2007

“Beyond Representation and Affiliation: Collective Action in Post-Soviet Russia.” In Blake Stimson and Gregory Sholette (eds.) Collectivism after Modernism: The Art of Social Imagination after 1945. The University of Minnesota press, 2007. Pp. 253-270.

When "a thinking political subject" looks around today, twenty years after the official end of the cold war and a few years since the beginning of the war on terrorism, two basic questions once resorted to by the Russian intelligentsia come to mind: "Who is to be blamed?" and "What is to be done?" But these questions sound rather old-fashioned to our ear now and, really, they are from the nineteenth century. Consistent with the mood of today they may more accurately be reframed as "Who cares?" It seems as if now we have never been further away from the old ideal of collective action and collective responsibility, and every attempt to organize such actions seems counterproductive. This essay will survey the decade of the 1990s in post-Soviet Russia, focusing specifically on two politically marginal efforts to go against the grain of political apathy; the art movement known as Moscow Actionism (Moscovcky Akzionism), presented here through the works and ideas of the artist, theorist, and curator Anatoly Osmolovsky, and the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers (CSM, Komitet Soldatskikh Materei), today properly called Union of the Committees of Soldiers' Mothers of Russia (UCSMR). My main focus will be to raise some general questions about the efficacy and ethics of political representation in post-Soviet Russia. Toward this end, the awareness and treatment of heterogeneity in pursuing such actions and the role of experimentation, using various theories of "the political," will be critically evaluated. I will argue that what I call "maternal politics" embodies a different notion of the political subject that in turn opens up new ways of thinking about political action in relation to recent experiences in post-Soviet Russia.
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