, 1995. P. 3.
15
A. A. Popov (Ed.). Kochevaia zhizn’ i tipyzhilishch u dolgan. Vol. XVIII. Moscow, 1952.
16
Neustroeva (Ed.). 65 let Anabarskomu ulusu. P. 4.
17
P. N. Tokarev. Istoriia voennogo komissariata RS(Ia).Vol. 1. Yakutsk, 2000. P. 211.
13
303
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
up in the second half of the 1990s.18 My research shows that despite the
fact that the obshchina was designed to revitalize indigenous cultures and
economy, indigenous people saw the obshchina as formal institutions to
communicate with the state structures and trading organizations.19 This was
the irst time that Western anthropologists were able to conduct ieldwork
in Siberia, and the period witnessed several publications on new forms of
property and changes of land use regime among the indigenous Siberian
people.20 Changes in the land use regime were also studied in Sakha among
ethnic Sakha21 and among indigenous minorities.22 However, very little
anthropological research is conducted in the tundra zone of the republic of
Sakha. The closest work to my research is that conducted by John Ziker,
who demonstrated that on the Taimyr peninsula, new private and collective
enterprises appeared not as a sign of the indigenous revitalization but as a
tool to defend indigenous hunting territories against other Russian hunters,
that is, to formalize exclusive land use rights.23
In the 1990s, the state farm was reorganized according to the municipal
agricultural enterprise Il’ia Spiridonov MUP, but many brigades established
their own hunting or herding enterprises. The “agricultural landscape” of
the district is complex, and includes various enterprises that differ from
18
M. K. Belianskaia. Sovremennye obshchiny evenov Yakutii // Sotsial’no-ekonomicheskoe i kul’turnoe razvitie narodov Severa i Sibirii: Traditsii i sovremennost’ / Pod
red. Z. P. Sokolova. Moscow, 1995. Pp. 119-136.
19
See Ventsel. Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity. Chapter 3. In this chapter, I demonstrate how the people of Anabar reregistered one enterprise several times, moving from
the “peasant farm” via obshchina to the small-scale enterprise, and how the Republic of
Sakha granted tax freedom and subsidies to new forms of enterprises.
20
David G. Anderson. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia: The Number One Reindeer
Brigade. Oxford, 2000; Gail A. Fondahl. Gaining Ground? Evenkis, Land, and Reform
in Southeastern Siberia. Boston, 1998; Idem. Legacies and Territorial Reorganization for
Indigenous Land Claims in Northern Russia // Polar Geography. 1995. No. 19. Pp. 1-21;
Patty A. Gray. The Obshchina in Chukotka: Land, Property and Local Autonomy. Working
Paper No. 29. Halle/Saale, 2001; Florian Stammler. When Reindeer Nomads Meet the
Market: Culture, Property and Globalisation at the End of the Land. Halle/Saale, 2004.
21
Susan Alexandra Crate. Cows, Kin, and Globalization. An Ethnography of Sustainability. Lanham, New York, Toronto, Plymouth UK, 2006.
22
Gail Fondahl, Olga Lazebnik, Greg Poelzer, and Vasily Robbek. Native “Land Claims,”
Russian Style // Canadian Geographer. 2001. Vol. 45. No. 4. Pp. 545-561.
23
John P. Ziker. Peoples of the Tundra. Northern Siberians in the Post-Communist
Transition. Prospect Heights, 2002; Idem. Land Use and Economic Change Among the
Dolgan and Nganasan // E. Kasten (Ed.). People and the Land. Pathways to Reform in
Post-Soviet Siberia. Berlin, 2002. Pp. 207-224.
304
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
each other in subordination to the district administration and Ministry of
Agriculture. This “landscape” contains subsidiary enterprises, small-scale
enterprises and family enterprises.24 All of them use the tundra’s resources,
as do people from the village. Central for the monitoring of the tundra is the
system of hunting territories (ugodia) and those who control them. Following
the local tradition of autonomy, the district administration – which has always
been led by local people – did not interfere in the land use negotiations of
formal and informal users. Moreover, the attempt in 2008 to establish in
the district “territories of traditional land use” (territoriia traditsionnogo
prirodopol’zovaniia), which would aimed at enhanced governmental control
of land use, failed completely.25
During 2000–2001, I spent a year in the district collecting data for my
doctoral thesis. For more than eight months of the ieldwork period I was in
various reindeer and hunting enterprises and brigades. After that, I remained
in contact with various people from the district, especially with hunters from
the family enterprise Tiistaakh, meeting them and their relatives regularly
in the capital of the republic, Yakutsk.
The Master and His Homeland
In my research area, I had heard the expression khoziain only in relation
to hunters and their permanent hunting spots. Khoziain is a Russian expression that has various meanings. Two different meanings of the word khoziain
are relevant to understanding popular conceptions of economic and political
change. The “real” khoziain (i.e., “master” as a positive connotation) was
an entrepreneur or peasant farmer, a hardworking and honest man. He built
up his enterprise, or farm, by working sixteen hours each day and traded
quality goods at fair prices.26 Another meaning of khoziain is negative: it
refers to the “bazaar” entrepreneur who trades imported poor quality goods
at high prices. This other khoziain is related to the Stalinist deinition of
See Ventsel. Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity. Chapter 3.
The federal law for “territories of traditional land use” was passed in 2001 but no
such territories have been registered in Russia yet. The reason may be that this status
gives free and exclusive land use rights to indigenous groups (Brian Donahue, personal
e-mail June 24, 2012). In the case of Anabar, the governmental committee was supposed
to control the governance of the territory, and, therefore, the plan met silent resistance
from the Anabar administration.
26
Julian Watts. Heritage and Enterprise Culture in Archangel, Northern Russia // Ruth
Ellen Mandel and Caroline Humphrey (Eds.). Markets and Moralities. Ethnography of
Postsocialism. Oxford, New York, 2002. Pp. 59-68.
24
25
305
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
kulak or expropriator.27 On the Taimyr peninsula, a khoziain was understood
to be a brigadier who was the “caretaker” of the territories of a state hunting enterprise.28 In this case, the brigadier was either appointed by the state
enterprise or worked on a contract basis on the reallocated territory, and the
expression khoziain was connected to a formal status.
The institution of khoziain (which I translate as “master”) that I encountered among Dolgans in the Anabarskii district is rooted in the formal status
but has ceased to be merely a formal category. It is closely connected to a
territory usually called rodina or “motherland.” The Dolgan native word
for rodina in Sakha was doidu, which means both “home” and “homeland,”
and was used to describe places in the tundra and the house in the village,
depending on the context and situation. Thus, the native and Russian understanding of rodina are conceptualized differently, both geographically and
emotionally. Rodina among Dolgans is understood to be a place where one’s
roots are, and in most places it is the region in the Anabar tundra where a
person’s family has hunted, herded their reindeer, and migrated for many
generations. Or at least they lay claim to the region. Rodina in Dolgan culture
is geographically very concrete and is deined through a narrative that links
places, history, markers, toponyms, artifacts, and facilities and creates an
emotional attachment to a place.
In order to analyze the notion of “masterhood” and rodina we must look
back into recent history. Relying on general Dolgan and Evenki ethnography and theories of hunter-gatherers, it seems that the “masters” were
partly a product of Soviet policy and partly a consequence of the incorporation into the Soviet agricultural model of old precollectivization values
and hunting practices. However, it is complicated to track this construct
beyond the period of collectivization. Early ethnographic information records certain families or groups that the authors have associated with the
Anabar region. As early as the seventeenth century, Tungus elders from
the Olenek and Anabar regions were complaining to Russian oficials that
Russian hunters were exploiting their hunting grounds. Dolgikh describes
the Kukui family who lived in the Anabar tundra, and the Laptev expedition
that encountered settlements of seminomadic hunters on the Arctic Ocean
Ibid. Pp. 67-99. Watts describes how the notion of khoziain changed over time
during the post-perestroika period in Archangelsk. He states that the word khoziain is
an “ancient and rich one, grounded in the world of the peasant household and feudal
estate, and means variously owner, proprietor, master, boss, manager, husband, and
host” (P. 62).
28
Ziker. Peoples of the Tundra. P. 374.
27
306
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
coast.29 While these groups certainly had some sense of deined land ownership and the mechanisms to regulate resource use, we nevertheless do not
know in detail how land ownership and “masterhood” were constructed in
these times.
As Fondahl has shown, the introduction of socialist patterns of hunting
and reindeer herding did not impact heavily on the old ways as often the
old strategies and concepts were incorporated into collective and state farm
hunting and reindeer herding.30 On a theoretical level, Ingold points out
that hunting strategies are not tied to a particular economic and political
setting.31 While they may change as the economic situation changes, it is
not necessarily so.32
The formal and informal land entitlement of hunters in the Anabarskii
district was in the majority of cases based on the territories of the hunting
spots or tochka, that is, a Soviet reorganization of territories (zemleustroistvo). The aim of the zemleustroistvo was not only to maximize the eficiency
of land use but also to control the indigenous population by giving certain
groups and organizations (hunters, reindeer brigades, state farms, collective
farms, etc.) ixed territories.33 What the zemleustroistvo achieved was the
establishment and reenforcement of the institution of the “master.” Several
researchers have stressed that despite their nomadic economy, Siberian native people had strong emotional ties to their hunting and pastoral lands.34
29
B. O. Dolgikh. Osnovnye voprosy sotsialisticheskogo stroitel’stva u malykh narodov Severa // Doklady i soobshcheniia nauchnoi konferentsii po istorii Sibirii i Dal’negoVostoka
/ Pod red. Z. B. Gogoleva. Tomsk, 1960.
30
Fondahl. Legacies and Territorial Reorganization. Pp. 1-21.
31
Tim Ingold. The Optimal Forager and Economic Man // Philippe Descola and Gisli Palsson (Eds.). Nature and Society. Anthropological Perspectives. New York, 1996. Pp. 25-44.
32
John P. Ziker. Assigned Territories, Family/Clan/Communal Holdings, and CommonPool Resources in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, Northern Russia // Human Ecology.
2003. No. 31. Pp. 331-368.
33
David. G. Anderson. Tracking the “Wild Tungus” in Taimyr. Identity, Ecology, and
Mobile Economies in Arctic Siberia // Peter Schweitzer, Megan Biesele, Robert K.
Hitchcock (Eds.). Hunters and Gatherers in the Modern World. Conlict, Resistance,
and Self-Determination. London, 2000. Pp. 223-243; V. N. Sannikov. Novye zemel’nye
otnoshcheniia na Severe Yakutii // Tezisy vserossiiskoi konferentsii “Dukhovnaia kul’tura
narodov Severa i Arktiki v nachale tret’ego tysiacheletiia / Pod red. I. I. Shcheikina,
I. F. Lapparova, A. I. Savvinova, V. A. Petrovoi, M. P. Lukinoi, N. D. Petrovoi. Yakutsk,
2002. Pp. 33-35.
34
Gail Fondahl. Through the Years. Land Rights Among the Evenkis of Southeastern Siberia // The Troubled Taiga. Survival on the Move for the Last Nomadic Reindeer Herders
of South Siberia, Mongolia, and China. Cultural Survival Quarterly. 2003. Vol. 27. No. 1.
307
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
During my ieldwork I noticed that in Anabar these emotional ties and the
sense of rodina were created through the activities of hunting and ishing
in the territory.
The institution of “master” would not exist today were it not for the
Soviet experiment in agricultural practice and the attempt to break traditional kinship ties and territorial afiliation according to the oficial goal
of collectivization. Instead, Dolgan family structure and its entrapment to
particular territories were embedded into the Soviet collective farm brigade
structures. What the state needed was the indigenous inhabitant’s knowledge
and skills to procure meat, ish, and furs, and here the economic rationale
outweighed the ideological.35
The period from the 1950s until the 1980s, in local folklore, is described
as the happy time of family brigades (semeinye brigady) or a time where
families continued to hunt and migrate in their pre-Soviet territories. The
rupture happened in the 1980s, when kinship-based brigades were reformed.
However, studying brigade enrollment lists I found out that even after the
1980s some members of the family continued to work and migrate within
their old territories as part of a reformed brigade. In this period, hunters’
camps were turned into permanent sites by the building of log cabins in
strategic places, such as river crossings where wild reindeer migrations
passed by twice a year. Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the
new reforms in agriculture, nonrelatives left such brigades to join their own
relatives. When conducting ieldwork in 2000–2001, I noticed that all the
reindeer and hunting brigades in the Anabar tundra were made up of relatives or dominated by one family.36
Agnia, a daughter of Moigo, the undisputed head of the Tiistaakh family, once explained to me her father’s relationship to the Tiistaakh hunting
Pp. 28-31; John P. Ziker. “Horseradish Is No Sweeter than Turnips.” Entitlements and
Sustainability in the Taimyr Autonomous Region, Northern Russia // Chris Hann and
“Property-Relations”-Group (Eds.). The Postsocialist Agrarian Question. Property Relations and the Rural Condition. Münster, 2003. Pp. 363-390.
35
In retrospective, the economic rationale dominated before the ideology when it came
to the reorganisation of Siberian indigenous communities. In most regions of the Russian
North, the Soviet state indeed tried to introduce a standardised structure and methods for
hunting, ishing and reindeer herding, yet it was nowhere fully successful and regional
differences remained until the end of the Soviet Union. It seems that it was more economically proitable to adapt existing skills and organisations to the state agricultural
policy, than to radically change everything to follow ideological prescriptions, i.e. the
priority was to fulil the plan at any costs.
36
Ventsel. Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity.
308
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
base and other hunters: “There used to be a [hunting] brigade in Tiistaakh.
Our family and another family hunted here. Then the other family went
away and my father remained here. Everybody knows he has always been
here. These are his lands” (Zdes’ byla v Tiistaakhe okhotnitskaia brigada.
Nasha semia i drugaia semia zhili zdes’. Togda eta vtoraia semia uekhala
i nash otets ostalsia zdes’. Kazhdyi znaet, chto on vsegda byl zdes’. Eto
ego zemli!).
During my irst ieldwork trip in Sakha from 2000 to 2001, the land, by
law, belonged to the state.37 Formally, no private ownership of land existed.
Although the “public” (state) status of land remained, the decision-making
authority in most cases was shifted from the federal center to the regional
government, who, for their part, delegated most decision making, especially
The legal land use regime in Russia – especially concerning indigenous people’s land
use – is confusing and laws change often before they are implemented. Some legal
anthropologists I have consulted about the issue expressed the opinion that this is intentional, in order to keep indigenous activists “off balance.” Since 2001, land property in
Russia has been liberalized and some portions of land can be privatized, usually large
enough for a house or a factory, but not land in the northern regions, which is part of
the federal land. The land use issue in Russia remains very confusing as not only land
but also land use rights are sold. In the perception of the public, both transactions are
usually undifferentiated and it is dificult to ind out whether people have sold or bought
the land or the right to use the land.
In the Russian Federation several federal laws regulate indigenous land use. However,
these federal laws are often general frameworks whose details should be worked out at
the regional level. All local laws have to be in accord with the federal law, but federal
level laws have to be enacted at the republic level through an act of the republic-level
legislative body (local parliament) in order for them to take effect (Brian Donahue, personal e-mail, June 24, 2012). This can cause delays in the implementation or modiication
of laws when they threaten to violate the interests of local power groups, as has been
the case in Tuva (see Brian Donahue. The Law as a Source of Environmental Justice
in the Russian Federation // Julian Agyeman and Yelena Ogneva-Himmelberger (Eds.).
Environmental Justice and Sustainability in the Former Soviet Union. Cambridge, MA,
London, 2009. Pp. 21-46, P. 25).
According to the Land Code of the Republic of Sakha, from 2011 the possessions on
the land can be transmitted from municipal ownership to private hands for free if the
purpose is for agricultural activity (Land Code Article 6.11). Federal lands can be transferred to private property only for private house construction, gardening, and part-time
farming (Land Code Article 8.11 and Article 8) but also for full agricultural activity
from the lands belonging to the category of agricultural land. The maximum amount of
land privatized for agricultural activity is limited to three hectares (Land Code Article
23). Article 16 states that indigenous people have the right to rent lands for reindeer
herding and other traditional economic activities (see http://www.neruadmin.ru/elib/
zemelni_kodeks_RSY.pdf).
37
309
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
regarding agriculture, to the local district administration.38 In the case of the
Sakha Republic this meant that the president and parliament delegated part
of their decision-making power to the districts. Local authority was given
to village administrations, except the responsibility for agriculture, which
was allocated to the successor of the state farm, the MUP. In the 1990s, as
new institutions appeared in the tundra, the MUP’s monopoly over “the
agricultural tundra” disappeared, although the MUP’s oficials maintained
the closest connection to the village administration, and through it retained
an inluential position concerning land use decisions.
As a rule, new enterprises in a district appeared when former state farm
brigades reregistered themselves as small-scale enterprises, obschchina,
and so forth.39 These new enterprises continued to use their own brigade
territories and – in the case of hunting enterprises – facilities built in the
Soviet era. With the reorganization of agriculture and the appearance of
new property laws, the social position of extended families and their heads
became more visible. Alongside these changes, the institution of the “master” in the Anabar tundra became a semilegal category. In new enterprises,
a family head’s decision-making powers became near absolute, independent
of whether old men were elected as enterprise directors or they remained as
ordinary hunters in the oficial records.
The existence of the Tiistaakh hunting family was the strongest proof
of the social meaning of the institution of “master.” The Tiistaakh was a
hunting base in the tundra, home to an extended family led by a patriarch
with the nickname Moigo. Moigo has ten children who work in various
enterprises in the village or are oficially unemployed. However, in the
hunting or ishing season most of them went to the tundra to assist their
father. The family had a very clear idea of their precise hunting territory
and Moigo had the authority to prevent ishing or hunting on his lands if
he did not like someone. All reindeer brigades, before migrating through
the Tiistakh territory, asked the permission of Moigo, who arbitrarily made
the decision. The interesting fact was that oficially the family had no legal
status at all. When I arrived in the district, the Tiistaakh clan was in the
process of registering their own “family enterprise” (semeinoe predpriatie) but had no oficial response and no registered land allotment – their
claim literally did not exist. Nevertheless, they were present at the district
G. Oshrenko. Indigenous Political and Property Rights and Economic/Environmental
Reform in Northwest Siberia // Post-Soviet Geography. 1995. Vol. 36. No. 4. Pp. 227237. P. 229
39
Ventsel. Reindeer, Rodina and Reciprocity. Chapter 3.
38
310
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
level, the head of the district celebrated the family in his speeches as the
model example for an indigenous traditional economy, the Tiistaakh were
included in the district’s economic statistics, and so forth. At the same time,
the family faced problems when trading their meat and ish to traders due
to their lack of oficial status.
What made the “elasticity of the land”40 in the Anabarskii district so
special and interesting is that even if the oficials did not support such entitlement, they tolerated it. Thus, the head of the Uurung Khaia village found
it strange when I wondered why the MUP’s reindeer herders respected the
land use rights of the Tiistaakh hunters, who did not have any legal status at
the time. He said, “But this is probably so everywhere!” In the Anabarskii
district, local people dominate the local government and administration. The
head of the administration, Nikolai Egorovich Androsov, was born there
and supported local people and the revitalization of the so-called traditional
economy. As long as there were no serious conlicts over land entitlement
(for example with the gold industry), Androsov did not interfere and did not
force people to legalize their entitlement.
The ambivalence of the informal institutions and their relationship to
oficial structures was symbolized by a meeting of reindeer herd brigadiers
and directors of hunting enterprises in the village head ofice where I assisted in spring 2001. Theoretically, it was an accountancy meeting where
brigadiers and directors of enterprises had to report their activities, gains, and
losses during the previous winter period. What I witnessed was in marked
contrast to the oficial hierarchy. The head of the village administration was
a young man in his thirties whereas most others were of senior age, giving
them the status of “elders.” The body language of the head of the village
was of a young man meeting with local patriarchs: he sat at the head of the
table, eyes down listening carefully to what the old men had to say, asking
questions with a respectful tone. The old men discussed the movements
and activities planned for the forthcoming season, dividing pastures among
themselves, and the head of the village, the highest state oficial in room,
accepted everything and ixed the results in a meeting protocol. For me, this
meeting was a demonstration of the position and power of the “master” in
the existing social setting of the district.
40
Katherine Verdery. The Elasticity of the Land: Problems of Property Restitution in
Transylvania // Eadem. What Was Socialism and What Comes Next? Princeton, 1996.
Pp. 133-167.
311
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
The Meaning of Tundra
In the north, I cannot remember hearing the word “tundra” (tuundra in
Sakha). People in the capital of Yakutsk and in the villages in Central Yakutia
used to say “going to the tundra,” “being in the tundra” (Tuundra hhatahsyehha; Tuundra hhasyldzyehha). In Anabarskii district, people use the word
tya for tundra, which in Yakutian means “forest.”41 But in vernacular use, tya
actually means “village” or “countryside.” A Russian–Yakutian phrasebook
gives tya as the equivalent of the Russian word derevnia (village).42 “Agriculture” (sel’skoe khoziaistvo) in Yakutian is tya khahaaiystabata, using the
word tya as “rural.” In a Russian–Yakutian dictionary, one can even ind the
pair kuoratuonna tya, translated as “town and village.”43 Tundra dwellers are
called tyetaghykihi (-kihiler in plural) and people who live in a village are
pöhyölekkihite (also -kihiler in plural), which simply means “village people.”
When people in the Anabarskii district go to the tundra, they do indeed go
to the countryside, which is not the same as the tundra. The meaning of the
word “tundra” has connotations of something isolated, outside the normal
social sphere of everyday life. The use of the word tya means that, for native
people, the tundra is a social space, more or less equivalent to the village.
From the oficial point of view, the tundra “lives” when it is covered with
tochkas, reindeer brigades and other marks of human activity. This discourse
is symbolized by huge maps, which decorate the walls of the ofices of the
head of the district administration, the director of the Il’ia Spiridonov MUP,
and the head of the district land commission. Colored points mark the location of the reindeer herds and log cabins. From the oficials’ point of view,
the landscape lives when it becomes “alive” on paper with settlements and
roads, whereas unmarked territories are seen as “empty” or “wild.”44 Their
“wilderness” is a social and cultural construction of village-based oficials,
but is not absolute and general.45 Many oficials of the district administration
in Saaskylaakh wondered how I, a Westerner who must need showers, good
food, and TV, could survive in the “wilderness,” where even they have never
been. On the other hand, I heard tundroviki saying that soon there would
Iakutsko-russkii slovar’. Moscow, 1972. Pp. 417-418.
Pogovorim po-iakutskii. Yakutsk, 1987. P. 100.
43
Russko-Iakutskii slovar’. Moscow, 1968. P. 131.
44
Cf. Peter Gow. Land, People, and Paper in Western Amazonia // Eric Hirsch and
Michael O’Hanlon (Eds.). The Anthropology of Landscape. Perspectives on Place and
Space. Oxford, 1996. Pp. 43-62.
45
See Philippe Descola, Gisli Palsson. Introduction // Idem (Eds.). Nature and Society.
Anthropological Perspectives. London and New York, 1996. Pp. 1-22.
41
42
312
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
be no space left in the tundra. And this at a time when we were driving on
snowmobiles or reindeer sledges through the tundra, seeing no other signs of
human life for hours on end! Both sides were deining space through different
activities and a different engagement with the environment, which all gave
nature a different social meaning.46 On the oficial map, the social space was
organized as registered ixed allotments for the production of meat, furs, and
ish with concrete resources ixed on paper. The mode of resource extraction
(whether reindeer herding, hunting, or ishing or all three) on a particular territory was deined in a constitution linked to a brigade or enterprise (ustav).
For the population, the tundra irst of all represents the movement
of people, ish, animals, and goods over a large territory crossing huge
distances. In recent years, the needs of village dwellers to use the natural
resources of the tundra have increased. Unemployment and low salaries in
the village have forced people to hunt and ish more extensively. Places in
the tundra hold meaning for most people in Uurung Khaia as landmarks
or as sources of food and money; there are useless, and on the other hand,
very highly valued territories, depending on their ecological resources and
accessibility. The described places shifted their meaning according to the
season. The wild reindeer migration twice a year kept hunters constantly
moving to “follow the herds,”47 and they paid little attention to formal
brigade or administrative borders. For example, the Tiistaakh family had
a very ambiguous relationship to the tundra. They had their own territory,
which was located on the migration route of wild reindeer, and the river
crossing to shoot reindeer was literally on their doorstep. In spring, Moigo
drove around the western and southern tundra to hunt reindeer, staying in
reindeer herder camps or hunting lodges. October to December was the
ice-ishing period, and entitlement to the good ishing places was strictly
divided among the clans that had their tochkas in the region. In contrast to
the winter ishing period, places to ish were less ixed in July when nets
were used. The luidity and controversy involving the territory came out
in a short discussion I had with the Tiistaakh family. When I asked Moigo
about where exactly his lands lie, he replied, “I do not need land, I need
water.” Agnia, who was in the kitchen, commented: “I think, father did not
understand you. Of course we have our land!”
For a long time I was confused by these two statements. The Tiistaakh
family had hunting grounds recognized by other people but also claims of
Cf. Ingold. The Optimal Forager and Economic Man.
E. Burch. Herd Following Reconsidered // Current Anthropology. 1991. Vol. 32. No.
4. Pp. 439-445.
46
47
313
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
informal land entitlement to the family. It may be that old Moigo, when answering my question, did not see his territory as one unit but rather a network
of places, an entrapment of meanings and functions. The water system is a
concrete network of rivers and lakes useful not only for ishing but also for
boat transportation, a link between strategic and useful places. Moigo saw
as his exclusive possession some river crossings and hills where arctic foxes
resided. At the same time, his land was not closed to other people. The (semi-)
nomadic tundra culture on the coast of the Arctic Ocean requires the constant
movement of people and goods. On the way to their own tochkas, hunters
cross through different hunting territories, spend a night in an occasional
tochka on the way and often visit inhabited places to “drink tea.” What is
considered a violation of local social norms is not the crossing of one’s lands
but hunting, ishing, and trapping without permission – that is, exploiting the
resources of a certain place in the territory. It is known that the Nganasan on
the Taimyr peninsula considered certain places, such as river crossings on the
wild reindeer migration routes or some especially good ishing places, as clan
possessions and had the right to limit the access of other clans to such places.48 Some of my older informants remembered hearing their parents speak
about similar traditions in the Anabarskii district. Today, in the Anabarskii
district, almost all the hunters’ tochkas are located on the riverbanks where
the main waves of the wild reindeer migration cross the river, and they use
facilities built in the Soviet era. It is very possible that the exclusivity of the
traditional precollectivization hunting places continued and institutionalized
under Soviet rule gave birth to the notion of rodina and khoziain.
As in other hunting families, Moigo argued that his family lived in the
region for generations and he had inherited the land entitlement that he also
held in the Soviet period. This was probably what the daughter meant by
saying that the family “has lands,” whereas Moigo seemingly understood
my question from the perspective of their value of use.
Domesticated Space
The “social landscape” in the Anabar tundra is often created by connecting real people and events with the landscape.49 The most obvious sign that
Chester S. Chard. The Nganasan: Wild Reindeer Hunters of the Taimyr Peninsula //
Arctic Anthropology. 1963. No. 1. Pp. 105-121, 109-111.
49
Cf. Michael J. Casimir. The Dimension of Territoriality: An Introduction // Idem and
Aparna Rao (Eds.). Mobility and Territoriality. Social and Spatial Boundaries Among
Foragers, Fishers, Pastoralists and Peripatetics. Oxford, New York, 1992. Pp. 1-26; also
in Gow. Land, People, and Paper.
48
314
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
people know a territory is that they have given names to places. The most
beautiful place name for me in the Anabarskii district is Golub Tölüür Aryyta
(the island where the dove is born). This island is where the early summer
bird hunt takes place, but there are also many people-related place names
in the district. One day in late summer we were mounted on reindeer and
looking for some lost animals. When we passed a small lake, Vassili, my
host, mentioned, “This lake’s name is Boris.” I asked: “Why Boris?” Vassili replied: “There used to be a Russian [in Uurung Khaia]. He ished here
often.” The lake was named after a real person and the name symbolized
his activities in the region.
Even from a brief glance at the map it is obvious that the Anabar region
has many person-related toponyms. When we drove north from the camp
of the 3rd reindeer brigade of Uurung Khaia we had to cross Ivan Salaata
(Ivan’s Path). Feodor Kylaia (Look at Feodor’s [Place], or Lights of Feodor)
was on the way to the village of Uurung Khaia (which itself means “White
Hill”) from Tiistaakh. The irst place is connected to the memory of the
trap lines of the hunter Ivan. The other river got its name from the hunting
cabin of Feodor, whose hunting grounds used to be there. Egor Paastaga
means “Egor’s fox trap.” Other toponyms hint at human activites, such as
Börölöökh (Full of Wolves), Sasyl Yrekh (Fox Stream), or Khaia D’iieleekh
(from Khaia Kurduk D’iie – House Big as Mountain).
Places where one can expect to see and hunt foxes or places that should
be avoided because of wolves that are likely to attack your reindeer, are only
known by those who make regular visits to these regions. The activities of
hunters and reindeer herders are thus entrapped in the landscape and these
features have meaning for others who share the same way of life. Of course,
many place names refer to some visible marker on the landscape, such as
Kholocholookh (kholo means curve, the name of a crooked-shaped lake),
Ulakhan Kumakh Yrekh (Stream of the Big Sand), or Bulgunn’akhtaakh
(Covered with Hills). The “story” of some place names has almost been
forgotten. For example, it was dificult to ind someone who could explain
to me the origin of the toponym Hetta Heddem (Seven Brothers). Finally
Aponia, the brigadier of the district’s northernmost reindeer herd, explained:
“There used to be seven brothers who migrated to the area. They were Tupriny. I think they were relatives of Pavel, our MUP’s director.”
I was always very impressed with how well tundroviki, especially older
people, knew the tundra. Many times, I witnessed how people were able to
ind their way in a snowstorm when the whole world seemed to be one white
rushing madness. When I returned to the district after a few months’ stay
315
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
in Moscow and brought back photos from previous migrations, people not
only recognized lakes and hills but also remembered what we were doing in
these places. For example, when I camped with the reindeer herders at one
unnamed lake, we had a small abandoned reindeer calf in our camp. The
brigadier said that he would let the calf grow a bit and then make a fur hat
out of her. Therefore the calf was called Shapka (hat, in Russian). When we
were looking at the photos some months later, the brigadier’s wife pointed
at the picture of the lake and said only one word: “Shapka!” I do not have
to wonder whether the lake now bears this name. Moreover, hunters and
reindeer herders demonstrated in many cases that they remember activities
that happened years ago, connected to certain places. I took a Soviet Army
map with me to the ieldwork. These maps used mainly local toponyms,
although in Russian transliteration, and people recognized them easily.
Drawing routes on the map with a inger, my informants showed me their
hunting and pasture lands, as well as those of others now dead, demonstrating that “memory” is what “writes subsistence and other activities on the
landscape,” and “articulates the relationship between the landscape and the
community, or between the landscape and individual.”50
Social space in the Anabarskii district is not necessarily bound to old
stories, nor is it static. New toponyms appear and some old ones are forgotten. It is important that the Dolgan “implication in a landscape” focuses
on an active relationship among living people, and a person and the land,51
whether that person is already dead or still alive. Place names demonstrate
how the entrapment of rodina is established through human activity in the
tundra, by the practical functions of the landscape as navigation marks or
provider of resources. Time lived on the land gives authority for the person
settling the territory because, over a long period, the activities of a person
or a family mark the territory, creating entrapment and a narrative. These
narratives symbolize “what actually has happened”,52 the relationship with
the tundra forms the history of a person and the family and legitimizes the
entitlement to a territory.
“My Parents Are Buried Here”: Ancestors’ Legacies
In almost every settlement of more than two families in the Anabar tundra,
crosses on the surrounding hills are a frequent sight. Dolgan burial customs
Mark Nuttall. Arctic Homeland. Kinship, Community and Development in Northwest
Greenland. Toronto, Buffalo, 1992. P. 57.
51
Gow. Land, People, and Paper. Pp. 51-52.
52
Turton. How to Make a Speech in Mursi.
50
316
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
are a mixture of traditional beliefs, Russian Orthodox, and Soviet tradition.
The Dolgans throw all the necessary tools and favorite items around the grave
of the dead person, breaking them before the burial. The best reindeer will
be slaughtered for the burial; the meat will be eaten and the bones put onto
the grave as well. After forty days (following Russian tradition), another
reindeer will be slaughtered, eaten and the bones left on the grave. This
procedure is repeated after one year. According to Dolgan tradition, after
three years, the relatives of the dead person build a small wooden box over
the grave. Often, in addition to the crosses, there are red star monuments, or
Russian-style gravestones with black-and-white pictures of the dead person.
One goal of the Soviet collectivization policy, to break “backward”
kinship ties, met with no success in the Anabarskii district.53 The reindeer
brigades had always been made up of close relatives, and hunting brigades
were very often made up of the father as a brigadier and his sons as hunters
working for him. The graves around the tochkas demonstrate that Soviet
power also had little success in turning hunting bases into sole places of
production, or some kind of workers’ temporary living space. It was (and
still is) a widespread practice for the dead to be buried in the tundra not far
from the tochka, rather than to be brought back to the village. This is very
well illustrated by an interview with the head of one hunting brigade, a man
nicknamed “Kupaa” who lived in Chöchördaakh – a hunting base with a
trading post (faktoria).
Author: Is the trader your relative?
Kupaa: The trader is our relative but not one of us. He is a Dolgan,
we are Even. Of course, we have already forgotten our language, but
we are Even.
Author: How do you happen to be here, in this tochka?
Kupaa: We have been living here for generations. Our family has
always hunted here.
Author: Even in Soviet times all of you worked here in the same
brigade?
Kupaa: Yes, my sons and I were here in the brigade. I buried my
parents here. They wanted to be buried in their homeland (rodina).
The relation between graves and a “master’s” legitimacy became clear
to me a few months later. After leaving Kupaa’s hunting base, I returned to
I. S. Gurvich. Current Ethnic Processes Taking Place in Northern Yakutia (Translated
by Emma Lou Davis) // Arctic Anthropology. 1963. Vol. 1. No. 2. Pp. 86-92; Yuri Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors. Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca and London,
1994. Chapter 6.
53
317
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
the reindeer brigade. In the winter we again migrated close to the area where
Kupaa’s base was located. Sometimes we even talked to him on the radio.
Near the trading post was a place where good quality coal lay on the ground
along the riverbank. The reindeer herders of the 3rd Uurung Khaia brigade
wanted to go and collect that coal but they needed Kupaa’s permission irst.
After a radio session one evening in a balokh, the mother of the family, Zinaida Tuprina, put away the radio microphone and said: “Kupaa is a
stingy person!”
Author: Why?
Zinaida: We ask him constantly for permission to dig coal near
Chöchördaakh, but he always avoids the subject. When we ask him
on the radio, he never says a word. Neither “yes” or “no.” If he had
answered, Ivan (the oldest son) could go off to dig the coal.
Author: But why must Kupaa give you permission? Is it his coal?
Zinaida: He is the “master,” these lands are viewed as his own!
(On khoziain, schitaetsia, shto eto ego zemli!)
The brigade of Kupaa is not atypical for the region; the members of the
brigade are closely related and have hunted in the region for a long time.
Although the tochka was established in the 1970s, the people tracked their
family history in the region back for many generations. These people had
established a strong emotional tie with the particular territory where they
had grown up hunting, typical of other Siberian state farm hunters.54
The entitlement of “master” rights to a region, are often based on the notion
that “we have lived here for generations.” The graves of the ancestors are an
important symbol deining the institution of the “master.” In symbiosis with
the Soviet state farm framework, this symbol became even more powerful. In
Soviet collectivized agriculture, the organization of the collectives was static,
and their territories closed to other people.55 Thus, particular families lived
in their hunting territories for many generations, even under Soviet rule, and
became accustomed to this relative independence, allowing them to operate
within the borders of the hunting territory. This facilitated the incorporation
of pre-Soviet land use norms into state farm ideology.
Association, indication, and identiication with a particular region means
more than some kind of presence “ownership” for the Dolgan. Social relations to the landscape were transferred among kin and from generation to
generation. This process of transmission of land entitlement was a conscious
54
55
Cf. Ziker. Assigned Territories, Family/Clan/Communal Holdings.
Anderson. Identity and Ecology in Arctic Siberia.
318
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
process among Dolgan hunters. For example, Kupaa told me that he would
retire soon and leave all of his balokhs and trap lines to his son: “He will
hunt here soon; I have done it enough.”
The transmission of territory as practiced by the Dolgan, means that after
all the older sons have received their share, the youngest son inherits all of his
father’s reindeer and other property such as the arctic fox traps, along with
the obligation to be the primary supporter of his old parents. Transferring an
ancestors’ space over to the children gives the act a historical dimension and
ingrains the family into the landscape, reconstituting the younger generation
as formal heirs to particular places, similar to the process of the transfer
of land entitlement described for sheep farmers in the Scottish borders.56
Ingold’s genealogical model of land ownership stresses the fact that
“dwelling unfolds history.”57 He argues that forms of landscape are constituted through this dwelling.58 Ingold holds the view that language and tradition for indigenous hunting communities are the object of memory, which
relates people to the landscape. In the Dolgan case, traditions of dwelling
and land use are constituted in memory and place names, but the ancestors’
presence is also made visible by graves and arctic fox traps on the landscape.
Graves give the legacy to a family to view a territory as something over
which they have supreme decision-making power. It could be argued that the
memory of ancestors and their symbolic presence transforms tochka from a
Soviet place of production to a homeland – rodina. Dead ancestors are part
of the local memoryscape and establish – in my view – an unquestionable
“moral possession.” The narrative of the land is based on activities of people
now dead. These activities live on in the memory, having two functions:
establishing a domesticated landscape and linking real people and families
to concrete places.
The Borders
One evening in January 2001 in the tundra with a reindeer brigade closely
related to the Tiistaakh people, we talked about land use rights. I put forth
the question: “Does the land we are migrating on now belong to Moigo?”
Before answering me, the old reindeer herder asked his wife: “Are
Moigo’s arctic fox traps around here (paastar)?”
56
John N. Gray. At Home in the Hills.Sense of Place in the Scottish Borders. New York,
Oxford, 2000. P. 220.
57
Tim Ingold. The Perception of the Environment. Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and
Skill. London, New York, 2000.
58
Ibid. Pp. 133, 199.
319
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
The discussion about private land ownership among nomadic Arctic hunters started with Frank G. Speck, who conducted extensive ieldwork among
Algonquian Indians in Canada and the United States in the early years of the
twentieth century. Since then, Arctic hunting territories and the importance of
trapping in deining these territories has been a matter of research and great
debate.59 In Anabar, the history of hunting animals for fur can be dated back
to the eighteenth century and, for me, the arctic fox traps encapsulate – entrap – the narrative of the land: accumulated knowledge and family heritage
about the landscape and its resources, which determined the activities of
real people on the landscape and turned the lands into a personalized space.
In Anabar, deadfall traps for arctic foxes are private property and serve
as visible markers of territorial ownership,60 that is, the trap is a “tool…
whose use marks its user in the social space.”61
In a series of publications, Speck argued that many Algonquian hunters had institutionalized “family hunting territories.” He wrote that “these territories were known and
recognized, and trespassing… was summarily punishable.” These “family hunting territories” were a “family inheritance” and operated only by the family (Frank G. Speck.
The Family Hunting Band as the Basis of Algonquian Social Organization // American
Anthropologist N.S. 1915. No. 17. Pp. 289-305, 290, 293). Speck is seen as the initiator
of the concept of “family hunting territories,” which was supported but also criticized
by other scholars. Dean Snow argued that, although family hunting grounds obviously
existed among Algonquian Indians, there were different systems. Speck ignored the fact
that the main activity on these territories was trapping, not hunting, and because of this,
the term “family hunting territory” was a “misnomer” (Dean R. Snow. Wabanaki “Family Hunting Territories” // American Anthropology. 1968. No. 70. Pp. 1143-1151). The
concept of land as private property was questioned by Eleanor Leacock, who argued that
such hunting grounds developed in response to European colonization. She stated that
before the arrival of Europeans, property among Algonquian hunters was not focused
on land but on beavers (Eleanor Leacock. The Montagnais “Hunting Territory” and the
Fur Trade. Menasha, Wisconsin, 1954. P. 2). Leacock used historical data to show that
strictly guarded family hunting territories were not suited to hunting for food (P. 25). She
supported her theory using the fact that having permanent trap lines was called “trapping like the white man” by the Indians because Indians had “luid territory” where the
locations of trapping lines were changed periodically and exclusive hunting territories
developed as the importance of commercial hunting increased (Pp. 30, 34).
60
Irrespective of whether hunting territories were private property and trap lines permanent (Speck. The Family Hunting Band) or territories luid and trap lines temporary
(Leacock. The Montagnais “Hunting Territory”), and whether the aim was to trap for
money (Ziker. Assigned Territories) or for social prestige (Robert Jarvenpa. Subartic
Indian Trappers and Band Society: The Economics of Male Mobility // Human Ecology.
1977. No. 5. Pp. 223-259), trapping lines are generally private property and the owner
has a right to limit their use by others.
61
Michel de Certeau. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1988.
59
320
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Andrei Tuprin, who worked on Bol’shoi Begichev island as a hunter at
the end of the 1970s, told me: “It is not so easy with traps. You must know
where the arctic foxes (kyrssa) are. You cannot build the traps everywhere.
You must know the landscape… And what the weather is like there…”
For Tim Ingold, trapping is a different kind of predation because the
trapper has to know the region where he sets up his traps but also the way
there and back.62 Arctic fox deadfall traps are sturdy constructions that can
be used for generations. To build the traps, one has to transport the material
(logs) into the tundra and expend considerable time and effort building them.
