Soviet Self-Hatred

Soviet Self-Hatred examines the imaginary Russian identities that emerged following the collapse of the Soviet Union. Eliot Borenstein shows how these identities are best understood as balanced on a simple axis between pride and shame, shifting in response to Russia's standing in the global community, its anxieties about internal dissension and foreign threats, and its stark socioeconomic inequalities.

Through close readings of Russian fiction, films, jokes, songs, fan culture, and Internet memes, Borenstein identifies and analyzes four distinct types with which Russians identify or project onto others. They are the sovok (the Soviet yokel); the New Russian (the despised, ridiculous nouveau riche), the vatnik (the belligerent, jingoistic patriot), and the Orc (the ultraviolent savage derived from a deliberate misreading of Tolkien's epic). Through these contested identities, Soviet Self-Hatred shows how stories people tell about themselves can, tragically, become the stories that others are forced to live.

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University. His books include Plots against Russia and Meanwhile, in Russia.... Follow him on X @eliotb2002 and visit him online at eliotborenstein.net.

Based on his exceptional knowledge of contemporary Russian mass culture, Borenstein offers precise and insightful descriptions of new group identities that have emerged in film, fiction, commercials, and other areas of popular culture; these categories, he believes, are key to understanding contemporary Russian politics and ideology

Julie A. Cassiday, Williams College, coeditor of Russian Performances:

Soviet Self-Hatred offers a unique, highly engaging, and groundbreaking argument about a genealogy of post-Soviet Russian identity based on the self-othering generated by self-hatred. Given Putin's hateful rhetoric concerning sovereignty and identity during Russia's equally hateful war in Ukraine, this book is especially timely and urgent.

Mark Lipovetsky, Columbia University, coauthor of A History of Russian Literature:

Soviet Self-Hatred is highly innovative in its approach and the texts it studies, crystal clear in its organization, witty and aphoristic in its style. Through interpretations of post-Soviet Russian culture that are both highly original and brilliantly precise, Eliot Borenstein creates a foundation for the political analysis of post-Soviet memes as an eminently worthy field of study.