The Patriotism of Despair

Examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds?

Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.

Drawing on return visits to Barnaul, his boyhood city, near the Chinese and Kazakh borders, he paints a profound psychological tableau of coping. His groupings are diverse: disgruntled leftists, whom he labels 'neocoms'; Chechen war veterans; and the mothers of dead soldiers. All, however, find meaning and community in narratives of tragedy.... From Oushakine's keen reading, one gets a sense of how, for a still wider circle of Russians, collapse and disorder led to alienation from the Western values that Russian reforms had tried to sell them, which then for some shaded into anti-Semitism and a crude nationalism.

Jane Zavisca:

The Patriotism of Despair brilliantly demonstrates that 'culture matters more than ever' during periods of societal transformation. Serguei Oushakine investigates a range of groups—nationalist activists and intellectuals, war veterans and soldiers' mothers—that form communities of loss around symbolic representations and ritual enactments of shared trauma in Russia. Based on fieldwork from 2001–2003 in the city of Bernaull in Southwestern Siberia, the book provides a rare glimpse of culture in a Russian province (most other ethnographies are based in Moscow or St. Petersburg).... The Patriotism of Despair is one of the most significant works on post-Soviet culture to date, showing how trauma is not simply limiting, but generative—of communities and of understandings of what happened, what it means, and what to do. This ambitious undertaking... engages an impressive array of evidence: analyzing interviews, recounting rituals, excavating archives, and interpreting photographs.

Mark Lipovetsky, University of Colorado–Boulder:

Serguei Oushakine's The Patriotism of Despair is a revolutionary book, the true subject of which is the collapse of the democratic revolution in Russia. It reveals the cultural and psychological, rather than merely political, reasons for the post-Soviet rejection of Western liberal ideologies and even the mass popularity of aggressively nationalist, racist, pro-Soviet and neotraditionalist discourses and narratives. Oushakine's work encompasses the meticulous analysis of various social groups located in Altai, the Siberian region on the border with China and Kazakhstan, and interviews with neocommunists, leftists, nationalists, and Chechnya veterans and their mothers. This book is especially valuable as it goes beyond worn binary oppositions, instead presenting a coherent—albeit quite unsettling—vision of post-Soviet society that is simultaneously fragmented and united by the trauma caused by the collapse of the Soviet world and seeking various imaginary and real forms of community and solidarity that inevitably turn out to be based upon loss, grief, and absence. This approach undermines both Western stereotypes about Russia and post-Soviet political self-imaging. It offers little optimism, but Oushakine's genuine interest in his personages represents the post-Soviet experience as an exuberantly rich and important facet of contemporary modernity.