To keep the arctic fox traps intact, they must be looked after and repaired
regularly. In winter, the owner must keep the traps baited and collect the
trapped animals before other arctic foxes eat them. All these activities are
justiied through the harvesting of a substantial quantity of furs. Therefore,
the inherited knowledge of the region and accumulated skills of trapping
have directly paid off and affected the livelihood of people. While in Soviet
times the state farm supplied hunters with materials and paid extra money
for building and repairing the traps, in the post-Soviet period all of these
caretaking and construction jobs were left to the hunters themselves. With
the abandonment of organized trapping and the increase in hunters’ independence, the traps became valuable private property, as did the resources of the
territory where the traps are located. By inheriting trapping lines, sons also
inherited territory and the right to consider this territory as their exclusive
hunting area. Oleg, a reindeer herder whose brigade migrated along the
Arctic Ocean coast, once showed me long trap lines in the tundra. “These
traps belonged to my father. Now my brothers use them,” he said. “This is
my rodina. These lands belong to us.” When I asked whether hunters from
other enterprises were allowed to hunt in their territory, Oleg thought long
and said, “Why should they? Their trapping lines are somewhere else. Here is
no place to put new trapping lines and we need to hunt for wild reindeer too!”
In the Arctic seminomadic economy, people inhabit territories that can
directly and indirectly feed them. Therefore the notion of rodina is very
complex and includes both the emotional afiliation with a territory and a
strong economic meaning. Via generations of inhabitance, the territory is
illed with meanings that both legitimize the entitlement and help to use
resources. Skills, ecological knowledge, history, and toponyms belong
together and become elements of the entrapment.
62
Tim Ingold. The Appropriation of Nature: Essays on Human Ecology and Social Relations. Iowa City, 1987. Pp. 93-94.
321
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
With Soviet state farm organization, that is, the shift to ixed brigade
territories, deadfall traps became symbols of the permanent occupation of a
territory with concrete borders. The combination of traps and trapped game
as private property and the brigade hunting territory system mean that traps
link their owner to the lands in which the traps are located. The practice that
sons use the same traps that their fathers had built, provides a continuity of
occupancy, transmission of land use, and the right to exercise control over
a certain territory.
Conclusion
In this article I have outlined the institution of khoziain (“master”) and
the concept of rodina (“homeland”). The Dolgan case proves that, despite
high mobility, kinship-based territorial control is central for nomadic economic and social organization. Hunting is a social process that has developed
within historical, ecological, and cultural constraints and also has a strong
connection to land use entitlement.63 To “domesticate” the tundra it had to
be turned into a social space where people’s activities were entrapped onto
the landscape. These activities were connected to real people who could
trace their personal and family history in a certain region. Thus the social
relationship to the landscape was established with the help of complex narratives and symbols – similar to the “plots” of White64 – that in sum helped
individuals and families to develop emotional ties to particular regions in
the tundra.
Success in hunting and ishing and the entitlement to territories depended
upon an accumulation of knowledge over generations, that is, familiarity
with the territory’s ecology, but also the skills to use those resources. The
longer the history of presence in the territory the more authoritative the
knowledge accumulated via this presence. Knowledge and success are
linked in the Anabarskii district to one’s “own” land and “own” wild reindeer population and have encapsulated the superiority of the master over
the resources of the hunting territory. In a nomadic culture, the transmission
of knowledge means for hunters and reindeer herders the transmission of
territorial rights. This knowledge was expressed in tangible and intangible
objects and symbols connected to the “domestication” of the tundra through
the life and work of real individuals.
63
64
Ibid. Pp. 252-256.
White. Metahistory.
322
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
The Soviet state farm policy of dividing lands into ixed parcels and relating individual production units (brigades) to territories, institutionalized
division of the tundra into concrete “ownerships,” and thus the territorial
entitlements of some families were strengthened by locating family brigades on their ancestors’ territory. The state farm also created new masters
by establishing hunting and reindeer brigades and allocating land to such
brigades, which has been important for establishing and transferring land
entitlements in the post-Soviet era.
With the collapse of Soviet agriculture, hunting bases and trap lines
became the private property of families and the land around them came
under informal ownership of the “master” – his homeland. With the help of
an ancestor’s memory, the homeland also received a historical dimension,
uniting a living master with past generations and increasing his authority
to decide upon access to the resources of his homeland. The “ghosts of
ancestors” transmitted not only the legacy of land use but also, using their
hunting grounds and skills, the mode of resource use.
The notions of “master” and “homeland” are a symbiosis of pre-Soviet
and Soviet practices that were used to monitor tundra resources. To symbolize “ownership” of lands, a complex system of narratives developed,
which includes place names, memoryscapes, ancestors’ graves, and especially arctic fox trap lines. These narratives functioned as entrapment
that positioned concrete actors in a local social context and related to
other people in the framework of land use.65 Dolgan people demonstrate
that claiming legal rights is always a discursive act, and in the northern
tundra, the family entitlement has material objects as reference points –
especially the trap lines – that become “total social facts” linking history,
memory, land, and law. This family entitlement – despite its semilegal
status – is a strong enough institution to be recognized, even by the oficials. Its survival and power demonstrates that the main goal of the Soviet
state – to establish control over nomadic people and their territories – was
less successful than was claimed. The continuation of the institutions of
khoziain (“master”) and rodina indicates that post-Soviet Russia has not
managed to establish strong state institutions and law enforcement in all
social and economic spheres. One begins to see why in Siberia it was never
possible to transform hunting and reindeer herding into a single, centrally
conigured economy.
65
For example, Nygren. Environmental Narratives on Protection and Production.
323
Aimar Ventsel, Entrapping History in Space: On Tuundra and Its Masters
SUMMARY
In this article, the author discusses landownership among the seminomadic Dolgan in the Republic of Sakha. Despite their nomadic lifestyle,
the Dolgan have developed a complicated landownership system based on
biographical and ancestral narratives linked to particular territories. The
article shows how these narratives make “wilderness” into “inhabited” land
and are essential for the “appropriation of nature.” Aimar Ventsel seeks
an answer to the question of why informal clan-based landownership has
been so vital and still today regulates the use of the tundra’s resources. The
concept of the “narrative of the land” is so strong that even formal administrative structures cannot ignore this form of landownership. Moreover,
the post-Soviet dismantling of state structures for controlling the use of
environmental resources makes the concept of the “narrative of land” more
instrumental for monitoring the use of resources in the Russian Arctic.
Ventsel’s hypothesis is that informal landownership or “moral possession”
is constructed through a complex set of tangible and intangible objects
that support each other in creating emotional bonds to a territory and thus
establishing a family’s right to control a territory’s resources.
Резюме
В статье рассматривается институт и культурный комплекс землевладения полуномадической народности долган в Республике Саха. Несмотря на номадический образ жизни, долгане создали сложную систему
владения землей, которая основывается на биографических нарративах
и рассказах о предках, связанных с определенными территориями.
Автор показывает, как с помощью нарративов, играющих ключевую
роль в освоении природы, “дикие” земли становятся населенными. Он
предлагает объяснение живучести неформальной системы землевладения, основанной на клановом родстве продолжающей регулировать
использование ресурсов тундры. Авторитет “нарратива земли” столь
непререкаем, что формальные административные структуры не могут
игнорировать эту форму землевладения. Автор проводит гипотезу, согласно которой неформальное землевладение, или “моральное владение”, конструируется посредством сложного сочетания материальных
и нематериальных объектов, поддерживающих друг друга и создающих
эмоциональную привязку к территории.
324
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Maxim MATUSEVICH
EXPANDING THE BOUNDARIES
OF THE BLACK ATLANTIC:
AFRICAN STUDENTS AS SOVIET MODERNS*
As a nineteen-year-old youth, Sunday Adelaja traveled some 5,000 miles
from his native Nigeria to Minsk, the capital of what used to be Soviet Belorussia. Adelaja arrived in Minsk in 1986, at the beginning of Soviet twilight.
In later years he would describe this journey to study journalism at Belarus
State University as divinely inspired. Indeed, the young Presbyterian from
Ogun State would go on to become the founder of one of the largest mega
churches in Europe, the Embassy of God, presently headquartered in Kyiv,
Ukraine. Fluent in Russian and resident in the former Soviet spaces for a
quarter of a century, Adelaja harbors few illusions about being an outsider
in one of the least cosmopolitan parts of Europe. Yet he clearly sees himself
as a foreigner with a mission: “Though I am a foreigner, God has given
me the ability to go and minister beyond race, culture and denominational
I am very grateful to Serguei Oushakine for his close reading of the manuscript and
a thoughtful critique of the original draft. Rossen Djagolov has kindly and generously
shared with me some of his archival indings that he deemed relevant for my research.
I am thankful to Michael Eckels for allowing me to peruse the images from his photographic collection. Finally, I would like to dedicate this piece to the memory of Lily
Golden, a one-person human bridge connecting Russia and Africa and... an ultimate
modern.
*
325
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
barriers.”1 It was God’s will, Adelaja assured his 25,000-strong congregation
in Kyiv (which includes the city’s mayor), to set a black man on the quest
“to bring religion back to Russia and the Soviet Union.”2 But the mission
has expanded beyond its initial purely religious objectives. Apparently, it
was God who moved the former Nigerian immigrant to lend his considerable
popularity and resources to the cause of a pro-Western Orange Revolution
in Ukraine, a political choice that almost automatically made him persona
non grata in Vladimir Putin’s Russia.3
But Russia itself has not been entirely immune from modernizing challenges presented by the black nomads transplanted to its soil. Just like
Adelaja and thousands of other young Africans, Joaquim Crima and Jean
Gregoire Sagbo irst arrived in the Soviet Union some twenty-odd years ago
in search of an affordable education. Both married, and stayed, and emerged
out of the post-Soviet lux relatively successful and well respected within
their respective provincial communities. Both appear to have embraced
their Russian identities but at the same time remained astutely aware of the
debilitating ineficiency and the myriad of social and economic ills plaguing
Russia’s countryside. Both made infrastructural development and the struggle against corruption and rampant drug addiction and alcoholism central
to their political campaigns for public ofice. Crima’s campaign eventually
loundered but Sagbo has been more successful and now serves as one of
the ten councilmen of his village Novozavidovo in the Volgograd region.
“This is my home, my town. We can’t live like this,” explained Sagbo who
had previously donated time and money to organize other villagers to clean
up their apartment buildings and improve the municipal garbage collection.4
The Soviet and post-Soviet odyssey of Adelaja, Crima, and Sagbo has
encapsulated a unique postcolonial transformation from migrant to settler,
from student to educator, from being the recipient of a particular (Soviet)
notion of modernity to becoming a reformer – and modernizer within the
former host community.
Afe Adogame. “Up, Up, Jesus! Down, Down, Satan!” African Religiosity in the Former
Soviet Bloc – the Embassy of the Blessed Kingdom of God for all Nations // Exchange.
2008. Vol. 37. Pp. 310-336.
2
Alan Cullison. Man with a Mission: A Nigerian Minister Sets Out to Save Kiev; Sunday Adelaja Promotes God and Democracy in a Land Suspicious of Evangelism // Wall
Street Journal. 2006. July 21.
3
Clifford J. Levy. An Evangelical Preacher’s Message Catches Fire in Ukraine // New
York Times. 2011. April 23.
4
Russia Welcomes First Black Politician // Afro-American Red Star. 2010. July 31–
August 6.
1
326
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Some two decades ago, Paul Gilroy
published his inluential essay The
Black Atlantic where he connected
the diasporic black experience with
the rise of modernity in the West.5 To
be sure, such connections had been
drawn before. The late Guyanese hisFig. 1. (Campaign poster for Joaquim torian and politician Walter Rodney,
(Василий) Crima) – personal collection of for example, explicitly linked the rise
Michael Eckels (with permission).
of European industrialization to the
exploitation of Africa by Europe during the Modern era. Africa, asserted
Rodney, served as the resource base for European capitalist expansion,
which forced the continent to put its resources, both natural and human,
at the disposal of Western entrepreneurs and colonizers.6 But for Gilroy,
Africans’ role exceeded that of industrialization fodder. Uprooted and
exploited, alienated from their surroundings, moved across the oceans
and continents, they, nevertheless, emerged over time as the true agents of
modernity. In the case of Africans in the diaspora, their very alienation, their
perpetual outsider status, their collective historical memory of dispersion,
the adaptability skills acquired in exile or bondage and then passed down
from generation to generation, their real or potential access to transnational
support networks – all were exactly the kind of attributes that one often
associates with this most visible symbol of modernity, the global nomad.
It is not a coincidence that Gilroy readily recognized the commonality of
black and Jewish experiences of dispersal, and here he followed in the
tradition of founding fathers of Pan-Africanism such as Edward Blyden,
who had been an early proponent of the afinity between Jews and Africans
established around the axes of migration, suffering, and servitude.7 Just
like Jews, diasporic Africans had to negotiate a transition from the state of
oppression to acquiring full citizenship rights. Similar to Jews, their inferior status produced a frenetic search for the optimal terms of political and
social existence.8 To achieve this self-serving goal they had to reform and
modernize the societies that traditionally exploited and oppressed them.
Paul Gilroy. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge,
MA, 1993. P. 261.
6
Toyin Falola, Kevin D. Roberts (Eds.). The Atlantic World, 1450–2000. Bloomington,
2008.
7
Gilroy. The Black Atlantic. P. 261.
8
Ibid.
5
327
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
And in doing so, just like the Jewish Mercurians recently imagined and
brought to life by Yuri Slezkine, they turned themselves into the agents and
promoters of the Modern Age.9
Gilroy presents to his readers a compelling new model of modernity that
is intrinsically tied to the historical expansion of the “web of diaspora identities and concerns” that he labels the “Black Atlantic.” Historians have long
since made the Atlantic central to the narrative of global capitalist expansion.
But, ironically, neither capitalism’s champions and apologists nor its foes
have been inclined to assign much independent agency to the people who
featured so prominently, both as the producers and the commodity, in the
Atlantic-centered globalization.10 Gilroy effectively transforms diasporic
Africans from mere victims into assertive agents of modernity. They challenge but also deine the West by introducing new discursive patterns and
political sensibilities, by championing novel forms of artistic expression, and
also, importantly, by initiating the white residents of the West (especially in
Europe) into the world of bifocal perspectives and multilayered identities.
Despite its ambition and a distinct expansionist élan, Gilroy’s project
remains limited by the history and topography of Western imperialism. While
acknowledging the global reach of African diaspora, Gilroy demarcates the
shores of the Black Atlantic as extending from North America into Western
Europe. In other words, the history of the Black Atlantic is the history of
Africa’s ill-fated encounter with those European societies who had a direct
involvement with either Atlantic slavery or colonialism. But this fairly narrow interpretation of diasporic geography, while quite understandable, implies that the impact of black migrations was largely absorbed by the former
colonial powers (Great Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, etc.) whose politics
and culture were transformed and modernized through the infusion of former
colonial subjects and, to a lesser extent, itinerant African-Americans.11 What
remains left out of this equation is, in fact, another vector of mass postcolonial migrations, the one that compelled thousands of young Africans to
travel behind the Iron Curtain, usually in search of education. In many ways,
their sojourns in the Soviet Union (and other socialist countries) were quite
distinct from the black experience in the West. For one, their introduction
to the East lacked the intimacy inherent in an encounter between the former
See Falola, Roberts. The Atlantic World; also Yuri Slezkine. The Jewish Century.
Princeton, 2004.
10
Ibid.
11
Paul Gilroy. Migrancy, Culture, and a New Map of Europe // Heike Raphael-Hernandez
(Ed.). Blackening Europe: The African American Presence. New York, 2004.
9
328
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
colonial subject and the former master society. The two communities (the
migrants and the hosts) possessed virtually no shared history, and colonialism
as a traditional point of reference worked only insofar as the Soviets were
known to have made a habit of decrying Western racism and imperialism.
Nevertheless, the arrival of black postcolonial migrants in the cultural and
political spaces on the other side of the Cold War divide had some profound
ramiications for the host societies.12 I would argue that this particular group
of educational nomads in the socialist nations of Eastern Europe functioned
as the conduit of modern ideas and sensibilities, some, understandably,
originating in the West, but the West, as astutely observed by Gilroy, fundamentally transformed by the Black Atlantic. Postcolonial Africans, making
their appearance in the midst of the societies whose ideology made them
wary of “foreign inluences,” performed a distinctly subversive role, both
culturally and politically. And in doing so they pushed back against the
Soviet consensus and the accepted norms of public behavior and discourse
in the Soviet Union. In some signiicant ways these young Africans pried
open the isolationist host society; they introduced their hosts to the rituals
and practices of global nomadism – and thus to modernity. In other words,
the shores of Gilroy’s Black Atlantic extended much further east then previously imagined – far beyond the borders of Western Europe and deep into
the heart of the Pax Sovietica.
The End of Internationalism
To appreciate the signiicance of the encounter between postcolonial
Africans and the Soviet society one must consider it in the context of the
Soviet Union’s postwar isolationism. As recently observed by Vladislav
Zubok, the war had inalized the transformation of the Soviet Union from
a multiethnic empire with an internationalist outlook to a nation state with
a strong Russian core. Since the late 1930s, Stalin, keenly aware of the
emotional appeal of Russian nationalism, actively encouraged and meticulously cultivated its resurgence. By supporting the production of historical
dramas such as Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944), both
directed by Sergei Eisenstein, Stalin sought to reclaim the heroic Russian past
heretofore shunned by the Bolsheviks. During the war, the regime brought
back the prerevolutionary Russian military insignia, evoked the names of the
faithful tsarist generals of yore, Alexander Suvorov and Mikhail Kutuzov, to
12
Maxim Matusevich. Journeys of Hope: African Diaspora and the Soviet Society //
African Diaspora. 2008. Vol. 1. No. 1. Pp. 53-85.
329
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
rally and decorate the troops and, on occasion, even allowed the Orthodox
priests to bless the soldiers’ arms before battles. The preeminence of the
Russian center of the Soviet Union was codiied in a new national anthem
that (tellingly) replaced the Internationale and was irst played on the Soviet
radio at midnight on January 1, 1944. Its famous irst stanza left no doubt
that the much trumpeted equality of Soviet nationalities was being qualiied; Russia was “more equal” than its fellow republics: “An unbreakable
union of free republics Great Russia has joined forever.”13 In a break with
the earlier Soviet practice, ethnic Russians were now actively promoted to
occupy the sensitive administrative and security posts, replacing the nonRussian cadres.14 The war experience also made it clear that the oficial
rhetoric of socialist internationalism notwithstanding, Stalin harbored deep
suspicions regarding some ethnic minorities’ willingness to defend his rule
against the foreign invaders. The liberation of Soviet territories from the
Nazi occupation was often accompanied by vicious campaigns of ethnic
cleansing, which targeted those groups most suspected of collaboration
with or sympathies for the Germans – Crimean Tatars, Chechens, Ingush,
ethnic Germans, Greeks, Estonians, and so on. Jews, yet another irksome
minority with dubious cosmopolitan inclinations and possibly harboring an
allegiance to a newly established State of Israel, were to follow. By the time
of Stalin’s death in 1953, Soviet Jewry, already ravished by a series of purges
and campaigns against the “rootless cosmopolites,” “Zionist conspirators,”
and, most notoriously, the “murderous doctors” with Jewish surnames, were
facing a very real possibility of mass arrests and deportations.15 If prior to
the war the Soviet Union had received a constant stream of black (mostly
African-American and Afro-Caribbean) visitors who led North American
racism and colonial oppression to experience the purportedly color-blind
Soviet utopia, now such trips became a rarity.16
“Gimn SSSR (1943),” http://www.hymn.ru/anthem-sovietunion-1943.html (accessed
November 16, 2011).
14
Vladislav Zubok. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War, from Stalin to
Gorbachev. Chapel Hill, 2007.
15
Jonathan Brent, Vladimir Pavlovich Naumov. Stalin’s Last Crime: The Plot Against
the Jewish Doctors, 1948–1953. 1st ed. New York, 2003. P. 399; Ya. L. Rapoport. The
Doctors’ Plot of 1953 [Na rubezhe dvukh epokh.] Cambridge, MA, 1991. P. 280; Louis
Rapoport. Stalin’s War Against the Jews: The Doctors’ Plot and the Soviet Solution.
New York, 1990. P. 318.
16
See Maxim Matusevich. Harlem-Globe-Trotters: Black Sojourners in Stalin’s Soviet
Union // Jeffrey Ogbonna Green Ogbar. The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics,
Arts, and Letters. Baltimore, 2010. P. 264.
13
330
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Stalin’s conservative revolution did not spare the disciplines deemed
prone to bourgeois deviations, particularly various area studies. The burgeoning ield of African studies, among others, bore the brunt of the wholesale
attack on the suspect disciplines. Some of the founding fathers of the Sovietorganized research on Africa were swept up in the purges, others changed
profession or else had to escape to the relative safety of African linguistics.
Despite an impressive crop of young Africanists that had made their presence
felt in Soviet academia during the early and mid-1930s, African studies as a
discipline remained in a rudimentary state, any attempts at serious research
effectively preempted by ideological constraints and a general atmosphere
of fear and uncertainty. Field research, even of the nineteenth-century Orientalist variety, was impossible to fathom. Until Professor Ivan Potekhin’s
1957 visit to Ghana, not a single Soviet scholar of Africa had set foot on
the continent.17 In other words, on the eve of African decolonization, the
Soviet Union found itself singularly ill-prepared to engage with the newly
independent African states.
“Africa Is Shaped Like a Heart”
The end of Stalin’s rule coincided with the rise of African independence.
Whereas Stalin harbored little hope for the political and ideological awakening of African colonies, those unredeemable preserves of Western imperialism, his colorful successor Nikita Khrushchev was full of optimism. Compared to Stalin, Khrushchev subscribed to a more nuanced worldview, which
allowed him to abandon the rigid dualism of his predecessor and recognize
the progressive potential of the emerging postcolonial regimes. For example,
Kwame Nkrumah, the leader of the pro-independence Convention People’s
Party in the British colony of the Gold Coast, was no longer dismissed as a
stooge of “big national bourgeoisie” and a British collaborator. And Gamal
Abdel Nasser of Egypt proved himself worthy of a major arms deal, which,
when concluded in 1955, sent shock waves through the Western alliance
and earned Nasser the undying hostility of its chief actors. No longer the
backwaters of global politics, the newly independent African nations now
held the promise of evolving into reliable Soviet partners and, hopefully,
eventual ideological allies. Such sentiments were expressed in a 1955 letter to Khrushchev and then-premier Nikolai Bulganin by Ivan Maiskyi, the
17
Apollon Davidson, Irina Filatova. African History: A View from Behind the Kremlin
Wall // Maxim Matusevich (Ed.). Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa: Three Centuries of
Encounters. Trenton, 2006. Pp. 111-131.
331
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
former Soviet ambassador in Great Britain: “[the next stage of] the battle
for the world supremacy of socialism would involve the liberation of colonial and semi-colonial nations from imperialist exploitation…” Winning
the goodwill of postcolonial Africans (and other Third Worlders) was now
imagined to be an important precondition for the ultimate disintegration of
the global capitalist system.18 After decades of academic and geopolitical
neglect, Africa had inally come into vogue with Soviet political elites.
At least in part, Africa’s emergence as a staple
theme of the Soviet Cold War discourse was a corollary to a relative opening up of the Soviet Union
during the Khrushchevian “thaw.” By denouncing
Stalin at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956
Khrushchev inaugurated a peculiar period, which,
while often equated with the height of the Cold War
and some of its most intense crises and stand-offs,
also became synonymous with a qualiied relaxation of ideological restrictions at home. Probably
no other event better captured this atmosphere of Fig. 2. Oppressed Africans
newness and liberalization than the International redeemed by Sputnik (KroYouth Festival held in Moscow in August 1957. kodil. 1958. No. 2. P. 8).
The festival made a profound and long-lasting impression on the postStalin generation. Almost ifty years later, Apollon Davidson, the doyen of
Soviet African studies, still remembered the cultural and emotional shock of
the festival. Davidson, like other Soviet students of Africa, had never been to
the continent and had limited contact with foreigners. And now, over 30,000
foreign youngsters had poured into Moscow. The Moscow streets were illed
with people who “looked anything but Soviet.”19 For the irst time in decades,
Soviet citizens found themselves face-to-face with the representatives of a
world ordinarily closed to them.20 For Davidson and his friends, the experience of this new openness was nothing short of “surreal, fantastic.”21 For a
famous jazz musician, Alexei Kozlov, interviewed half a century later, the
RGANI. F. 5. Op. 30. D. 161. L. 1, quoted in S. V. Mazov. A Distant Front in the Cold
War: The USSR in West Africa and the Congo, 1956–1964. Washington, DC; Stanford,
2010. P. 334.
19
50 let nachala Vsemirnogo festivalia molodezhi i studentov v Moskve // Radio Svoboda, http://www.svobodanews.ru/content/transcript/404434.html (accessed November
12, 2011).
20
Youngsters Fill Moscow For Fete // New York Times. 1957. July 28.
21
For more on the festival and its impact on Muscovites, see this recent memoir: A. B.
Davidson, L. V. Ivanova. Moskovskaia Afrika. Moscow, 2003. Pp. 7-25.
18
332
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
festival spelled the beginning of Soviet unraveling, a virtual extravaganza of
cultural exposure and mixing that introduced permanent issures inside the
Soviet monolith.22 Writer Anatoly Makarov closely echoes Kozlov’s sentiments; he also remembers being completely overwhelmed by the novelty
of his experiences: “The world, it turned out, was remarkably diverse. In
this multiplicity of human types and races, tongues, customs, fashions, and
musical rhythms – we all shared in the desire to live, to interact, and to get
to know each other… For me it was like a revelation. Our country was discovering the world, becoming one with the rest of humanity. And the world
was discovering our country… I don’t even recall whether I had a chance to
sleep or eat [during those fourteen days]. I was happy, as simple as that.”23
By many accounts, African delegates enjoyed wide (and wild) popularity during the festival. The hotel reserved for African delegations quickly
turned into a vibrant social spot, “the liveliest place” in town, with Soviet
youngsters crowding its entrance in hope of getting acquainted with the
foreign newcomers.24 Urban folklore circulated the wild tales of Russian
girls throwing themselves at dark-skinned visitors. The rumors, undoubtedly
greatly exaggerated, cast the festival as a veritable eruption of interracial
debauchery. Yet the gathering did excite Soviet citizens, unaccustomed to
such close, not to mention intimate, contacts with foreigners, pushing the
most adventurous toward behaviors both risky and risqué. One of the festival’s unintended consequences was the appearance of a generation of biracial
“festival kids,” whose presence amid the Soviet populace would serve as
a continuous reminder of that 1957 summer of love in Moscow.25 Indeed,
love was very much in the air. “Africa is shaped like a heart,” gushed forth
poet Evgenii Dolmatovsky, yet another contemporary observer smitten by
the festival.26
The party and state authorities had planned the festival to showcase Soviet values, but the event overwhelmed them and, as suggested by Kozlov,
produced some unanticipated and long-term ramiications. In August 1957,
millions of Soviet citizens received their irst exposure to the lifestyles,
Ibid.
Anatoly Makarov. Deti festivalia // Izvestia. 2007. July 10.
24
Ibid. Pp. 9-10. Also see 2-Week Revelry In Moscow Ends // New York Times. 1957.
August 12.
25
Kristin Roth-Ey. “Loose Girls” on the Loose? Sex, Propaganda and the 1957 Youth
Festival // Melanie Ilič, Susan E. Reid and Lynne Attwood (Eds.). Women in the Khrushchev Era. New York, 2004. Pp. 75-95.
26
Russian State Archive of New History (RGANI). Department of Culture at CC CPSU.
F. 5. Op. 55. Ex. 103 (January 1964–July 1965).
22
23
333
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
mannerisms, aesthetics, cultural expressions, and political debates that
contrasted most sharply with the Soviet norm.27 The effects of the festival
would linger on for decades; it provided an opening through which Western
ideas and art forms began to percolate into Soviet society.28 Africans, so
visible and popular during the festival, would soon begin to arrive in the
country in signiicant numbers. They came to study, but in an ironic role
reversal, they ended up educating the Soviets; they introduced a population steeped in parochialism to modern aesthetics, new art forms, and the
liberation political discourse.
The Eastern Shores of the Black Atlantic
In August 1957, the waves of the Black Atlantic reached the Soviet
shores. In the aftermath of the Moscow fete, the Soviet leadership sought
to capitalize on the publicity generated by the festival to expand its contacts
with the rapidly decolonizing African locations. In 1958, the Soviets inaugurated radio broadcasts on the continent, irst in French and English, but
soon adding programming in Swahili, Amharic, and Hausa. Simultaneously,
the Soviet Union began to ship thousands of copies of Russian-language
books and periodicals to Africa, while also initiating a series of library and
museum exchanges. The offerings of a recently founded publishing house
Vostochnaia literatura (Oriental Literature) prominently featured books by
African authors and a variety of publications on African themes.29 For the
irst time in their professional lives, Soviet Africanists were allowed to set
foot on the continent that they aspired to study. Between 1957 and 1959,
several delegations of Soviet scholars visited Ghana, Sudan, Ethiopia, Liberia, Egypt, and Madagascar.30 The two lagship universities, in Moscow
and Leningrad, adopted new curricula and, in the case of Moscow State
University, established a new department in African studies.31
The institutional foundations of Soviet efforts in Africa had been laid
with the creation, in 1959, of the Institute for African Studies (also known
For a comprehensive overview of the festival’s impact on Soviet society, see the recently published Pia Koivunen. The 1957 Moscow Youth Festival: Propagating a New,
Peaceful Image of the Soviet Union // Melanie Ilič and Jeremy Smith (Eds.). Soviet State
and Society Under Nikita Khrushchev. London, 2009. Pp. 46-65.
28
This argument has recently been made in Yale Richmond. Cultural Exchange and the
Cold War. University Park, 2003.
29
Mazov. A Distant Front in the Cold War. P. 334.
30
Yu. M. Ilyin. Institut Afriki, 1960–2004. Moscow, 2005.
31
S. V. Mazov. Sozdanie Instituta Afriki // Vostok. 1998. No. 1. Pp. 80-88.
27
334
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
as Africa Institute) under the umbrella of the USSR Academy of Sciences.
The institution’s creation myth has it that the idea had irst been pitched
to Khrushchev by none other than the great pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du
Bois, who in a private conversation called on the Soviet leader to set up
“an institute for the study of Pan-African history, sociology, ethnography,
anthropology and all cognate studies.”32 Less than a year later, a party
resolution in February 1960 stipulated the founding of a new university to
train “the national cadres for the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America.”
Friendship University, later renamed
Lumumba University after the martyred
Congolese prime minister, Patrice Lumumba, would emerge as the principal
institution of higher learning, catering
to the needs of Third World students and Fig. 3. African Students at Lumumba
University (Friendship University (forthus, presumably, to the needs of Soviet merly Lumumba) archival collection).
foreign policy.33
The irst students from Sub-Saharan Africa made their appearance in
Moscow and Leningrad soon after the festival, but until the launch of Lumumba University, their numbers remained relatively insigniicant. As of
January 1, 1959, only 7 Sub-Saharan Africans were oficially enrolled in
Soviet institutions of higher learning.34 But by the end of that year, 114 young
Africans were studying in the Soviet Union.35 Just a year later, in January
1961, Soviet oficials put the number of African students in the country at
well over 500.36 By the end of the decade this number would increase almost
tenfold, reaching 5,000.37 On the eve of Soviet collapse, close to 30,000
See W. E. B. Du Bois. The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century. London, 2007. Pp. 18-19. Also
see Mazov. Sozdanie Instituta Afriki; Ilyin. Institut Afriki.
33
RGANI. F. 4. Op. 16. D. 783. L. 13 and D. 806. L. 19, 21. For more archival references,
see Mazov. Sozdanie Instituta Afriki.
34
RGASPI. “Spravka o kolichestve studentov-inostrantsev iz kapitalstran, obuchaiushchikhsia v vuzakh SSSR na 1 ianvaria 1959”. F. 1M. Op. 46. D. 248. L. 12
35
RGANI. F. 3. Op. 12. D. 639. L. 57; cited in Mazov. A Distant Front in the Cold War.
P. 334.
36
RGANI. F. 5. Op. 35. D. 180, Ll. 12-17; cited in ibid.
37
These numbers come from O. M. Gorbatov and L. Ia. Cherkasski. Sotrudnichestvo
SSSR so stranami Arabskogo Vostoka i Afriki. Moscow, 1973 – also quoted in Julie
Hessler. Death of an African Student in Moscow // Cahiers du Monde Russe. 2006. Vol.
47. No. 1-2. Pp. 33-63.
32
335
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
young Africans were taking academic courses in the USSR, or about 24
percent of the total body of foreign students.38
The cultural and social proile of this new cohort of black sojourners in the
Soviet Union differed most dramatically from the earlier pre–World War II
wave of travelers. As demonstrated by some recent studies, the vast majority
of the earlier trekkers had arrived from North America or the Caribbean,
often attracted by Soviet ideology or, at the very least, by its antiracist and
anticolonial rhetoric. The numbers most likely remained in the low hundreds
and diminished greatly by the end of the 1930s.39 The post–World War II
arrivals, however, came overwhelmingly from the continent. In most cases,
they led no racism or persecution but rather pursued the pragmatic goal
of procuring an affordable education. In fact, the majority hailed from the
newly independent African nations, steeped in feverish political activism
and brimming with cultural assertiveness and identity politics that often
accompanied the process of decolonization. From their perspective, their
Soviet destination was not so much the promised land of racial egalitarianism, but rather just another developed nation with a well-regarded system of
higher education, which also happened to offer fairly generous scholarship
packages to foreign students.40
There is no question that throughout the Cold War period, the Soviets
sustained a concerted propaganda effort decrying and mocking Western
racism and colonialism, creating, in fact, a whole subgenre within the vast
inventory of Soviet political cartoons. The evils of American racism and
European colonialism were satirized almost daily in the pages of Soviet
periodicals, including major propaganda vehicles such as Pravda and Izvestia. Antiracist and anticiolonial cartoons regularly appearing in the popular
humor magazine Krokodil [The Crocodile] ridiculed the real and sometimes
invented manifestations of racial inequality in the United States while also
V. V. Gribanova, N. A. Zherlitsyna. Podgotovka studentov iz Afrikanskikh stran v
vuzakh Rossii // Publications of Africa Institute www.inafran.ru/ru/content/view/77/51/
(accessed June 17, 2008).
39
See, for example, Woodford McClellan. Africans and Black Americans in the Comintern
Schools, 1925–1934 // International Journal of African Historical Studies. 1993. Vol. 26.
No. 2. Pp. 371-390; Maxim Matusevich. Africa in Russia, Russia in Africa. P. 411; Idem.
“Harlem Globe-Trotters.” Pp. 211-244.
40
In a well-researched recent article Constantin Katsakioris dwells on the connection
between the modernizing aspirations of postcolonial African elites and the educational
opportunities offered by the Soviets. See: K. Katsakioris. Afrikanskie studenty v SSSR.
Ucheba i politika vo vremia dekolonizatsii // Ezhegodnik sotsial’noi istorii. 2008. Pp.
209-228.
38
336
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
heaping scorn on the fast-shrinking European colonial empires. Needless
to say, Soviet initiatives and selless actions in defense of the colonized, the
exploited, and the discriminated against in and by the West were juxtaposed
with the reactionary habits of Moscow’s Cold War rivals.41 But there is little
evidence that these propaganda campaigns had much impact on the continent.
Contrary to some of the claims expressed in Soviet propaganda cartoons,
the majority of Africans entered the Soviet Union to receive affordable education, not to escape capitalist oppression. Khrushchev and his successors
may well have interpreted decolonization as an opportunity to subscribe
postcolonial populations to the socialist model of modernization, pegging
their hopes on vague, made-for-use concepts such as the “noncapitalist path
of development” and “socialist orientation.” However, theory and practice
diverged most drastically. Across the colonial world, the end of European
domination did not necessarily entail an automatic reorientation of the
emancipated toward socialism. In the case of Africa, Khrushchev’s early
enthusiasm would be curbed in the course of the Soviet Union’s continuous encounters with independent African actors who, notwithstanding their
anti-imperialist rhetoric, kept the Soviets at arm’s length. Moscow’s early
successes in securing allies in places like Ghana, Guinea, Algeria, and Mali
would come to naught once those friendly regimes had been overthrown or
had changed their initial pro-Soviet orientation by the mid-1960s.42
Literally hundreds of such cartoons can be found in the pages of Soviet newspapers and
popular magazines. A typical one presents a short comic strip in two frames. In the irst
frame, we see a wretched bunch of dark-skinned Africans toiling under the whip of a white
capitalist exploiter. But in the second frame, a Soviet satellite crosses the horizon, an event
apparently deemed capable of inducing Africans to liberate themselves from colonial oppression. Inspired by Soviet technological achievement, Africans gain in self-conidence
and give the boot to their Western tormentor (see Krokodil. 1958. 20 January. No. 2. P. 8).
42
A few years back I examined this hard postcolonial pragmatism in a book on Nigerian–
Soviet relations: see, Maxim Matusevich. No Easy Row for a Russian Hoe: Ideology
and Pragmatism in Nigerian–Soviet Relations, 1960–1991. Trenton, 2003. P. 302. More
recently, the dificulties the Soviets faced in the Third World, and more speciically, in
Africa, emerged as an important theme in a series of revisionist post–Cold War studies of
African–Soviet ties, as well as in memoirs by former Soviet diplomats in Africa: see, for
example, Davidson, Filatova. African History. Pp. 111-131; S. V. Mazov. Politika SSSR
v Zapadnoi Afrike, 1956–1964: Neizvestnye stranitsy istorii Kholodnoi Voiny. Moscow,
2008. P. 335; Idem. A Distant Front in the Cold War. P. 334; D. F. Safonov. A dugi gnut s
terpeniem: Kak ia stal diplomatom-Afrikanistom. Moscow, 2002; A. M. Vasiliev (Ed.).
Afrika v vospominaniiakh veteranov diplomaticheskoi sluzhby. Moscow, 2001; A. M.
Vasiliev, P. P. Petrik (Eds.). Afrika v vospominaniiakh veteranov diplomaticheskoi sluzhby. Moscow, 2004; S. Ya Sinitsyn. Ostavlennye rubezhi: iz vospominanii diplomata.
Moscow, 2006.
41
337
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
Thus young Africans who began to enter Soviet society in the early 1960s
rarely represented any particular political interests and sensibilities besides
their own. Their encounter with the Soviet Union and their response to everyday Soviet life bore little resemblance to the euphoric acceptance expressed
by the previous generation of black travelers, many of them conscientious
refugees from America’s Jim Crow or colonial racial hierarchies. Accounts
by African students in the Soviet Union are replete with complaints about
drab lifestyles, everyday regimentation, substandard dorm accommodations,
and alleged spying by Soviet roommates.43 Upon his arrival in Moscow in
1959, an East African student named Everest Mulekezi was quick to discover
that he had to share his 14- by 16-foot dorm room with three other students,
two of whom were “hand-picked” Russians. His hopes for a hot bath after a
long and arduous journey were quickly dashed – hot water was available only
once a week, on Wednesdays from ive to eleven o’clock in the evening.44
Another young East African supplied a similarly gloomy account of his irst
few days at a dorm in Baku: “We were put four students to a room of 12 feet
by 12 feet. There were no curtains in the windows. In the room were four
beds. On each bed we had a mattress, one blanket and two sheets… There
are no bathrooms in the hostels. To take a bath you have to go to a bathing
house two miles away where you pay 15 kopecks. There are no laundries;
every citizen has to do his own laundering.”45 Fifty-ive air force cadets from
Guinea enjoyed even fewer creature comforts at a training base in Soviet
Kirghizia. Their complaints triggered an inspection by the CPSU Central
Committee, whose conclusions conirmed the wretched living conditions
in the barracks: “The cadets are housed six to seven people per room, living quarters are poorly furnished with little to no furniture. Most buildings
lack plumbing and heating….” According to the report, the cadets grumbled
about the empty shelves at the local grocery and stationery store: “This is
the country of sputniks but look at this poverty.” Alarmed, the party inspector warned that the low living standards at the installation could potentially
See, for example, Olabisi Ajala. An African Abroad. London, 1963; Andrew Richard
Amar. An African in Moscow. London, 1963; Jan Carew. Moscow Is Not My Mecca.
London, 1964; Andrea Lee. Russian Journal. New York, 1981; Nicholas Nyangira. Africans Don’t Go to Russia to Be Brainwashed // New York Times Magazine. 1965. May
16. P. 64; S. Omor Okullo. A Negro’s Life in Russia – Beatings, Insults, Segregation //
U.S. News and World Report. 1963. Vol. XLIX. No. 5. August 1. Pp. 59-60; William
Anti-Taylor. Moscow Diary. London, 1967.
44
Everest Mulekezi. I Was a Student at Moscow State // Readers Digest. 1961. Vol. 79.
No. 471. Pp. 99-104.
45
Nyangira. Africans Don’t Go to Russia to Be Brainwashed.
43
338
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
tarnish the image of the country abroad and supply its foes with an effective
“propaganda weapon against us, against the socialist community.”46
In stark contrast to the prevailing climate of complacency and the relative timidity of their Soviet peers, Africans protested vociferously against:
poor living conditions; racist incidents; restrictions on travel within the
USSR; restrictions on dating Russian girls; and restrictions on forming
national and ethnic student associations. As early as March 1960, African
students in Moscow petitioned the Soviet government to curb the expressions of crude racism by Soviet citizens.47 On another occasion, two African
students refused to be part of a long established Soviet practice – an annual
dispatch of thousands of Soviet students to work in the countryside during
the harvest. The objectors from Chad and Morocco resorted to a culturally
sensitive rationalization of their indolence. In their cultures, they argued,
men under twenty-ive were not allowed to work in the ields but rather had
a special obligation “to engage in leisure activities.”48 At about the same
time, in September 1960, four African students (Theophilus Okonkwo of
Nigeria, Andrew Richard Amar and Stanley Omar Okullo of Uganda, and
Michel Ayieh of Togo) were expelled from Moscow State University for
defying an administrative ban on forming the Black Africans’ Student Union.
Their expulsion and subsequent departure from the country received wide
coverage in the Western press. The students publicly accused university
oficials of suppressing the union as well as of imposing severe restrictions
on the circulation of “books and jazz records.” Okonkwo, Amar, and Ayieh
challenged the Soviet authorities in a biting “open letter”: “For the Soviet
leaders to pose before the world as champions of oppressed Africa while
they oppress millions in their own country and their satellites is hypocrisy
at its worst.”49 The expelled students left the Soviet Union with a scandal
and, once safely outside the country, sought to capitalize on their notoriety.
