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Russian politics beyond the Kremlin

On November 4-5, the MacMillan Center hosted a diverse group of historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists to discuss sites and expressions of Russian politics beyond a standard Kremlinology-focused discourse.

The conference, titled “Russian Politics Beyond the Kremlin: New Concepts, Paradigms, and Sites,” was attended by more than fifteen academics, in addition to many other participants from the Yale and New Haven communities. Sponsors included the European Studies Council, Russian Studies Program, MacMillan Center, The Carnegie Foundation, and the Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund.

Invited speakers represented various disciplines in American universities, and also included Russian scholars from Saint-Petersburg, Novosibirsk, Moscow, and Tula. Each day of the conference featured two thematic panels. On Friday, panels included “Sites of Russian Politics Beyond the Kremlin” and “Historical Memory Beyond the Kremlin.” On Saturday, the panels highlighted “Regional and Rural Politics Beyond the Kremlin” and “Ethnic and National Politics Beyond the Kremlin.”

The first panel featured a discussion about various minority groups practicing politics in Russia outside the four main ruling parties constituting the Russian State Duma. Irina Soboleva (Columbia) spoke about gamification of opposition politics and its participants in Alexei Navalny’s campaign for mayor of Moscow. Anya Bernstein (Harvard) spoke about an alternate form of politics expressed in a Russian movement to conquer death, believing that technology will make it possible to soon eliminate mortality among people. Bernstein connected this movement to Russian religious writings about death (such as in the work of Russian 19th century philosopher-futurist Nikolai Fedorov) and Soviet politics of time and utopia. Maria Sidorkina (Harvard), the last presenter in the panel, spoke about the speech patterns of Novosibirsk-based political discussion groups as exemplary of collectivity.

The second panel included discussions of both historical memory and monumentalization. Both Ivan Kurilla (European University of Saint-Petersburg) and Mischa Gabowitsch (Einstein Forum) spoke about the construction of collective historical understanding on the part of different members of Russian society (e.g. the military, professional ideologists, historians). Professor Kurilla highlighted the difference between the framing of Russian history in the professional historian community and that of professional ideologists and state actors (including the much-discussed dissertation of Russian Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky). Kurilla also brought up the recent unveiling of a recent monument near the Kremlin to Prince Vladimir (famous for uniting the Kievan Rus’ state, the predecessor East Slavic state common to Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians), and discussed how an image of Russian history as united throughout the different manifestations of the Russian state is used for political purposes. Gabowitsch developed a similar thesis in his discussion of The Federal Military Memorial Cemetery near Moscow, Russia’s recently constructed Arlington equivalent. Gabowitsch suggested that the very layout of the cemetery, juxtaposing memorials of different generals and military battles throughout the long span of Russian history, suggest an understanding of a panhistorical militarism throughout Russian. In other words, Gabowitsch argues, memorializing history as a chain of military successes implies an unproblematic continuity of the current state with its predecessor states.

The third panel included discussions of agricultural and economic development in local regions in post-Soviet Russia. Irina Trotsuk and Alexander Nikulin (Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration) gave a talk focused on the Belgorod region and the relationship between social and political infrastructure and economic development in the region. Susanne Wengle’s (Notre Dame) talk also discussed agricultural development in Russia, focusing specifically on the privatization of previously state-owned land by large corporations. Tatiana Barchunova (Novosibirsk State University) also discussed local politics, but in a different light; she focused on locally led initiatives from Tomsk and Novosibirsk: specifically the Immortal Regiment celebrating World War II casualties and the Total Dictation dedicated to Russian-language literacy. Both movements began as local initiatives, but would later be co-opted and popularized by the Russian state.

The concluding panel highlighted ethnic politics in Russian national republics and the politics of the National-Bolshevik Party led by Eduard Limonov. Petr Panov (Perm State University) explained that although the choosing of political leaders on the basis of ethnicity was disallowed in contemporary Russia, the ethnic principle seemed to continue in practice. Some republics would even take on a form of power-sharing, in which the head of the republic would be an ethnic Russian, while the head of the Parliament would share the ethnicity of the titular republic, or vice-versa. Fabrizio Fenghi (Brown University) presented the last paper of the conference on the National-Bolshevik Party, discussing how the party’s politics simultaneously resembled an avant-garde opposition movement and a conservative form of politics in conversation with movements such as Eurasianism.

During the concluding discussion of the conference, participants reflected on the larger themes and polemics brought throughout the conference talks. While most participants agreed that a “pragmatist” approach to the study of Russia that moved beyond the Kremlin was necessary, some worried that a complete discarding of Kremlin-focused studies might result in the normalization of contemporary political realities in Russia. Participants also discussed the difficulty of crossing disciplinary barriers in approaches to Russian studies, and suggested the possibility of compiling the conference papers in a special multidisciplinary journal or article collection. Other themes touched upon included the appropriation of non-state initiatives by state, the importance of understanding and defining social memory and its appropriation, and the balance of area studies and more theoretical approaches in certain disciplines. Participants also stressed the importance of building connections between scholars in and outside of Russia.


Written by David Kurkovskiy, Class of 2017, who is studying Russian and Eastern European Studies and Computer Science.