Amar quickly penned a book while Okonkwo gained minor celebrity by
Instruktor Otdela partiinykh organov TsK KPSS po soiuaznym respublikam B. Popov.
O polozhenii na tsentral’nykh kursakh po podgotovke i usovershenstvovaniiu aviatsionnykh kadrov Ministerstva Oborony SSSR // RGANI. F. 4. Op. 16. D. 937. L. 95-97
(December 31, 1961); Mazov. Politika SSSR v Zapadnoi Afrike, 1956–1964. P. 335.
47
RGANI. F. 5. Op. 35. D. 149. L. 42, 44. For more on this and similar incidents, see
Mazov. Afrikanskie Studenty v Moskve. Also see: The Plight of Our Students in the
USSR // West African Pilot. 1964. February 3.
48
Doklad o provedenii letnego otdykha studentov UDN vo vremia letnikh kanikul 1961
goda // RGASPI. F. 1M. Op. 46. D. 295 (1961).
49
Africans Did Russians in by Rioting // Chicago Defender. 1963. December 28; also
see: Africans Embarrass Reds // Christian Science Monitor. 1964. February 18.
46
339
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
publicizing his Soviet travails in a series of interviews and lengthy newspaper
articles.50 Soviet authorities responded in kind, denouncing Okonkwo and
his friends in no uncertain and well-tried terms as “Pentagon men bought
for American dollars” and “inspired by [their] overseas masters.”51 But for
the Western media the troublesome students represented something entirely
different – the tip of a burgeoning dissident movement in the USSR no less.52
The death of a Ghanaian student in Moscow, in December 1963, which
his friends suspected to have been a homicide, occasioned an exceptionally
angry reaction among African students in the USSR.53 They staged a protest
march on the Kremlin demanding a “Bill of Rights” for African students in
the country (the irst unauthorized demonstration in the Soviet Union since
the expulsion of Leon Trotsky in 1927).54 The press was also raging back
on the continent: “Why did our students… protest in Moscow recently?”
asked a particularly incensed African observer. “Was it not because… our
boys had been insulted and attacked on trams, on the streets, in restaurants,
in most public places? Could it be that our students have grown tired of the
hypocrisy of Communism and the Soviet system?”55 More trouble brewed
in 1964 and 1965, with African students in the USSR frequently reporting
racist attacks, ights with Soviet youngsters, and even feeling compelled
to “carry knives for protection.”56 In 1965, in a particularly embarrassing
episode for the Soviet authorities, several dozen African students organized
an eight-day sit-down strike at the railway station in Baku; they protested the
death of a fellow student from Ghana who had apparently fallen victim to
See Richard Andrew Amar. A Student in Moscow. London, 1961; Chukwuemeka
Okonkowo. Behind the Iron Curtain // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960. November 20; Idem.
Life in Moscow University // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960. November 6; Idem. I Meet
Imoudu in Moscow // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960. November 13; Idem. The Russians
Try to Hold Me Back // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960. November 20; Idem. Behind the
Iron Curtain // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960. October 16.
51
L. Koryavin. Razbudivshaiasia Nigeria. Moscow, 1962.
52
Moscow Accuses Nigerian Student // New York Times. 1960. October 30.
53
An exhaustive study of this episode is found in Julie Hessler. Death of an African
Student in Moscow: Race, Politics, and the Cold War // Cahiers Du Monde Russe. 2006.
Vol. 47. No. 1-2. Pp. 33-63.
54
Students Demand “Bill of Rights” // West African Pilot. 1963. December 30.
55
Sunny Odulana. Our Students in Moscow // West African Pilot. 1964. January 2.
56
See: Red Race Relations // Washington Post. 1964. January 5; Africans Carry Knives
for Protection In USSR // Chicago Daily Defender. 1964. May 11; Soviet-African Student Fighting Reaches Kremlin // Washington Post. 1965. January 28; African Students
Trying Anew to Leave Russia // Washington Post. 1965. April 4; Kenya Students Tell
Why They Left USSR // Chicago Daily Defender. 1965. April 8.
50
340
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
an intense rivalry over a girl. The strike in Baku reverberated throughout the
community of African students across the length of the Soviet Union, with
solidarity protests reported in Moscow, Leningrad, and Minsk. Eventually
twenty-nine students insisted on being repatriated back home. The Soviets
obliged in their own fashion by giving the recalcitrant youths “50 minutes
to pack.” During a debrieing in Nairobi upon their return, they painted a
highly unlattering picture of their Soviet sojourn, complete with alleged
harassment by the authorities and perennial ighting with Soviet students.
Rivalry over girls, in particular, tended to express itself in “racial terms.”57
In the aftermath of the Baku scandal, Komsomol oficials at Moscow
State University (MGU) grudgingly acknowledged several instances of scandalous behavior by Soviet students, but also argued that Africans and other
foreigners at MGU had a limited understanding of the selless and romantic
nature of Soviet young men, many of whom preferred the hardship of toil in
remote Siberia to the pleasures of Moscow high life. One wonders if it was
the “romantic nature of Soviet young men” that fueled the passions of one
freshman geography major who threatened to “lynch” an African student
married to his Russian fellow student. Or was it a disagreement over their
respective work ethics that led another MGU freshman to call upon his
African roommate to “pack up his stuff and go back to Mali?”58
In May 1965, the Soviet authorities tacitly linked the African student
community in the country with the idea of political subversion when they
expelled a black American diplomat, Norris D. Garnett, for “conducting
anti-Soviet work among students from African countries.”59 Garnett, luent
in Russian and Swahili, peeved the Soviets by making a habit of entertaining
African students in the library of the U.S Embassy in Moscow, where he
Kenya Students Go Home After Mysterious Death of Youth from Ghana // Pittsburgh
Courier. 1965. April 17; Kenyans Charge Soviet Brutality // New York Times. 1965.
April 7; Death of Another Ghanaian in Soviet Angers Africans // New York Times. 1965.
March 22; Kenya Students Go Home After Mysterious Death of Youth from Ghana //
Pittsburgh Courier. 1965. April 17; Lawrence Fellows. Kenyans Charge Brutality //
New York Times. 1965. April 7; Richard C. Longworth. Soviet Party Girls Look West
// Chicago Tribune. 1965. November 21; Adolph J. Slaughter. There’s A Jim Crow in
Russia Too // Los Angeles Sentinel. 1965. July 22; Victor Zorza. Student’s Death “Not
a Racial Issue” // Guardian. 1965. July 12.
58
Spravki ob internatsional’nom vospitanii v MGU // RGASPI. F. 1. Op. 39. D. 127.
Ll. 9-10, 87 (1964).
59
See: U.S. Diplomat Ordered to Leave Soviet Union // Chicago Daily Defender. 1965.
May 12; Soviet Ousts U.S. Cultural Aide as Inciter of African Students // New York
Times. 1965. May 12; also: Expelled Negro Diplomat Calls Soviet Charges Ridiculous
// Washington Post. 1965. June 17.
57
341
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
served as a cultural attaché. His anti-Soviet activities, it appears, consisted
mostly of drinking, smoking cigarettes, and listening to jazz records in the
company of young Africans, to whom on occasion he also lent money.60
Garnett’s departure from the scene hardly garnered the desired long-term
effect, as the community of African students in the USSR continued to be
the source of multiple headaches for the Soviet authorities. Incidentally,
Garnett’s expulsion from the Soviet Union infuriated the African-American
press back in the United States. At the height of the Civil Rights movement,
the public humiliation of one of very few prominent African-American
diplomats at the State Department was interpreted as a slander and a major
setback for the cause of racial emancipation.61
Discrimination or alleged discrimination aside, the students’ resentment,
it was noted, stemmed from “the sole fact of their living in a communist
country.”62 Once in the Soviet Union, Africans, “even self-proclaimed
leftists,” had to reconcile “the obvious discrepancies between what is said
and what actually exists.” And what “actually existed” in the Moscow of
the 1960s and 1970s were “the crowded living conditions, lack of privacy,
monotonous diet, inadequate sanitary facilities, and the overall drabness of
life.”63 A former African student at Moscow State University, writing about
his experiences there, maintained that of all foreign students in the Soviet
Union, Africans were most upset by Russia’s depressed style of living: “No
cars, no cafés, no good clothes or good food, nothing to buy or inspect in
the stores, no splash of color to relieve Moscow’s damp gray. Nothing but
shortages and restrictions. No opportunity to let go normally, breathe easily,
and enjoy some harmless student fun. Not a trace of the civilized pleasures
of Paris—or even Dakar.”64
By expressing their displeasure with the Soviet status quo (something
that few of their Soviet peers dared do) and by challenging it through their
“foreign” lifestyles and cosmopolitan aesthetics, some African students
became the de facto conduits of dissent. They had more freedom of expression and travel (and quite often more money) than their hosts, and many of
Who’s Meddling on Whose Campuses? // Chicago Tribune. 1965. June 2; Russia Expels
U. S. Diplomat Who is Negro // Chicago Tribune. 1965. May 12; Garnett’s Expulsion //
Chicago Defender. 1965. May 22.
61
Ibid; Adolph J. Slaughter. There Is Jim Crow in Russia Too // Los Angeles Sentinel.
1965. July 22.
62
The Plight of Our Students in the USSR // West African Pilot. 1964. February 3.
63
Ibid.
64
George Feifer. The Red and the Black: Racism in Moscow // Reporter. 1964. January
2. P. 27.
60
342
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
them arrived from postcolonial settings reverberating with spirited political
debates.65 Russian students in the hostel, according to the nonconformist
Oknokwo, enjoyed the company of Africans; they found “our easy manner,
our gaiety and our open debates quite attractive.”66 In class, African students were eager to challenge their professors, they asked “uncomfortable
questions,” not to subvert the educational process but rather to “know the
answers.” Fascinated by such displays of uninhibited behavior, some Russian
students reportedly attempted to emulate it.67 Everest Mulekezi remembered
intense political discussions he used to hold in his dorm room with some
of his Russian friends who were
bewildered by the openness and
nonchalance with which Everest
and his fellow Africans discussed
politically sensitive matters. From
the Soviet perspective, Everest, by
encouraging his Russian friends
to question authority and read the
Western press, clearly acted as an
agent of political subversion. By
introducing them to jazz, he effectively sabotaged Soviet cultural
values. It was in the course of one
such “sedition session” that a Russian friend of Mulekezi’s “buried
his face in his hands” and conceded
the truth of the African’s argument:
“It is true we’re not free… I am not
Fig. 4. Soviet cartoonists decry the evils of free to read what Westerners read. I
Western music (Krokodil. 1966. No. 17. P. 10). am not free to visit the West or even
travel in my own country without a permit.”68 African students in Moscow
articulated ideas manifestly out-of-sync with Soviet sensibilities in the pages
of Russian Journal, Andrea Lee’s perceptive memoir of her time in Russia.
Lee records, for example, a memorable conversation she had in a smokeAmar. An African in Moscow. P. 19.
Chukwuemeka Okonkwo. Behind the Iron Curtain // Sunday Times. Lagos, 1960.
October 16.
67
Ibid.
68
Everest Mulekezi. I Was a Student at Moscow State // Reader’s Digest. 1961. Vol. 79.
No. 471. Pp. 99-104.
65
66
343
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
illed Moscow kitchen with a stern-looking Eritrean student: “In my ive
years in Russia, I’ve come to hate everything about the Soviet system. Life
here is a misery of repression – you yourselves know it… The Soviet Union
has educated me, though not in a way it intended.”69 A former student at
Lumumba University recalled a popular joke from his time in Moscow: “If
you want to bring up a good Communist and radical send the kid to study
in the West. But if you want him to grow up a sensible bourgeois then have
him educated in the Soviet Union!”70
It is not that the majority of African students in the USSR embarked on
an Okonkwo-like collision course with the Soviet system. For many, the
romantic aura surrounding their arrival in this strange new land never entirely wore off. They were overwhelmingly young, mostly single, and often
adventurous, and Moscow, while no London or Paris, still offered at least
some excitement of urban student living, not to mention the opportunities
for exploring the vastness of the USSR through organized and sometimes
independent travel.71 Their economic situation was usually far superior to
that of their Soviet peers. During the 1960s the average stipend of a foreign
student in the USSR exceeded 90 rubles, or three times the amount paid to
Soviet students. This discrepancy was not lost on the regular Soviet citizen; it
also served to underscore the disparity in social and economic status between
the two communities, and the difference did not work in the Soviets’ favor.72
Being an African in the Soviet Union meant that one performed “foreignness” on a day-to-day basis. Besides, blackness implied an almost automatic
association with a number of modern political and cultural phenomena that
taxed Soviet sensibilities. Antiracist and anticolonial movements carried
a powerful liberation (and often implicitly religious) message, while the
sorts of cultural production usually associated with black roots tended to
be antiauthoritarian, both in form and content. The liberal wing of the Soviet intelligentsia sometimes embraced the oficially sanctioned liberation
“causes” not out of any deep respect for Soviet foreign policy but rather
because Africa’s struggle for emancipation and freedom resonated with
those whose own freedoms were signiicantly restricted. For example,
Lee. Russian Journal. P. 152.
Lina Rozovskaya. Oni uchilis’ v SSSR // BBC Russian. 2010. February 4 http://www.
bbc.co.uk/russian/russia/2010/02/100204_peoples_friendship_lumumba.shtml (accessed
November 15, 2011).
71
For an insightful analysis of the impact those trips had on the students’ perception of
their host country and their place in it, see Rossen Djagalov, Christine Evans. Moscow,
ca. 1960: Imagining a Soviet-Third-World Friendship / Unpublished paper, 2009.
72
See, Nyangira. Africans Don’t Go to Russia to Be Brainwashed.
69
70
344
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
having visited West Africa in the late 1950s, the bard of the Soviet “thaw”
Yevgenii Yevtushenko produced a collection of emotionally charged and
ideologically ambiguous poems. To be sure, the poet exoticized Africa but
also mused on the supposed commonality of fate between the savannah
(Africa) and the taiga (Russia):
Savannah, I’m the taiga
I’m endless like you
I’m a mystery for you
And you’re a mystery for me…
Your sons desire for you
Freedom eternal
And toward them I’m illed with love
Enormous like the pine trees of my land...73
Of course, one could read the poem as yet
another celebration of African emancipation.
Indeed, over the years, the Soviets labored
assiduously to domesticate and appropriate
African anticolonial movements or to claim a Fig. 5. “Pushkin in Africa”
(Russian intelligentsia chankind of ideological kinship to the Civil Rights nels their African connection
movement in the United States (a movement through Pushkin) – photograepitomized by a charismatic Baptist minister – phy by Michael Eckels (with
by no means a natural ally of the USSR).74 Yet permission).
considering Moscow’s own less-than-stellar record in that department, any
discussion of human and civil rights, even by a poet generally loyal to the
Savannah and Taiga // Evgenii Evtushenko. Vzmakh Ruki. Moscow, 1962. Pp. 58-59.
Translated by the author.
74
Martin Luther King, Jr., with his Christian gospel and Gandhi-inspired tactics of civil
disobedience, had to be inconvenient for the Soviets. They far preferred irebrand radicals
such as Angela Davis, whose famous 1971–1972 trial occasioned a massive propaganda
campaign of support by the Soviet Union. See, for example, numerous commentaries
and cartoons about the trial in issues of Krokodil for 1971–1972. A typical one depicts a
plucky Davis holding her head high in front of a racist judge. The sleeve of the judge’s
robe is in fact an executioner’s ax ready to drop on the courageous black communist.
See Krokodil. 1972. No. 5. P. 10. But even Angela Davis inspired more than a sense
of solidarity in the hearts of the Soviet intelligentsia. In 1978, a leading Soviet nuclear
physicist Sergei Polikanov was expelled from the Communist Party after having made a
statement to Western reporters protesting restrictions on travel abroad. “It was easier to
ight for the freedom of Angela Davis than for our own freedom,” announced Polikanov
and predictably got into trouble with the authorities. See: Soviet Physicist Who Complained of Travel Curb Is Ousted by Party // New York Times. 1978. March 28.
73
345
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
regime, was potentially subversive. Yevtushenko’s ode to African freedom,
composed at the time when hopes were running high for a long-lasting
post-Stalin liberalization of Soviet society, can also be read as a hymn to
freedom – African and Russian. Was it just a coincidence then that one of
the irst public expressions of dissent in Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was occasioned by African events? In 1968, Andrei Amal’rik, the dissident author
of the visionary Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, breached a
major taboo when he and his wife picketed the British embassy in Moscow
carrying signs reading “Gowon Kills Children” and “Wilson, Don’t Help
Gowon.”75 This unsanctioned protest was an ingenious act of political deiance. It was the Soviet Union, not Britain, that had been providing crucial
military aid to Nigerian General Yakubu Gowon since 1967. At the time,
Gowon’s federalist regime was locked in a bloody civil war against the
secessionist Biafra.
Probably the most visible aspect of Africa’s subversive challenge to
Soviet values could be observed in the countercultural prominence of the
types of artistic expression usually associated with African/black cultural
tradition. Living in Moscow in the early 1960s, Andrew Amar noted the
Russian students’ fascination with jazz music as well as their awareness of
its historical roots: “One of the things which often brought us together with
the Russian students was listening to modern jazz music. Large numbers of
them appreciated the better kind of jazz and also realized and acknowledged
that it had developed from the folk music of the African people.”76 With
its strong emphasis on improvisation and free spontaneous expression,
jazz (just as rock music later) forged between its listeners a special kind
of camaraderie that knew no borders and/or ideological divides. Jazz as
an art form then was bound to run afoul of Soviet authorities, a fact duly
noted by the observant Amar: “It was really the popularity that this type of
music gained among Russian students, thus bringing them into close contact
and friendship with American and African students, that really decided the
Soviet authorities to condemn this kind of music.”77 Early Soviet commentators saw in jazz the worst manifestations of Western decadence. They
also fumed over the “jungle” and “uncivilized” roots of the music. When
it came to criticizing jazz (and later rock) the gloves came off and Soviet
Henry Kamm. Portrait of a Dissenter. Preface to: Andrei Amal’rik. Will the Soviet
Union Survive Until 1984? New York, 1970. P. XIII.
76
Amar. An African in Moscow. P. 63.
77
Ibid. P. 63.
75
346
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
cultural critics and commentators did not hesitate to tap into the basest racial
stereotypes borrowed from the West. The great proletarian author Maxim
Gorky had explicitly linked jazz to the alleged savagery and unbridled
sexuality of its performers. For Gorky, jazz was a symptom of decay and
sexual degeneracy, a logical inal step in man’s descent into a spiritual
abyss (obesity and homosexuality
being the intermediary stages).78
Some thirty years later, jazz provided the Soviet intelligentsia
with an opening into what Irina
Novikova aptly termed a “second
life.”79 Soviet jazzmen like Alexei
Kozlov remained keenly aware of
the genealogy of jazz and readily
recognized its black roots as well
as the historical connection of the
genre to the themes of individualism and personal and collective
liberation. Jazz as a music of black
redemption appealed to the sensibilities of the post-Stalin generation in the Soviet Union, many of
them searching for an escape from
the heavy paternalism of the dominant system. Black Music, White
Fig. 6. Through racialized imagery Soviet Freedom was the title of the irst
cartoons mocked the allegedly “jungle” nature samizdat volume on jazz theory
of jazz and rock music (Krokodil. 1964. No. by the genre’s great enthusiast and
17. P .7).
future emigrant, Eim Barban.80
For excerpts of Gorky’s writings on the subject as well as an informed discussion of
the history of jazz in the USSR, see S. Frederick Starr. Red and Hot: The Fate of Jazz in
the Soviet Union, 1917–1991. New York, 1994. P. 91.
79
Irina Novikova. Black Music, White Freedom: Times and Spaces of Jazz Counterculture in the USSR // Heike Raphael-Hernandez (Ed.). Blackening Europe: The African
American Presence. New York, 2004.
80
Eim Barban. Black Music, White Freedom: Music and Perception of Avant-garde Jazz.
Leningrad, 1977, reprinted as Chernaia muzyka, belaia svoboda. Muzyka i vospriiatie
avangardnogo dzhaza. Ekaterinbrug, 2002; 2-е izd. St. Petersburg, 2007.
78
347
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
Conclusion
Africa and Africans thus occupied a highly ambiguous place in Soviet
everyday life. African students, the continent’s most visible and numerous
ambassadors in the Soviet Union, would come to showcase much more than
the Soviet Union’s internationalist credentials. While over the years the Soviet state and its ideologues exerted considerable efforts in “bringing Africa
into the fold,” the reality of African presence in the USSR was far more
multilayered and complex. The Soviets had intended to gain in international
legitimacy by providing the decolonizing Third World nations with generous
educational scholarships. The plan to bring in thousands of Africans and
other postcolonials to the institutions of higher learning in the Soviet Union
had a touch of Khrushchev’s ebullient idealism, yet it was also a pragmatic
enterprise, intended to display the Soviet achievement and obtain new allies
in the developing world. But in an unexpected twist of historical irony, the
poor African relations became the agents of change lodged within the host
society. Their impact was profound if rarely recognized, akin to the agency
of Black Atlantic moderns in Western Europe. Such a signiicant inlux of
foreigners inside the largely isolated Soviet society produced some unintended consequences for their hosts. Soviet authorities were soon to learn
that the propaganda value of the African student cohort was often outweighed
by the subversive impact of their presence on Soviet political discourse and
the oficially sanctioned cultural production. African students in the Soviet
Union, due to their privileged status (high stipends, access to hard currency
stores, relative freedom of travel), often functioned as the conduits of Westernization and an exclusive link connecting the isolated Soviet society to
the global community. Their privileged status within the Soviet Union laid
bare the visible beneits of global mobility. Not only did the “Mercurian”
Africans provide the Soviet public with their irst taste of jazz and rock music
and blue jeans but they also routinely challenged the established norms of
political behavior. Contrary to their Soviet peers, African students rarely
hesitated to ile oficial complaints against university authorities, to submit
grievance petitions to Soviet governmental and party bodies, and even to
organize protest strikes. In other words, they introduced the Soviets to the
antiauthoritarian international youth culture and its rituals of political protest during a decade marked by mass antiestablishment movements on both
sides of the Atlantic. Is it merely coincidental then that half a century later,
in post-Soviet Russia, the global nomads Crima and Sagbo have being following in the steps of their predecessors in the Soviet Union by challenging
348
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
their host communities to modernize? Having successfully adopted
new Russian identities they also
effectively globalized them. By
engaging in political activism and
striving to reform their adopted
communities they privileged mobility and change over stasis. In
the process, these African immigrants introduced their Russian
Fig. 7. Black Russian fan celebrating a Russian soccer win during the 2008 European Cup families, friends, and neighbors
(photography by Norvezhsky Lesnoy, Georgy to the practical manifestations of
Stefanov, Vitaly Azheurov, and Stanislav global nomadism; they taught their
Laur, published with permission by lenta. Russian voters an important lesson
ru on 22 June 2008 http://euro2008.lenta.ru/
in civic engagement and the value
photo/2008/06/22/ura/n05.htm).
of diversity; in other words, they
helped them become more modern. The driving force behind the activism
of Crima and Sagbo is the very energy of the Black Atlantic, so eloquently
summoned by Paul Gilroy, and now yet again being felt on the other side
of the former Iron Curtain.
SUMMARY
This article by Maxim Matusevich proposes to develop the model of
modernity presented by Paul Gilroy in his seminal essay The Black Atlantic,
to better understand the modernizing impact of African students in the Soviet
Union on their host society. While it is true that the Soviet Union, just as its
Russian predecessor, possessed no African colonies and, in fact, remained
unrelenting in its critique of European colonialism and North American
racism, it experienced its own modernizing encounter with the Black Atlantic. In the aftermath of the 1957 Youth Festival in Moscow, irst dozens,
and eventually thousands of African students made their appearance in the
USSR. They arrived in Moscow, Leningrad, Baku, Kiev, Minsk, and other
Soviet cities attracted by generous educational scholarships but also inspired
by their own postcolonial dreams of reforming and rebuilding their newly
independent nations. For the Soviets, steeped in anticolonial rhetoric and
349
Maxim Matusevich, Expanding the Boundaries of the Black Atlantic
guided by Cold War exigencies, these young Africans seemed to be “natural
allies” who could help to enhance Moscow’s credentials in the Third World
and cultivate its future elites. However, the reality of the encounter between
these postcolonial nomads and a largely isolationist society produced some
unintended consequences. From the point of view of Soviet authorities, the
community of African students in the Soviet Union continued to be a source
of ambivalence and even, on occasion, political and cultural subversion.
Cosmopolitan and globally minded African students repeatedly challenged
the norms of Soviet political and cultural discourse and, in doing so, proved
to be the true harbingers of modernity and globalization for the hosts. In the
course of the encounter with Soviet society, they inadvertently expanded
the reach of the Black Atlantic, bringing its tidal waves well beyond the
Iron Curtain.
Резюме
Статья представляет собой оригинальную попытку применить модель модерности, предложенную Полем Гилроем в его знаменитом эссе
“Черная Атлантика”, для понимания модернизационного воздействия
африканских студентов в СССР. Автор рассматривает период после
московского фестиваля молодежи и студентов 1957 г., когда в СССР
стали прибывать десятки, а позднее и тысячи африканских студентов.
Их привлекали не только щедрые стипендии; они вдохновлялись постколониальной мечтой реформирования своих ставших независимыми
наций. Советы рассматривали их как естественных союзников и агентов
укрепления позиций Москвы в третьем мире. Однако в реальности
контакты между этими постколониальными номадами и изоляционистским советским обществом привели к ряду неожиданных последствий,
анализ которых и составляет главный предмет рассмотрения в статье.
Космополитичные и глобально мыслящие африканские студенты бросали вызов советскому политическому порядку и культурному дискурсу
и, как показывает автор, оказывались провозвестниками иного типа
модерности и глобализации в принимающем обществе. Взаимодействуя
с советским обществом, они непреднамеренно расширяли и пределы
Черной Атлантики за рамки железного занавеса.
350
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Marina MIKHAYLOVA
A SPRINGBOARD TO A WIDER WORLD:
REACTIVE NATIONALISM
AS AN IDEOLOGY OF SURVIVAL
“I don’t understand how people can leave their land to look for a better
life.”1 In October 2011, Lithuania’s main online news portal, Deli, cited
this proclamation by Parliament Speaker Irena Degutiene in an article on
migration. Lithuania, a former Soviet republic, which became a member of
the European Union (EU) in 2004, has the highest rate of emigration among
EU member states,2 and media and politicians frequently voice anxieties
about the survival of the nation. The article, in which Degutiene suggested
that both schools and families should put more efforts into cultivating paI would like to thank individuals in the UK who kindly agreed to be interviewed. I
do not acknowledge them by name for the sake of their privacy. I am very grateful to
Columbia University’s Harriman Institute for the postdoctoral fellowship that allowed
me to pursue my research and to Alan Timberlake for his support and input. This article
grew out of a paper that I presented at Harriman Institute’s conference on Labor Migration
in the Post-Soviet World. I also thank Serguei Oushakine and two anonymous reviewers
for their thorough and insightful comments on drafts of my article.
1
Eglė Samoškaitė. I. Degutienė: nesuprantu, kaip žmonės palieka savo kraštą dėl gero
gyvenimo // Deli. 2011. Spalio 27.
2
According to Eurostat data, in 2010, the highest negative net migration per 1,000 population was recorded in Lithuania (–23.7). Lithuanian Statistics Department. Lietuvos
gyventojų tarptautinė migracija 2010. Vilnius, 2011. P. 63.
*
351
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
triotism among young people, in order to prevent them from forsaking their
nation, triggered a lurry of online comments. Politicians may bemoan a lack
of patriotism, but, as the reaction to Degutiene’s words suggests, far from
being obsolete, the Lithuanian nation remains a potent concept and lived
reality for thousands of Lithuanian migrants within the EU.
In this article, I draw on interviews with Lithuanians in the United
Kingdom, the main destination of Lithuanian migrants,3 to examine how the
concept of the Lithuanian nation4 is reasserted as a result of transnational
mobility. While recent anthropological scholarship has focused on the resurgence of antimigrant nationalist sentiments in the EU countries,5 I will
address reactive nationalism – the ways in which transnational mobility and
social exclusion reinforce and shape migrants’ own ideas about nationhood
and ethnicity. While Lithuanian membership in the EU enabled unprecedented migration, mobility can reinforce the importance of belonging to
the Lithuanian nation and dependence on ethnic networks. Paradoxically,
some individuals can achieve transnational mobility and function in the
“wider world” beyond the Lithuanian state only by narrowing their social
world down to ethnic enclaves. At the same time, an analysis of reactive
nationalism shows that the vocabulary of ethnic difference and nation-based
social imaginary are naturalized not only among the right-leaning portion
of the population but also among migrant communities.
Transnational Lithuanian migrant networks oriented toward the country
of origin are not a novel phenomenon. Vytis Ciubrinskas, a key scholar of
Lithuanian migration, examines how Lithuanians and their descendants,
who came to the United States during and before the Soviet period, sustain
and reclaim transatlantic “Lithuanian-ness.” He highlights the signiicance
of the idea of “home” and an idealized vision of Lithuania for migrants who
moved to the United States to escape the Soviet regime.6 However, the social
context of recent Lithuanian migration to the EU countries is strikingly different from earlier migration waves described by Ciubrinskas. While politiLithuanian Statistics Department. Lietuvos gyventojų tarptautinė migracija 2010. P. 10.
The Lithuanian term “tauta” has a range of meanings. “Nation” is the most prominent
one, but it can also be translated as “the people” or even “ethnicity.” The term “tautybe”
refers to nationality or ethnicity.
5
For example, Douglas Holmes. Integral Europe: Fast-Capitalism, Multiculturalism,
Neofascism. Princeton, 2000; Maryon McDonald. New Nationalisms in the EU: Occupying the Available Space // Andre Gingrich and Marcus Banks (Eds.). Neo-Nationalism
in Europe and Beyond. New York, 2006.
6
Vytis Ciubrinskas. Transatlantic Migration Vis-à-vis Politics of Identity: Two Ways
of Lithuanian-ness in the US // Filosoija. Sociologija. 2009. V. 20. Nr. 2. Pp. 85-95.
3
4
352
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
cians and the media at times accord Soviet-era migrants moral superiority
for their rejection of the Soviet regime and loyalty to Lithuanian traditions,
post-independence Lithuanian migrants in the EU are often portrayed in
more negative terms. In turn, the migrants have an ambivalent relationship
to their “homeland,”even as they remain oriented toward Lithuania and may
plan to return there. This article aims to examine these “new” migrants’ own
narratives about transnational mobility and national belonging.
Scholars have begun to investigate experiences of post-independence
Lithuanian migrants to the United States and the EU. One of the key indings seems to be the persistent importance of migrant social networks that
channel individuals into particular locations and jobs. Migrant networks,
in interaction with dimensions such as gender and class, can provide social
and inancial support but also restrict individuals’ opportunities.7 What types
of solidarities and differences are constructed through a reliance on these
social networks? The studies of Lithuanian migrants have begun to address
this question by focusing on the interplay between belonging and discursive
separation of “us” versus “them.” Thus, Neringa Liubiniene considers the
process through which individuals construct their understanding of their own
space in Ireland partially through exclusion.8 Violetta Parutis examines how
Lithuanian and Polish migrants construct their own identities in the context
of ethnoracial diversity in London. She argues that they employ a variety
of strategies to position themselves as part of the UK’s “white” majority,
in opposition to other migrants.9 However, migrants’ reaction to the UK’s
demographics varies: Jolanta Kuznecoviene highlights the diversity of migrants’ experiences and categorizes migrants into four groups, distinguished
by their degree of integration into British society and orientation toward
Lithuania.10 Scholarship on Lithuanian EU migrants is dwarfed by a more
Jurga Bucaite-Vilke, et al. The Experiences of Lithuanian Migrants: The Social Construction of Networks and Identities // Filosoija. Sociologija. 2011. No. 4. Pp. 510-522;
Daiva Kuzmickaite. The Adaptation of Recent Lithuanian Immigrants in Chicago //
Lituanus. 2000. Vol. 46. No. 2. Pp. 63-76.
8
Neringa Liubinienė. Migrantai iš Lietuvos Šiaures Airijoje: “Savos Erdvės” Konstravimas / Ph.D. Dissertation; Vytautas Magnus University, 2009.
9
Violetta Parutis. White, European, and Hardworking: East European Migrants’ Relationships with Other Communities in London // Journal of Baltic Studies. 2011. Vol. 42.
No. 2. Pp. 263-288.
10
Jolanta Kuznecoviene. Outside of Imagined Community: Strategies of Incorporation
of Lithuanian Immigrants // Identity Politics: Migration, Communities, and Multilingualism [Acta Historica Universitatis Klaipedensis XX, Studia Anthropologica IV]. 2010.
Vol. 9. P. 23.
7
353
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
extensive body of work focused on East European migrants in general and
on Polish migrants in particular. These studies describe features common to
East European migrants, including their orientation toward the home country, their sense that their migration is a temporary solution, and a variety of
labor strategies they undertake.11
This article builds on studies of the social organization and political
imaginaries of migrants in order to explore the construction of reactive
nationalism among Lithuanians living in the UK. Caroline Brettell, referencing Anthony Fielding’s essay “Migration and Culture,” argues that
anthropology’s key contribution to the study of migration is its ability to
show that individuals mediate their experiences and socioeconomic conditions through their own cultural and social orientation.12 I draw on Brettell’s
methodology of an analysis of migrants’ narratives in order to examine the
ways in which individuals interpret and manage social transformations and
encounters with others engendered by transnational mobility. According to
Steven Vertovec, anthropology is well positioned to explore the politics of
culture linked to transnational migration and to analyze the ways in which
individuals use concepts such as culture, cultural difference, and nation to
contemplate the role of migrants in their societies.13 However, instead of
focusing on local residents’ responses to migration, this article examines
how migrants themselves use the terminology of nationhood and cultural
difference, as a reaction to novel socioeconomic circumstances and various types of social exclusion in their new places of residence and work. An
analysis of migrant narratives reveals the mechanism through which exclusion can be reinterpreted in moral terms and translated into the vocabulary
of nationalism and ethnic difference.
This article is based on interviews with seventeen Lithuanian migrants,
which I conducted from October 24 to November 9, 2011, in London,
London suburbs, and Peterborough. I had begun to examine individuals’
discourses about migration, national belonging, and the Lithuanian state
during my dissertation ieldwork in Lithuania. By interviewing individuals
Richard Black, et al. (Eds.). A Continent Moving West? EU Enlargement and Labor
Migration from Central and Eastern Europe. Amsterdam, 2010; Jakub Isanski and Piotr
Luczys (Eds.). Selling One’s Favorite Piano to Emigrate: Mobility Patterns in Central
Europe at the Beginning of the 21st Century. Cambridge, 2011; Anna White. Polish
Families and Migration Since EU Accession. Bristol, 2011.
12
Caroline Brettell. Anthropology and Migration: Essays on Transnationalism, Ethnicity,
and Identity. Walnut Creek, 2003. P. 23
13
Steven Vertovec. The Cultural Politics of Nation and Migration // Annual Review of
Anthropology. 2011. No. 40. Pp. 241-256.
11
354
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
in the UK I wanted to track narratives about Lithuania as a homeland and
the ethnic differences that emerge as a result of transnational mobility. I
aimed to include a broad range of individuals, in order to observe whether
there are recurrent themes in individuals’ discourses. Thus, my interviewees
include ive individuals working in education, business, and upper management, and twelve individuals employed in services or manual labor, such
as factories and construction work.14 While I had a list of broad questions I
asked each respondent, my intention was to have a semistructured, informal
discussion.15 Some of the interviews turned out to be group discussions,
since individuals would involve their friends and family members in the
conversation and would shift their addressees between me and their friends,
sometimes picking up long-standing discussions or arguments. My goal
is not to generalize about the views and opinions of Lithuanian migrants
based on this small sample but to examine how individuals construct their
narratives and analyze tropes, metaphors, and vocabulary that they employ
when talking about their migration trajectory and experiences in the UK.
Thus, the interviews exemplify the process of construction and reiication
of national belonging and cultural difference, as well as the social implications of this vocabulary.
I begin by considering the valence of discourses about nationalism
in Lithuanian politics in light of recent migration from Lithuania. I then
examine how individuals narrate their encounters with others outside of
Lithuania’s borders and show how social exclusion results in a reassertion
of ethnic difference. The next section describes how for some migrants,
the Lithuanian nation emerges as a lived identity that is necessary for
survival but also highly limiting. I show that the individuals I talked to in
the UK perceive Polish migrants as a model nation, highlighting their own
commitment to the ideal of a monoethnic culture and acquiescence to the
failure of integration. Finally, I analyze individuals’ interpretation of their
own mobility and their relation to the Lithuanian nation-state in light of the
solidiication of ethnicity as a key dimension of belonging and a platform
for social action.
14
All of my interviewees moved to the UK after Lithuania’s independence. I obtained
contact information for all of my respondents (except one, whom I approached without a
prior introduction) through four different acquaintances in Lithuania. I made a conscious
choice to rely on my acquaintances’ social networks, in order to achieve at least a degree
of rapport with the interviewees.
15
The interviews were 40 minutes to 1.5 hours long, and all but one were recorded. Four
of the interviews involved two or three people, and the rest were one-on-one.
355
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
The European Union, Lithuanian Nationhood, and Mobility
While Lithuania was still part of the Soviet Union, “nation” and “Europe” were powerful concepts in mobilizing individuals against the Soviet
regime. A Herderian notion of unique nationhood, which became important in
Lithuania during the nineteenth century, has only been reinforced by Soviet
nationalist policies, as scholars have shown.16 In the 1980s, resistance against
the Soviet regime gained a broad mass following, spearheaded by Lithuanian
intellectuals, who framed the movement toward greater sovereignty in terms
of survival of the nation and a return to the European family of nations.17 The
Lithuanian nation, thus, was a site of morality and solidarity in opposition
to the repressive Soviet policies and Moscow-imposed control over Lithuania’s territory. Some politicians and scholars have described Lithuania’s
drive toward independence as a return to the “European family of nations,”
equating the Soviet system with an artiicial and antinationalist “prison of
nations.”18 Thus, the nation was an alternative form of belonging and moral
community, while “Europe” served as a paragon of morality and political
organization. After Lithuania became independent from the Soviet Union,
the political elites were uniied in the goal of joining the European Union.
After Lithuania’s accession to the EU in 2004, the country became
entangled in a variety of political initiatives and institutions but remained
peripheral in terms of its decision making. Migration out of the country
provoked additional anxieties about Lithuania’s place in the EU’s political
economy. Lithuania’s entrance into the Schengen zone – the EU territory
where internal borders and custom controls have been eliminated – enabled
free migration within the EU. In 2004, Ireland, the UK, and Sweden opened
Roger Brubaker. Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in
the New Europe. Cambridge, 1996; Francine Hirsch. Empire of Nations: Ethnographic
Knowledge and the Making of the Soviet Union. Ithaca, 2005; Yuri Slezkine. The USSR
as a Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism //
Slavic Review. 1994. Vol. 53. No. 2. Pp. 414-452; Ronald G. Suny. The Revenge of the
Past: Nationalism, Revolution, and the Collapse of the Soviet Union. Stanford, 1993;
Ronald G. Suny and Terry Martin. A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the
Age of Lenin and Stalin. Oxford, 2001.
17
Romuald Misiunas. Baltic Nationalism and Soviet Language Policy: From Russiication to Constitutional Amendment // Henry Huttenbach (Ed.). Soviet Nationality Policies: Ruling Ethnic Groups in the USSR. New York, 1990; Alfred E. Senn. Lithuanian
Awakening. Berkeley, 1975.
18
Jan Blommaert and Jef Verschueren. The Role of Language in European Nationalist Ideologies // Language Ideologies: Practice and Theory. Oxford, 1988; Suny. The
Revenge of the Past.
16
356
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
access to their labor markets for residents of other EU countries. Discrepancy
in the economic level between Lithuania and other EU countries, as well as
increasing unemployment in Lithuania in recent years, contributed to high
levels of emigration out of Lithuania to other EU countries. According to
the European Migration Network, 0.6 million people emigrated from Lithuania since its independence.19 This is a signiicant number considering that
as of June 2012, Lithuania’s population was 3,185,883.20 However, many
of the individuals I talked to believe that, in fact, much of the migration is
not recorded, since many people do not declare their departure. In 2010, 50
percent of migrants declared the UK as their country of destination, while
Ireland and Norway lagged signiicantly behind as the destination countries
of Lithuanian migrants.21 Like other so-called A8 migrants, Lithuanians in
the EU embodied a novel type of mobility: neither international nor truly
internal.
In the context of limited sovereignty and high levels of migration, politicians, media, and individuals in everyday conversations often resort to the
vocabulary of nationhood to lament or analyze Lithuania’s situation. Talk
about the death of the nation is common in politicians’ narrative repertoires,
usually expressing concerns about the changing ethnic composition of the
state or anxieties about social rapture.22 As Oushakine argues, traumatic
narratives about nationhood act as a “sociosymbolic operation of disinvestment from previously important contexts and practices that vanished within
a very short period.”23 In the case of Lithuania, discourses about the dying
nation seek to reconcile Lithuania’s participation in the EU, which was long
considered the moral standard, with the country’s persistent socioeconomic
dificulties and political scandals. Not surprisingly, individuals’ interpretations of Lithuania’s position within the EU and migration’s causes differ
depending on social position. Thus, politicians, especially those afiliated
19
European Migration Network – Lithuania. “Migration: 10 Years Overview” // http://123.
emn.lt/en/general-trends/migration-10-years-overview. 2011.
20
Statistics Lithuania. Rodiklių duomenų bazė / Gyventojai ir socialinė stastika // http://
www.stat.gov.lt.
21
In 2010, 49.7 percent of Lithuanian migrants declared the UK as their next place of
residence. The next two most popular countries of destination were Ireland (14.5 percent) and Norway (5.9 percent). Lithuanian Statistics Department. Lietuvos gyventoju
tarptautine migracija 2010. P. 10.
22
Susan Gal and Gail Kligman. The Politics of Gender After Socialism. Princeton, 2000.
Pp. 27-28.
23
Serguei Alex. Oushakine. The Patriotism of Despair: Nation, War, and Loss in Russia.
Ithaca, 2009. P. 114.
357
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
with right-wing political parties, blame individuals for their moral disorientation, lack of patriotism, and betrayal of the Lithuanian nation-state.24 On the
other hand, individuals frequently portray Lithuanian elites as the culprit of
moral disintegration and rampant social injustice. While the culprit of moral
and social corruption varies, the debate continues in terms of nationhood,
however ill-equipped this concept is to explain the complexities of the EU’s
political economy and individuals’ geographic labor trajectories.
Degutiene’s statement, “Civic development in school: is it possible to inherit love for the motherland?” made during the conference that I mentioned
at the beginning of the article, is an example of a narrative about migration
as a betrayal of the nation. At the conference a variety of educators and politicians discussed how patriotism can be cultivated among school students.
Degutiene said that she could not understand or imagine a situation where
“just because today the state is in a dificult situation, and I can’t live the
way I could live in a foreign state, because of this I should lose my sense of
nationhood, my language, to forsake it, to integrate into a different society,
where, actually, it is dificult to it in.”25 In this narrative the Parliament chair
suggested that mobility is a betrayal of one’s nation-state – a callous valuation
of personal economic beneit over eternal values of love for one’s nation and
language. Not only were individuals, according to Degutiene, abandoning
their state at the time of adversity, but they were literally losing their own
sense of belonging to the nation. The individuals I talked to, however, saw
their mobility in quite different terms. They frequently portrayed their migration as a result of the state’s abandonment of the Lithuanian nation and
the elites’ lack of concern about Lithuanian citizens. In the next section, I
show that migrants’ encounters with others outside of Lithuania’s borders
only heightened their reliance on the vocabulary of nationhood.
Failed Integration and Ethnic Difference
What are the effects of Lithuanian migrants’ transnational mobility on
their own notions of belonging? Do individuals fashion a novel type of
cosmopolitan orientation or new multiple allegiances? One of the results
of mobility, as I show in the section below, can be a “discovery” of ethnic
For example, there is an interesting collection of papers on migration, ranging from
statistically oriented analyses to lyrical contemplations about the longevity of the Lithuanian nation: Lithuanian Republic Parliament. Emigracija iš Lietuvos: Padėtis, Problemos,
Galimi Sprendimo Būdai. Konferencijos Medžiaga. Vilnius, 2006.
25
Samoškaitė. I. Degutienė.
24
358
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
difference. Individuals translate many of the everyday traumas and failures
to integrate into the vocabulary of deep-seated ethnic difference, reinscribing the prominence of ethnicity and national belonging as categories that
organize their social reality. As scholars have shown, in the context of social
instability and marginalization, group loyalty and naturalized group bonds
can become especially important.26
One of the striking features of the new Lithuanian migration is its shortterm orientation, which, as some researchers have indicated, can discourage
individuals from learning English or trying to integrate into the local community.27 Everyone I talked to insisted that they originally came for a short
time, “just to see what it is like,” and planned to go back to Lithuania once
they had earned some money. More than half of the people I talked to were
still planning to return to Lithuania at some point in the future. Indeed, some
individuals told me that they purposefully kept their apartment in Lithuania or refused to buy property in the UK, so as not to be tied to their new
place of residence. However, failure to integrate is not simply a personal
decision: individuals encounter various forms of exclusion within the local
communities and institutions.
Individuals interpret everyday forms of exclusion through the vocabulary
of ethnic difference. Migrant narratives described a social world that was
structured by a hierarchy of ethnicities. In this hierarchy the English occupy
the highest position, “Pakistanis” – as they refer to South Asian migrants –
are in the middle, and East Europeans, especially Lithuanians, are at the
very bottom. My interviewees assigned South Asian migrants second place
because of their supposed knowledge of their rights and the laws, which
give them leverage against the English who are afraid of discrimination
accusations. Unlike the Lithuanian migrants in Violetta Parutis’s study,
who made an effort to align themselves with the English on the basis of
skin color,28 a few people I talked to insisted that Lithuanians were at the
very bottom of the hierarchy in terms of their treatment by the English, the
scale of wages, access to schools, jobs or services. For example, Juozas,29 a
young man who worked as an auto mechanic, said that the hierarchy applies
Oushakine. The Patriotism of Despair. P. 12.
Equality and Human Rights Commission Report. The UK’s New Europeans: Progress
and Challenges Five Years after Accession. Washington, 2010. P. 17.
28
Violetta Parutis. White, European, and Hardworking: East European Migrants’ Relationships with Other Communities in London // Journal of Baltic Studies. 2011. Vol. 42.
No. 2. Pp. 269-270, 280-284.
29
All the interviewees’ names are replaced by pseudonyms.
26
27
359
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
to the order in which individuals are assisted at the auto repair shop – irst
the English, then Pakistanis, and, inally, Lithuanians. Juozas offered this
as an example of discrimination and one of the reasons why he does not
like living in the UK. Juozas and others I talked to distinguished among
ethnicities based on their ability to claim privileges and navigate the UK’s
labor market and social world.
Individuals derive lessons about ethnic differences not only at work and
during business interactions but also from other socialization experiences.
Most individuals said that they have no friends among the English. I interviewed Giedre and Irma at a Polish diner at a mall in northeastern London.
Giedre, in her late sixties, was retired but active in the local Lithuanian
community and in a particular Lithuanian Catholic Church, which, as she
explained, functioned as a Lithuanian social club. Irma, her friend, who
was in her late forties, was getting a degree in public administration from
a Lithuanian university and planned to move to Lithuania in a few years.
Giedre and Irma, as other people I interviewed, explained English aloofness
in terms of social organization and mentality.
Marina: Do you have many acquaintances, friends among the
English?
Giedre: The English will never be your friends. Never. You see,
the English somehow they position themselves… well… We’re all
immigrants to them, you know. English will never… And for us… I
was studying in college. And the teacher – she was English – so she
says: “Do you have English friends?” Everyone is silent. There were
all different ethnicities there. So, she says, “I didn’t think you did.”
Because that’s how the English position themselves. Of course, they
talk to you, communicate at work, everything. But they will never
allow a friendship.
Irma: Well, this is their established tradition. This is their mentality.
Giedre: This is their mentality.
The interaction between Giedre and Irma is telling, because it illustrates
the process through which ideas about ethnically speciic behavior become
entrenched. To prove her point that friendship between the English and
Lithuanians is impossible, Giedre refers to a local teacher who transmitted a
narrative about the willingness of the English to come into contact with other
ethnicities. For Giedre, the teacher, who is English herself, is an authority
on the topic, and other students in the class only conirm her words by their
tacit acknowledgment that they have no friends among the native residents.
Giedre also insists on this idea to Irma, and readily picks up an explanation
360
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
about mentality volunteered by Irma. Later in the same conversation Irma
explained English aloofness in terms of the rigidity of their social circles.
And while Irma tried to use Giedre’s friendship with another woman to
show that the English do occasionally socialize with migrants, Giedre was
adamant about differentiating between the English and Irish ethnicities with
corresponding modes of behavior.
Irma: There is this preprogrammed social circle. And since we –
migrants who came here – end up in such a – how should I say it? – a
bit of a marginalized bounded social space… Still there are some
personal connections. There is some type of communication. Well, [to
Giedre] like you and your friend.
Giedre: Yes. But she is Irish. We do socialize.
Irma: Well, anyway.
Giedre: No, she really emphasizes that. That she is Irish.
Irma: It’s different, huh?
Giedre: She will never say that she is English. Never. She is Irish.
This is completely different, you know. The English, they are different.
Giedre’s interaction with her Irish friend reconirmed for her the importance of ethnic differentiation and naturalized ethnicity and migrant exclusion. While Irma attempted to explain the lack of communication between
Lithuanians and the English in terms of social differences, Giedre channeled
the discussion into the vocabulary of ethnicity. Giedre also rejected Irma’s
attempt to group together the British and the Irish, by pointing out that these
two ethnicities presuppose completely different modes of behavior. In this
and previous episodes, Giedre relies on the discourses of difference offered
by two local residents: her English teacher and her Irish friend.
Individuals get conirmations of the importance of ethnic differentiation
from interlocutors in England, from each other, and from Lithuanian media
and literature. Many individuals’ experiences of exclusion are so traumatic
that they describe their interactions in terms of assault on their humanity.
In some interviews, my respondents emphasized that it is their children
who have the most dificulty in adapting to their environment and have the
most miserable time in the UK. Ostracized in school, bored at home, seeing very little of their parents, these children found it extremely dificult to
adjust to life in the UK and build friendships with the English or even with
migrants, who are not Lithuanians. I interviewed Romune, a woman in her
mid-forties, and her friend Jurate, about forty years old, in their apartment
in Peterborough. Both women and their husbands worked at a chocolate
factory. The women, their husbands, and children shared one apartment.
361
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
Our conversation took place in their kitchen, which was sparsely decorated
and not well heated. Jurate, who had a cold, wore a pink bathrobe over her
clothing in an effort to warm herself. Romune said that her youngest child
is being picked on by teachers and other students just for being Lithuanian.
Romune explained bitterly that since neither she nor her husband spoke
much English, “there is no one to ight for him.” For Romune the mistreatment she encountered at the factory and her son’s tribulations in school
were traumatic experiences that she framed in the warlike terminology of
assault and resistance. In another interview Migle, a twenty-one-year-old
woman, could barely hold back tears when she recounted the humiliation
of her high school experience. When she came to the UK at fourteen, she
could not speak English, and the children in her class would constantly tease
her. Migle described her troubles at school:
In school it was completely horrible. Because the kids are cruel.
Because they think that if I can’t say something in English, they think
that I can’t say anything at all, that I am not a person. They ask me, they
say in front of the class – I remember that question very well – they
say: [in English] “Are you a human being?” And I didn’t know what to
answer because I didn’t know what that meant. They asked me if I am
a human being. And I didn’t know what that meant. And you just sit
and don’t know what to answer, and the whole class is laughing at you.
For Migle this question represented the general attitude of English residents toward immigrants, especially those who cannot speak English well.
Since there were no other Lithuanians in her class, Migle believed that she
did not have the necessary social support to resist those who teased her.
The only venue of resistance that Migle saw was a retreat into an ethnically
based community. But Migle went further and explained that the absence of
her compatriots meant that no one around her could conirm her humanity
by engaging in a conversation and seeing her as a complete human being.
Thus, for her, only members of her own ethnic community could validate
her and allow her to feel herself fully human.
Traumatic experiences linked to exclusion and problems of communication were translated into broader conclusions about incommensurability of
ethnic differences. Many respondents pointed to language and dificulties of
cultural translation as lasting barriers to meaningful relationships with nonLithuanians. Even now that she speaks English well, Migle prefers to communicate with other Lithuanians, since, in her opinion, it is only with them
that she can truly express herself and be fully understood. Migle explained
that it is dificult for her to socialize with people of other ethnicities. She
362
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
said: “In my leisure, I choose people who are close to my heart, to my soul.”
While she did have acquaintances among Latvians and Pakistanis, she could
not be as relaxed with them as with people of her “own ethnicity.” Thus,
Migle described the existence of a more intimate level of communication,
mutual understanding, and respect, which is only accessible to individuals from the same ethnicity. Migle categorically rejected the possibility of
staying in the UK – she said that she realized how important the Lithuanian
nation is to her and she was planning to move back to Lithuania, where she
believed she could ind more people spiritually close to her.
Exclusions by others and failed interactions encouraged individuals
to articulate the idea of a belonging to a nation or an ethnicity and to acknowledge the seriousness of ethnic differences. Nowhere is the dawning
realization of one’s belonging to a nation more explicit than in Nojus’s
account. Nojus, who is about forty years old, has tried a range of various
professions, speaks numerous languages, and currently teaches seminars
on a variety of topics. Nojus, who now lives in London, made the amazing
discovery that he was part of a Lithuanian nation, when he irst moved from
Lithuania to Israel in the 1990s. Nojus described his feelings: “Suddenly,
for the irst time in my life, I found…for the irst time in my life I found
out that I am a part of a nation…that I belong to a nation. For me that was
an unbelievable thing. A shock.” This discovery was so dramatic because
Nojus did not expect to have nationalist sentiments. It is only when he
became an emigrant that he realized his belonging to the Lithuanian nation. Before he left Lithuania he believed himself to be a cosmopolitan,
yet living abroad he felt “that somewhere deep inside me a Lithuanian is
speaking.” Nojus describes ethnicity as a deep interiority that “wakes up”
once he is beyond Lithuania’s borders. In Nojus’s narrative, his ethnicity
or belonging to the nation suddenly comes into relief when he attempts to
live a full life and communicate with local residents. It is this failure of
communication and subsequent recognition of difference that provoked
him to draw on vocabulary of nationhood that then became a platform for
action – his temporary return to Lithuania.
Only two of my interviewees acknowledged that most of their communication is with people of other ethnicities. I met with Aurelija in London’s
inancial area. Aurelija, in her late twenties, a striking young woman, looked
as if she stepped out from the pages of a fashion magazine. As we talked,
she exuded conidence and optimism. Aurelija, the only one of my respondents who offered to switch into English, noting that she is equally luent
in both languages, graduated from Cambridge and worked as a manager
363
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
at an emissions and commodities trading company. In Aurelija’s account,
national belonging is a choice that individuals make, once faced with increasingly homogenized social forces and popular culture. Aurelija herself
felt the need to be part of a Lithuanian network: “I started a Lithuanian
youth association because my circle of friends and partner at the time were
English so I was not really exposed to any Lithuanians. And I was really
missing it.” Thus, although Aurelija was communicating with the English
and was well integrated into the local society, she felt the need to engage
with the Lithuanian community. Aurelija’s high social standing and her
educational and professional experiences enabled her to circumvent many
of the traumatic encounters and the need for ethnic networks as a survival
mechanism, yet even she felt that her “globalized” lifestyle provoked a need
for national allegiance.
Zoja, a twenty-four-year old woman, on the other hand, had no friends
among the English but many friends among other migrants. Zoja, who
came from a working-class Russian-speaking family in Lithuania, was
less invested in the narrative focused on the Lithuanian nation. Zoja, who
has never had a chance to complete high school, came to London when
she was eighteen. She progressed from dishwasher to retail manager at a
supermarket in six years. She explained that she had only one Lithuanian
friend, even though she did share an apartment with Lithuanians when she
irst arrived in the UK. Zoja, whom I met at a coffee shop in Notting Hill,
close to her job, told me:
I have one friend from Lithuania with whom I spend time, a few
Latvian girls. But mostly I have many acquaintances from India,
Pakistan, from Sri Lanka. It’s easy for me to communicate with them.
Because they are also diligent and they work very hard. And, by the
way, they are really smart. They completed all those schools [laughs].
I have this feeling that they should be professors [laughs]. I have very
many acquaintances like that.
It seems that it is precisely her satisfaction with her labor trajectory
and her lack of investment in the idea of Lithuanian ethnicity that allowed
her to portray other migrants in positive terms, constructing a binary of
hard-working migrants versus spoiled British. Her rejection of monoethnic
nationhood allowed her to experience cosmopolitanism as a lived identity;
her social circle, nevertheless, excluded the English. In her framework, the
dividing line, both in friendship and work, is between the migrants and the
English. Here is how Zoja explained that at her job top managers are English, while the rest of the employees are migrants from different countries:
364
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
“The way I understand it, the way it was explained to me, if you want to go
higher and higher, you must be English. They won’t let you jump high, so
to speak.” But for everyone except Zoja and Aurelija, the Lithuanian nation was a key category of identiication and a rudimentary social resource
necessary for survival.
Ethnic Enclaves and Poles as the Model Nation
As individuals encounter more exclusion, which they interpret as irreconcilable ethnic difference, they retreat into their own ethnically based
enclaves. Except for Zoja, Aurelija, and another young woman who worked
in academia, everyone else noted that they had few friendships or communications with non-Lithuanian residents of the UK. Lithuanian networks are
key to migrants’ everyday lives, from inding jobs and housing to illing out
applications and socializing. Acquaintances are especially important, in light
of what is a key dimension of vulnerability for Lithuanian migrants – the
insecurity of work, and, frequently, of housing. I interviewed Onute, who
was about ifty years old, in her house in Peterborough. In a dimly lit living room, with a parakeet chirping in the background, Onute told Dalia, a
woman who had introduced me to her, and me about her tribulations when
she came to the UK in 2004. When she had just moved to the UK, Onute
shared a house with eleven other people, most of whom were young men,
but in her next job she lived in a ifteen-room house with around sixty other
migrants. Indeed, this widespread migrant housing arrangement, where many
East Europeans share one house, contributes to sociality and information
sharing that can result in a new job or new forms of exclusion. Although
acquaintance networks and agencies are fundamental in enabling migrants
to ind jobs, individuals often become restricted to the options available
through these channels and are funneled into particular types of jobs and
locations with heavy concentrations of migrants. As a result, they become
entrenched in particular low-paying jobs, with no time or motivation to
learn the English language.30
Most of the Lithuanian migrants who were employed before they left
the country worked in sales, industry, or transportation – all realms that are
in demand in the present UK economy.31 Lithuania had a large industrial
sector during the Soviet period, but its share fell from one-third of gross
Equality and Human Rights Commission Report. The UK’s New Europeans. P. 31.
Lithuanian Statistics Department. 2010. P. 19; Cinzia Rienzo. Brieing: Migrants in
the UK Market: An Overview. Oxford, 2011.
30
31
365
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
value to one-ifth during the 1990s.32 A few of my interviewees told me that
their factories ceased operations in the early 2000s. Through networks of
acquaintances Lithuanian migrants acquire similar – or lower status – jobs
at various factories or in the service industries. Jurate and Romune, who
worked at a factory and did not like living in England, explained to me that
it is nearly impossible to ind a job in Lithuania.
Jurate: In Lithuania right now you won’t get a job as a janitor if
you don’t speak English.
Romune: Yes.
Jurate: With a broom [laughs]. Yes. A person went to apply for a job,
and they asked: “Do you know the English language?” He says: “But
wait. Who will I have to talk to? To the broom? In English?” [laughs].
According to Jurate, the person returned to England “in shock” that he
had to know English in order to get a manual labor type of job in Lithuania.
It is striking that Jurate felt it was easier to get a job without a knowledge of
English in England than in Lithuania. Jurate’s anecdote points to a paradox
that transnational mobility does not need to correlate with a more cosmopolitan and multilingual lifestyle. In fact, Jurate and Romune did work at
factories where they had little need or opportunity to learn English because
they worked mostly with Lithuanians and Poles.
Among all ethnolinguistic groups, Poles were especially frequently
mentioned with a mixture of animosity and admiration. Some individuals
described Poles as a model migrant community. While individuals believed
that Poles are also at the bottom of the ethnic hierarchy, their similarity in
terms of religion, history, and work in the UK made them an especially
important reference point for Lithuanian migrants. My interviewees felt
that Poles got special privileges because of their numbers and cohesion,
and would discriminate against Lithuanians.33 Many were resentful about
the dominance of Polish language in their workplace.
Marina: Are there many Poles in the city?
Onute: It’s full of them. Oh, how many Poles.
32
Government of the Republic of Lithuania and European Commission Directorate
General for Economic and Financial Affairs. Joint Assessment of Lithuania’s Economic
Policy Priorities. Vilnius, 2000.
33
Poles constitute the largest portion – about two-thirds – of A8 migrants. Researchers
have noted that Polish migrants often have more access to information and services
than other A8 migrants because of the economy of scales. Equality and Human Rights
Commission Report. The UK’s New Europeans: Progress and Challenges Five Years
after Accession. 2010. Pp. 13, 28.
366
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Dalia: Poles have their own church.
Onute: Oh, how many Poles, Jesus. They took over everything.
They took over everywhere. At different jobs.
Dalia: In factories [shifting into English] the working instructions
are printed in English and Polish, OK? There is no Lithuanian.
Onute: Yes.
In this excerpt from an interview, individuals describe the dominance
of Poles at work and outside of work with a degree of resentment. Dalia
switched from Lithuanian to English to state that there were no instructions in Lithuanian, as if emphasizing marginalization of the Lithuanian
language. My respondents insisted that in some factories it was enough
for individuals to speak only Polish. Romune and Jurate were interrupting
each other in a hurry to tell me about the privileges that Poles receive at
their factory.
Romune: For example, a Lithuanian must know the English language. A Pole is a manager or a supervisor – they come and say, she
or he does not understand English. They are allowed not to. And the
Lithuanians are not allowed not to know it. A Lithuanian must speak
English.
Jurate: Or, even better, it’s like this: “Do you speak Polish?”
Romune: Not English!
Marina: Really? They ask that?
Jurate: It’s now an international language here.
Romune: So you don’t need English.
Jurate: So we don’t need to learn English. At all. There, where we
work right now.
Jurate and Romune were especially indignant about what they perceived
as unequal rights among migrant communities, where Poles were excused
from knowing the English language. For Jurate and Romune the Poles’ ability to speak in their own language represented their oficial recognition as
a respected community capable of defending their rights. At the same time,
work at Polish factories made knowledge of English unnecessary but still
left Lithuanians at a disadvantage in resolving problems or asserting their
rights with Polish or English supervisors.
Individuals whom I interviewed were surprisingly univocal in contrasting
the disunion within the Lithuanian migrant community to the cohesion of the
Polish community. Poles were lauded for being uniied in one community
and sticking up for each other. Comparisons with the Polish community
367
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
must be understood in light of ethnic politics within Lithuania, where the
relative socioeconomic status and political importance of individuals afiliated with Lithuanian and Polish ethnicity have shifted through the past
centuries. Today, in the UK’s geographic and social landscape, the power
dynamics have shifted once again. The sheer size of the Polish migrant
communities and their longer history in the UK have contributed to their
prominence and created a situation where Lithuanian migrants have to
contend with Polish supervisors, managers, and ethnically based systems
of social support.
The perception of the Polish community as uniied and hostile toward
Lithuanians ampliies Lithuanian migrants’ reliance on as well as skepticism
toward Lithuanian migrant networks. Indeed, individuals use examples of
Poles’ supposed solidarity to highlight shortcomings of the Lithuanian community. For example, Migle, whom I mentioned above, said that while in
school she regretted she lacked the protection that the Polish students offered
to their classmates. She explained that there were a number of Poles in her
school, and they would stick together and “hold off the attack.” After a while,
when Migle learned to speak English and when more Lithuanians entered
her school, they organized a similar group to protect their own, especially
the young kids, from any moral or physical assaults. Others juxtaposed
Lithuanian and Polish behavior more explicitly.
Marina: So, they [Poles] probably also accept their own, their own
friends into jobs.
Onute: Yes. Actually, Poles are…
Onute and Dalia together: …very friendly.
Dalia: Among themselves.
Onute: Among themselves. They help each other. And a Lithuanian
will eat another Lithuanian alive.
Dalia: Unfortunately, this is so.
Onute: Yes.
Dalia: But in our… You are socializing in your own circle, then
it’s OK.
Onute: Yes. We have our own circle of friends.
Similarly, Romune said: “We are yelling that these Poles are so terrible.
But with their own people, I have never seen such a friendly nation yet.”
She added later: “Poles, now that’s a nation!” The Polish migrants thus act
as a model community for Lithuanians in the UK. The size, prominence,
and supposed solidarity of the Polish community are the features that Lithu368
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
anians would like to see in their own communities. The prominence of Poles
in Lithuanian migrants’ narratives reveals the limits of social imagination
among Lithuanians in the UK: the ideal toward which individuals can aspire
is a cohesive community that survives through solidarity and protects one
another’s rights against other migrants and the English.
Despite or rather because of the key role of ethnic networks, individuals
are deeply ambivalent about the Lithuanian community in the UK. “I don’t
know what happens to our Lithuanian nation here in England,” said Romune,
a woman in her mid-forties, who worked at a chocolate factory. Romune,
Jurate, and Onute insinuated that one should not trust a Lithuanian – outside
of Lithuania. Romune and Jurate claimed that in their behavior toward each
other, Lithuanians are much worse than other migrants.
Marina: So, the socialization is just among Lithuanians…?
Romune: Oh, that’s even scarier. If you meet a Lithuanian, and he
says “Good afternoon,” see if it’s not evening.
Jurate: He will never help you if there is a problem. Never.
Romune: In England the most terrifying person is a Lithuanian.
Jurate: Yes.
Romune: To the extent that it’s really embarrassing to tell people.
A Lithuanian, a Lithuanian – it’s your ethnicity, so how can you not
like your own people?!
Romune repeated the phrase “if he says ‘Good afternoon,’ see if it’s not
evening” a few times during the conversation, as if it were a proverb expressing common wisdom among migrants. This phrase expressed distrust of the
motivations of other Lithuanians. Many of my interviewees told me horror
stories about betrayal, backstabbing, and theft in the Lithuanian communities.
Onute recalled with bitterness how Lithuanian women she used to share a
house with turned away from her in her moment of need. These narratives
describe ethnicity as a moral community that should be deined by solidarity
and affection – the function that ethnonational identity fulilled during the
political struggle against the Soviet regime, for example. The individuals
imply that these values are in a state of deep crisis and articulate a discourse
about the moral corruption of a nation, which should naturally coalesce into
a community outside of Lithuania’s boundaries.
However, troubles that individuals encounter within their ethnic enclaves
have a real social basis. Ethnic networks, which are fundamental to migrants’
lives, are a source of great social anxiety and potential marginalization, as
Jennifer Cole highlights in her paper on female migrants from Madagascar
369
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
in France.34 My interviewees saw envy as the root of the problem within the
Lithuanian community and, in fact, the rapidly changing social standing of
individuals elevated the stakes of social ties and reputation. Onute and Juozas
noted that a new discrepancy in income that replaced relatively egalitarian
income distribution in Lithuania triggered envy within the migrant community; as Serguei Oushakine notes, sudden extreme income differentiation
in the post-Soviet context can trigger discourses of distrust.35 Migrants’
anxieties about the Lithuanian community also highlighted limitations of
overreliance on tightly knit migrant groups, where not only information
but also rumors circulate with promptness, where the competition for work
is heightened, and where the main currency is one’s social standing and
reputation. Dalia and Onute, like other migrants I talked to, said that they
depend on a small circle of friends for their socialization. Indeed, overreliance on ethnic networks, which also become channels for job competition
and information for criminals, forces individuals into increasingly more
claustrophobic social circles.
A Nation Beyond State Borders
Notions about national allegiance shape individuals’ views of their
mobility and their relationship to the Lithuanian state, as well as act as
a platform for action. For many individuals their failure to integrate and
an increased sensitivity to cultural differences bring into relief their own
position as a “nation-in-exile.” Many of the interviews revolved around
metaphors of a forceful push away from or a pull toward Lithuania. My
interlocutors insisted that they had not abandoned their nation – it was the
state that abandoned the nation and forced people to leave their land. Zoja,
for example, passionately recounted her reaction to Degutiene’s disapproval
of migrants: “How dare you write that? You are personally kicking them
out!” Those who had the fewest opportunities in Lithuania would highlight
rampant inequality and corruption in the country. Onute, who worked at a
furniture factory in Lithuania, recounted how her managers got richer by
stealing materials from the factory and juxtaposed migrants to Lithuanian
political and business elites: “We found our place here, we could not ind
our place in Lithuania. Because nobody needs us there. If they want to live
Jennifer Cole. Gossip and the Intimate Politics of Realignment Among Malagasy
Migrants in France / Conference Paper. American Anthropological Association Annual
Meeting. Montreal. November 17, 2011.
35
Oushakine. The Patriotism of Despair. P. 76
34
370
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
for themselves in wealth, let them live there. We are not jealous of them.”
She added: “Yes, I’m very angry with Lithuania. That we can’t live in our
own land. Really. I’m really, really angry.” In a poignant reversal of Degutiene’s rhetoric about citizens abandoning their nation, Onute narrated her
experience of mobility as a representative of the Lithuanian nation who was
forced off her land by a renegade state. Interestingly, nobody I interviewed
blamed EU policies or global capitalism for their hardships, but many have
consistently portrayed Lithuanian elites as fundamentally hostile to the
Lithuanian population.
My interviewees’ attitudes toward the Lithuanian state were inluenced
by their social positions. Thus, individuals who had the fewest opportunities
in Lithuania were the most hostile to Lithuanian elites, while middle-class
individuals were likely to criticize the government as well as to seek some
sort of engagement with the Lithuanian state. For example, Irma criticized
Degutiene and other Lithuanian elites: “It’s as if they live in a vacuum. In
a glass bubble.” She added: “You see what kind of gap there is between
politicians and regular people.” Vilte, a woman in her mid-thirties, who was
a social worker in Lithuania, sitting with me in a café in a remote London
area, while a Polish waitress brought us coffee, shared her reaction to the
article: “I got really angry. They say we leave for a better life. No, we leave
to earn money. And we don’t want welfare payments from Lithuania. We
want to earn it with our own hands.” Irma, Vilte, and Giedre painted a picture
of the elites who disregard their compatriots in Lithuania and abroad. They
disapproved of the Lithuanian elites’ unwillingness to include migrants in
the decision-making process of Lithuanian government and were – so far
unsuccessfully – seeking ways to establish contacts between Lithuanian
politicians and Lithuanian migrants.
Individuals who had appropriate social resources could use the national
identity that they “discovered” abroad as a platform for action and engagement with the Lithuanian state. Nojus and Aurelija described how their discovery of their roots pulled them toward Lithuania. Thus, Nojus’s discovery
of his own national belonging interfered with his previous plans and forced
him to return to Lithuania from the Middle East: “I couldn’t live anymore.
It had such an impact that I had to do something with that. To realize this
somehow. So I went back to Lithuania. Very consciously.” Nojus returned
to Lithuania for a few years in the hope of giving something back to his
country. But Nojus had one more goal, which he managed to fulill: once
he realized that it was dificult to break through language and cultural barriers, he decided that he should ind himself a Lithuanian wife. Ironically,
371
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
after Nojus worked for a while in Lithuania, organizing seminars in Parliament, while receiving no remuneration, his wife insisted that they move to
the UK, where many of her relatives were already living. Thus, Nojus has
migrated again, but this time he retained and multiplied his connections to
his home country, leading online seminars, traveling back to Lithuania every
two of months for a couple of weeks, acting as an adviser in the Lithuanian
Parliament and establishing a think-tank that addresses Lithuania’s political
and social issues. Nojus noted that, paradoxically, he was more useful to
Lithuania and better able to build a career when he was based in the UK.
To explain why he irst returned to Lithuania and then went to the UK,
Nojus borrowed my notepad and drew a diagram with multiple concentric
circles and a single arrow emanating from the center toward the outer circles.
Nojus explained the diagram as the model of a human being’s development
through circles that represent the mother’s womb, kindergarten, school,
university, city, nation-state, and, inally, the global level. According to
Nojus, in order to develop, an individual must progress through different
levels. Otherwise, a person “loses meaning, experiences degradation and
depression.” Nojus added:
In my own opinion, if you want to live normally at a global level,
like a cosmopolitan, like a person of the world, you have to go through
a national stage irst, to live through it somehow – that will be a natural
bridge, a springboard into the wider world. If you didn’t do that, you
will feel as if you did not complete something. And you won’t be able
to feel good in the wider world.
Nojus’s model of the world and understanding of his mobility assume
an expanding identity with an inherent teleology, where a human being
naturally progresses toward the transnational realm. In this view, national
allegiance is a lasting interiority, a person’s core, but also a stage an individual must pass through and internalize in order to reach the ultimate goal
of transnationalism. Thus, human development through time is associated
with progression from more peripheral to more global levels.
Aurelija interpreted her own mobility and her own engagement with the
Lithuanian nation-state not as a natural progression but in terms of a tension or even a battle between a cosmopolitan life with many opportunities
and a chance to help her country. Aurelija said: “For me it was always a
battle. Whether I’m more useful to Lithuania or I should work on the global
issues. For me there is no question that whatever job I do, I want it to be
for the beneit of others.” It takes some effort, Aurelija explained, to take
yourself out of London’s “vibrant environment with many opportunities”
372
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
and realize that you need to do something for your country. Aurelija said:
“You want to ultimately make a difference. It is a matter of pride to go back
to and make a difference in your country.” Aurelija did return to Lithuania
for a few years. She, along with some of her acquaintances, was invited
by the Lithuanian government – the Conservative Party, which recruited
a young professional from abroad to almost every ministry, according to
Aurelija – to work as an adviser to one of the ministers. “They need you
there. They love it when you are there,” said Aurelija about the Lithuanian
government. After a while almost all the “migrant youth” returned to the
UK. Aurelija too came back, but she does not preclude the possibility of
working there again. In the meantime, she continues her involvement by
organizing conferences, acting as an adviser to the Lithuanian government
and participating in an organization for young Lithuanian professionals
in London. Aurelija explained to me that globalization has the interesting
effect of making people more nationalistic. She believed that as we lead
more similar lives across the world, we “try to ind the roots, where we are
from. We want to be unique. And having a nationality makes us unique.”
Aurelija felt she had to “to keep that spirit of Lithuania alive” in herself and
prevent herself from “drifting farther and farther away” from her Lithuanian
roots. Aurelija employed familiar tropes of nationalism, referring to roots
and the nation’s spirit. Her account relied not on a personal development
timeline like Nojus’s but on historical development – as societies become
more modern and globalized, individuals seek to “go back” and rediscover
their national belonging.
At irst glance, migrants’ orientations to the Lithuanian state are highly
diverse: from forceful rejection to criticism and a desire for engagement
with the state to Aurelija’s and Nojus’s intense collaboration with Lithuanian
political institutions. Aurelija and Nojus were in many ways distinct from
my other respondents: their social position, connections, and cultural capital
allowed them to perceive their national belonging as a type of obligation
highlighted by their transnational experiences. Yet even they were only able
to imagine cosmopolitan belonging as irmly rooted in national orientation.
No matter how enamored by London both of them were, they still referred
to Lithuania as their state and their nation. Nojus’s chronotope of personal
development depended on fulillment of the national stage, while for Aurelija,
a cosmopolitan lifestyle triggered a return to idiosyncratic national roots.
Nojus’s and Aurelija’s greater social resources and cultural capital enabled
them to actively foster Lithuanian networks and use them as a platform
for fulilling work and political engagement, instead of using preexistent
373
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
networks for survival and being restricted to narrow labor niches.36 Yet,
like other migrants, their social imagination, political activism, and selfidentiication were irmly rooted in the ideology of national belonging and
ethnically based networks.
Conclusion
The concept of a Lithuanian nation remains a viable and essential social category for Lithuanians living abroad. The category of nationhood is
reinforced by Lithuanian migrants’ everyday interactions with the English,
other migrants, and their former compatriots. Individuals mediate their
mobility and their encounters abroad through their preexisting beliefs about
nationhood as a key dimension of personhood. Exclusion of migrants from a
variety of contexts and antimigrant sentiments can breed a more aggressive
self-deinition as a nation with a distinct and disadvantaged position among
the hierarchical order of ethnicities.
Social exclusion and failures of integration can push individuals into
increasingly narrow ethnically anchored social circles. At the same time,
even as the individuals I talked to are dependent on ethnic communities for
all aspects of their everyday lives, they are skeptical about the “Lithuanian
nation” abroad. Their narratives about the corruption of the moral fabric
of Lithuanians outside of the country’s borders reveal a tension between a
desire for belonging and the networks as a hub of gossip, criminality, and
intense competition for jobs. It is revealing that many Lithuanians in the
UK describe the Polish community as a model nation. The features that
individuals admire, such as Poles’ solidarity and deep social support networks, highlight the ideal of a monoethnic moral community and suggest
the failure to imagine an alternative model of integration.
While the EU enables individuals to seek out livelihood opportunities
across its geographic space, paradoxically, migrants can frequently survive
on the transnational stage only by narrowing the “wider world” into ethnic
enclaves. Even the most “cosmopolitan” of my interviewees still perceived
nationhood as the necessary internal core of a transnational citizen. National
identity, ethnic difference, and ethnically based networks come to be naturalized as fundamental dimensions of personhood and platforms for social
action. Failure to integrate, interpreted and naturalized through the prism
36
An illustration of the way migrant networks can contribute to long-term social stratiication. Equality and Human Rights Commission Report. The UK’s New Europeans:
Progress and Challenges Five Years after Accession. 2010. P. 31.
374
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
of rudimentary ethnic differences, interacts with Lithuanian elites’ alarmist
narratives about the dying of the Lithuanian nation. Individuals, for whom
nationhood is a key category of personhood and a lived reality, however,
contest the elites’ narratives about the people who have lost their national
allegiance. Indeed, Parliament Chair Degutiene was eventually pressured
into issuing a public apology to emigrants for accusing them of disloyalty
to their nation.37
While individuals argue about which social group is more patriotic and
how this patriotism is manifested, the debates in the media and everyday
conversations still operate with the vocabulary of monoethnic national belonging. Neither the elites nor migrants have yet developed a terminology
of belonging that would take into account the complex reality of open-ended
transnational trajectories and individuals’ social engagement in different
geographic locales. Social exclusion and economic marginalization constitute fertile ground for the emergence of reactive nationalism. Although
this type of nationalism is defensive in nature and stems from a position of
disadvantage, it still adds fuel to the xenophobic social imaginary of naturalized ethnic differences and cultural incommensurability that are gaining
momentum within the EU.
SUMMARY
Lithuania has the highest rate of emigration within the European Union,
yet the conception of the Lithuanian nation is often reinforced as a result of
transnational mobility. This article examines reactive nationalism by tracking
how migrants construct ideas about national belonging and ethno-national
difference in response to exclusions they encounter. The article draws on
interviews with Lithuanian migrants in the United Kingdom to show how
ideas about nationhood mediate individuals’ interactions with England’s
residents and other migrants, their interpretations of mobility, and their
orientation to the Lithuanian state.
Резюме
Литва демонстрирует самые высокие показатели эмиграции в
Европейском Союзе, однако эта транснациональная мобильность
I. Degutienė: nuoširdžiai atsiprašau emigrantų // Ekonomika.lt. 2011. November 9.
http://www.ekonomika.lt/naujiena/i-degutiene-nuosirdziai-atsiprasau-emigrantu-15477.
html (last visited: 07.13.12).
37
375
Marina Mikhaylova, A Springboard to a Wider World
часто работает на концепцию литовской нации. Марина Михайлова
рассматривает этот феномен реактивного национализма, анализируя,
как мигранты в ответ на исключения и ограничения, с которыми они
сталкиваются, конструируют представления о национальной принадлежности и этнонациональных отличиях. В основу статьи положены
интервью литовских мигрантов в Великобритании. Автор показывает,
как представления о национальной принадлежности опосредуют их
взаимодействия с британцами и другими мигрантами, а также интерпретации мобильности и ориентацию на литовское государство.
376
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
Stephen M. NORRIS
NOMADIC NATIONHOOD:
CINEMA, NATIONHOOD, AND REMEMBRANCE IN
POST-SOVIET KAZAKHSTAN*
The oficial Web site of Kazakhstan’s president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, is
loaded with fascinating historical interpretations. Sprinkled in his speeches –
all posted to the site – and on other informational pages about the country
he leads, these historical lessons offer an intriguing window into the way
the new Kazakh state has harnessed the past. Much of the work going on in
this site has to do with creating a “history” for a nation that has not existed
for very long and with interpreting the deep and recent pasts for present-day
nation-building purposes. And many of the interpretations that result from
this work have to do with the nomadic past as a source for contemporary
Kazakh nationhood.
Most former Soviet republics have had to create History with a capital
“H” after 1991. As Mark von Hagen noted in an insightful 1995 Slavic
Review article, Ukraine had a “history” only in the sense that people living
on Ukrainian lands possessed a lived experience of the past. But the new
nation-state had no “History” in the sense of a scholarly, written record of
that experienced past that “command[ed] some widespread acceptance and
*
I wish to thank Serguei Oushakine for asking me to write about nomadism and for his
helpful suggestions on a draft of this article. I also want to thank the two anonymous
reviewers for their comments.
378
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
authority in the international scholarly and political communities.”1 Creating
new history departments, new narratives about Ukraine’s pasts, and new
ways to integrate coherently the lived experiences of Ukrainian citizens
after 1991 proved to be a dificult task to say the least.
Similar dilemmas faced Kazakhstan. Nazarbayev’s nation had no “History” in the way Ukraine also lacked one. As a new nation-state experiencing
independence for the irst time, Kazakhstan, its leaders and citizens agreed,
needed a national history and a new tradition of historical scholarship. The
task was not a straightforward one. The history of the Kazakh steppe is one
caught between West and East,2 but also between traditions of written stories
and oral testimonies about the past. Much the way Ukrainian historians and
nation-builders appropriated the Cossacks and their experiences as early
“Ukrainians” and therefore “Ukrainian history,”3 nomads could serve in the
same capacity for Kazakhstan. On the president’s Web site, Kazakhstan’s
“ancient and medieval history” is explained as one where mankind has lived
for “nearly a million years” because the rich lands there provided wild game
and wild fruits. From these ancient civilizations, “Kazakhstan became the
region for the mastery of horse-breeding and the formation of nomadic
civilizations” [Kazakhstan vkhodit v zonu osvoeniia konia i formirovaniia
kochevykh tsivilizatsii].4 Kazakh lands, we learn, have been inhabited by
tribes that mastered cattle breeding and the art of being warriors. These
peoples also developed an extensive, elaborate culture, culminating in
the “world famous” Golden Man (who may in fact be a warrior princess),
found in an Issyk burial mound and proof that a Kazakh culture has deep
historical roots.
This article seeks to expand on this short foray into history-making
found on Nazarbayev’s Web site and narrated in other important Kazakh
memory sites (textbooks, memorials, and so on). The purpose is not to dissect
these exercises in “mythistory” or to wade into the thorny scholarly ield
Mark von Hagen. Does Ukraine Have a History? // Slavic Review. 1995. Vol. 54. No.
3. P. 658.
2
For a small but useful sample that illustrates the dificulties in writing a history of the
region, see James Millward. Eurasian Crossroads: A History of Xinjiang. New York,
2009; and Justin Jacobs. The Many Deaths of a Kazak Unaligned: Osman Batur, Chinese
Decolonization, and the Nationalization of a Nomad // The American Historical Review.
2010. Vol. 115. No. 5. Pp. 1291-1314.
3
See Serhy Yekelchyk. Ukraine: Birth of a Modern Nation. New York, 2007. Ch. 1.
4
Taken from the Russian version of the Web site: http://www.akorda.kz/ru/kazakhstan/
general_information/ancient_and_medieval_history_of_kazakhstan/. The site is also
available in Kazakh and English.
1
379
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
of studying the historic cultures of nomads on the Kazakh steppe,5 but to
analyze how the new Kazakh nation-state’s attempt to provide a history to
its people functions as a sort of “nomadic nationhood,” an ongoing, vibrant
process of building both a sense of national identity and a sense of historical
remembrance that center on nomads. The state has taken the lead in this
nation-building exercise, and Kazakh ilms, often relying on state support,
have also played a starring role.
Alon Conino has urged scholars to explore the “hybrid links between
two powerful notions that have stood at the center of the shift from society to
culture: nationhood and memory.” Nationhood itself functions as a “culture
of remembrance, as a product of collective negotiation and exchange between
the many memories that exist in the nation.” Conino continues: “Nationhood
and memory appear as modern sensibilities that give meaning to values and
beliefs such as collectivity, selfhood, territoriality, and the past.”6 And yet,
as Bhavna Dave has recently pointed out, the Kazakh nation is a work-inprogress, guided mostly by a “nationalizing state” (she borrows the term
from Rogers Brubaker).7 Independent Kazakhstan is a hybrid nation-state
that has attempted to create a new sense of nationhood and a new sense of
remembrance out of the legacies the Soviet Union bequeathed. The result has
been the creation of a seemingly contradictory locus for both: the nomads.
While the state and Kazakh ilmmakers have usefully mined the past to
articulate a new Kazakh nationhood centered on nomadic culture, its reception among Kazakh citizens has produced a mixed bag: many Kazakh audience members have celebrated what they see as a “new Kazakh patriotism”
articulated onscreen. Others have criticized certain aspects of the onscreen
nomadic nationhood, particularly the Kazakh state’s role in promoting it and
Kazakh ilmmakers’ adaptation of Hollywood techniques. Still others have
stayed away from Kazakh ilms entirely, choosing instead to check out the
latest Hollywood blockbuster. Still, the work of nation-building and memorymaking that has gone on in recent Kazakh cinema indicates that these ilms
are capable of conveying “serious history” in the way Robert Rosenstone
has argued: they render an important past in innovative and complex ways.8
The best monograph remains Anatoly Khazanov. Nomads and the Outside World (2nd
ed.). Madison, 1994. See Joseph Mali. Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography.
Chicago, 2003, for more on the crucial roles myths have played in the construction of history.
6
Alon Conino. Germany as a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing
History. Chapel Hill, 2006. P. 18.
7
Bhavna Dave. Kazakhstan: Ethnicity, Language, and Power. London, 2007.
8
Robert Rosenstone. History on Film/Film on History. London, 2006. P. 2.
5
380
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Seeing Like a Post-Soviet State: Nomad and the Creation of Nomadic Nationhood
Of course, the creation of nomadic nationhood, which locates Kazakh
history in the deep past, has its origins in more recent events. The Russian
and Soviet encounters with the region profoundly shaped the way its residents viewed themselves. The tsars, as Dave has written, saw their southern
frontiers as unexploited and unclaimed; the disparate nomads living on the
steppe were deemed a backward nuisance.9 Beginning in the 1860s, Russian
colonists began to settle in the region, following the military conquest of
Central Asia. Locals were inorodtsy (“aliens”), a “broadly inclusive legal
category to describe relatively or completely ‘backward’ non-Russians”
in the empire.10 Although Central Asia was undergoverned,11 the Russian
colonial presence introduced notions such as “nation,” “race,” “empire,”
and other modern ideas to the steppe. Out of this encounter a modern form
of Kazakh national consciousness developed, one that took up the category
of “nation” brought by Russian settlers and infused it with local, “Kazakh”
traditions.12
The Soviet experiment both transformed Kazakh nationhood and did
much to destroy traditional ways of life in the steppe. The scholarship on
USSR as empire is rich and diverse; what matters here is that in the eyes of
the Soviet state, as Dave writes, “nomads and Muslims were seen as lacking
a history, a record of material and cultural achievements, and categorized
as the ‘most backward people’ [ranee otstalye narody], or ‘people without
scripts’ [bespis’mennye narody].”13 The scripts provided by the Soviet state
to the Kazakh nomads took two forms: irst, an attempt to deine Kazakh
nationhood as one centered on traditional music; and second, an attempt to
eradicate nomadism and replace it with a new, “Soviet” way of life.14 As
Matthew Payne has recently written, “the regime sought not only to make
the Kazakh nomads ‘legible’ to the state, but also to impose order on a
Dave. Kazakhstan. P. 35.
Willard Sunderland. The Ministry of Asiatic Russia: The Colonial Ofice That Never
Was But Could Have Been // Slavic Review. 2010. Vol. 69. No. 1. P. 138.
11
Adeeb Khalid. The Politics of Muslim Cultural Reform: Jadidism in Central Asia.
Berkeley, 1998. P. 60.
12
See Steven Sabol. Russian Colonization and the Genesis of Kazak National Consciousness. Basingstoke, 2003.
13
Dave. Kazakhstan. Pp. 22-23.
14
For the former effort, see Michael Rouland. Music and the Making of the Kazak Nation, 1920–1936 / Ph.D. Dissertation; Georgetown University, 2005.
9
10
381
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
disorderly nature and its savage, nomadic children.”15 The attempt to settle
the nomads as part of Stalin’s collectivization program proved disastrous:
between one-third and one-half of the 4.1 million Kazakh nomads perished.
The Kazakhs only reached their 1926 population level again in 1969.
The crux of this encounter between the Soviet state and its nomadic
citizens was in how each viewed the land. For the nomads, the steppe was a
lived environment, a deeply rooted homeland centered on kinship and community. For the state, the steppe was an empty space, a site for trying out
development policies.16 Soviet oficials believed the Kazakh steppe could be
conquered for their projects: agricultural, cultural, political, and otherwise.
The nomads, as backward people without scripts, had to be settled. The empty
space could be populated by other Soviet peoples, whether they were party
enthusiasts or deported “special settlers” (indeed, after the collectivizationsettlement campaign, Kazakhstan became the home of 1.2 million deported
nationalities, roughly the same number of Kazakhs who died in the ensuing
famine). No wonder, then, that Kazakhstan also became the site of major
Gulag camps. No wonder it became the center of Khrushchev’s Virgin Lands
scheme. And no wonder it served as the space for Soviet nuclear tests and
for sending Soviet rockets into space.17 The Kazakh lands proved to be the
laboratory for Soviet projects in population management, agricultural reform,
and technological developments.
Given this usage, it is not too surprising that nostalgia for nomadism
developed among Kazakhs and party oficials alike even before 1991.18
Most post-Soviet Kazakh histories dwell on the settlement campaign as a
naked, violent colonial act.19 And just as unsurprising, if not paradoxical, is
Matthew Payne. Seeing Like a Soviet State: Settlement of Nomadic Kazakhs, 1928–
1934 // Golfo Alexopoulos, Julie Hessler, and Kiril Tomoff (Eds.). Writing the Stalin
Era: Sheila Fitzpatrick and Soviet Historiography. New York, 2011. P. 60.
16
In addition to Payne’s article, see Kate Brown. Gridded Lives: Why Kazakhstan and
Montana are Nearly the Same Place // American Historical Review. 2001. Vol. 106. No.
1. Pp. 17-48; and Mukhamet Shayakhmentov’s memoir, published in English as: The
Silent Steppe: The Memoir of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin. New York, 2007.
17
For these histories, see Steven Barnes. Death and Redemption: The Gulag and the
Shaping of Soviet Society. Princeton, 2011; Michaela Pohl. The “Planet of One Hundred
Languages”: Ethnic Relations and Soviet Identity in the Virgin Lands // Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland (Eds.). Peopling the Russian Periphery:
Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History. London, 2007. Pp. 213-237; and Martha
Brill Olcott. The Kazakhs. Stanford, 1995.
18
Payne. Seeing Like a Soviet State. Pp. 78-80.
19
For the best account of Kazakh history in the twentieth century (itself part of the
attempt to give Kazakhstan a “History”), see K. Karazhaov and A. S. Takenov (Eds.).
15
382
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the survival of many Soviet-era cultural practices in the new Kazakhstan.
The Soviet state eradicated nomadic life. It also provided contemporary
Kazakhs with the language of nationhood and the symbols of Kazakhness,
often created by nomads on the steppe.
The Soviet era also provided the source of the lament for the nomads of
old as a more “authentic” source of Central Asian identity, captured most
powerfully by Chingiz Aitmatov in his 1980 novel, The Day Lasts More
Than a Thousand Years. The main theme of the novel is the mankurt motif,
which stresses the loss of cultural identity among non-Russians. Because
of the novel’s success in late Soviet Central Asia, the term “mankurt” came
to represent all non-Russians who had been cut off from their roots because
of the Soviet project.20 In Kazakhstan (even before the Soviet era), as Dave
argues, pastoral nomadism became seen as “not just a functional mode of
survival” but “came to symbolize a way of life rooted in a web of kinship,
shared cultural and psychological traits, and a common pastoral imagery
and myths imparted through oral folklore.”21 Akseleu Seidembekov, the
Kazakh writer, suggested that “what Soviet power accomplished was not
the attainment of the long-promised Bright Future and the creation of a true
Soviet community of nations, but a mankurtizatsiia [mankurtization] of the
nations.”22 This historical memory work, one that interpreted the Soviet era
mostly as a colonial project,23 informed the new Kazakh state’s decisions to
create sovereignty based on a “continuing and ongoing process of decolonization and the construction of an autonomous national imagination.”24 It
Noveishaia istoriia Kazakhstana: sbornik dokumentov i materialov. Almaty, 1998. This
collection of newly published archival documents itself is a revealing window into the
process of nation-building and historical narration in the new Kazakhstan. The “newest
history,” as the title indicates, contains a number of archival documents that shed light
on contentious issues from the recent past. Published in Russian, the book also relects
the tensions of language politics established under Soviet rule.
20
See David Laitin. Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the
Near Abroad. Ithaca, 1998. P. 135. As Dave notes, the adoption of the “mankurt thesis”
in postsocialist Kazakhstan conveniently covers up the effects of Soviet-era afirmative
action policies and the close collaboration of Kazakh communist elites with the Soviet
system (Pp. 3-4).
21
Dave. Kazakhstan. P. 34.
22
Quoted in Ibid. P. 50.
23
Certainly there is some truth to this claim, as the devastation caused by the settlement
campaign attests to. The Stalinist project also replaced nomadic epics, oral folklore, and
memory with the printed word, literacy, and Marxist history as the central markers of
modernity. Dave. Kazakhstan. P. 57.
24
Ibid. P. 24.
383
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
also represents the nexus between nationhood, empire, and remembrance
in postsocialist Kazakhstan.
The present-day turn toward nationhood, articulated around nomadism
so plainly on Nazarbayev’s Web site, is therefore an indication of the traces
Soviet policies left and the ways they came to be remembered. To help to
build a new sense of nationhood and to articulate new historical narratives
to the broadest possible audience, the Kazakh state also turned to cinema.
Nazarbayev invested a great deal in the cinema industry, overseeing the
reconstruction and reemergence of Kazakhil’m, the largest ilm studio in
Central Asia. Films have therefore become one of the primary sites where
the past gets interpreted and ultimately an important place to examine for
the emergence of nomadic nationhood.
No recent Kazakh ilm has received more attention than the 2005 epic
The Nomad [Kochevnik]. With only a small degree of hyperbole, Gulnara
Abikeyeva declared that “never before have Kazakh people waited so long
for the arrival of a national ilm.”25 The ilm seemed ready-made to fulill
President Nazarbayev’s desire that the task of the new Kazakh state “is not
a simple creation of statehood as understood in twentieth century terms, but
a revival of its historical statehood [my emphasis].”26 Given the fact that
Kazakh history was marked by statelessness and by its nomadic traditions
that could hardly be it into Western concepts such as “state,” “nation,”
and so on, Nazarbayev’s call was one that implicitly asked for historical
retroitting to take place.27
Nomad attempted to do just that. Filmed at great expense (the exact igure
has never been released by the Kazakh government, which footed the bill,
but is believed to be around $30–40 million) and involving three directors
(Sergei Bodrov, Ivan Passer, and Talgat Temenov), the movie begins in
1710, when the Kazakh tribes are bickering and Oraz, the ilm’s narrator,
longs for a descendant of Chingis Khan to unite the Kazakhs. Meanwhile,
the Jungar tribes to the east of the Kazakhs threaten the fragile stability of
the Kazakh lands. When a baby is born to a Kazakh sultan, Oraz saves him
from a Jungar attack and persuades the father to let him raise the boy. He
does, along with a number of other boys chosen from the various Kazakh
Gulnara Abikeyeva. The Nomad Is Coming…// KinoKultura. 2006. No. 14. http://
www.kinokultura.com/2006/14r-nomads.shtml.
26
Quoted in Dave. Kazakhstan. P. 140.
27
For more on the idea of historical retroitting, see Serguei Oushakine. “We’re Nostalgic, But Not Crazy”: Retroitting the Past in Russia // Russian Review. 2007. Vol. 66.
No. 3. Pp. 451-482.
25
384
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
tribes. The boy, Mansur, becomes a formidable warrior and develops a
close friendship with Erali. They both fall in love with Gaukhar. When the
Jungars mount an attack against the Kazakh tribes, the two sides agree to
let the dispute be settled by a duel between Mansur and Sharish, the iercest Jungar warrior. Mansur kills his foe and the Kazakh tribes hail him as
the new Ablai, the name given to a heroic khan. Erali, meanwhile, has left
to rescue Gaukhar, who has been kidnapped by Jungars and promised to
Sharish as his tenth wife. Mansur is also captured by Jungars and made to
go through various “tests” meant to kill him. He survives, but in his inal
trial, he ights a masked Erali and kills him. Mansur and Gaukhar escape,
declare their love for each other, and make their way back to the Kazakh
camp. Six months later, Mansur leads the united Kazakh tribes in victory
over the Jungars, touting his role in uniting his people and with it, his role
in creating a Kazakh nation.
Fig. 1. An act of cinematic nation making: Ablai unites the Kazakh tribes and creates
the Kazakh nation. Still from Nomad (2005).
The ilm is, as Abikeyeva has argued, “pure mythology”;28 less historical drama than legend. And yet this structure is signiicant, for it marries,
however badly, the structure of a Kazakh folk epic to a ilm epic. The plot
of the ilm, however, was not nearly as important as the process of making it and of promoting it. Branded with the oficial slogan “every warrior,
every people, every love must have its fatherland” Nomad attempted to put
a present-day spin on an important period in Kazakh history and introduce
a worldwide audience to contemporary Kazakhstan. While it succeeded
somewhat in the former attempt, it failed in the latter goal.
28
Abikeyeva. The Nomad Is Coming.
385
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
Nomad managed to visualize virtually every important symbol of Kazakhness connected to the nomadic past: the yurt, the dombra (a musical
instrument widely promoted in late imperial and early Soviet-era nationbuilding texts), notions of hospitality, the steppe landscape, nomadism itself,
a localized form of faith, and so on. By situating the action in the past, the
Fig. 2. Visualizing Kazakh nationhood: the aul, yurt, and steppe landscape. Still from
Nomad (2005).
ilmmakers gave these symbols of nationhood deep historical anchors. Indeed, while the action is loosely based on the real-life Ablai Khan, Nomad is
more about using the past for present-day purposes. The repeated messages
that Kazakh tribes need to unite around a strong, heroic leader and that the
nation’s very existence is constantly threatened by invading foreigners are not
that applicable to the historical setting. Instead, these messages are aimed at
the contemporary audience. At the end of the ilm, Mansur/Ablai sends the
Jungar ruler a “new globe” that has the lands from the Aral Sea to the Tian
Shan Mountains marked as “Kazakhia.” The accompanying scroll declares
that “all enemies of the Kazakhs” must know that these lands “have been
occupied by the Kazakhs since ancient times.” Given the fact that the term
“Kazakh” (Turkic for “independent” or “free” nomads) gained wide usage
only in the ifteenth century, the ilm’s historical retroitting sounds a lot like
Nazarbayev’s calls – most famously made in his 1997 speech “Kazakhstan
2030” – for national unity as a basis for state security and his warnings that
internal discord will cause failure.29 Nomad was mostly meant to promote
patriotism among contemporary Kazakhs. Certainly the ilm hammered
home the main messages of unity and patriotism again and again. Whether
29
The speech is available on his Web site. http://www.akorda.kz/ru/kazakhstan/kazakhstan2030/ (last visit 13 July, 2012).
386
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
they had any effect or not is unclear: the domestic box ofice igures have
never been released.
Nazarbayev has also repeatedly expressed his desire to use mass media as
a means to present Kazakhstan as an attractive place for tourists and investors
alike. As Abikeyeva wrote, the ilm is also signiicant because it appeared
as part of the attempt to create not just a Kazakh state, but an “image of
this new country.”30 The ilmmakers, she suggests, were charged with the
task of presenting Kazakhstan to the world by “generating a positive image
of the independent state with its unique traditions, culture, and the special
mentality of its people”; to “make a genuinely patriotic ilm and strengthen
national consciousness within Kazakhstan”; and to “create a precedent in
domestic cinema that would provide an impetus for the development of the
ilm industry as a whole.”31 As one scholar has recently described it, the
ilm served as an attempt to establish a new national brand for Kazakhstan,
one aimed at a global audience.32
It is possible to view Nomad as a lengthy infomercial of sorts that
depicted a beautiful land full of unique traditions. Long delayed, Nomad
inally hit Kazakh cinemas only in September 2006, after the Sacha Baron
Cohen comedy Borat had debuted in Toronto.33 Nazarbayev, who was in
Washington, DC, around the time both ilms appeared, discussed Borat
with then-president George W. Bush. Some critics have speculated that
Borat’s success scuppered the chances of Nomad to make an impact and to
introduce the world to the “real Kazakhstan.” These claims are dificult to
prove. What is certain, however, is that Nomad failed in its international advertising aims. Referred to as “stilted and lame” by one of the few American
critics to review the ilm,34 it appeared only in limited release and earned
an embarrassing $79,000 at the U.S. box ofice, a small portion of the $3
million it earned worldwide.
Abikeyeva. The Nomad Is Coming …
Ibid.
32
Saulesh Yessenova. Nomad for Export, Not for Domestic Consumption: Kazakhstan’s
Arrested Development to “Put the Country on the Map” // Studies in Russian and Soviet
Cinema. 2011. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pp. 181-203. Yessenova also discusses the curious choice
of Ablai Khan as a twenty-irst-century national hero.
33
For more on the Borat controversy in Kazakhstan, see the articles in the special issue of Slavic Review devoted to it, particularly by Edward Schatz and Robert Saunders
(2008. Vol. 67. No.1).
34
Stephen Hunter in the Washington Post (27 April 2007): http://www.washingtonpost.
com/gog/movies/nomad-the-warrior,1133190/critic-review.html#reviewNum1. Hunter
began the review by imagining what Borat would say after watching the ilm.
30
31
387
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
Nomad’s ultimate signiicance, however, may rest with the money that
went into refurbishing Kazakhil’m Studios. The studio acquired $5.5 million
worth of cameras, equipment, and recording technologies. This post-Soviet
upgrade in turn allowed other Kazakh ilmmakers to refurbish the national
past and screen memories about it.
Out of the Tupik: Kazakh Films and the Nomadic Past
Ernest Gellner, the legendary scholar of nationalism, wrote in his 1981
forward to Anatoly Khazanov’s book Nomads and the Outside World that
“nomadic society is stagnant. It does not, and cannot, as a pastoral society,
develop any further. It constitutes a sociological cul-de-sac, or, to use the
expressive Russian word, a tupik.”35 Gellner’s words referenced the Soviet
scholar S. E. Tolybekov’s view of nomadic society. Nomads could not have
contributed to the growth of feudalism, Tolybekov argued, because nomadic
society does not it into Marx’s historical schema. It is stagnant yet also
vibrant, for “every illiterate nomadic Kazakh, like all nomads of the world,
was in the ifteenth to eighteenth centuries simultaneously a shepherd and
a soldier, an orator and a historian, a poet and a singer.”36 Nomads, at least
in this scholarly view, are therefore outside of Western history and Western
historical concepts, particularly those that employ terms such as “nation,”
“class,” and “ethnicity.” What matters here, however, is less the historical
(or, more broadly, the scholarly) understanding of nomadism, but the ways
that recent Kazakh ilmmakers and audiences have reinterpreted the meanings of nomadism and its connections to the past. Nomads, at least in the
past two decades, have become useful for deining the Kazakh nation and
the Kazakh people.
Recent Kazakh ilms have proved to be an important site where history,
memory, and nationhood get performed. Nomad may be the most famous
(or perhaps infamous) example, but a host of recent movies have interpreted
the past, engaged in the work of memory, and captured important items
from the menu of nationhood.37 Above all, recent Kazakh cinema has done
much to promote what can be termed “nomadic nationhood” as an essential
component to contemporary Kazakh historical remembrance. These ilms
Ernest Gellner. Foreword // Khazanov. Nomads and the Outside World. P. xix.
Quoted in ibid. P. xxi.
37
The notion of a “menu of nationhood” comes from my reading of Anthony D. Smith.
Gastronomy or Geology? The Role of Nationalism in the Reconstruction of Nations //
Nations and Nationalism. 1995. Vol. 1. No.1. Pp. 1-23.
35
36
388
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
have collectively provided the new scripts to the new nation, replacing the
Soviet ones and the Soviet view that nomadic Kazakhs lacked them. These
ilms are also not all state-ordered ones akin to Nomad; instead, the attempts
to provide new scripts for nationhood, and therefore to deine a nomadic
nationhood, are ones also made by a host of new Kazakh ilmmakers employing a number of different cinematic genres. While some scholars have
reviewed these recent Kazakh ilms individually (particularly in the online
journal KinoKultura), their connections to each other and the way they have
collectively taken part in the attempts to remember the past and to construct
a post-Soviet Kazakh nationhood have not been explored.
One way that recent Kazakh ilms have recaptured the nomadic past is
by focusing on the effect the Soviet experiment had on the Kazakh lands.
Several ilms set in contemporary Kazakhstan present a barren landscape,
devoid of family life and deined by immorality and fear. In a sense, these
ilms articulate narratives about what might have been and what came instead; had Kazakh life continued without the Soviet project, the steppe would
still be vibrant, full of life, full of tradition. Instead, the empty spaces today
testify to the harm done by the Soviet “civilizing mission,” which brought
only destruction to the aul and its nomadic culture. Zhanna Isabaeva’s 2007
Karoy represents the clearest (and bleakest) example of this trend. The title,
which refers both to a locale in the Kazakh steppe that translates as “black
Fig. 3. The barren steppe. Azat (left) surveys his bleak life. Still from Karoy (2007).
389
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
cavity” and the word meaning “dark thoughts,” provides a cue into the ilm’s
plot. It follows Azat, a depraved con man who wanders through the barren
landscape robbing, lying, beating, and raping. The towns Azat travels through
are decrepit, broken ones. So too are the families, both his own and others.
The reason for Azat’s violence and immorality, we learn from his mother, is
because he “did not have a childhood.” His Soviet upbringing was one dominated by a violent, abusive father, one illed with theft and drunkenness, and
therefore one illed with no moral center. The Soviet system, Azat’s mother
implies, destroyed traditional kinship and community networks and Azat
is the logical product. He is an embodiment of Seidembekov’s view about
mankurtizatsiia: Azat’s world is a world without the aul, without traditional
Kazakh nomadic culture.38
While some Kazakh ilmmakers used the barren steppe to stand as testament to Soviet destruction, others have recreated a traditional, nomadic-like
culture on the very same landscapes. With the Soviet Union gone, these ilms
suggested, Kazakhs could get back to the project of building a nationhood
based on their nomadic past and its family values. Isabaeva’s follow-up to
Karoy, 2009’s My Dear Children (Oipyrmai), promotes a positive, timeless family culture as an important part of Kazakh identity. The ilm, as
Joe Crescente has noted, is “primarily about the maintenance of Kazakh
family traditions and related generational conlicts.”39 A “family comedy
genre imbued with traditional national values for the masses,”40 the star of
the movie is the Mother, who attempts to hold her family together despite
generational and economic differences. In addition to promoting the family
as the center of the Kazakh nation, a part of nomadic culture still usable for
the new state, Isabaeva’s ilm celebrates traditional Kazakh housewarming
(making beshbarmak), the dombra and other Kazakh instruments and music,
and celebratory occasions such as weddings. Indeed, Crescente has rightly
noted that the movie reads “like a list of ‘positive’ Kazakh traditions” and
that “many national stereotypes are summoned” to make it up.41 Only Kazakh itself is spoken in the ilm, an important marker of identity too (most
of the ilms discussed in this article use Kazakh with Russian dubbed over
It is also the same barren world that the family in Akhan Sataev’s 2009 ilm Strayed
[Zabludivshiisia] encounters. See Achim Hättich. Review of Strayed // KinoKultura.
2010. No. 30: http://www.kinokultura.com/2010/30r-strayed.shtml.
39
Joe Crescente. Review of My Dear Children // KinoKultura 2009. No. 26: http://www.
kinokultura.com/2009/26r-oipyrmai.shtml.
40
Ibid.
41
Ibid.
38
390
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
it). Isabaeva’s main point is what matters: “every nation has its own unique
family relations. Every land has special family traditions, peculiar to itself.
More than that, though, my ilm is about the strength of the family, about
the spirit of family unity. … In My Dear Children we speak about values
that are understood by every person, irrespective of age or homeland.”42
Karoy speaks to the damage the Soviet era did to traditional family values
and nomadic kinship networks; My Dear Children also addresses the ways
Kazakhs can reclaim these values as part of a new nationhood. In a sense, My
Dear Children presents a visual recreation of the shezhire, the genealogical
family tree, for post-Soviet Kazakhstan.43
Fig. 4. Kazakh hospitality, Kazakh shezhire. Still from My Dear Children (2009).
Family and the damages done to it under Soviet rule may be one prominent theme running through recent Kazakh cinema and a theme that engages
with larger issues of memory and nationhood; so too are landscape and
village life. Sabit Kurmanbekov’s Seker (Sugar, 2009) was ilmed in the
director’s home village of Chubar in the northern, mountainous Taldykorgansk region. It is very much a new “village ilm” that resembles Karoy
but that has the more positive characteristics of My Dear Children. The
ilm also has an ethnographic feel to it, a bit like the “neo-neo-realism” of
Quoted in ibid.
For more on the shezhire as a marker of Kazakhness in the twentieth and twenty-irst
centuries, see Saulesh Yessenova. “Routes and Roots” of Kazakh Identity: Urban Migration in Postsocialist Kazakhstan // Russian Review. 2005. Vol. 64. No. 4. Pp. 661-679.
42
43
391
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
Gennady Sidorov’s 2003 Russian ilm Old Women (Starukhi),44 for it stars
mostly unprofessional actors from the village itself. As Kurmanbekov has
stated, “my ilm is based on the ‘aul theme,’ because I am a village person –
the village is my homeland.”45 The ilm is loosely based on the director’s
mother’s life story as a girl who was originally brought up as a boy in
postwar Kazakhstan. Much like the previous movies discussed above, the
historical memory work is accomplished from the outset: Seker opens with
landscape scenes, moving into the aul, where two older men (one played
by the iconic Nurzhuman Yqtymbaev) are working and speaking Kazakh to
each other. Here, two aspects of nomadism survive untouched by the Soviet
era: village life and language. Seker is also very much a ilm that invokes
the past and present, one that integrates, as Jane Knox-Voina has written,
“national iconography that celebrates the yurt, the dombra, kumys, traditional clothing.”46 The eponymous heroine of the ilm has dreams about the
Kazakh fairy tales her father has told her, dreams that feature Kyz-Zhibek
(the subject of a sixteenth-century Kazkah folk tale later made into the irst
Kazakh national opera in the 1930s). Kurmanbekov’s ilm employs humor
to treat these parades of national icons with some degree of self-irony. Still,
the ilm promotes an idea that the village and the village family will win
out and survive. Seker is a ilm that recreates a past where mankurtization
did not occur.47
44
See my, The Old Ladies of Post-Communism: Gennadii Sidorov’s Starukhi (2003) and
the Fate of Russia // The Russian Review. 2008. Vol. 67. No. 4. Pp. 580-596.
45
Quoted in Jane Knox-Voina. Review of Seker // KinoKultura. 2009. No. 26: http://
www.kinokultura.com/2009/26r-seker.shtml.
46
Ibid.
47
Sergei Dvortsevoi’s Tulpan (Tiul’pan, 2008), and Guka Omarova’s Native Dancer
(Baksy, 2009), also evoke the signiicance of place in Kazakh nationhood. Both were
art-house, festival circuit ilms that had screenings at a number of important festivals.
Dvortsevoi’s movie, the more acclaimed of the two, traces the return to his steppe village
of a Kazakh man who has served in the Russian leet. He wants to get married and live
a traditional way of life by herding sheep. The director, born in Kazakhstan, employs
his documentary style (he had previously directed acclaimed documentaries) to capture
beautiful steppe landscapes. Yurts, camels, sheep, donkeys, storms, dust, ields: these
are the symbolic markers of the ilm and indicators that traditional Kazakh ways of life
have survived. Omarova’s ilm also features stunning landscapes, making the steppe an
important actor in both ilms. The titular character is a traditional Kazakh healer who
has to balance tradition and change, generational difference, and crime in the seemingly
timeless landscape. Yet again the processes of intertwined remembrance and nationhood are captured at the beginning of the ilm, which introduces the old healer invoking
traditional spirits while standing atop a mountainous landscape.
392
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Fig. 5. Folklore revived: Kyz-Zhibek in a dream. Still from Seker (2009).
These ilms are among the many recent Kazakh features that resuscitate
past values and national symbols for present-day viewers. Although they
have not always performed well at the box ofice,48 collectively these ilms,
mostly produced at Kazakhil’m, offer a rich variety of scripts that mine the
past and nomadism for present-day nationhood purposes. Recent Kazakh
historical ilms have also performed the same tasks while simultaneously
offering viewers new ways to think about the past and how to view it
and with them, possible alternatives not taken. While the ilms discussed
above mostly feature contemporary settings where traditional elements of
Kazakh nationhood appear, a host of recent ilms transport viewers back
to the past to see how these very same traditions appeared then. Zhanabek
Zhetiruov’s 2006 Notes of a Trackman (Zapiski putevogo obkhodchika) is
the story of an old, blind man (played by Nurzhuman Yqtymbaev, arguably
Kazakhstan’s most recognizable actor) who served as a railway worker in
the Soviet era. His blindness makes him unaware of the present problems of
the postsocialist state; instead, the ilm celebrates his life and his work and
See Georgii Afonin. Vyshli my vse iz naroda, no kak ot nego daleko // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2008. 17 October: http://www.izvestia.kz/node/9739; for analysis on Baksy’s
tepid performance. And his So zritelem nuzhno rabotat’ // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2008. 3
October: http://www.izvestia.kz/node/5252 for his pessimistic take on Kazakh cinema’s
failure to attract audiences in general.
48
393
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
the relationships among the three generations of his family. He tells stories
of nomadism to his grandson and how he came to love sleeping in the steppe
lands. His nomadic past allowed him to ind his own way in life but also
to be a good worker in Soviet times. The grandfather acts as a traditional
Kazakh storyteller passing down national values to future generations: he
recounts legends, tells of the past life, and their roles in a new state. At the
end, as Michael Rouland has astutely observed, “dombra music, representing
Kazakh tradition and folk culture,” plays, accompanying the grandfather as
he strolls along a track.49 Modernity and change have come to Kazakhstan,
the ilm implies, but traditions remain.
The nomadic past plays an equally important role in Ardak Amirkulov’s
2008 feature, Farewell Gul’sary (Proshchai Gul’sary!). Based on a short
story by Chingiz Aitmatov and set in the years after World War II, the ilm,
according to the director, is “the story of the last nomad.”50 The story, as
Christina Stojanova describes it, is “about the love of Tanabai, a devout
Kazakh communist and a WWII hero, for his beautiful stallion Gul’sary,
who is a symbol of freedom and idealism – everything the main character
Fig. 6. The last nomad? Tanabai on the Kazakh Steppe. Still from Farewell, Gul’sary!
(2008).
Michael Rouland. Review of Notes of a Trackman // KinoKultura. 2007. No. 18: http://
www.kinokultura.com/2007/18r-zapiskiobxod.shtml.
50
Christina Stojanova. A Sentimental Journey: Farewell, Gulsary // KinoKultura. 2009.
No. 25: http://www.kinokultura.com/2009/25r-gulsary.shtml.
49
394
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
stands to lose to the crash collectivization in the Far East in the 1940s and
50s.” It too opens by inscribing nationhood into the past: traditional Kazakh
instruments play as the camera pans across a snowy steppe landscape. A
stable full of horses are scared by an approaching wolf, bringing Tanabai
out from his traditional yurt. The horses break free from their stable and
gallop across the landscape, only to be corralled again by Tanabai’s skills.
It is only after this scene that we learn our hero is a Soviet person. Tanabai’s
devotion to his party is outweighed by his devotion to his own morality and
his creative spirit. He refuses to give Gul’sary to a higher-ranking oficial
and refuses to go along with the violence of the postwar system he serves.
He is sent to a labor camp but eventually is reunited with his horse. As
Stojanova describes him, “Tanabai is indeed ‘the last nomad,’ and the ilm
represents a series of his stubborn and futile resistance against the numerous attempts to destroy his farm, his horse, and his soul.”51 His free spirit,
his nomad spirit, survives.52
Similar national resuscitations appear in Doskhan Zholzhaksynov’s 2009
ilm Birzhan Sal. This cinematic memory work focuses on Birzhan Turlybaiuly Kozhagulov (1834–1897), perhaps the most famous dombra player
in late nineteenth-century Kazakh lands.53 The two-stringed dombra is the
national instrument of the Kazakhs and Kozhagulov’s songs are among the
most famous ever played on it. Set in the years of Russian colonization of
the steppe, the ilm captures the differences between the traditional Kazakh
way of life and the Russian ways of life (the titular character speaks Kazakh).
It pays homage to nomadism and nomadic culture. While the plot focuses
on the titular character’s love life, the star of the ilm is his music. Reviewing the ilm, Adol’f Artsishevskii described it as “the rebirth of a legend,”
a igure “loved and not forgotten by the people [narod]” today, but that the
Ibid.
Other aspects of Kazakh nationhood “survive” in Satybaldy Narybetov’s 2008 Mustafa
Shokai. The titular character was the descendant of Kazakh khans and a Turkestani nationalist in the early years of the Soviet Union. He fought for an autonomous Turkestan
that was independent from the USSR, a wish that led to the Soviet government branding
him as backward, elitist, and religious-oriented. Narybetov’s ilm rehabilitates Shokai
and his ideas, presenting them as alternatives not taken but also as a source of values
for the present. Mustafa tells a friend that he was “for Turkestan’s autonomy” but that
“we had no unity” (a lament also stressed in Nomad). Kobiz music accompanies these
discussions, adding an aural reminder of Kazakhness to go along with the usable values
of Shokai and his associates.
53
For a useful overview of his life and the ways Birzhan has been remembered, see Serik
Medetov. Igral na dombre i pel // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2010. 3 September: http://www.
izvestia.kz/node/12979.
51
52
395
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
main hero of the ilm is his music, which “entered organically into the lesh
and blood of the ilm and became its integral part.”54 Another review praised
the beautiful scenery shot in the Kokshetau steppes, noting that “everything
was here: the rolling, peaceful steppes; the expansive, deep sky; the wind’s
noise on the tops of the trees; the swan’s light across a lake; and herds of
horses.”55 Several scenes – including one lengthy re-creation of a festive
meal – act as cinematic historical ethnography: they aim to provide the “authentic” look of nomad culture from the past as a source for contemporary
patriotism. Birzhan Sal’s lyrics that “the time of the Kazakhs is inished”
and that “our people have stopped being proud” also have the present-day
effect, as Michael Rouland has noted, of trying to connect audience members
to their “nomadic and musical traditions from the past.”56
Fig. 7. The sounds of Kazakhness: Birzhan Sal plays his dombra. Still from Birzhan
Sal (2009).
Onscreen, as captured by Kazakh ilmmakers in their attempts to provide
new scripts about the past, nomadism has certainly come out of the tupik.
Nomadic life is far from stagnant in these ilms. It is vibrant and usable as
a historical anchor for present-day nationhood.
Adol’f Artsishevkii. Birzhan-Sal: Vozrozhdenie legendy // Central Asia Monitor: http://
camonitor.com/archives/84.
55
Dina Sablina. “Birzhan Sal”: istoriia odnogo poeta-voina // Gazeta.kz. 2009. 7 September: http://articles.gazeta.kz/art.asp?aid=136792.
56
Michael Rouland. Review of Birzhan Sal // KinoKultura http://www.kinokultura.
com/2010/30r-birzhansal.shtml.
54
396
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Nomad II?
By 2008, the Kazakhstan-based ilm critic Georgii Afonin began to
write about the “monotony of drama” that had dominated the ifteen years
of postsocialist domestic cinema. While searching for the reasons for this
cine-market saturation, Afonin offered some criticisms of Kazakh directors
and their ixations on the past and on literary adaptations. Instead of making historical ilms, the critic wrote, Kazakh directors should have ilmed
genres that people in the country found popular. Afonin noted that “while
many speak about a new boom in Kazakh cinema,” “these movies are not
known for their variety in terms of genre.” In the end, he openly hoped for
“new scripts.”57
Afonin’s reasons for the seeming monotony in Kazakh cinema may
be valid, but his major gripe speaks to larger, historical reasons for the
overwhelming focus on drama in recent Kazakh ilms: directors, producers, and the Kazakh state have all engaged in the process of deining a new
nationhood and in charting the parameters for postsocialist remembrance.
Recent Kazakh cinema has served as an important site where history, remembrance, and nationhood collide and reinforce each other in important
ways. Kazakhil’m’s revival has produced a wave of new ilms where this
convergence has taken place.58 Blockbusters, art-house ilms, contemporary village ilms, historical ilms, dramas, even horror ilms (as in Akhan
Sataev’s 2009 ilm Strayed): all have engaged in the process of building a
new nomadic nationhood.
Gulnara Abikeyeva’s words about the reasons for Nomad’s historical
setting as an essential one for a new sense of nationhood it the other ilms
discussed in this article. “We can look at ourselves in different ways,” she
wrote, “for example, we can examine Kazakhstan and our history as a series
of endless, tragic experiments – from collectivization, djut, the KarLAG,
Georgii Afonin. Opiat’ … drama? // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2008. 19 December: http://
www.izvestia.kz/node/1734.
58
This revival is discussed in Asemgul’ Bakytova. Eshche ne vse poteriano // Izvestiia
Kazakhstan. 2008. 21 November: http://www.izvestia.kz/node/6580; and Askar Gazizov.
Iskusstvennoe dykhanie s mechtoi o bume // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2009. 23 October:
http://www.izvestia.kz/node/3673. Note the change in tone from one year to the next:
Bakytova reports on the continued struggles of domestic Kazakh cinema; one year later,
Gazizov reports on the growing boom. See also Jane Knox-Voina’s enthusiastic view of
recent Kazakh cinema in her: The Kazakh “New ‘New’ Wave” // Studies in Russian and
Soviet Cinema. 2010. Vol. 4. No. 2. Pp. 195-203; followed by Birgit Beumers’s more
tempered view: Waves, Old and New, in Kazakh Cinema. Pp. 203-209.
57
397
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
to the Semipalatinsk polygon and the ecological disaster of the Aral Sea,
etc.” The litany of bad history, however, would not inspire. Instead, “it is
obvious that what we need are myths about a great country, strong heroes,
wise philosophers, and happy people.”59 Kazakh ilmmakers have granted
these desires, screening their nomadic nationhood for a new state.
The state at least has attempted to harness this national cinematic remembrance project, hosting “days of national cinema” in the run-up to
Independence Day (December 16). Local, regional, and national governments support the ilms. Kazakh directors, producers, actors, and others
associated with the ilm industry do too. The efforts to promote a “nomadic
nationhood” from the top are certainly strenuous ones.
From below, however, the results are mixed. Audiences have provided
nuanced reactions to the ilms described above. When Nomad appeared, the
ilm prompted a number of critical responses on prominent ilm sites such
as Kino-Teatr.ru, Kinopoisk.ru, and Kino.kz (it is also worth pointing out
that two of the sites that feature regular posts from Kazakhstan are located
in Russia; the third is largely conducted in the Russian language, itself a
sign of the complicated way Kazakh History and Kazakh nationhood get
constructed). One Kazakh viewer, “Beibarys,” complained that the state
spent a lot of money on the ilm but could not seem to ind any Central Asian
actors. A second posted that Nomad represented “a good, quality, watchable, patriotic ilm about the formation of a proud and wonderful people
[narod] – the Kazakhs.”60 Similar praise and complaints appeared on other
sites: many opined that “the government of Kazakhstan simply decided to
draw attention to its independence” and did so by making a “hyper-patriotic”
Hollywood-style blockbuster; others at least praised the look of the ilm, its
setting, subject, and even its horses.61
At times the responses on these global sites revealed national divides.
On one forum devoted to Akhan Sataev’s ilm Strayed, for example (see
note 37), several viewers from Russia suggested the ilm was derivative, a
lot like other Russian ilms. A handful of Kazakh spectators responded. One
noted “I live in the Kazakh steppe” and declared that the ilm represented
them well; a second wrote “in general the ilm is our Kazakhstan.”62 This
sort of patriotic response characterized the reception of the other ilms: a
Abikeyeva. The Nomad Is Coming.
Both appeared on the Kino-teatr.ru forum: http://kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/post/3216/
forum/#524718.
61
See the responses on the Kinopoisk.ru site: http://www.kinopoisk.ru/level/1/ilm/47270/.
62
See the forum: http://kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/post/30920/forum/#1016662.
59
60
398
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Kazakh viewer of My Dear Children posted that he loved the ilm because
it showed “the different parts of Kazakhstan,” “the strong ways family and
mutual support exist among Kazakhs,” and the beautiful use of music, all of
which combined to make a story that could be one from “any city and village
in Kazakhstan.” Most important, the viewer declared that Isabaeva’s ilm
offered a way out of the “Borat syndrome” that had affected the nation.63
“Only a Kazakh or someone who has lived a large part of their life among
the Kazakhs,” a second respondent noted, “will be able to understand the
entire truth of this ilm.” Kazakh viewers posting on kino.kz even debated
whether or not the characters onscreen had eaten beshbarmak correctly.64
These “truths” extended to the reception of the ilms set in the past. Audience members declared “this is our past” and “this is a powerful, honest
story about life,” typical posts to Farewell, Gul’sary! and Mustafa Shokai
(see note 53).65 Some viewers saw the recent stream of Kazakh ilms using Kazakh actors as the antithesis of Nomad and therefore an answer to
Hollywood. Writing about the ilm Baksy [Native Dancer], a viewer noted
“I am proud that Kazakhs did not forget my culture and I believe that they
can show these Western, Hollywood ‘giants’ what Kazakhstan means!”66
Yet another form of nomadism has developed: despite the patriotic
praise, Kazakh audiences have not yet responded in large numbers to the
new cinema, taking part in what Afonin has dubbed “the cinematography
of exile.” “The authorities have decided to renew a respect for national
cinema,” he argues, but the “culture building” efforts of the new Kazakh
cinema, while not without some minor successes and some excellent ilms,
have not succeeded in attracting mass audiences.67 One person posting to
kino.kz praised the rich use of symbols in Farewell, Gul’sary! and the way
the ilm criticized the Soviet regime but concluded his post by stating “there
were only 8 people in the cinema at the premiere.”68 Many Kazakhs migrate
instead to Hollywood blockbusters: as Afonin laments, Zach and Miri Make
a Porno (2008, Kevin Smith) was more desirable than Karoy; James Bond
still attracts more spectators than Tanabai in Farewell, Gul’sary!69
On the Kinopoisk.ru forum: http://www.kinopoisk.ru/level/1/ilm/467973/.
See the responses on kino.kz: http://www.kino.kz/notice/notice.asp?id=2786&page=10.
65
See responses on http://kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/ros/16505/forum/#601535 and http://
kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/post/17545/forum/#416329.
66
http://kino-teatr.ru/kino/movie/ros/15679/forum/#589768.
67
Georgii Afonin. Kinematograf v izgnanii? // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2008. 28 November:
http://www.izvestia.kz/node/6160.
68
See http://www.kino.kz/notice/notice.asp?id=2509&page=2.
69
Afonin. Kinematograf v izgnanii?
63
64
399
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
As a result, Nazarbayev visited the set of Kazakhil’m in late 2009. The
president paid tribute to the historic role of Kazakh cinema in the Soviet
era and to the renewal of cinema he had overseen. “The new history of
Kazakhstan is created today right before our eyes,” he declared. This history making in the present, Nazarbayev announced, had taken place in
part because Kazakh ilmmakers had fashioned national narratives out of
the past: “everyone recently has been fascinated by historical themes.” At
the same time, while the Kazakh state spent a lot on Nomad, “we did not
obtain the appropriate return.” It was time, he said, for Kazakh ilmmakers
to focus on the present.70
Nazarbayev’s visit and speech did not signal the end of nomadic nationhood onscreen. Akhan Sataev’s $7–10 million blockbuster Zhauzhurek Myn
Bala [One Thousand Warrior Boys] opened in May 2012 in Kazakhstan. It
recounts the story of young nomadic warriors, led by a boy named Sartay,
who unite to defeat the Jungars in 1729. Sataev declared that his ilm is
signiicant because “the young generation should know the cost that our
ancestors paid for our current independence and our freedom.” Ermek Amanshaev, the head of Kazakhil’m, noted that while “cinema is a myth-making
industry” this ilm about “the Steppe Robin Hood” would succeed because
of “the accuracy of the historical background.”71 Unlike Nomad, this time
around all the actors are Kazakh and they all learned to speak an old Kazakh
dialect. Early reactions to the ilm were positive: it made $2 million during
its irst week, and audience reaction was strong. Reports in online chat rooms
consistently noted that the cinema halls were full. One post, from “Galym
Akishev,” noted that he was at the premiere and that the ilm meant “the
disgrace of Nomad can now be forgotten as a strange dream,” even though
Myn Bala also carried Nazarbayev’s strong stamp on it. Although the ilm
used state money to recapture a historical myth onscreen, Galym Akishev
stated, “every nation needs its myths and legends, not just those of ancient
Greece.” His recommendation: “all Kazakhs of every nationality should go
right away to the movie and see it.”72
See Anna Assonova. V ozhidanii blokbastera // CentrAzia. 2009. No. 12. Pp. 15-28.
http://www.continent.kz/asia_12/13.htm. See also the report on Nazarbayev’s Web site:
http://www.akorda.kz/ru/news/2009/11/segodnya_prezident_nursultan_nazarbaev_posetil_natsionalnuyu.
71
Quoted in Natasha Elkington. Romantic Kazakh Epic Film Aims to Woo the Young
// Reuters. 2011. 10 October http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/10/10/us-romantickazakh-idUSTRE79947R20111010.
72
Posted on kinopoisk.ru’s discussion board: http://www.kinopoisk.ru/level/1/
ilm/665337/. The box ofice igure and reports of full theaters appeared in: Akhan Sataev.
70
400
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
SUMMARY
This article examines the new Kazakh nation-state’s attempt to provide
a history to its people and how this attempt functions as a sort of “nomadic
nationhood”: an ongoing, vibrant process of building both a sense of national
identity and a sense of historical remembrance that center on nomads. The
state has taken the lead in this nation-building exercise, and Kazakh ilms,
often relying on state support, have also played a starring role. Surveying a
number of recent Kazakh ilms, the author argues that Kazakh ilmmakers,
responding to President Nursultan Nazarbayev’s calls to create national
narratives, have turned to nomads and the nomadic past as the source for
Kazakh nationhood and remembrance. The reception among Kazakh citizens
has produced a mixed bag: many audience members have celebrated what
they see as a “new Kazakh patriotism” articulated onscreen. Others have
criticized certain aspects of the onscreen nomadic nationhood, particularly
the Kazakh state’s role in promoting it and Kazakh ilmmakers’ adaptation
of Hollywood techniques. Still others have stayed away from Kazakh ilms
entirely, choosing instead to check out the latest Hollywood blockbusters.
As a result, Nazarbayev declared in late 2009 that Kazakh ilmmakers
should start to pay more attention to the present and not just the past, but
the cinematic nomadic nationhood has not stopped. The May 2012 ilm
Myn Bala [A Thousand Boys] mines the same historical territory as 2005’s
The Nomad, the ilm that in many ways initiated the new Kazakh cinema’s
turn to the nomadic past.
Резюме
В статье рассматривается политика истории в современном Казахстане, который продвигает концепцию “кочевой национальности”.
Стивен Норрис понимает эту политику как живой процесс строительства национальной идентичности и формирования исторической
памяти, в центре которой кочевое прошлое. Казахский кинематограф,
располагающий государственной поддержкой, играет в этом проекте
национального государства важнейшую роль. В статье анализируется
несколько недавних казахских фильмов, авторы которых отозвались
на призыв президента Нурсултана Назарбаева создать национальный
My mogli pozvolit’ sebe polivat’ // Izvestiia Kazakhstan. 2012. 18 May: http://www.
izvestia.kz/node/21689.
401
Stephen M. Norris, Nomadic Nationhood
казахский нарратив. Они обращаются к кочевникам и кочевому прошлому как к источнику казахской национальности и памяти. Норрис
анализирует образный язык и идеологическое послание этих фильмов
и их восприятие аудиторией. Автор реконструирует диапазон оценок от
восторженно-патриотических до умеренно критических и откровенно
индифферентных и делает вывод о функционировании концепции
“кочевой национальности” в современном казахстанском обществе.
402
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Melanie KREBS
FROM A REAL HOME TO A NATION’S BRAND:
ON STATIONARY AND TRAVELING YURTS*
Yurts – the round felt tents, known under different names – were for
centuries the common house for the nomadic steppe dwellers of Central Asia
as well as the inhabitants of the mountainous areas of today’s Kyrgyzstan,
on whom I will focus in this article. The article traces how the yurt changed
with the decline of nomadism as an everyday way of life during the period
of the Soviet Union, on the one hand, and analyzes the increasing interest
in yurts as symbols not only in national but also transnational representation (and often romanticization) of Central Asian nomadism, on the other
hand. My main interest is not the role of the yurt within nation-building
processes in Kyrgyzstan, but in the way the yurt itself transports ideas that
are constitutive for the Kyrgyz nation, while also evoking individual as
well as collective dreams in people living far away from Kyrgyzstan and
any nomadic traditions. For this attempt I use the idea of nation-branding
instead of nation-building, which focuses mostly on the dynamics within the
nation being built. A nation-brand as Keith Dinnie deines it is “the unique,
multidimensional blend of elements that provide the nation with culturally
grounded differentiation and relevance for all its target audiences.”1 A brand
can therefore be anything that is somehow connected with the nation’s own
*
The author acknowledges the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and
suggestions.
1
Keith Dinnie. Nation Branding: Concepts, Issues, Practice. Amsterdam, 2008. P. 15.
403
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
idea of its strength (typical examples are hospitality, love for certain arts,
freedom, etc.) and can be reduced to something that is highly recognizable
and easy to reproduce (often reduced to a mere slogan, sketch, or logo).
Branding a nation-state is often started by a civil administration or tourism
experts and focuses more on the prospective consumer than on the people
living in and with the potential brands, as Simon Anholt criticizes.2 I take
the Kyrgyz yurt and its physical as well as symbolical usage and changes
in different cultural settings as an example of how an object of material
culture can become part of a network of ideas and emotions built around
it, while also shaping the material according to the ideas connected with it.
The yurt was much more than a mere commodity or an important but
replaceable object of material culture, but a house, a home with all the
emotional aspects that are connected with this idea. Houses are often not
just seen as shelters; they are regarded as the extension of the body or even
of the self, sharing a history with the people living within them and thus
intimately linked to concepts of family and society structures.3 To put up a
house – or a yurt – is to claim a space to live, a place to eventually start a
family and protect it against enemies, or in which to host guests. Another
indication of the close connection between the yurt and the idea of “home”
and even “homeland” can be found in the way most Western languages use
the word today: Originally, yurd meant home or homeland in most Turkish
languages. It is very likely that foreign travelers misunderstood the term
and started to use it to refer only to the felt tent. In Kyrgyz, a yurt is called
boz uy or, more rarely, refers to using the Russian term kibitke.4
Due to the fact that the yurt was an important part of the life of Kyrgyz
nomads, its meaning signiicantly changed when nomadic Kyrgyz everyday
life and culture changed during the twentieth century: the yurt lost its importance as a home and became a commodity also sold outside the region.
In order to explore these changes in the usage, meanings, and values of
the yurt and its parts in different cultural settings, I apply Igor Kopytoff’s
approach of the cultural biography of things and investigate the yurt as an
object within various temporal and cultural shifts.5 In particular, I focus on
Simon Anholt. Brand New Justice: The Upside of Global Branding. Oxford, 2003. P. 123.
Janet Carsten, Stephen Hugh-Jones. Introduction // Idem. About the House. Cambridge,
1995. Pp. 1-46.
4
My observations are based on eight months of ieldwork for my doctoral research in
Kyrgyzstan from April to October 2005.
5
Igor Kopytoff. The Cultural Biography of Things: Commodization as Process // Arjun Appadurai (Ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
Cambridge, 1988. Pp. 64-91.
2
3
404
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the question of how the yurt is interpreted and used by various new stakeholders (such as the new Kyrgyz government, local as well as international
nongovernmental organizations [NGOs] working in the ield of preserving
Kyrgyz culture, tourism experts, and foreign yurt enthusiasts), and how this
changes the appearance of the yurt itself as well as the life of the people
still producing and using yurts in the Kyrgyz countryside. Therefore, in
my research, I concentrate on the material basics of the yurt as well as on
its meaning within a broader sense of history and nomadism, but not on its
signiicance as a house and the special research questions related to that
status. Even if every inhabited furnished yurt was, from the perspective
of the owners, a unique and not exchangeable home, single parts of a yurt
could be seen in terms of exchangeable commodities, as characterized by
Kopytoff. In this article I focus on the cultural biography of these items
over the past 150 years.
For Sergei Tretyakov, writing a biography of the thing instead of a
classical human-centered novel concentrating on the emotions of a hero
could help to bring the reader’s attention to a ield that, in Tretyakov’s
opinion, has been greatly overlooked in literature: the social environment
of people and the connections between different groups, as well as the
world of work and the workers. According to him, emotions should be
not portrayed as the feelings of an individual but described as emotions
of classes and groups of people. This could be done through a biography
of a thing rather than through traditional literature.6 While restricting the
biography of an object only to its production process (and regarding this
production process as mainly industrial), Tretyakov misses in this idea the
fact that human beings can have very strong and very personal emotional
connections to things. This applies not only to objects produced by hand,
and perhaps according to the special wishes of the customer, but also to
every object that is owned, used, or even destroyed by people. In this way,
even more people than the producers alone are connected to the object:
retailers, owners, consumers, collectors, garbage removers – they can all
in their own special way be part of the biography of the object and their
emotions toward it can be as varied as their connections with it. Writing a
biography of an object has to include all these emotions toward it – at least
to the extent that they are traceable. Along these lines, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi shows how much objects can matter for people and how different
6
S. Tretiakov. Biograiia veshchi (1929) // Literatura fakta. Pervyi sbornik materialov
LEFa. Moskva, 2000. S. 68-72.
405
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
the emotions toward a commodity can be, not only when this commodity
changes over time or is brought from one cultural sphere to another, as
described by Kopytoff, but also, as in Csikszentmihalyi’s example, when
a commodity owned by a single family has very different meanings for
different members of the family.7
Although commodities can have very different meanings for different
people and can therefore be connected to them through different emotions,
commodities can also be used to evoke the emotions of unity and of belonging to a larger group, thereby becoming symbols for this group. The use of
certain works of craftsmanship usually connected with prestige and used
by an elite and not by the whole group, such as daggers (for example, in
Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates), jewelry or parts of craftworks
such as carpet patterns (as in Turkmenistan) in national representation, can
be seen as an institutionalization of emotions toward a commodity in order
to build a national consciousness. These works can be represented on lags,
stamps, coins, and banknotes, but also on billboards on the streets. Even if
these commodities are only used by one gender, age, or social group, and
never signify the same thing for every member of this smaller group, most
of the members of the extended group recognize these works as “ours.”8 In
a next step, the object can be used as a nation-brand fulilling Anholt’s claim
for a higher identiication of the local community with the created brand.9
In general the usage of contemporary crafts and crafts production in nationbuilding is less researched than the role of architecture and archaeological
sites or museum displays and objects.10 The research on nation-branding,
the objects chosen as a brand – tangible or intangible heritage − as well as
its impacts on the branded nation and the targeted audience worldwide are
even more rare.11
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. The Meaning of Things. Domestic Symbols and the Self.
Object Relations. Cambridge, 1981. Pp. 90-120.
8
Alexis Schwarzenbach. Portraits of the Nation. Stamps, Coins and Banknotes in Belgium and Switzerland 1880–1945. Bern, 1999. For the use of Kyrgyz and Uzbek crafts in
national representation of today’s Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan: Melanie Krebs. Zwischen
Handwerkstradition und globalem Markt. Berlin, 2011. S. 94-98, 106, 107.
9
Anholt. Brand New Justice. Pp. 123.
10
Michael Rowlands. Heritage and Cultural Property // Victor Buchli (Ed.). The Material
Culture Reader. Oxford, New York, 2002. Pp. 105-115.
11
Dace Dzenovska. Neoliberal Imaginations, Subject Formation, and Other National
Things in Latvia, the Land that Sings // Tsypylma Darieva, Wolfgang Kaschuba (Eds.).
Representations on the Margins of Europe. Frankfurt and New York, 2007. Pp. 114-136 in
particular Pp. 122-125; Marie Louise Stig-Sorensen. The Fall of a Nation, the Birth of a
7
406
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Scholarship on nation-building, speciically in Central Asia, often focuses
on the ways the nation is built in the consciousness of the people who should
become “Kyrgyz,” “Tajik,” or “Uzbek,” and which role language and culture
play in this process.12 Even if these nation-building processes also include
representing the national culture outside the borders of the nation itself, little
research has been done on how the new nations have tried to make their
country known to a global public after independence.
In this case, the focus of this article is not on just on the Kyrgyz people
who consider the yurt as something that belongs to them, but on the people
from outside Kyrgyzstan for whom the yurt is something exotic, because
regarding a commodity as “ours” is not the only means by which people
form a special relationship with it: on the contrary, the idea of possessing a
commodity that is unknown to the possessor’s own culture can lead to the
formation of a special bond between the possessor and the commodity. The
fact that an object belongs to another cultural context can make it even more
interesting for consumers and it often allows more and other redeinitions
than are possible with an object originating from the customers’ own culture.
The “foreign” object does not have to be adapted as something completely
new, it can still have the meaning from its original culture (at least in the
way the new owner interprets it) and can also receive new meanings within
its new culture. As a result, it becomes an object new to both cultural settings. This can happen when the object is transferred geographically, but
also when the cultural environment of the object changes, as happened in
Kyrgyzstan in the past century.
There can be many reasons for adapting foreign objects. One is that
people are looking for something singular, for an object that is unique and
has a special meaning and authenticity. These objects tend to be labeled as
“art” in contrast to “craft,” a term used to refer to items that are often seen as
common and are produced in greater quantity. But in times when every work
of art can be reproduced and reproductions can be bought everywhere, this
special aura of authenticity, the value of a work of art that lies in its special
Subject: The National Use of Archaeology in Nineteenth-Century Denmark // Margarita
Diaz-Andreu, Timothy C. Champion. Nationalism and Archaeology in Europe. London,
1996. Pp. 24-47.
12
Laura Adams. Invention, Institutionalization and Renewal in Uzbekistan’s National
Culture // European Journal of Cultural Studies. 1999. Vol. 2(3). Pp. 355-373; Mary
Margaret Doi. From the Heart: Marginality and Transformation in the Lives of Uzbek
National Dancers, 1929–1994. PhD diss., Indiana University, 1997; Lutz Rzehak. Vom
Persischen zum Tadschikischen. Wiesbaden, 2001.
407
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
presence, as Walter Benjamin describes it, of having a singular priceless
object in your home, is easily spoiled.13 Therefore, people in Europe and the
United States tend to look for other objects that have the aura, the special
authenticity that makes an object unique and priceless for the owner as well
as representative of special tastes, and they tend to ind this authenticity in
commodities from foreign cultures. Objects with an aura of singularity and
pricelessness can be seen as the opposite of objects reduced to a brand with
its demand to be easy to be reproduced in different materials and shown (or
sold) everywhere.
The structure and history of the yurt
Yurts were described for centuries in travelogues of Western as well as
Chinese travelers as the homes of most families in the region of today’s Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, and Mongolia. All these travelers stress how perfectly
the yurt is adapted to the nomadic or semi-nomadic lifestyle of the Central
Asian steppe dwellers and to the extreme climate of these regions.14 In fact,
the yurt seems to be so perfectly adapted to its inhabitants’ needs that the
basic structure has not changed for centuries, perhaps even for millennia.
The structure is made of wood from young willow trees that grow along
small mountain creeks or lakes and contain the trellis (kerege),15 which usually comes in two or more sections and forms the “walls” of the yurt, the
roof poles (uuk), and inally the round roof crown, the tunduk, which not
only is the highest point of the yurt and holds the structure together but also
contains the air hole that allows the smoke from the ireside directly beneath
it to leave the yurt (ig. 1). The tunduk is therefore not only regarded as the
“cornerstone” of the yurt but also connected with the ireplace and the hearth
of the family living inside the yurt. It symbolizes the unity and warmth of
the family and the tribe, in modern times of the nation and became therefore
important in the nation-branding process.
Walter Benjamin. Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit.
Würzburg, (1936) 2010.
14
Alfred Brehm. Reise zu den Kirgisen. Leipzig, 1982. S. 155; Richard Karutz. Unter
Kirgisen und Turkmenen. Leipzig, 1911. S. 69. Brehm and Karutz traveled in the second
half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century mostly in the region
of today’s Kazakhstan, but their observations can also be seen as valid for the Kyrgyz
people of the same time. Fritz Machatschek. Landeskunde von Russisch Turkestan.
Stuttgart, 1921. S. 125.
15
Because I mainly focus on yurts in today’s Kyrgyzstan, I use the Kyrgyz words for
the different parts of the yurt.
13
408
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Fig. 1. Tunduk in its original place. Photo by the author.
The kerege is surrounded by a plaited wall screen (chiy) made from a
special kind of wild sedge that is also known in Kyrgyzstan as chiy. This
chiy can be adorned with complicated patterns by wrapping each stem
separately with colored raw wool before weaving it into the screen. This is
very tedious work because for more complicated patterns the screen has to
be woven twice: First to draw the pattern on the screen, than after opening
and wrapping every single stem with colored wool, weaving it once again
in exactly the former order. This technique is mostly used by Kyrgyz people
and is especially widespread in northern Kyrgyzstan.16 The frame and the
chiy are covered by thick, large layers of plain white felt that darkens over
the years. The color of a yurt covered with fresh layers of felt led to the
Kyrgyz name for yurts: boz uy – white house, even if the wooden parts of
the yurt are usually painted red. The big felt covers usually last ive to ten
years before they need to be replaced by new ones. Woven or plaited bands
of all lengths and widths play an important role in the yurt’s stability. They
are visible on the external parts of the yurt as well as inside the yurt, so they
are often diligently decorated with geometrical patterns and additionally
adorned with colorful tassels. Yurts usually have a felt door in mosaic style
16
Elena Tsareva. The Construction and Decoration of the Yurt // Music for the Eyes.
Textiles from the Peoples of Central Asia. Antwerp, 1998. Pp. 75-79.
409
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
(shyrdak) and backed with a chiy. Solid wooden doors with wood carvings
are also very common.
Less research has been done on the usage of space in the Kyrgyz yurt
than in the Mongolian yurt,17 but it can be said that the yurt is traditionally
divided into a male section on one side and a female section on the other.
The items used by men as hunting equipment and other tools are stored in the
male section on the left side of the entrance, while the female section on the
right side is used for cooking and storing household devices. A kitchen can
be within the yurt – normally hidden from the eyes of visitors by a special
chiy (ashkana chiy) – or in the summer located outside the yurt. A special
place opposite the door is reserved for honored guests.18
The main advantage of a yurt is that it is easy to transport between different
pastures. Travelers also wrote about how quickly yurt camps could disappear
and be put up again.19 But nevertheless, putting up a yurt big enough to house
a larger family can require more than an hour and several people. Therefore,
most families used tents when they stayed in the same place for just a few
nights and put up the yurt only when they settled down for a longer period.
This was mostly the case on the summer and winter pastures, for Kyrgyz
nomadism was mostly semi-nomadism between two or three places in the
course of the year. The Kyrgyz mostly bred sheep and, to a much smaller
extent, cattle and camels.20 The yurt was mainly connected with the summer
pastures (jajloos) in the mountains. The German traveler Alfred Brehm wrote
in 1876 that Kyrgyz people used to live in yurts only during summertime, while
winter settlements consisted mostly of the same houses as the settlements of
sedentary people – even though, according to his observations, these houses
were less well adapted to the climate than the yurts.21 That might be one of
the reasons why yurts were also used in sedentary settlements.22
Another reason why the yurt was perfectly adapted to the nomadic life
was that the most important material, wool, was produced by the sheep the
family owned, and that other materials were found near their campsites, such
as chiy or plants for natural colors used to dye wool and yarn for the bands
and carpets within the yurt. Only the wooden frame of a yurt was always
17
Caroline Humphrey. Inside a Mongolian Tent // Ken Teague (Ed.). Nomads. Nomadic Material Culture in the Asian Collections of the Horniman Museum. London, 2000. Pp. 87-95.
18
Tatyana Emelyanenko. The Yurt // Music for the Eyes. Pp. 43-53; P. 43.
19
Brehm. Reise zu den Kirgisen. S. 159; Karutz. Unter Kirgisen und Turkmenen. P. 69;
Heinrich Moser. Durch Zentral-Asien. Leipzig, 1888.
20
Machatschek. Landeskunde von Russisch Turkestan. S. 154-156.
21
Ibid. S. 124-126; Brehm. Reise zu den Kirgisen. S. 155.
22
Emelyanenko. The Yurt. P. 43
410
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
made by a sedentary master in a commercial workshop. This is because,
on the one hand, carpentering a wooden frame requires a lot of experience,
and on the other hand, that the other woodwork requires more and heavier
tools than can be easily transported in a nomadic lifestyle.
After buying the frame, all other parts of the yurt, the chiy, the felt covers, woven bands and the interior, were made by the women of the family
in addition to their household work. Felting yurt covers is much more timeconsuming than any other kind of felt work and it requires numerous helpers,
so women from different families often helped each other in producing the
big felt covers, but they rarely exchanged completed works outside the family, nor did they sell them. Occasionally women asked an especially talented
woman from outside the family to draw a pattern for a felt carpet or a chiy,
but even this woman would not be considered an artist or a master of a special
craft to the same extent as the carpenter making the wooden frame, and she
did not receive any money for her work. Furthermore, although felt carpets
were given as presents within the extended family, they were not distributed
outside this circle. In this way, the frame was seen as a commodity for sale
that did not display any individuality, while for a long time the parts made
by women were not regarded as tradable. Most women making felt for the
commercial market today still say that the idea of selling felt would have been
inconceivable for their mothers, as these objects were seen as the expression
of the family’s wealth and the diligence of its women, and were therefore to
be displayed in the family’s own yurt and not to be given away.23
In contrast to the wooden structure of a yurt that is nearly impossible to
change, the interior can be customized to an extent that it is not exchangeable in the sense of Kopytoff’s theory.24 The interior can display individual
tastes, the craftsmanship of the producer, the ideas regarding authenticity
of producers or customers, and it can be changed due to various inluences.
The most important elements of traditional yurt furniture are felt carpets
(shyrdak and alakiyis), embroidered wall hangings (tush kiyis), and bags for
storing all kinds of goods. This does not mean that wooden chests made by
sedentary craftsmen were completely unknown even in nomadic households,
but they were not an essential part of the furnishings.
One of the most important changes in the decoration of the yurt occurred
in the nineteenth century when Russian rule was established in the Central
Anna Portisch describes the same for the Kazakh living in Western Mongolia: Anna
Portisch. Techniques as a Window onto Learning // Journal of Material Culture. 2009.
Vol. 14. No. 4. Pp. 474-994; P. 474.
24
Kopytoff. The Cultural Biography of Things. P. 69.
23
411
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
Asian steppes. According to Brehm’s account, during this time, wealthy
families owned up to ifteen yurts. The family of the owner lived in one yurt
while the other ones were used by people who worked for the family or by
guests. Many yurts meant that the owner could not only afford to buy enough
wooden frames from sedentary masters but also that he owned enough sheep
to produce the large amount of wool needed for the covers, enough female
relatives to make the covers, and enough transport animals (probably camels)
to transport the yurts from one place to another. By putting up more yurts than
absolutely needed by the family, wealth as well as hospitality were openly
displayed. Because yurt camps could be easily spotted from miles away,
everybody could estimate the social status and economic conditions of a
family based on the number of yurts before actually approaching their home.
When Russian oficials began assessing tax rates in the region, they
based the rate on the number of yurts a family owned. This led to the irst
change in the appearance of the yurt that did not originate from the shifting
tastes of the yurt dwellers, but from an outside force. To avoid higher taxes,
people began investing more money in the yurt’s interior rather than setting
up more yurts.25 Now a visitor had to be invited to the family’s yurt to get
an idea of the wealth and social status of the owner. The custom of adorning
the chiy probably also began at this time. In the end this pattern is not seen
from outside the yurt and even rarely from within the yurt and appears in full
beauty only on the rare occasions in summer when it is so hot that the felt
covers of the yurt are removed to let the wind come through. Little is known
about the appearance of the yurt interior before this important change in the
late nineteenth century, because most of the examples we ind in museum
collections today are from this very period.
In the 1930s, Stalin sedentarized the nomads in the Central Asian Soviet
republics by force and started the collectivization of land in Central Asia.
Nomads were compelled to settle down and organize themselves in kolkhoz
structures. As the big sheep herds could not survive without moving from
one pasture to another, many animals and later the people themselves died
due to famine. The better-off families who owned yurts were also in danger
of being accused and killed as kulaks. But even though the Central Asian
nomads were formally sedentarized, this did not mean the complete end
of the nomadic lifestyle for the Kyrgyz people.26 Sheep breeding remained
Brehm. Reise zu den Kirgisen. S. 160 f. and S. 168 f.
Manfred Hildermeier. Die Sowjetunion 1917–1991. München, 2001. S. 36-38; Peter
Finke. Contemporary Pastoralism in Central Asia // Gabriele Rasuly-Paleczek, Julia
Katschnig. Central Asia on Display. Wien, 2004. Pp. 397-410; P. 399.
25
26
412
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the most important economic activity and shepherds still moved between
different pastures at different altitudes during the year.27 Yurts were still
used on the summer pastures in the mountains or were put up in the yards
and gardens in the village as additional rooms for guests, especially in the
summer months, when relatives and friends from the cities came to the
countryside on vacation.
The livestock declined starting in the 1950s with Khrushchev’s agriculture policy and especially in the irst years after independence. Peter Finke
also found a reduction in the Krygyz people’s movement patterns to only two
places – one in summer and one in winter – instead of the former cycle of
four places that was typical in pre-Soviet and Soviet times.28 Nevertheless,
even during my recent ieldwork, many of my neighbors and colleagues in
Bishkek told me proudly about the sheep and cattle they have somewhere
in the countryside, herded by rural relatives for money or in exchange for
medicine or technological goods.
The importance of the two settlements changed signiicantly under Soviet
rule. According to the memories today related in Kyrgyzstan and testimonies from early travelers, the summer pasture was the more important place
in the life of Kyrgyz people, or at least equal to the winter settlement, but
during Soviet times the settlements became the center of social, cultural,
and political life, as this was where the administration of the kolkhoz was
concentrated, along with schools, workers clubs, and so on. Increasing
numbers of families or family members stayed behind in the village for at
least part of the summer instead of moving the entire household to the summer pasture. Yurts were no longer given as a future home to newlyweds as
a place in which to live and start their family because the concrete house in
the village had become the place for the family, while the yurt became the
extraordinary place to stay during the summer months. However, this did
not changed the yurt’s importance within the “moral geography” of Kyrgyz
people, according to research by Jeanne Féaux de la Croix.29
The interior also changed again with the yurt’s loss of importance as a
regular or even temporary home of Kyrgyz families in the twentieth century.
Finke. Contemporary Pastoralism in Central Asia. Pp. 401-406. Caroline Humphrey
describes the same development for sheep and cattle herders in Mongolia, where the
main migration principles based on altitude and relief stayed broadly the same during
the collective period, even if there were some important changes. Caroline Humphrey,
David Sneath. The End of Nomadism? Durham, Cambridge, 1999. Pp. 233-236.
28
Finke. Contemporary Pastoralism in Central Asia. Pp. 401-406.
29
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix. Moral Geographies in Kyrgyzstan: How Pastures, Dams
and Holy Sites Matter in Striving for a Good Life / PhD dissertation; St. Andrews, 2011.
27
413
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
The traditional felt and leather bags of all sizes hanging from the kerege and
used for storage30 became less important once only a few family members
moved to the summer pasture with the yurt while other family members
and all nonessential items stayed behind in the house in the village. The use
of trucks also contributed to this change, as a truck can be used to easily
transport a shelf or cupboard in a manner that is much more convenient than
the traditional bags – as long as the roads to the mountain pastures are good
enough to drive up by truck. As an elderly woman from a village near Issyk
Kul told me: “We used to go to the jajloo by car, taking all our things with
us. But now the road is too bad. We have to go by horseback. I go maybe
for a few days now, to visit the old places. Others go. But me? I am too old.
No, thanks.” Together with the involuntarily return to the old way of going
up to the mountains by horse, the bags have become more important again,
but are not inseparably connected with yurts as they were before.
Yurts in national representation
Since the establishment of the Kyrgyz Soviet Socialist Republic in 1936,
the yurt has been part of the representation of the Kyrgyz Republic within
the Soviet Union. As a result, yurts were shown in All-Union Exhibitions,
occasionally republic-wide competitions among yurt makers were held,
and successful yurt makers were asked to produce yurts as presents of the
Soviet Union to other states.31 However, although the yurt was established
as a symbol of the Kyrgyz traditional lifestyle in these times, its use was
mostly folkloristic. This changed after Kyrgyzstan gained independence
from the Soviet Union in 1991. For the young state it became necessary to
create national symbols for a nation that had never been independently united
on this territory and under a common government before. But the task of
building a nation was not the only problem. Considering Kyrgyzstan’s dificult economic situation and its lack of natural resources (at least compared
with other Central Asian republics like Turkmenistan or Kazakhstan), the
development of other income sources also became important. This made
it necessary to ind a brand to “sell” the nation within the global tourism
industry. This is not an uncommon strategy for nation-branding, but seems to
be more common for new states, which feel a need to improve their position
in the globalized world – or even need to become known in the irst place.32
Elena Tsareva. Yurt Interior. Wall Bags and Other Textile Containers // Music for the
Eyes. Pp. 105-144; K. Antipina. Narodnye sokrovishcha Kirgizii. Frunze, 1974. P. 19.
31
V. Maksimov. Kyrgyz Ojmoloru. Frunze, 1986.
32
Dzenovska. Neoliberal Imaginations. Pp. 122-125.
30
414
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
One of the main reasons for the utilization of the yurt within the national
representation and nation-branding of Kyrgyzstan is its strong connection
with nomadism and its long history. The yurt combines the longing for a
distant but still present past, a kind of “living history” rooted in ancient times
and connected to the promise of freedom and independence from any political
forces that is often associated with nomadism. In my interviews with oficials
as well as in unoficial conversations, my interlocutors often brought up the
nomadic tradition of the Kyrgyz people in order to explain certain events and
behaviors that were seen as expressions of a “national character.” When it
came to the Soviet past or the danger of a more fundamentalist Islam, I often
heard: “You see, we are nomads, we reduce every ideology to something that
can it in our saddle bags,” to explain why Kyrgyz people were never fully
committed communists or Muslims. The “Tulip Revolution” in March 2005
was commented upon with a laconic: “Nomads are not used to accepting
a government just because it is a government. We are not used to having a
ruler above us.” Interestingly, while the last point might not be exactly what
a government already struggling with legitimacy problems wants to have
claimed as a national character, even oficials state this fact with much pride.
The most important element in the general usage
of the yurt is the tunduk,
which is shown on the
Kyrgyz lag. As a pars pro
toto for the whole yurt,
the tunduk is a symbol of
the unity of the family,
which is also expressed
in the wish to a newlywed
couple, “Tündükün tüshpösün” (Never break your
Fig. 2. Tunduk as an advertisement and symbolic centre tunduk) (ig. 2).33 In the
in a yurt camp near Lake Issyk Kul, August 2005. Photo wider national context,
by the author.
the tunduk is also interpreted as the symbol of the unity of the forty Kyrgyz tribes (which are also
symbolized on the Kyrgyz lag by the forty rays around the tunduk). The
symbolic signiicance of the tunduk was already in use during Soviet times:
The monument in Bishkek to the Kyrgyz soldiers who fell in World War II
33
Stefanie Bunn. Nomadic Felts. London, 2010. P. 122.
415
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
shows a giant broken tunduk (see ig. 3). The yurt and its parts differ from
many other objects of material culture that are used in national representation due to the fact that the yurt was actually used – even if not owned – by
nearly all Kyrgyz people during a certain time now in the past, and not a
commodity used only by a single group. In this way especially, the tunduk
can function as a possible brand, standing for the yurt and all its meanings
as whole but easily reduced to a logo.
Fig. 3. Broken tunduk: World War II memorial in Bishkek, 2005. Photo by the author.
It is interesting that this national representation focuses mostly on the
wooden structure of the yurt while the felt and textile parts are not put to use
equally.34 Even the woven bands, which are vital for the construction and
sometimes show a high level of craftsmanship, do not play a signiicant role
within any yurt-related national representation. Yurt-shaped structures made
mostly from metal or plastic, rarely from wood, were erected in Bishkek in
2005 for major public celebrations such as Victory Day (May 9) or Independence Day (August 31). But these structures were only put up as decoration
in some of the central urban squares, such as the Ala Too square in front of
That does not mean that other felt products do not play a signiicant role in national
representation, too. In particular, the highly recognizable patterns of the mosaic carpets,
the shyrdak, are also used, but nowadays they are not automatically connected to yurts
and can be found in any Kyrgyz house, so I will not go deeper into their usage.
34
416
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the National History Museum, and had no practical function whatsoever.
In order to be decorative elements they were not even covered with felt but
with textiles in the national colors of red and yellow. The round structure
and the conic shape make these structures obviously recognizable as a yurt
even if the material and colors are completely different from the traditional
yurt. The reduction to a mere shape or an isolated part of the yurt and the
transformation into different materials transforms the yurt into a brand
for the Kyrgyz Republic: easily recognized by Kyrgyz city dwellers and
foreigners alike, immediately connected to the nation’s nomadic past and
culture but without connection to the former cultural context of production
and meaning. This structure has no use as a living space and there is no
need for masters to make yurt frames or people skilled in putting up yurts
anymore: Every worker can transport a metal frame to a public square, ix
it, and cover it with textile lags.
While in the national representation, the traditional materials like willow
wood, chiy, and felt were almost totally neglected, the fact that the yurt is
made only of natural materials – and in the case of chiy, materials found only
in the Central Asian steppes – is often mentioned by local and international
NGO representatives in order to emphasize the deep connection Kyrgyz
people have to their land and how they preserved the sensitive environment
they live in. The perfect adaption of the yurt to the environment is also used
as proof of the connection to the land itself – something that is always more
dificult for nomads than for sedentary people who can use archaeological
excavations to “prove” that their group has lived in the same region for a
long time. Another important point regarding the yurt often made by Western
NGO representatives or tourists is that the Kyrgyz nomads’ way of living was
adapted to the sensitive environment of mountains and steppes and that their
lifestyle was in line with today’s ideas of an environmentally friendly lifestyle.
Felt, one of the basic materials of a yurt, plays an important role, particularly in the narratives about the long history of the yurt and yurt making as
well as in ecological discussions. It is often stressed that felt is one of the
oldest known materials made and used by humans (felt carpets have been
found in Scythian graves from the Pazyryk culture from around the sixth to
the third century BC), and perfectly its with a nomadic lifestyle because it
does not require any tools that are heavy or dificult to transport (i.e., spinning
wheels or looms).35 Together with the idea of the yurt’s centuries-old shape
and unchanged construction, the ancient history of felt contributes to the yurt’s
special aura that is used by national representatives and tourism experts alike.
35
Janet Harvey. Traditional Textiles from Central Asia. London, 1996. Pp. 43, 62.
417
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
Yurts for foreigners
Tour operators link the country to the famous Silk Road, even if Kyrgyzstan does not have many architectural monuments or the legendary Silk Road
cities such as Bukhara or Samarkand in Uzbekistan, and promote its national
beauty and nomadic pastoralism.36 Posters and brochures often show mountain ranges and jajloos dotted with yurts and locks of livestock, families in
front of yurts (often elderly people in colorful clothes and with weathered
faces and pictured with children) or eagle hunters on horseback – giving
an image of a nomadic culture and an untouched landscape far away from
cities and urban life. Pictures of yurts play an important role in these visual
materials to attract tourists and even full-sized yurts are brought to tourism
and crafts fairs all over the world, where they often stand side by side with
Mongol or Kazakh yurts. At the international crafts fair in November 2006
in Berlin, a yurt served as a showroom for felt fashion. But even with a big
sign in front bearing the words “Kyrgyz Heritage,” more than half of the
interviewed buyers, visiting the yurt and buying felt-silk shawls or one of
the small felt accessories, located the origin of their bargains in Mongolia,
while others more or less equally named Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, or Siberia
as the country of origin. A few even connected the felt works with Lithuania,
which occupied the neighboring stall.37 As a nation-brand for Kyrgyzstan,
the yurt certainly faces the problem that there are many competitors.
But the interviews at the craft fair also showed that – despite the geographical problem – most visitors linked the same ideas about nomadism with the
yurt as the Kyrgyz oficial statements and the tour operators do: the freedom
and independence of nomads and their closeness to nature and the land they
live on – the branding process was already at work here. These dreams also
make yurts attractive for foreigners looking for an authentic experience when
traveling in Central Asia. For them – in contrast to the Kyrgyz oficials using
only the iconic version of the yurt – the contact with the people involved
with the yurt, the producers and dwellers, is an integral part of the yurt. The
visitors are interested not only in spending the night in a round felt tent but
also in talking to people who are supposed to have a close connection to
the yurt and all it stands for. They want to share this at least for a few days.
To fulill these expectations, home stays in yurts are now offered to visitors
(ig. 4). Advertising was created, announcing, “Stay in Yurt Inn in Kyrgyzstan –
36
Cynthia Werner. The New Silk Road: Mediators and Tourism Development in Central
Asia // Ethnology. 2003. Vol. 42. No. 2. Pp. 141-159.
37
Interviews with customers at the Import Shop – Fair / Berlin, November, 2006.
418
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Fig. 4. Yurt camp near Lake Issyk Kul, August, 2005. Photo by the author.
explore nomad’s life style” 38 and describing the experience: “Accommodation in a Yurt is an opportunity to feel deeply the life style of Central Asia
nomads, traditional Kyrgyz hospitality and kindness.”39 In this way, yurt stays
for tourists on the summer pastures were advertised and promised authentic
experiences of the Kyrgyz nomadic lifestyle and hospitality, together with
all the amenities needed by Western tourists, from satellite phones to horseback riding, from minibars to folklore shows. The issues that arise between
authenticity and tourists’ demands become apparent when it comes to the
furnishing of the yurt: The problem of whether you can expect hot water
or Western-style beds and toilets in a yurt stay was often discussed among
travelers in Bishkek. So, although beds, boards, and chairs are in no way
authentic yurt furniture (and not even very authentic for sedentary Kyrgyz
villagers either!), they play an important role in the yurt stay advertising.
“One kitchen yurt decorated in national style”40 is advertised as a special
treat – making the formerly most private, least decorated part of the yurt
into the most important part of a tourist attraction.
http://www.centralasia.kg/yurts.html (last visit: December 22, 2011)
http://www.adventurer-kg.com/en/tr_inf/yurt_inn.htm (last visit: December 22, 2011)
40
This and all examples for yurt camp facilities were found on the Web site http://www.
centralasia.kg/yurts.html (last visit: December 22, 2011).
38
39
419
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
On special occasions such as the “International Felt Symposium” 2005,
organized by the Kyrgyzstan-based Central Asian Craft Support Association (CACSA), felt artists and anthropologists from Europe and North
America were given the opportunity to come together to learn more about
yurt making in the village of Kyzyl Too in northern Kyrgyzstan. The visitors
were taught by the yurt-making families how to produce a miniature yurt
of 60 cm in diameter themselves – at least the parts made of felt and chiy,
and to a lesser extent also the woven bands and tassels, while the wooden
frame was previously prepared by the workshops.
Kyzyl Too claims to be the place where most Kyrgyz yurts come from
and there are several yurt-building workshops in the village and a few more
in the neighboring villages and the nearby small town of Bokonbaevo. All
of these workshops are run by families in which the traditional gender-based
division of labor still exists. Men carry out the woodwork, while women
do the felting, weave the chiy and the bands, and design the interior as a
whole. During my ieldwork in 2005, only a few workshops had functioning machines for combing the wool and preparing it for felting; this is done
mostly by hand. A family (sometimes with hired helpers depending on the
amount of work) can produce up to ive 5-meter-diameter yurts and several smaller ones a year. With a price of about $5,000 for a fully decorated
5-meter-diameter yurt, a yurt workshop can be one of the most economically successful businesses in a village or even the whole region, even if it
can sell only one to three yurts a year. As a result, yurt building – and felt
making in general – is a very attractive economic ield and the competition
among the different workshops is quite high.
Even if most owners of yurt workshops are proud that their workshops
are old and that their parents (and often grandparents) made yurts, they also
often stress that “there were no yurts in Soviet times.” When asked about
this apparent contradiction, one yurt maker claimed, “Yes – but this was
during communism!” It seems that today and in conversation with a Western
researcher, only yurts made for the external market and paid for in foreign
currency are considered “real business” by the yurt makers. They do not even
mention the yurts they produce for the local market, even though there are
still local customers.
Making yurts for foreigners – either for yurt stays or for export – differs
in many ways from the traditional yurt-making process when yurts were
produced for the local market only. The process for foreigners is marked by
an increasing commodiication of objects that were previously not regarded
as tradable, and this creates work opportunities that did not exist before. The
420
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
new kind of customer orders not only the wooden frame from a workshop but
also the felt covers and yurt bands and often (in the case of Western customers
always) a fully inished yurt with complete interior. These customers will not
provide any raw materials or participate in the building themselves, they just
pay for the inal product. Nowadays the workshops have to buy the raw wool
for their felting because even if they still breed sheep themselves, their herds
cannot supply enough for a larger felt workshop producing up to ive, often
fully furnished ive-meter-diameter yurts. It also means not only that the men
in the family doing the woodworking are involved in the family’s business
but also that the women of the family become an important part of the business by doing the felt work and the interior furnishings. They also often hire
women from outside the family to help; some yurt workshops employ more
than ifteen women during peak times. This development means that things
formerly not seen as tradable commodities, such as wool, and work formerly
regarded only as unpaid women’s work for the family (e.g., combing or dyeing
wool, felting, weaving yurt bands, or sewing felt carpets), became commercialized and turned into one of the main sources of income for many families.
The change in the role of felt-making women can be considered the largest
transformation: These women started to regard felt making, something that
their mothers and grandmothers had done as part of their household duties,
as a profession and a business in which they could make a living, and the
training that every young girl used to receive from her elders is often considered insuficient and is therefore complemented by workshops provided
by Western NGOs and development agencies. Here, felt-making women
receive information about Western tastes and fashions and are taught to
design their products according to these fashions (i.e., using natural colors,
making lealets with information about the history and meaning of the patterns). The fact that the yurt’s interior is especially important for foreigners
and often requires a lot of communication between the customer and the
woman designing the furniture and leading the work makes this woman a
very important person within the workshop. Western development agencies
especially focus on these women and provide training in business communication and accounting for them. It is therefore no surprise that today
most felt workshops are run by women who organize the work, buy the raw
material, sell the goods and represent the workshop to foreign buyers and
institutions. Even if I never heard any hostile remarks against these women
in their villages, some women now heading workshops seem to feel a need
to place their new career within a conventional framework by explaining
it in traditional terms as “putting bread on the table for our families” or
421
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
claiming that their work still demonstrates their diligence and commitment
to the family to the outside world, just as the carpets their grandmothers
sewed showed this to any visitor in the yurt.
It is dificult to say exactly when the role of women in felt making
changed: As fully equipped yurts were already being produced for a Soviet
Union–wide market, it seems very likely that women were already working
in this ield for money before 1991. But these yurts were produced mostly in
yurt workshops that emerged from the traditional workshops where the main
focus was on carpentering the wooden frame. Women working within these
workshops were not seen (and did not consider themselves) as employed,
but as doing what they had always done: producing felt covers and interior
decorations for yurts used by their families – even if “using” in this sense
meant that the yurts were brought to exhibitions, maybe won prizes there,
and were sold. But when asked, most of them date the beginning of their
business back to the early 2000s when a U.S.-based NGO, Aid to Artisans,
organized training sessions in order to prepare felt artists (not exclusively
yurt makers) to enter overseas markets for their products41 – leading also
to the social changes already referred to. Following their advice, Kyrgyz
women set up felt businesses in several villages, mainly focusing on felt
work that can be easily exported, such as smaller carpets, miniature yurts,
or clothing and accessories. Some of these felt workshops buy wooden
frames from the carpenter workshops and then produce the felt covers and
the interior decorations in order to sell the fully inished yurt.
The question of authenticity
In interviews with foreign customers shopping for a yurt, the fact that
they are looking for a “real” or “authentic” yurt is often mentioned and there
are many discussions about the characteristics of an authentic yurt. Most
customers agree that every part should be handmade from natural materials
and by producers who still have a special connection to yurts. Patterns used
for yurt bands and loor carpets should have a special meaning known by the
producer and chosen for this special yurt to make it unique. These demands
for authenticity show some parallels with the demands for authenticity of
Turkmen carpets, as analyzed by Brian Spooner.42
Beth Gottschling, Mary Ann Littrell. Central Asia: An Artist Association Is Born.
Hartford, 2004.
42
Brian Spooner. Weavers and Dealers: the Authenticity of an Oriental Carpet // Arjun
Appadurai (Ed.). The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective.
41
422
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
According to Spooner, an authentic carpet combines properties such as
utility, commodity, and exotic meaning.43 The production of a special exotic
meaning is connected to the fact that a carpet should be handmade by a
woman who chooses the motifs she uses according to the traditions of her
family and her own ideas, in contrast to a worker in a carpet factory who
has no possibility of choosing the motifs he uses himself. The last point is
especially important for foreign customers looking for a real yurt. While
being a commodity is not part of an authentic yurt – in contrast to items
such as oriental carpets or Chinese porcelain, which were traded as highly
appreciated commodities in Europe for centuries and are still in demand by
collectors – yurts were until very recently never considered by their producers and owners as a tradable good outside the region. The commoditization
of yurts only started in recent decades. Even within the region, dealing in
yurts – especially in fully furnished yurts – was perhaps not unknown but
rare. Because of this, yurt dealers are not common and customers usually
deal more or less – with the help of interpreters or maybe an organization
that helps to establish the contact – directly with the yurt maker. This makes
a big difference in the idea of an authentic yurt in comparison with an oriental carpet. A yurt does not have to be old. In fact, most yurts are ordered
and produced directly according to customer wishes. In this sense, it is not
possible to “falsify” a yurt as it is possible to falsify an antique carpet. As
pointed out earlier in the text, meeting with the producer and the negotiations
about the production of the yurt are part of the experience of authenticity that
consumers look for. Otherwise, even if the yurt just bought does not have to
be old, the idea of a century-long continuity of the tradition of production
makes a recently produced yurt a relict of a glorious past.
The interior is today particularly important for the trade outside the region
and is therefore of special interest when it comes to furnishing an authentic
yurt. While the interior plays a less important role during yurt stays because
of tourists’ demands for Western-style furniture like beds and cupboards,
most Western customers order yurts with full interiors, that is, felt carpets,
cushions, embroidered wall hangings, tassels, and adorned bands. These
wishes for an “authentic” yurt and its “real,” “traditional” furnishings are
often inspired by objects seen in books or exhibitions of Central Asian art
Cambridge, 1995. Spooner analyzes the growing interest Western collectors have shown
over the past few decades in Turkmen carpets from the nineteenth century. Some of his
results are also valid for Western interest in yurts, such as the romantic notions Westerners have regarding nomadism and tribal structures. See P. 202.
43
Ibid. Pp. 224-225.
423
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
in Europe or the United States. This becomes apparent when, for example,
the offer of kuraks, the typical Kyrgyz quilts, or embroidered cushions are
refused by Western customers because they are not seen as authentic enough.
Kuraks are very rare in Western museum collections and embroidered cushions hardly ever appear there. The reason might be that the region of today’s
Kyrgyzstan was not often visited by travelers and collectors, in contrast
to the legendary cities along the Silk Road in today’s Uzbekistan, and the
few travelers who did visit Kyrgyzstan concentrated mainly on felt items,
which were already seen as more authentic for the region than fabrics. Felt
and woven bags, today replaced primarily by shelves and cupboards in yurt
camps, are also not in demand among foreign customers, even though they
represent one of the most authentic parts of original yurt furniture.
Another example for this changing picture of how an authentic yurt
should look is the felt band that goes around the yurt between the wooden
frame and the felt covers at the point where the roof begins and kerege
and uuk are attached to each other with ropes. This band has the practical
function of saving the felt covers from direct contact with the wood and
the ropes, and it is only seen from the inside. It is usually done in shyrdak
style. Because this band is completely invisible from the outside, it is often
attached to the external felt covers of miniature yurts (ig. 5). During the
Fig. 5. Small model yurt with felt ornament band at the outside. Yurt workshop near
Bokonbaevo/Kyrgyzstan, August, 2005. Photo by the author.
424
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
past few years, tourists who had seen miniature yurts also wanted to have
normal-sized yurts with this “authentic” ornament.
A further idea regarding authenticity is the demand for natural colors,
which for most Western customers means that the colors not only should
be from natural dyes but also in muted, not very bright colors, such as earth
tones. In the beginning of my ieldwork I was often confused when craftswomen told me about their old, traditional colors and their own dyes (or
in the southern villages “the tajik” dyes – for the factory was on the other
side of the border in Tajikistan), meaning synthetic dyes and referring to the
natural dyes made from local plants as “the new” or even “the American”
dyes, because they had just learned about these dyes in a workshop organized
by an American NGO. The fact that bright colors have always been very
popular among Kyrgyz people (the reason why the synthetic dyes quickly
became popular at the beginning of the twentieth century is because they
enabled the production of colors even brighter than natural dyes) does not
make these colors “authentic” for most foreigners – and sometimes not even
the proof that the dyes were natural can change the idea that muted colors
are more authentic than bright ones. A customer from the Netherlands once
refused a bright red and yellow carpet because the colors did not look natural
enough to her, even though she had just witnessed the dyeing process with
natural plants.
Another way in which purchasing a yurt differs from buying an oriental
carpet, which tends to be seen more as a piece of art than a commodity, is
that yurts are rarely bought as parts of collections: While collectors of carpets
often set up collections of over a hundred different objects they would never
use in everyday life, yurt buyers only buy one yurt, and most of them are
not collectors of other Kyrgyz objects such as felt carpets or other crafts. In
fact, customers buy yurts in order to use them for very different purposes,
ranging from an artist workshop in a Finnish suburb, to esoteric seminars in
the British Midlands, or to a kindergarten in a town in the United States – but
in all these cases the customers want the yurt to be used, not just collected.
Even museums ordering yurts normally want them as part of hands-on
exhibitions where they should be touched and “experienced” as part of a
still living nomadic culture – in whichever way this might be possible in a
climatized room far away from the Kyrgyz mountain pastures. Even in this
marketing of (more or less) real yurts, the tunduk can play a role as an easily
recognizable part: the German NGO Nomadenland (nomad’s land), which
organizes events in a Kyrgyz yurt, shows one in its advertising materials.44
44
http://www.nomadenland.de (last accessed 06.05.2012).
425
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
The idea of the yurt as a home for nomads living far away from the civilized world in nature traveled even farther than the material yurts produced
in Kyrgyzstan or Mongolia. Since the 1980s, yurt camps have become
fashionable for U.S. campsites, especially in the Midwest, which provide
round, conic buildings made from wood and covered with fabric or vaguely
resembling yurts, usually with windows, electricity, and even bathrooms.
How important the connection between yurt and nomadism is (even if it is
a concrete yurt) is demonstrated in an article about yurt camping in Iowa
that begins with the words, “In summer, the nomads are on the move.” And
ends: “…we’ve got lots of nomads, and they’re all looking for a cool place
to stay.”45 And this cool place is a yurt.
Conclusion
After the yurt lost its relevance as the main home of the family for most
of the Central Asian peoples in the twentieth century, it was in use only on
the summer pastures during a certain time of the year. After independence
in 1991, the yurt achieved great signiicance in the national representation
of most of the countries in the region, becoming a brand for the emerging
Kyrgyz tourism sector and felt business, and in this way obtained some
economic value: yurts became commodities used in the tourism sector as
well as being produced to be sold to foreigners and shipped all over the
world. Together with the material presence of the yurt, images of nomadism,
tradition, and ecological awareness were represented, sold, and bought. I
argue that this loss of importance of the yurt as the spatially mobile house
of most Kyrgyz people was followed by a shift to a more symbolic, social
and culturally mobile representation of Kyrgyz history and culture within
and outside its region of origin. It is recognized as “ours” and a “real
home,” even by Kyrgyz who have lived in cities and towns for more than
two generations, and it can therefore serve as a symbol for Kyrgyzstan and
Kyrgyz life in national representation as well as a brand in advertisements
to tourists, and can be an “ambassador” for the country when sold in other
parts of the world. These new markets and the new demands made of the
yurt changed its appearance as well as the work and life of yurt makers,
in particular.
But even if today the Kyrgyz yurt is used in many different ways, most
of all far from its original purpose as a nomadic house, it is still neverthe45
“Yippee for Yurts” http://www.midwestweekends.com/plan_a_trip/stay/camping/
yurts_state_parks.html (last accessed December 22, 2011).
426
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
less strongly connected to its original purpose in the way that the idea, the
symbolism, or, to quote Benjamin, the aura of the yurt depends on this nomadic history. Even yurts made of unfamiliar materials, put up in different
cultural settings, and used in new ways still stand for nomadism, freedom,
and being close to “the spirit of nature” – regardless of whether the yurt in
question is a metal structure in the urban center of Bishkek used as a national symbol of the Kyrgyz Republic, a yurt bought from an “authentic”
Kyrgyz yurt maker in a remote mountain village and now used as a place
for esoteric or felt-making workshops on the outskirts of a city in Europe,
or a concrete yurt set up in a state park in Iowa.
Because the yurt is so strongly connected with nomadism, it is dificult
to establish it as a brand due to this more general association: the typical
Western consumer of a yurt does not make much distinction between a
Mongolian, Kazakh, Siberian, or Kyrgyz yurt. Even the buyers debating
over every detail with the Kyrgyz yurt makers are often more interested in
the nomadic aura and in the experience of buying a yurt from its producer,
rather than in the fact that they are purchasing something speciically from
Kyrgyzstan.
SUMMARY
Even though the yurt almost completely lost its relevance as a home for
most of the Kyrgyz people during the twentieth century, it is still a central part
of today’s nation-branding in the Kyrgyz Republic. The article outlines how
the yurt and the life of yurt makers changed with the decline of nomadism as
an everyday way of life during the Soviet Union and the increasing interest
in yurts as symbols in a national as well as a transnational representation
(and often romanticization) of Central Asian nomadism.
Резюме
Хотя в течение XX в. юрта практически потеряла свое значение дома
для большинства киргизов, она остается важнейшим элементом национального брендинга в современной Республике Киргизстан. В статье
показывается, что сама юрта и жизнь ее производителей изменились
427
Melanie Krebs, From a Real Home to a Nation’s Brand
с упадком номадизма как образа жизни в советской Киргизии. Автора
также интересует возникновение постсоветского интереса к юрте как
символу, использующемуся в национальной и транснациональной
репрезентации, а также тенденция к романтизации юрты и центральноазиатского номадизма в целом.
428
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Piers VITEBSKY
WILD TUNGUS AND THE SPIRITS OF PLACES*
Wild peoples of the Far North
The nomadic Tungus peoples of Siberia are best known to Russians from
a famous poem by Alexander Pushkin:
My reputation will spread through all of great Russia,
And every living being will cite me in their own tongue,
The proud descendant of the Slav, and the Finn, and the still wild
Tungus, and the steppe-loving Kalmyk.1
Pushkin was echoing a poem written in Latin 2,000 years earlier by
Horace, court poet to the irst Roman emperor Augustus, who consolidated
the modern idea of empire as control over a far-lung territory of diverse
peoples who feed consumption at the center in exchange for civilization,
their own lives bent to an alien agenda that they barely comprehend.
The ecology, politics, and spirituality since the 1980s of the community discussed in
this article are described in detail in Piers Vitebsky. The Reindeer People: Living with
Animals and Spirits in Siberia. London and Boston, 2005. That book also lists my many
debts over two decades of research. The present article is greatly indebted to recent discussions with Anastasia Piliavsky. I am grateful to the University of Tromsø for funding
my presentation of an earlier version at a conference of the International Arctic Social
Sciences Association in Akureyri, Iceland.
1
Слух обо мне пройдет по всей Руси великой,
И назовет меня всяк сущий в ней язык,
И гордый внук славян, и финн, и ныне дикий
Тунгус, и друг степей калмык.
My translation.
*
429
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
The triumphalism of Pushkin’s poem refers not merely to routine imperialism but also to the supposed universalism of Great Art. The Tungus, like
the now-forgotten Italian tribes mentioned by Horace, serve as archetype for
the one who is outside both these aspects of the totalizing project, but who
must be drawn in and transformed into a participant. The Soviet phase of
the Russian empire has made Pushkin’s prediction come true: the Tungus
do indeed recite him, if not always in their own language, then certainly
in Russian.
Who are the Tungus? The naming and counting of the indigenous peoples
of Siberia and the Russian North has a complicated history. Such peoples
currently number some 200,000 and fall under some thirty to forty ethnic
labels. The term “Tungus” is currently used to cover several peoples who
speak closely related languages of the Tungus-Manchu family. The Tungus
peoples are spread extremely thinly in the least populated area of a vast
region from central Siberia to the Paciic coast and from the border areas
of China to the Arctic Ocean coast. The largest group are the Evenki, who
probably number over 30,000, and the Even, who number around 20,000.
My ieldwork was conducted among Even, but I am obliged to call them by
the Russian plural Eveny, to avoid impossible grammatical constructions
in English, such as “Even men ride reindeer.” My Eveny friends live in the
Verkhoyansk mountain range, which happens to be the region of Siberia
that claims the coldest winter temperatures of all. Without actually living
there, it is dificult to imagine the vastness and emptiness of this huge, jagged landscape. My base village of Sebyan-Kyuyel’ contains 800 people,
of whom around 90 work out on the land as reindeer herders, while all the
others remain in the village and work (or not) in services or as backup to
the herders. The surrounding area, which is used by the herders and their
animals, amounts to 1 million hectares, or around 2,500,000 acres.
To the Russian mind, the Tungus were “wild” for many reasons. They
had Asiatic faces, spoke a strange language, and were unbaptized. Their
name resonates with a greater glamour and mystique than the names of
other northern peoples, not least because they gave us the word “shaman,”
meaning a spirit medium whose soul lies around the cosmos during a very
wild-seeming trance. And what was later to become most problematic for
the Soviet regime, they were nomadic.
Until the Russian expansion into Siberia in the seventeenth century, all the
indigenous northern peoples were hunters, their lives adjusted to the migratory movement of animals. Their shamans would make soul-ights around
the landscape to scout for animals, or turn temporarily into those animals in
430
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
order to understand their psychology and migratory intentions. Hunting is
about arranging an encounter or ambush, a cross-cutting of two independent
trajectories. But the Tungus peoples had also domesticated reindeer some
2,000–3,000 years ago in order to ride on their backs and hunt wild reindeer.
With domestication, humans and animals started to move side by side. The
impact of Russian colonial expansion from the seventeenth century led to a
rapid growth in the size of herds,2 as the escalating demand for meat changed
domestic reindeer from just a means of transport to the foundation of a system
of ranching that would eventually grow into the large-scale reindeer herding
of today, in which a state farm or its privatized successor organization3 might
have several domestic herds of around 2,000 animals each. The economy has
grown from a subsistence base to a meat industry obsessed with “productivity.” I shall argue that this change has also led to a shift in the nature of
“wildness” among the Tungus, as well as in the locus of that wildness, which
is now differentially distributed between men and women, and between the
forest and the village newly established by the Soviet regime.
The image of wildness is often fed by imagining the movement of nomads
as random, irrational, chaotic, and directionless. This is how the term is often
used in popular speech as an equivalent of vagrant or stray. But true nomads
follow a highly structured movement related to the cycle of the seasons.
The Verkhoyansk mountains rise to 6,000 feet (2,000 meters) and run for
several hundred miles north toward the Arctic Ocean. The ground is under
snow for six months and the reindeer subsist mainly on lichens, a special
kind of plant that does not die back in winter and that they excavate from
under the snow and ice by digging with their hooves. But from May onward,
the northward and uphill retreat of the melting snow reveals a succession of
resprouting green plants such as grasses and willows. An irrepressible urge
to migrate builds up in the animals and they start to move up the valleys
toward the highest mountain meadows. In August, after a brief summer,
they begin to move downstream toward their winter pastures in the deepest
valleys. Green plants disappear successively through the autumn and the
animals increasingly revert to their diet of lichen.
Such annual cycles, which can cover a thousand miles or more, were
already talking place many millennia ago when all reindeer were wild. HuIgor Krupnik. Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders. Hanover,
NH, 1993. Ch. 5.
3
Anna Sirina. Rodovye obshchiny malochislennykh narodov Severa v Respublike Sakha
(Iakutiia): shag k samoopredeleniiu? [Studies in Applied and Urgent Ethnology, No.
126]. Moscow, 1999.
2
431
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
man involvement in progressive stages of domestication has not signiicantly
altered this pattern. Rather, generations of indigenous skill, veterinary science and bureaucracy have introduced many nuances of animal and pasture
management. Herders guide their animals toward a balanced diet and the
avoidance of overgrazing and harrassment by biting insects, while also selecting good sites for their own camping and ishing. But out on the landscape,
away from the controlling fantasies of the administration of the state farm,
the herders understand well that the control between themselves and their
animals is mutual, and the question of who leads whom remains ambiguous.
Figs. 1 and 2. Loading saddlebags onto reindeer before a migration. Photo by the author.
Reindeer tend to drift forward constantly on their migration, while humans pitch their tents and move them forward every few days to keep up.
Just as the pasture gets grazed and trampled, so the camp site gets “tired”
and dirty. After a few days the herders become restless. Instead of the calm
mood of cooperation, tempers rise. They consider how far their animals have
drifted, and decide to move on themselves. On arrival at the next site, there
is a noticeable feeling of relief and relaxation. Tents are pitched, sometimes
over their still-visible imprint from the same moment the previous year, and
inside each tent a ire is lit. Before people eat, they feed the spirit of the ire
with an offering of food and vodka (if available), and mutter a prayer: “Draw
back your feet and let us stay here” or “Give us good dreams.”
432
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Every item is unpacked and placed in its usual position inside the tent.
With the tent lap closed, you would not know where you are. Yet outside the
tent each site is utterly different, both in the coniguration of the landscape
and also in its role in the annual cycle. Almost immediately, the tension
starts to rise and the urge builds up to move on. At different seasons and on
different pastures one may stay for a shorter or longer time, but the pattern
is the same. It is not so much that the old site rejects you or pushes you out,
but more that the next site draws you forward. The herders explain this by
a metaphor of “magnetism” and by the Russian word tyanet: “it pulls us.”
This is not the way sedentary people often imagine mobile people to be,
a notion in which transience is negative in principle, as in the widespread
Eurasian fantasy of the cursed gypsy pushed ever forward. Rather, humans
and reindeer alike are pulled by the same force. Reindeer behavior provides
the foundation of Eveny cosmology and of daily experience. The humans
experience this animal instinct and extrapolate it into the foundation of
their own culture. If there is indeed something “wild” about the Tungus, it
is perhaps in their sharing of this animality – an empathy that has persisted
from the true wildness of prehistoric herds through all forms of modern
management. In this symbiotic ecology of mood, humans and animals share
the same tension, the same urge to move, the same magnetism of the next
grazing area and camp site, and the same relief on arriving.
433
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
Reindeer movement is unidirectional: they never go back the way they
have come. Humans, too, should keep moving forward. There are many
manifestations of this idea. Herders talk lyrically about the beauty of each
site, wondering aloud whether they will live another year to see this place
again. Yet when the moment of migration arrives, they set out with never a
backward glance, behavior so different from my own instinct to keep looking back for a last lingering glimpse. It was some time before I worked out
that turning back is felt to be perverse and dangerous, because the backward
glance subverts the forward movement. You should never look back in any
situation where it is essential to move forward. It is only after death that
you become pinned down on the landscape, when you are buried at your
favorite spot in the annual cycle (though you will continue to nomadize in
the next world). Those passing by your grave must leave an offering such as
a coin or cigarette and walk away looking only forward, lest you interpret
a backward glance as a sign of attachment and draw the visitor after you
into the realm of the dead.
Nomadic religiosity
In a sedentary culture, this ine balance between attachment and separation might remain a confusing ambiguity. In the nomadic experience it is
separated out into an alternation between contrasting moments of tension
and relief, anticipation and fulillment. In detaching yourself from one camp
site and reattaching yourself to the next one, you are renewing a relationship that has been in abeyance since the same time last year. A destination
is never inal, and the destinationality of each place is also transient: in the
perpetual cycle of migration, there is no inal resting point and no closure.
Each site is dormant until woken up in its turn by a brief burst of human
engagement and settlement in response to the place’s latent magnetism.
Eveny religion seems based on the idea of spirits located in places. For
years I asked about the identities and personalities of the landscape’s many
spirits, but got few answers. I have now come to understand that the identity of each spirit is largely derived from the character of the place itself.
Indeed, most spirits have no other name, except the name of their place.
The character of spirits is brought into focus, indeed the spirits are made
manifest, one after the other as you migrate through a succession of sites.
The spirit of a place merges with the spirit of the ire that one lights there.
The act of pitching a tent draws these spiritual forces into a partnership to
create a place that is habitable for humans.
434
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Fig. 3. A herder surveys the landscape and plans tomorrow’s migration. The mountainsides are bare, while a larch forest rises out of the valley below. Photo by the author.
435
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
This contrasts strikingly with the religions of sedentary cultures, where
the most sacred part of a church or temple is generally experienced as the
inal destination of a journey, and the sense of sacredness becomes more
intense as the worshipper moves closer to this focal point. But for the Eveny,
the entire landscape is like a huge open-air temple in which there is no inal
destination, no one camp site that is more spiritually charged than the others.
The herders progress around a succession of places that never comes to an
end. The sacredness of each place is equally intense, but the herders engage
with it for only a few days, until they are forced by their animals’ onward
migration to move on to the next place. Then the old place lies unvisited, not
enlivened by human presence, as if asleep. Even the predictive dreams that
are so important to the Eveny (perhaps especially since the Soviet regime’s
elimination of their shamans) seem to be tied to this cyclical pattern. Momentous dreams are often said to be fulilled “exactly a year later.” This is
the moment when a nomad returns to the place where the dream occurred.
It is as if the place is a portal that is at its most open at the same time each
year, and the dream is a kind of pre-echo foreshadowing the event that may
become fulilled when one returns to the same site.
Joining the empire
What can it mean for a person formed by this way of life to join the imperium and learn to recite Pushkin? The Russians came to native territories of
Siberia in the sixteenth century for furs; in the twentieth century they stayed
for minerals and national security,4 culminating from the 1960s onward in the
oil and gas boom that now provides the mainstay of the Russian economy.5
The early Soviet regime also took on responsibility to administer and
civilize the remotest territories and peoples in their realm. They had no
doubt about the essence of the wildness of the Tungus and other northern
peoples: nomadism. For bureaucrats, nomadism was bad in terms of governance because nomads were hard to control; for thinkers, it was bad in
terms of social evolution because it was primitive and backward. Just as
the indigenous peoples had domesticated their reindeer thousands of years
earlier, now they would have to be domesticated by missionaries of socialism. It is perhaps no accident that uncovering the undocumented prehistoric
process of reindeer domestication became a major preoccupation for Soviet
Pier Horensma. The Soviet Arctic. London and New York, 1999.
Florian Stammler and Emma Wilson. Dialogue for Development: an Exploration of
Relations Between Oil and Gas Companies, Communities, and the State // Sibirica:
Journal of Siberian Studies. 2006. Vol. 5. No. 2. Pp. 1-42.
4
5
436
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
anthropologists and historians6 at the same time that the regime was devising
policies for taming the natives themselves.
The Soviet empire was unusual in that it brought literacy and literature to
everyone, with the high ideal of making them kul’turnyi (cultured, civilized),
at some periods through Russiication, and at others by devising alphabets
and publishing local literature in indigenous languages. This is the most
successful legacy of the Soviet presence, and through their avid reading of
poetry, science, and philosophy, Soviet reindeer herders became surely more
kul’turnye than people in an equivalent occupational position anywhere else
in the world. When my Eveny friends excuse any outrageous behavior by
saying “I’m a wild Tungus,” they are making a sophisticated, learned joke.
But the master-policy for civilizing the nomads was sedentarization
(osedlost’). Just as the mind imbued with ideals of governance sees nomads
as ungoverned, so from the perspective of a culture based on peasant agriculture they are seen to suffer from an ecological lack: no ields, no crops,
no villages. Even when their mobility is acknowledged, as in modern ecological studies, this is still seen negatively as a response to environmental
constraints, as if indigenous cultures in the Arctic are fully determined by
cold (or desert cultures by drought). Certainly, there is a need to migrate,
but if one frees oneself from a prejudice in favor of settled agriculture, one
can equally see this as taking advantage of the opportunities or affordances
of the environment, and existentially as a way of life (obraz zhizni). Why
would one do anything different? In the historical experience of the Eveny,
sedentarization is the strange way of life requiring a dificult adjustment,
and it is still exacting a complicated price.
Like many other villages built throughout the indigenous North, the main
village in my study was founded in the late 1920s to sedentarize the people
of this vast area, though it did not succeed in drawing most of them from
their nomadic tents into log cabins until the 1960s. The village changed the
perception and experience of space by its very lack of movement. When out
on the landscape, one might still think of traveling as the old people traveled,
cyclically with the herd, and beyond that even further aield for hunting or
for visits, indeinitely in every direction as over a web. But now the village
commands the surrounding landscape, and space radiates out from the vilG. M. Vasil’evich, M. G. Levin. Tipy olenevodstva i ikh proiskhozhdeniia // Sovetskaia
etnograiia. 1951. No. 1. Pp. 63-87; V. N. Skalon. Olennye kamni Mongolii i problema
proiskhozhdeniia olenevodstva // Sovetskaia arkheologiia. 1956. No. 25. Pp. 87-105;
S. I. Vainshtein. Problema proiskhozhdeniia olenevodstva v Evrazii. Part I // Sovetskaia
etnograiia. 1970. No. 6. Pp. 3-14; Part II. Sovetskaia etnograiia. 1971. No. 5. Pp. 37-52.
6
437
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
Fig. 4. Sedentarisation: the village from the air. Photo by the author.
lage in concentric circles of decreasing signiicance. Every herding family
has a house in the village that they use as a base lying completely outside
their nomadic cycle. Herding camps are no longer just a place in relation to
other places: some are more “remote” than others because they are further
from the village. The village in turn is itself seen as lying at the outer edge
of a far grander concentric space with its center in Moscow. Villages were
located for ease of access to the outside world rather than to the reindeer
pasture,7 and were designated as “points of population” (naselennye punkty),
as if no population could exist without them or beyond them, and “points of
supply” (punkty obespecheniia), as though supplies could come only from
outside, thus belying the actual productivity of the land and the low of meat
to towns of Russian settlers.
Though there are many reasons why my friends may sometimes idealize
a former way of life, it was a fundamental principle that earlier nomadic life
required a full family, with men and women carrying out complementary tasks
and training the next generation of children.8 Family relations were founded
on what people call “taigá values” based on taciturnity and discretion, in
A policy justiied in B. Lashov. Nekotorye voprosy razvitiia natsional’nykh raionov
krainego severa. Yakutsk, 1973.
8
A. A. Alekseev. Zabytyi mir predkov. Yakutsk, 1993.
7
438
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
which one would sense the feelings and needs of others through an extreme
sensitivity and a congruence of moods among human companions, animals,
and landscape. In the long silences of life in the taiga, the herders can be
so alert to each others’ unspoken moods that it seems almost like telepathy.
Fig. 5. When the family migrated together, 1940s. By an unknown photographer.
Soviet reform was impatient with such values. Communist missionaries
started to “civilize” the native peoples and rescue them from backwardness (otstalost’), not only by building them permanent wooden villages
but also by providing basic schooling and medical facilities, introducing
state bureaucracy, and teaching them Communist values.9 From the 1920s,
young Siberian native adults were selected and sent to a special college in
Leningrad called the Herzen Institute, where they were trained to occupy
administrative or Party positions back home; by the 1960s, all young children were being taken into boarding schools from the age of seven. The
approach was well-meaning and brutal at the same time: the regime gave
prizes to housewives for the cleanest tent while it also imprisoned or killed
the shamans who linked the Tungus to the powers and spirits of the land.
A process brilliantly, sometimes satirically, described in Yuri Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors:
Russia and the Small Peoples of the North. Ithaca and London, 1994.
9
439
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
Despite the inroads of the fur trade since the seventeenth century, the
previous economy had still operated largely at a subsistence level and was
not very “productive.” The regime collectivized everyone’s reindeer and
organized both people and animals into collective farms (kolkhozy, changed
in the 1960s across the North to state farms, sovkhozy), imposing a model
designed for peasant areas of western Russia with little modiication onto
hunting and herding communities with quite different economies, cultures,
and landscapes. Since the herds of reindeer were generally far from the new
villages, reindeer herders were restructured on the model of Russian miners
and other industrial workers who were similarly far from their residential
base. Experimental models imitating industrial shift work (vakhtovyi metod
or smennyi vypas) were tested in the northwestern areas of the Soviet North
and then extended to the rest of the country.10 In effect, reindeer herding
was industrialized, and its emphasis changed from subsistence to ranching, as the landscape became a giant open-air meat factory. This newfound
productivity of meat was linked to the consumption needs of the growing
settlements of Russian miners across the North, a process that was greatly
accelerated with the development of hydrocarbon extraction and the advent
of helicopters in the 1960s. So in much of the North a dual pattern arose,
separating participation in the indigenous people’s animal economy from
that in the white man’s mineral economy (even though mining settlements
often provided the main market for the herders’ meat).
Within the indigenous community, the long-term effect of sedentarization has turned out to be catastrophic in an unexpected way. Those white
workers will return to western Russia or Ukraine with a pile of money, but
for the native herders there is nowhere else to go – this is their home. The
original Bolshevik missionaries already identiied women as the proletariat
among the northern peoples,11 and women have remained the locus of attempts to domesticate the wild Tungus to this day. Women were brought
into the village to work as teachers, bookkeepers, and dinner ladies. The
children, too, were taken off the land. In some villages they were taught in
a village school, in others they were sent to harsh, distant boarding schools
G. S. Anufriev. Smenno-zven’evoi vypas v olenevodstve // Nenetskii Avtonomnyi
Okrug: Entsiklopedicheskii Slovar’. Moscow, 2001. Pp. 242-243; F. P. Filippov et al.
Smenno-zven’evaia forma organizatsii truda v olenevodstve nenetskogo natsional’nogo
okruga: povyshenie produktivnovsti olenevodstva. Moscow, 1976. Also G. A. Dvizda et
al. Biography, shift-labour and socialization in the northern industrial city – the Far North:
particularities of labour and human socialization, 2010. Web publication in English and
Russian; full pdf available for download on http://www.arcticcentre.org/?deptid=23618/.
11
Slezkine. Arctic Mirrors.
10
440
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
and not allowed to speak their own language. Almost the only people left
tending the reindeer out on the land were men. The village has become a
predominantly female space while the landscape has been masculinized and
brought closer to the environment of migrant industrial workers. The process
has been so successful that young women regard herders with disdain, and
refuse to live with them under what they perceive as dirty, primitive, and
cold conditions.12 If there are any wild Tungus, from the women’s point of
view these are the herders in their distant reindeer camps.
When I irst arrived here in the late 1980s, herders were still quite well
paid. But they were already suffering from the separation from their women
and children back in the village. With the economic crash of the 1990s, herders were sometimes not paid for years on end, and there was little remaining
incentive to endure an enforced bachelorhood. The rate of fatal ights and
suicides has rocketed, especially among young men and especially when
they visit the village and have access to vodka. I witnessed a sudden moment of possible opportunity (externally introduced by perestroika) for the
community to reorganize their lives from 1988 into the early 1990s, and the
subsequent failure of this. It now appears, both to them and to me, that this
period was not a great celebratory transition at all, but a bruised aftershock
from three generations of enforced rupture, and a conirmation that as postnomads their agency would remain extremely limited.
Eveny discourse today is not simply about a lack of recent change, but
about a failure to change now that this is needed.13 As for many other groups
in Russia, the impulse of perestroika petered out in disappointment. During
the 1990s there was a plunge from initial hope to great economic deprivation,
with widespread disappearance of wages, social welfare, and helicopters
or biplanes. On this landscape with no cash and no roads, many people no
longer expected to go anywhere, ever, for the rest of their lives. Reindeer
herders became even more isolated in their bachelorhood; the boarding
schools had already produced two generations who were mostly ignorant of
how to herd reindeer or parent their own children since they had not been
parented themselves; and a terrible catalogue of young people’s drunken
accidents, murders, and suicides escalated. The general revival of Russia’s
12
Piers Vitebsky. From Materfamilias to Dinner-lady: The Administrative Destruction
of the Reindeer Herder’s Family Life // Anthropology of East Europe Review. 2010.
Vol. 28. Pp. 38-50.
13
Piers Vitebsky. Repeated Returns and Special Friends: From Mythic Encounter to
Shared History // Signe Howell and Aud Talle (Eds.). Returns to the Field: Multitemporal
Research and Contemporary Anthropology. Bloomington, 2012. Pp. 180-202.
441
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
economy in the 2000s, riding on the back of high world energy prices, has
brought little comfort to the broken families of these communities.
The discourse of failure to change for the better developed an undertone
of a change for the worse: morality was declining, young people had no
fear stealing offerings from graves. During the 1990s I was often told that
minority peoples like the Eveny were heading for extinction, as “endangered
species.” Those informants were people of my own generation, half-nomadic
people who had been persuaded or forced to believe in the Soviet project
and were now in a state of confusion and anger.
I readily bought into this rhetoric at the time,14 but my view has been
challenged by a recent study in a neighboring Eveny community that suggests possible grounds for more hope. In the irst detailed study of the attitudes of children in a Siberian reindeer-herding community, made in the
2000s, Olga Ulturgasheva studied children’s visions of their own future in
Topolinoe, the village where she herself grew up.15
This study reveals a signiicant difference between children who spend the
irst years of their life in reindeer camps in the forest, and those who grow
up in the village, never having known the forest. Ulturgasheva argues that
each of these two interrelated but distinct cosmological and social spaces is
associated with the formation of a different kind of person and the anticipation of a different life trajectory. Though all children end up in the village for
schooling by the time they reach seven, those who have irst been brought
up in the forest are formed with a particular construct of time and space that
is grounded in forest practices of sharing. The child’s developing person
is likened to that of a growing reindeer calf, at the same time that the child
develops a strong sense of their own agency through taking part in useful
tasks and constantly being called upon to exercise judgment while moving
around the landscape. The personhood of children who have spent all their
lives in the village, by contrast, more directly relects the community’s
current despair, alcoholism, and post-Soviet collapse of infrastructure and
social welfare. These contrasting social worlds translate into contrasting
narratives of the child’s supposed adult destiny as they imagine their own
projected future. All children imagine going to the city of Yakutsk or even
beyond for education or to make their fortune, and all aspire to avoid the
Piers Vitebsky. Withdrawing from the Land: Social and Spiritual Crisis in the Indigenous
Russian Arctic // Chris M. Hann (Ed.). Postsocialism: Ideals, Ideologies and Practices
in Eurasia. New York and London, 2002. Pp. 180-195.
15
Olga Ulturgasheva. Circles of Absence and Return: Ideas of the Future Among Young
Eveny in Northeast Siberia. Oxford and New York, 2012.
14
442
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Fig. 6. Children in a summer tent. The tent is dismantled and moved on every few days.
Photo by the author.
443
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
alcoholism, poverty, and broken families of their parents. But the forestreared child imagines bringing the fruits of city education back to the forest
to improve herding life, while the village-reared child imagines escaping to
settle in the city for ever.
It is too early to know how far these “future autobiographies” will be
fulilled, and whether they represent a genuine new sense of agency or a
hopeless fantasy whose failure will further fuel the alienation and depression
among the young. But I think we can see the ways in which they reconigure
nomadic senses of space and time, in which old patterns can be played out
or transformed in new contexts, through new trajectories that partly perpetuate old ones and partly override them. All these children’s visions are
framed within the post-nomadic, sedentary model of concentric space, but
this space is now conceived on the larger scale of the nation or imperium.
Soviet civilization made the forest peripheral to the village; now the village
too is peripheral to the regional capital. Just as sedentarization into villages
broke up the pattern of total nomadism, so now the city is starting to break
up the semi-nomadism of the village, even if people hardly ever go there.
Nomadic time, too, is changed. The children have repositioned their own life
experience within this new space, as their time scale is extended to match
a new notion of biography. The repetitive annual cycle of migration and
dream prediction has been largely superseded – even for the forest-reared
children – by a lifespan model structured in terms of successive stages of
education, romantic marriage, and business success.
Diversifying wildness
There is not yet a total abandonment of nomadic consciousness, but
rather its fragmentation or evolution into more diverse forms of identity,
only some of these closely linked to subsistence or nomadism. In principle,
as with reindeer migration, there is no going back, but these people will no
longer keep returning to the same point. Some remain more or less nomadic,
though with a modernized consciousness, most remain in the village in
an uncomfortable limbo as they fantasize about leaving, and a very small
number move out. Among adults, the highest level of agency and fulillment
seems to be among those who combine subsistence patterns on the land with
other economic activities that link them to the wider world in ways that are
not humiliating or demeaning, such as small business enterprises selling
reindeer antlers or smoked ish. They also diversify the family economy
and spread risk by placing close relatives in white-collar positions such as
teachers or administrators. In some other regions, where reindeer herders
444
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
are badly impacted by oil, gas, and other industrial development, they also
seek positions or develop contacts inside the industrial company.
Russianized education has brought a new aesthetics, in which static,
synoptic paintings or photos of “landscape” (peyzazh) on the wall of the
village house replace the sense of forward movement and the frequent
change of scene outside the tent lap. These pictures depict something called
“nature” (priroda), which along with the “environment” (okruzhaiushaia
sreda) can also serve the dissident agendas of social and cultural activists.
These terminologies, some of them calqued into Russian from western
languages, have no Eveny equivalent. This kind of discourse has its roots
in the early years of perestroika, for example, with the founding of nongovernmental organizations such as the Association of Northern Indigenous
Peoples (now RAIPON) or the Unquiet North (Trevozhny Sever), both of
whose inaugural meetings I attended in the late 1980s. This was a radical
and innovative discourse even among Russians, and its rapid co-opting by
indigenous peoples is the latest phase of their encounter with empire, a sign
that their education has integrated them to the point where they can become
well-informed critics from within.
Pushkin speaks from a sedentary center of empire about Art and Civilization, grand objects of reverence that are separate from the daily life
of ordinary people and always at risk of being eclipsed by the banality of
circumstances. His Tungus have no voice of their own, since their role is
to suffer from a lack of both these noble qualities and to revere what is offered them by the imperium. But in fact there are local Pushkins among the
Tungus themselves. They do not sing of imperial command or an abstract
domain of Art, but of negotiated social relationships among equal partners
whose activities are rooted in the landscape:
Today I obtain a wild reindeer,
I shall share it so that there is enough for everyone...
Honor every person,
Consider them your equal,
And between you there will be peace and harmony.
If I deny a guest their share,
That is the worst offense of all.
But if your intimate guest is happy,
Then your domestic reindeer will be healthy...
In an environment where one must engage directly and robustly with the
elements, Tungus poets also sing of mondji, the quality of being self-reliant,
able to survive without help in life-threatening situations, and never giving up:
445
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
He can manage to break strong rope,
Who strives forcefully toward happiness.
When you meet suddenly with unexpected misfortune,
Don’t rush: Think! Observe!
Don’t turn back!
Stand irm...
If you want to be a true man,
Rely only on yourself!
It is very dificult to scramble up the steep slope
To your goal,
Even harder to do good to another.
For happiness is not given to anyone lightly,
It is brittle like the irst ice of autumn,
It comes only to those
Who are true to mondji!
The old Eveny reindeer herder Vasily Pavlovich improvised these songs
while living at the outer edge of the state farm’s territory, 300 miles and
several days’ ride from the village. But it was not enough for them to remain
in his oral repertoire: he also wrote them down in an exercise book, and intended this as the irst step toward a publication with which they would join
Fig. 7. Women feeding salt to reindeer to keep them tame. Ideally this should be done
daily, to discourage them from reverting to a semi-wild state. Photo by the author.
446
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
the canon of indigenous “literature,” that important genre in the Soviet nexus
of “culture” and “friendship of the ethnicities” (druzhba narodov). Vasily
Pavlovich had little schooling, and as the son of an original anti-Bolshevik
“bandit” he was not sent to study at the Herzen Institute. But even so, the
long arm of Pushkin reached his consciousness in the remotest campsite in
one of the remotest communities in the whole of Siberia.
Since Pushkin’s day the concept of wildness has undergone extensive
transformation, as the Eveny have been drawn into the imperial project of
literacy, military service, and productivity statistics. An old-timer like Vasily Pavlovich would not have known that he was wild unless Pushkin told
him: for him the essence of the Tungus character lies in mondji. The spatial
locus of wildness, too, has fragmented, as has its distribution and evaluation
among different kinds of people. For well-groomed village women with the
licker of consumerist imagery on their jabbering TV sets, wildness now
resides among the dirty, telepathic, animal-like men who herd reindeer in
“remote” forests and mountains. Looking at the drunken, suicidal youths
around these women, one might conclude that the Soviet project of civilization has turned inside out so that the village itself now constitutes the
heart of wildness: instead of nomads moving around a trajectory that is administratively and cosmologically justiied, these young men have become
directionless strays.16 The children who will shortly grow into this stage
of life try to preempt this fate by escaping to the city.17 Some do so with
the ideal of eventually returning to the forest, a space that now appears as
pure rather than wild, an alternative space of civilization sustained through
isolation rather than through integration.
SUMMARY
The essay by Piers Vitebsky is based on the author’s ield research on
the Tungus family of peoples in Siberia’s north and, in particular, on the
Eveny. The author introduces the geographic, social, ethnic, and cultural
parameters of the life of the Eveny and attempts to decipher the speciically
nomadic features of their life. Vitebsky ties the origin of Eveny nomadism
to the reindeer-based economy. The cycle of migration and the ecologically
16
Interestingly, there is now an elaborate discourse about how the carefully bred and
well-trained dogs of the past have been replaced by undisciplined, badly hybridized strays.
17
Of course, the city has its own large-scale forms of wildness that the Eveny are not
equipped to survive. Most of those youths who do go to the city do not succeed or even
stay there for long, and quite a few become depressed or die.
447
Piers Vitebsky, Wild Tungus and the Spirits of Places
determined routes of migration of domesticated reindeer shape the life of
the Eveny. The nomadic way of life is best relected in the desire of the
Eveny to move immediately after a temporary camp is established on the
route of their migration. This urge to move is relected in religious beliefs,
which reference a number of spirits by location, while the pluralism of this
animistic belief is linked to the desire to change places. The author then
focuses on the perception of wildness of the Tungus, which was formed as
a result of Russian imperial expansion in Siberia and the encounter of the
normative Russian discourse of the sedentary population with the realities of
nomadic life of the Tungus peoples. He traces the inluence of the discourse
of wildness on Soviet transformative policies of forced modernization and
sedentarization in the north. In the inal part of the essay, the author explores
the reproduction of the nomadic way of life in the new circumstances of the
Eveny in Soviet and post-Soviet life. Even though the policy of sedentarization was largely successful, the nomadic predispostion is relected in Eveny
mobility between the village and the city.
Резюме
Эссе Пирса Витебского “Дикие тунгусы и духи места” основано на
полевом исследовании тунгусской семьи народов, проживающих на
русском Крайнем Севере, и в частности на исследовании жизни эвенков.
Автор пытается идентифицировать черты социального и культурного
уклада эвенков, наиболее ярко отражающие их кочевой способ жизни,
зарождение которого автор связывает с оленеводческой основой экономики данного народа. Экологически обусловленная миграция одомашненных оленей определила кочевой образ жизни эвенков, который сложным образом отразился в их религиозных верованиях. Эти верования
содержат анимистические представления о связи духов с определенной
местностью. Плюрализм анимизма эвенков, таким образом, отражает
стремление к смене места и духа-покровителя. В статье также рассматривается восприятие тунгусов через троп дикости со времен русской
экспансии в Сибири. Автор прослеживает, как имперский дискурс
дикости повлиял на советскую политику ускоренной модернизации и
перехода эвенков к оседлости. В заключительной части эссе Витебский
анализирует способы воспроизводства кочевого образа жизни в новых
для эвенков условиях советской и постсоветской реальности. Хотя переход к оседлому образу жизни был успешно завершен в советский период,
элементы номадизма продолжают характеризовать жизнь эвенков в той
ее части, которая касается оси миграции от деревни к городу.
448
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Ольга БУРЕНИНА-ПЕТРОВА
ЦИРК – КУЛЬТУРА НА КОЛЕСАХ
1.
В “Трактате о номадологии” Жиль Делёз и Феликс Гваттари, задавшись целью отыскать сообщество, противостоящее государственности,
находят таковое в племенах кочевников.1 Государство, принуждающее
человека к оседлости, представляет собой, согласно Делёзу и Гваттари,
главное зло для свободной личности. Чтобы высвободиться от сковывающего порядка государственности, кочевники противопоставляют
ему свое неповиновение, именуемое философами “машиной войны”.
Делёз и Гваттари иллюстрируют различие между “военной машиной”
и механизмом государства с помощью игры в шахматы и игры го.
Шахматные фигуры обладают неизменными свойствами: слон в игре
всегда остается слоном, а конь – конем. Фишки го, напротив, выступая
в качестве анонимного собирательного лица, оказываются элементами
коллективной машины. Характеристика номоса, которую дают Делёз
и Гваттари, очень сходна с сущностью циркового искусства, в пространстве которого не только сам цирк, но и тело артиста принадлежат
негосударственному миру.
С одной стороны, жизнь на колесах, лишенная постоянного фиксированного места проживания, заставляет цирковых артистов неустанно
территориализировать и детерриториализировать чужое пространство.
1
См.: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari. Nomadology: The War Machinе. New York, 1986.
449
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
Будучи по природе кочевниками, циркачи всегда присваивают себе ту
территорию, на которой собираются давать представления. Они словно
раскалывают пространство, проводят границу, по одну сторону которой локализуются сами, а по другую – оставляют территорию полиса.
Культура на колесах – это способ присвоения и обживания цирковым
номосом чужого пространства, превращения его в свой дом, формирования в любом месте собственной семиотической вселенной, т.е. в
широком смысле – трансгрессия пространственных, этнических, национальных, социальных, смысловых границ, осуществляемая за счет
непрерывного движения циркового каравана по горизонтали. При этом
присваиваемым пространством может являться не только земная, но
и водная территория. Известно, что одни из пионеров американского
цирка Джон Робинсон и Док Сполдинг2 открыли в 1852 г. в Цинциннати
плавучий цирк на две тысячи четыреста мест. Внутри цирка, возведенного на гигантской барже, располагался манеж, с двух сторон которого
во всю длину были установлены трибуны для зрителей. Баржу с цирком тянул на буксире колесный пароход “Норт Ривер”, умещавший на
своем борту не только здание цирка, напоминавшее четырехэтажный
деревянный дом, но еще и конюшни, гримерные и разного рода другие
подсобные цирковые помещения.3 Характерно, что пароход, возивший
по Миссисипи и Огайо цирк, был колесным. Таким образом, цирк
Робинсона и Сполдинга, кочуя по водному пространству, продолжал
сохранять символическую связь с одним из важнейших атрибутов
циркового номадизма – колесом.
Повседневная жизнь артистов сливается с цирковой, что и порождает феномен культуры на колесах. Остановки в пути не статичны, так
как подготовка к представлениям или сами представления – это всего
лишь один из инвариантов кочевого образа жизни артистов. Вагончики
и повозки, на которых они передвигаются по свету, превращаются во
время остановок или в период представлений во временные жилища.
Игровое пространство передвижного цирка собирается, складывается
почти на глазах у будущих зрителей, как детский игрушечный домик,
из частей, таких же мобильных, как и он сам. Цирковой шатер – одно
из самых архаичных архитектурных сооружений, родственных юрте,
яранге, типи индейца или палатке бедуина. В нем, как и в этих тентовых
сооружениях, целесообразна каждая деталь. При этом легкая брезенНастоящее имя артиста – Гилберт Р. Сполдинг.
См. об этом факте подробно: Доминик Жандо. История мирового цирка / Пер. с
франц. О. Гринберг. Москва, 1984. С. 44-45.
2
3
450
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
товая ткань цирка, ее проницаемость и уязвимость перед природными
катаклизмами, передают присущее артистам ощущение хрупкости,
бренности всех материальных ценностей, порождаемых цивилизацией.
Подобное чувство возникает также и при взгляде на юрту, ярангу, типи
или шатер бедуина. Колышки, которые вбиваются в землю, для того
чтобы установить цирковой шатер, а также стойки-мачты, на которые
натягивается брезентовый полог, являются знаками-метками присвоения и обживания чужой территории (см. илл. 1). И даже когда цирк уже
разобран, от него остается метафизический след, хранящий память о
проходивших на этом месте представлениях. В фильме Чарли Чаплина
“Цирк” след от уехавшего цирка
настолько отчетлив, что обретает
сходство с магическим кругом.
Этот след оказывается в финале
фильма геометрическим и символическим образом мифологической, иррациональной с точки
зрения современного обыденного сознания Вселенной, мифологическим пространством,
Илл. 1. Александр Родченко. Собирают отмеченным соприсутствием
конструкции цирка Шапито.
божества.
Жизнь на колесах не знает центра и по сути своей является жизнью
в открытом “гладком” пространстве, не расчерченном границами и
дорогами. Ритм этой жизни созвучен мировому ритму Вселенной. И
лишь цирковой шатер или просто открытая цирковая площадка играют
роль внутреннего координационного центра, необходимого артистам
для ориентации в истории и современности, а также для продвижения
к будущему. Во время представления пространство и время сливаются под куполом шатра или в круге площадки, а само представление
превращается в сакральное действо. Однако этот центр никогда не
остается на одном месте, его можно перемещать. Даже стационарные
цирки – это всего лишь временное пристанище постоянно гастролирующих циркачей. “Мы – кочевники и люди неуловимые, нас ловят, но
безуспешно”,4 – заметил в одном из интервью Олег Попов.
В фильме Феллини “Дорога” цирковой силач Джампано, бродя по
свету, присваивает себе не только пространство, но и то, что находится
4
См. http://kudryats.journalisti.ru/?p=89.
451
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
в сфере его границ. Так, в поисках партнера для своих выступлений он
покупает у крестьянки дочь Джельсомину, включая ее в цирковую программу и, сверх того, в ритм всей своей бродячей жизни. По сути, здесь
представлен символический акт захвата земледельца в номадический
плен: девушка из крестьянской семьи отныне принадлежит циркачу-номаду. Цирковая жизнь на колесах, показанная в фильме, ощущается не
как перемещение, направленное
из одной точки в другую, а как
бесконечное движение по миру,
лишенное конечного пункта назначения, пронизанное случайностями. Гладкое пространство
бескрайних ландшафтов изоморфно в фильме безграничным
степям номадического мира.
Как и номады, Джампано черпает в степи витальные силы,
он оставляет в ней свои следы, Илл. 2. Кадр из фильма Феллини “Дорога”.
а при встрече с такими же, как он, бродячими артистами, ведет себя,
как настоящий степной обитатель. Последним, вероятно, может быть
объяснимо совершаемое им убийство циркача Матто. Примечательно,
что и в рассказе Владимира Набокова “Весна в Фиальте” цирковой
фургон, проходящей лейтмотивом, в финале оказывается причиной
гибели автомобиля, т.е. объекта цивилизации. Героиня рассказа Нина
гибнет в автокатастрофе. Ее автомобиль “потерпел за Фиальтой крушение, влетев на полном ходу в фургон бродячего цирка”. Уже в первых
фрагментах рассказа “объявление заезжего цирка, с углом, слизанным
со стены” является герою в виде символического знамения и проходит
лейтмотивом как знак судьбы через все произведение.5
“Дорога” Феллини – это не путь, а трасса в делёзовском смысле,
поэтому с нее невозможно свернуть. Понятно, почему, покинув ДжамВладимир Набоков. Рассказы. Приглашение на казнь. Роман. Эссе, интервью, рецензии. Москва, 1989. С. 73, 91. О мотиве цирка в творчестве Набокова на примере
интертекстульного диалога Андрея Синявского с Набоковым см., напр., подраздел
“А. Синявский-Терц (‘В цирке’): смерть как фокус” в статье: В. Десятов. Русский
постмодернизм: полвека с Набоковым // Империя N. Набоков и наследники / Под
ред. Ю. Левина, Е. Сошкина. Сборник статей. Москва, 2006. С. 210-256. О лейтмотиве цирка в рассказе Набокова “Весна в Фиальте” см. подробно: С. Седерович,
Е. Шварц. Сок трех апельсинов. Набоков и петербургский театральный авангард //
Там же. С. 306-309.
5
452
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
пано, а вместе с ним и цирковую жизнь, девушка в конце концов умирает. В одной из сцен Джампано играет на трубе, напоминая один из
иконографических образов возвещающего о Страшном суде архангела
Михаила. Михаил был змееборцем – змея изображена на левой руке
Джампано. На правой его руке – татуировка со скрещенными шпагами, своего рода аллюзия на копье архангела Михаила. Образ клоуна
с трубой завершает и фильм Феллини
“Клоуны”: артист играет на трубе, призывая душу умершего товарища – клоуна Фру-Фру. Иными словами, циркач,
как и кочевник, не должен и не может
никуда бежать. Интересно, что группа
“Белый орел”, транспонировавшая в
клип “Моя любовь, воздушный шар”
многие цирковые картины Пабло Пикассо (“Девочка на шаре”, “Арлекин”,
“Арлекин в кабачке ‘Проворный кролик’”, “Комедианты”, “Семья акробатов с обезьяной” и др.), разворачивает
Илл. 3. Кадр из фильма Феллини сюжеты этих картин таким образом,
“Дорога”.
что повесть о жизни бродячих артистов
осмысляется как общечеловеческая история. Музыкант в образе старого
гитариста – сам художник, внедрившийся в экранизацию своих картин,
которые, складываясь, собираясь в сюжет, оказываются трансисторичными по своей сути, так как репрезентируемые в них принципы бытия
показаны действительными и актуальными для любых времен (илл. 4).
Эрнст Блох, считавший принцип утопии конституирующим принципом человеческой социальности, в работе “Принцип надежды” увидел
в цирке то место, где человек освобождается от ощущения неполноты
мира и максимально приближается к реализации духа утопии. По Блоху,
“еще-не-бытие” (noch-nicht-sein) никогда не сможет трансформироваться
в “бытие” (sein). Зазор, образуемый между ними, – это территория надежды, характеризуемая в философских построениях Блоха как несуществующее место, утопия и одновременно как Родина, т.е. место, связанное
с детскими мечтами и воспоминаниями. Таким местом, в представлении
Блоха, является цирк, поскольку именно он являет собой пример искусства, лишенного амбивалентности кажимости и наделенного свойством
незавершенности реального бытия как приближения к лучшей жизни. Но
именно потому, что цирк это не “отчужденное” от земли пространство,
453
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
а место, которое существует. Он далек от идеального и, следовательно,
деструктивного состояния завершенности. В нем заключен принцип
надежды, пронизывающий, с точки зрения Блоха, всю человеческую
жизнь. Именно этим принципом надежды руководствуется бродящий
по дорогам циркач. Мир цирка –
культура в движении. Следовательно, в нем оказывается
возможным диалог различных
культурных традиций, смешение
разных языков. Не только в труппе современного цирка Чимелонг
вместе работают артисты из
Америки, Африки, России, Казахстана и Китая. И в том, что один
из австралийских цирков назван
“Московский цирк”, нет ничего
парадоксального: каждый современный цирк – многонационален
Илл. 4. Пикассо. Комедианты.
и полифоничен.
В процессе незавершенного движения цирк реализует утопический
сверхпроект, в основе которого – стремление к преобразованию мира.
Подобно номадам, он срастается не только с пространством, но и с
атрибутами всего своего циркового мира. Не случайно циркач без грима
и костюма выглядит почти трагично.
С другой стороны, цирковой номадизм предполагает принципиальную пластичность и изменчивость субъекта и его ролевых функций:
циркач воспринимается в культуре не только как артист, но и как образ
живой, вечно трансформирующейся, перекодирующейся структуры,
знак потенциального кода, обеспечивающего постоянные метаморфозы
человека и окружающего его мира. Павел Флоренский в письме, отправленном в 1930-е годы из дальневосточной ссылки, посвятил цирку
небольшой, но весьма примечательный пассаж:
Дорогая Тика, в этом письме хочу рассказать тебе об особом
цирке, который устраивают в Швеции. Цирк этот называется
“Человек-Цирк”. Он устраивается в сравнительно небольшом
здании, примерно на 80 человек зрителей. Здание оборудовано
как настоящий цирк: места для зрителей, ложи, место для оркестра, арена и даже губернаторская ложа. У входа в цирк – касса.
Входишь, садишься на свое место. Над углублением, где оркестр,
454
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
виднеются верхушки инструментов – трубы и пр. Звонок. Начинается музыка. Верхушки инструментов колышутся, временами
мелькает палочка дирижера. Но играет – только одна труба: в
оркестре только один человек, он – музыкант, он же клоун, он же
наездник, он же фокусник, он же – и директор цирка. По окончании
музыки выбегает на арену небольшая лошадка с всадником. Лошадь эта – из папье-маше, через брюхо и спину ее просовывается
наездник, ноги его прикрываются попоной. Он бегает по арене со
своею лошадью и проделывает всевозможные упражнения. Затем
лошадь убегает с арены и почти немедленно выходит клоун – тот
же человек, но в другой одежде. Он показывает разные клоунские
проделки. Затем выходит фокусник и т. д. Так проводится вся программа единственным действующим лицом, которое непрестанно
меняет одежду, вероятно, парик и вообще свой вид. По завершении
представления в губернаторской ложе появляется “губернатор” – в
военной форме, с эполетами. Он аплодирует и бросает на арену
букет цветов. Губернатор этот – все то же Действующее лицо всего
представления, и букет цветов – его последний выход.6
В приведенном выше пассаже Флоренского хорошо показано, как артист, не обладая закрепленным амплуа, выступает в роли собирательного
лица: музыкант становится клоуном, затем наездником, фокусником,
директором цирка, лошадью и, наконец, губернатором. В этом смысле
цирковой артист подобен фишкам игры го, поскольку всегда готов на
ситуативность и импровизацию. Циркач существует до тех пор, пока находится в движении, осуществляемом не только синтагматически вместе
с передвигающимся во внешнем мире цирком, но и парадигматически,
т.е. на открытой цирковой площадке или на манеже под куполом цирка.
Во время представления артист может менять маски/образы тела, при
этом не обязательно обращаясь к гриму, реквизиту и костюмам. Так, в
репризе “Калейдоскоп” Леонид Енгибаров, лишенный цирковых атрибутов, по ходу действия демонстрировал мгновенные превращения в
гитариста, в хоккейного вратаря, в нападающего и, наконец, в пожилого
человека. Множественность репрезентаций телесности в случае Енгибарова или в пассаже о цирке Флоренского оказывается способом сопротивления иерархии как таковой, противопоставления силе властных
структур, поскольку государство всегда ощущается цирковым артистом
П. Флоренский. Письма с Дальнего Востока и Соловков // П. Флоренский. Сочинения: В 4 т. / Сост. и общая ред. игумена Андроника (А. С. Трубачева), П. В.
Флоренского, М. С. Трубачевой. Москва, 1998. Т. 4. С. 323.
6
455
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
номадически, т.е. как институт духовного и физического подчинения
и подавления и, таким образом, как вселенское зло. Разыгрывая синтетическое представление, циркач дополнительно акцентирует момент
неподчиненности циркового искусства никаким иерархиям, его независимости ни от какой власти, кроме власти художественных образов
(аплодирующий циркачу представитель власти у Флоренского – знак
победы артиста над аппаратом государства.) Цирковой артист сам по
себе обладает способностью быть эквивалентным цирку как таковому
и окружающему его миру, становясь таким образом в оппозицию государственной власти. Подвижное и свободное, преодолевающее свои
собственные пределы, его тело в конце концов также является “машиной
войны”, символически разрушающей узаконенное государственностью
очерчивание сферы человеческих границ.
Этот факт хорошо обыгрывается в романе Юрия Олеши
“Три толстяка”: только благодаря цирковому гимнасту Тибулу и его юной ассистентке
Суок становится возможной
победа над господством триоправительства. В экранизации
романа Алексеем Баталовым
гимнаст Тибул уже в начале
фильма вооружен обручем,
увешанным огнестрельным
оружием. Позже он показан уже Илл. 5. Кадр из фильма Алексея Баталова
“Три толстяка”.
с оружием в руках.
В связи с этим уместно вспомнить приведенный Юрием Боревым
пример разрушающего противостояния цирковых артистов официальной власти:
Марко Поло, венецианский путешественник XIII в., рассказывал, как владыка Китая Кублай изгнал фокусников и акробатов из
своей страны. Их было так много и они так хорошо владели своим
оружием, что, перейдя через многие горы и пустыни, завоевали
дальние страны.7
На самом деле в упоминаемой Боревым “Книге о разнообразии
мира” Марко Поло сообщается легенда о том, что китайское царство
7
Ю. Борев. Эстетика. Москва, 1969. С. 294.
456
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Мян решил покорить некий великий хан, при дворе которого было
множество фокусников и плясунов. Хан приказал артистам сформировать войско и захватить это царство. В помощь он дал им начальника и провожатых. В конце концов циркачи завоевывают царство,
описываемое Марко Поло как величественное. Покорение цирковыми
артистами государства Мян, возможно, является не фактом истории,
а исторической легендой, однако служит наглядным примером того,
как полис оказывается бессильным против номоса. С одной стороны,
хан, представитель государственности, вынужден просить штукарей
о помощи, потому что их витальная сила – в слитности с природой, в
единстве с космосом. С другой стороны, государство терпит поражение
в схватке с цирковыми артистами, поскольку, руководствуясь исключительно принципами стратегического расчета, в результате становится
беспомощным перед номадической эксцентрической непредсказуемостью циркачей. Интересно, что именно как набег кочевников на город
описал Петр Шаликов в своих “Путешествиях” появление цирковых
артистов на ярмарке в Ровны:
Гуляя по рядам, увидите вдруг чрезвычайное волнение в народе, услышите топот лошадей, пронзительный бой барабанов, и
явится глазам вашим взвод амазонок, как можно разрумяненных,
как можно распещренных; вместо стрел и копий летят из рук их
во все стороны афиши, которые говорят: в семь часов вечера будут
пантомимы, игры гимнастические и балансеры.8
В фильме Федерико Феллини “Клоуны” появление циркачей в городе
Римини пугает маленького мальчика:
гомон, который исходит от клоунов,
напоминает шум, производимый при
набеге номадов на оседлые поселения.
Интересно, что в фильме “Номады”
Джона Мактирнада эксцентричность
Илл. 6. Кадр из фильма Феллини кочевников, предстающих в образе
“Клоуны”.
свирепых хиппи-панков, обладает
сходством с эксцентричностью и монструозностью клоунов Феллини.
Герои фильма в ужасе бегут от натиска явившихся из прошлого номадов
так же, как сбегает с представления клоунов плачущий ребенок. Эксцентричность в чистом виде обретает в обеих кинолентах монструозные
8
П. И. Шаликов. Второе путешествие в Малороссию. Москва, 1804. С. 88.
457
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
формы. Параллель между хиппи и клоунами провел Вячеслав Полунин, заметив, что в 1950-е гг. в поисках “живого искусства” “клоуны,
объединившись в хиппи, уходили на улицу, потому что самое простое
и быстрое понимание того, что хотят люди, возникает при прямом
контакте”.9
В конце 1970-х гг. Вячеслав Полунин, обратившись к традициям
бродячего цирка, создал театр “Лицедеи”, сценой которого становились
не только мюзик-холлы и стадионы, но и улицы, витрины магазинов,
трамваи, парки, ступеньки дворцов, соборные площади. Актеры полунинского театра, наделенные сходством с хиппи и панками одновременно, нередко разыгрывали театральные представления в виде внезапных
“набегов” на город. Десять лет спустя этот театр трансформировался
в театральный город на колесах под названием “Караван мира”, обошедший в течение полугода многие города Европы; тем самым Полунин реализовал уникальную идею европейского фестиваля уличных
театров.
2.
Другими словами, цирковая жизнь на колесах – и есть само бытие,
противопоставленное “ничто” полиса. Вытесняя мифологему театра,
цирк все ощутимее становится мифологемой и аллегорическим эквивалентом нашей современности. Будучи по своей природе номадическим,
т.е. в основе своей незакрепленным и неподлежащим закреплению
культурным феноменом, цирк в ситуации “взрыва” визуальности и
медиальности, охватившей современную культуру,10 начинает ассоциироваться с универсальной семиомедиасферой, в пространстве которой
присутствует попытка найти некую абсолютную модель динамического
равновесия между “семиосферой” (Ю. М. Лотман) и медиасферой, т.е.
между знаковыми системами и материальными носителями знаков
(письмом и книгой, кинематографом и компьютерной технологией),
между устно-зрелищной и письменной культурой, между вербальным и визуальным. Не случайно цирк начинает характеризоваться
как “универсальная зрелищная форма” искусства, “вариации которой
Цит. по: Т. Смирнягина. Театр мечты Вячеслава Полунина // Е. В. Дудков.
Развлекательное искусство в социокультурном пространстве 90-х годов. СанктПетербург, 2004. C. 164.
10
Ср. И. Ильин. Постмодернизм от истоков до конца столетия. Эволюция научного
мифа. Москва, 1998. С. 186.
9
458
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
можно обнаружить как в традиционных, так и в новых (технических)
зрелищах”.11 Следовательно, цирк – трансмедиальное искусство,
предполагающее ситуацию постоянного перехода, перевода из одной
знаковой системы в другую, способность репрезентации разных медиа.
В противоположность замкнутости синтеза, трансмедиасфера цирка,
благодаря своей номадической сущности, открыта вовне и предполагает
постоянное переключение, перемещение равновесия с одного объекта
на другой. Под трансмедиасферой я имею в виду не репрезентацию
одного медиума другим,12 а наличие в ней самой переключателей, отсылающих к разным сферам культуры, – искусству, истории, политике
и др. Мне представляется, что именно в цирковом искусстве присутствует попытка найти некую универсальную модель межмедиального
(и одновременно) межсемиотического равновесия между литературой
и зрелищем, между вербальным и визуальным как таковым. Кстати,
еще в 1920-е гг., сопоставляя искусство цирка и кинематограф, Лев
Кулешов постулировал родственную близость обоих искусств именно
в силу их номадической основы:
Цирковой актер не ограничен местом работы. Он кочует по
всему миру. Кинематографическая лента также демонстрируется
по всему миру, и возможность такой широкой работы получается
от того, что отдельные “номера” есть показатели точнейшего расчета и сложнейшей работы человека над собой.13
Номадическая vs трансмедиальная сущность цирка хорошо показана
в фильме Александра Клуге “Артисты цирка под куполом: беспомощны”, главная героиня которого Лени Пайкерт, воздушная гимнастка,
ставшая директором цирка, мечтает о реформированной программе.
Однако в финале она неожиданно порывает с цирком, начинает изучать
теорию массмедиа и вместе с другими артистами переходит работать
на телевидение. Лени легко справляется как с теорией, так и практикой,
поскольку механика СМИ (“световые эффекты”, “зрительный опыт”,
“акустическое восприятие”), с которой она знакомится, по сути, воспроизводит цирковую, а сам цирк трактуется ею как важное информаСр.: Н. Хренов. Кино. Реабилитация архетипической реальности. Москва, 2006.
С. 43.
12
Ср.: Philip Hayward. Echoes and Relections. The Representations of Representations //
Idem. Picture This! Media Representations of Visual Art and Artists. London, 1998. Pp.
1-25; G. Winter. Kunst im Fernsehen // Helmut Korte/Johannes Zahlten (Hrsg.). Kunst
und Künstler im Film. Hameln, 1990. S. 69-80.
13
Л. Кулешов. Цирк – кино – театр // Цирк. 1925. № 1. С. 14-15.
11
459
Ольга Буренина-Петрова, Цирк – культура на колесах
ционное пространство. Разрыв с цирком, таким образом, оказывается
для героев мнимым.14 На то, что цирковое искусство в силу заложенной
в его основе динамики равновесия обладает свойством трансмедиальности, в свое время обратил внимание Юрий Олеша:
Цирк учел силу воздействия на человека всяких зрелищ, в
которых нарушаются наши обычные представления об отношениях человека и пространства. Большинство цирковых номеров
построено на игре с равновесием: канатоходцы, перш, жонглеры.
Что же получается?
Цирк волшебным языком говорит о науке! Углы падения, равные углам отражения, центры тяжести, точки приложения сил – мы
все это узнаем в разноцветных движениях цирка.
Это очаровательно.15
Теодор Адорно усматривал экспликацию в цирковом искусстве
первообразов или дохудожественных образов искусства:
Формы так называемого низкого искусства, как, например,
цирковое представление, в конце которого все слоны встают на
задние ноги, а на хоботе у каждого неподвижно стоит балерина в
грациозной позе, – все это представляет собой бессознательные,
создаваемые без обдуманного намерения, изначальные образы
того, что история философии расшифровывает в искусстве, из
форм которого, отвергнутых с отвращением, можно столько выведать о его сокрытой тайне, о том, относительно чего вводит в
заблуждение уровень, на который искусство возводит свою уже
отвердевшую форму.16
Номера циркового представления ассоциируются Адорно с элементами коллективного бессознательного в духе Карла Юнга. Соответственно, сам цирк – предикат вечности. В нем актуализуется информация, присущая целым поколениям. Можно утверждать, что цирковые
представления сопоставимы с информационным пространством, образуемым интернетом. И наоборот, современная Всемирная паутина
напоминает пространство цирка, образующее во время представления
особого рода “гиперпространство”, параллельную вселенную, где законы притяжения оказываются бессильными, а скорость света и случаи
Ролан Огю, размышляя о цирке XIX столетия, назвал цирк “телевидением XIX
века”, как раз имея в виду коммуникативно-информационную функцию циркового
искусства: Roland Auguet. Fêtes et spectacles populaires. Paris, 1974. P. 127.
15
Ю. Олеша. Избранное. Зависть и другие. Pullman, Michigan, 1973. С. 201.
16
Т. Адорно. Эстетическая теория / Пер. с нем. А. В. Дранова. Москва, 2001. С. 411.
14
460
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
трансгрессии – возможными. (Не случайно одна из мощных компьютерных программ названа Acrobat. Гибкость, с которой программа способна
интегрироваться в видео-, текстовые, графические, звуковые файлы,
сходна с гибкостью и подвижностью артиста-акробата, выступающего
в разных жанрах.) Пластика акробатов, в свою очередь, сходна с бесконечной взаимопревращаемостью элементов космического целого.
Номадизм, заложенный в самой природе цирка, позволяет сосуществавать в данном искусстве элементам массовой и высокой, профанной и сакральной, общечеловеческой и национальной культуры,
вырабатывать “охранно-восстановительный потенциал”, с одной
стороны, консервирующий культурные ценности архаической эпохи,
а с другой стороны, их реставрирующий.17 Данное понимание выводит
цирк за рамки искусства и позволяет рассматривать его как культурный
феномен номадического типа, затрагивающий и художественные и
внехудожественные области.
SUMMARY
In this article, circus is treated outside the context of art. It is understood
as a nomadic-type cultural phenomenon. On the one hand, circus nomadism
is a transgression of spatial, ethnic, national, and social borders as well as
the borders of meanings. On the other hand, circus nomadism presupposes a
fundamental plasticity and changeability of the very subject and of his roles:
in cultural terms, a circus actor functions not only as an artist but also as an
image of a live, constantly transforming and recording structure, a sign of
a potential code that enables permanent metamorphoses of a human being
and his environment. In addition, a circus is a transmedial art that enables
constant translation from one system of signs into another and is capable
of representing different media.
17
Ср. Н. Хренов. Зрелища в эпоху восстания масс. Москва, 2006. С. 316.
461
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS
Vitalii ANANIEV, Candidate of Sciences in History, Senior Lecturer, History Department, St. Petersburg State University, Russia. wostokzapat@
newmail.ru
Anya BERNSTEIN, Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology,
Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. abernstein@fas.harvard.edu
Molly BRUNSON, Assistant Professor, Department of Slavic Languages
and Literatures, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA. molly.brunson@
yale.edu
Olga BURENINA-PETROVA, Doctor of Sciences in Philology, Research
Fellow, Institute of Slavic Studies, University of Zurich, Switzerland.
olga_burenina@alice-dsl.net
Aleksandr CHASHCHUKHIN, Candidate of Sciences in History, Associate Professor, Senior Research Fellow, Laboratory for the Study of the
Soviet Everyday Life, National Research University − Higher School of
Economics, Perm Branch, Russia. alexandr-pstu@mail.ru
Sharyl CORRADO, Assistant Professor, History Department, Pepperdine
University, Malibu, CA, USA. sharyl.corrado@pepperdine.edu
Daria DIMKE, MA in Anthropology, Center for Independent Social Research and Education, Irkutsk, Russia. derevo1983@list.ru
Polina GOLOVATINA-MORA, Candidate of Sciences in History, Medellín
University, Columbia. Polina.golovatina@gmail.com
607
List of Contributors
Pekka HÄMÄLÄINEN, Rhodes Professor of American History, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, UK. hamalainen@history.
ucsb.edu
Zhanna KORMINA, Candidate of Cultural Studies, Associate Professor, Chair of Humanities, Department of Sociology, National Research
University − Higher School of Economics, St. Petersburg Branch, Russia.
jkormina@hse.spb.ru
Anton KOTENKO, Ph.D. Candidate, History Department, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary. kotenko_anton@ceu-budapest.edu
Irina KOTKINA, Candidate of Cultural Studies, Ph.D. in History and
Civilization, Doctoral Student, Department of Art History, Russian State
University for the Humanities, Moscow, Russia. ik341@yandex.ru
Melanie KREBS, Ph.D., Research Fellow, Institute for European Anthropology, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. krebsmel@hu-berlin.de
Michael KUNICHIKA, Assistant Professor; Director of Graduate Studies,
Department of Russian and Slavic Studies, New York University, New York,
NY, USA. mmk11@nyu.edu
Laurie MANCHESTER, Associate Professor, Department of History,
Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ, USA. Laurie.Manchester@asu.edu
Maxim MATUSEVICH, Associate Professor and Director, Russian and
East European Studies Program, Seton Hall University, South Orange, NJ,
USA. matusema@shu.edu
Rustam MATUSEVICH, MA in Arts Studies, Lecturer, Chair of Management, History, and Theory of Screen Arts, Belarus State Academy of Arts,
Minsk, Belarus.
Olaf MERTELSMANN, Dr. phil., Associate Professor in Contemporary
History, Institute of History and Archeology, University of Tartu, Estonia.
Olaf.Mertelsmann@ut.ee
Marina MIKHAYLOVA, Visiting Assistant Professor, Temple University,
Philadelphia, PA; Postdoctoral Fellow, Harriman Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA. marinam@uchicago.edu
Danielle MORRISSETTE, MA in History, Central European University,
Budapest, Hungary. dmorrissette87@gmail.com
Marianna MOURAVIEVA, Associate Professor, Chair for the Theory of
Law and Civic and Legal Education, Herzen State Pedagogical University,
St. Petersburg, Russia. muravjev@online.ru
608
Ab Imperio, 2/2012
Emil NASRITDINOV, Ph.D., Associate Professor, Anthropology Department, American University of Central Asia, Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. emilzn@
gmail.com
Mikhail NEMTSEV, Candidate of Sciences in Philosophy, MA in Gender
Studies, Lecturer, Novosibirsk State University of Economics and Management, Novosibirsk, Russia. Nemtsev.m@gmail.com
Stephen M. NORRIS, Associate Professor, History Department, Miami
University, Oxford, OH, USA. norriss1@muohio.edu
Oxana OSTAPCHUK, Candidate of Sciences in Philology, Associate Professor, Chair in Slavic Philology, Department of Philology, Moscow State
University, Moscow, Russia. ostapczuk@yandex.ru
Serguei Alex. OUSHAKINE, Associate Professor of Slavic Languages &
Literatures and Anthropology; Director of Graduate Studies; Acting Director
of Program in Russian and Eurasian Studies, Princeton University, Princeton,
NJ, USA. oushakin@princeton.edu
Aleksei POPOV, Candidate of Sciences in History, Associate Professor in
Humanities, Crimean Economic Institute of the V. Hetman Kiev National
Economic University, Simferopol, Crimea, Ukraine. popalex79@mail.ru
Mikhail ROZHANSKII, Candidate of Sciences in Philosophy, Academic
Director, Center for Independent Social Research and Education, Irkutsk,
Russia. mr1954@yandex.ru
Gayane SHAGOYAN, Candidate of Sciences in History, Research Fellow,
Department of Contemporary Anthropological Studies, Institute of Archaeology and Ethnography, Armenian National Academy of Sciences, Yerevan,
Armenia. gayashag@yahoo.com
Krista SIGLER, Assistant Professor of History, University of Cincinnati,
Blue Ash College (UCBA), Ohio, USA. Krista.sigler@uc.edu
Iuliia SKUBYTSKA, Ph.D. Student, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA. taakava2@gmail.com
Alexander SOROCHAN, Doctor of Sciences in Philology, Associate Professor, Chair for the History of Russian Literature, Philology Department,
Tver State University, Tver, Russia. bvelvet@rambler.ru
Aimar VENTSEL, Ph.D. in Anthropology, Senior Researcher, Department
of Ethnology, University of Tartu, Estonia. Aimar.Ventsel@ut.ee
Piers VITEBSKY, Head of Anthropology and Russian Northern Studies, Scott
Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge, UK. pv100@cam.ac.uk
609