Hilary Pilkington, “No Longer ‘On Parade’: Style and the Performance of Skinhead in the Russian Far North”
This paper draws on research conducted between 2002 and 2007 with a group of self-identified “skinheads” in the city of Vorkuta to readdress the meaning of style within contemporary subcultures. Engaging with theoretical interpretations of the role of “style” in skinhead movements in the West and academic and media discussion of the contemporary Russian movement, the article argues against an understanding of Russian skinhead as a purely mimetic practice in which style plays an essentially functional role. On the basis of the empirical material, the article suggests rather that style has no fixed meaning; the importance attached to style varies between group members and changes over the subcultural career of both individual skinheads and the group as a whole. The article also charts a decline in the significance of style over time within the group and suggests that this process reveals style practices to be as much a product of ongoing engagement with the outside world as a reflection of a set of fixed internal values within the group. Finally, drawing on Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of gender as “performance,” the article considers the visual display of skinhead style in the context of a wider range of rituals and practices of masculine performance. These performances-- including the exclusion of women from skinhead performative style and a range of intimate bodily practices such as piercing and tattooing--reveal the centrality of homosocial bonding and the enactment of pleasure, pain and mutual trust to the group’s changing understanding of itself. Thus, it is concluded, skinhead in Russia should be read neither as empty imitation nor crude political reaction but as a vibrant example of the work involved in the naturalisation of difference and the manufacture of identity through the complex interaction of the performance of masculinity, ethnicity and class.
Dan Healey, “Active, Passive and Russian: The National Idea in Gay Men’s Pornography”
This paper examines examples of Russian-produced and hybrid Russian-European/American produced gay men’s erotic periodicals and films for their use of national symbols, clichés and storylines to construct gay male desire as Russian. Scholars of Russian pornography have overlooked gay pornography, or dismissed it from unsympathetic second-wave feminist perspectives. This paper draws upon queer and pornography-appreciative perspectives (pioneered in the 1980s by Richard Dyer and Linda Williams) to argue that Russian gay men’s pornography is anything but marginal to an understanding of contemporary Russian sexual culture. It demonstrates how global and local producers of pornography, operating to different objectives and with different (but equally catastrophic) historical legacies, have collaborated to write gay desire into Russian culture. In this pornography, national motifs sell Russian gay sex as an “exotic” taste on the globalised gay men’s porn market, and domesticate men’s same-sex sexuality for a Russian audience at the same time. By revising histories of sexual repression, and working through “the dilemmas of the self” for men experiencing gay desire (Dyer), this genre injects something wholly innovative in Russian culture. Examining an archive of 1990s gay periodicals (including Tema, Partner(sha!), ARGO, and the long-running 1/10), the paper first establishes the prevalent motifs which first emerged in gay porn. The films discussed date from the mid-1990s, and use the Cossack all-male idyll, the sinister world of KGB surveillance, and the jet-setting New Russian’s glamorous appeal to frame their narratives. The paper concludes with an analysis of the significantly distinctive role of the military, of the countryside, and of the “power of submission,” in Russia’s gay male pornography.
H. S. Hundley, “Defending the Periphery: Tsarist Management of Buriat Buddhism”
In the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russian Empire, non-Russian Orthodox religion was the one indicator of otherness, and therefore danger. Most non-Orthodox peoples were annexed through territorial expansion. Russia’s Buddhists, however, were created in the early eighteenth century by foreign missionaries among the Buriats, a Shamanist people. By its own definition, tsarist Russia saw a major challenge to its hegemony in its own empire with the appearance of Buddhism in Eastern Siberia. For over a century and a half succeeding Russian policies sought to constrict, control, deflect, and even eliminate Buddhism. This article traces and addresses the various tsarist attempts to achieve these ends. In addition, it compares these policies to those used for the Muslim population in the empire, and Catholic and Protestants in the Baikal territory.
David Moon, “The Debate over Climate Change in the Steppe Region in Nineteenth-Century Russia”
There was much debate over the nineteenth century among Russian scientists, landowners, government officials, both local and central, and other educated Russians concerning whether the climate of the steppe region was changing and, if so, whether the activities of humans, in particular in the felling much of the small areas of woodland in the region, were responsible. Contemporaries were most concerned about the recurrence of serious droughts, which caused harvest failures and famines. This article considers the debates over the period from the 1830s to the 1900s. The article also pays attention to the relationship between the views of Russian scientists and the international scientific community.
Kirsten Lodge, “Russian Decadence in the 1910s: Valery Briusov and the Collapse of Empire”
To this day Briusov’s 1911 novel The Altar of Victory and its incomplete sequel, Jupiter Overthrown, started in 1912, are placed within the tradition of the realist historical novel that underwent a revival beginning in the pre-Soviet period and continuing after the Revolution. In this article I argue against this interpretation, illustrating that they are metahistorical fictions that continue the traditions of symbolism and decadence. Indeed, The Altar of Victory should be recognized as a masterpiece of Russian decadence. Examining how Briusov used histories of the Roman Empire that he himself cited as his primary sources, I show how Briusov creates a mythopoetic vision of the last days of the Roman Empire that accords with the paradigm of the decline and fall of Rome as it was envisioned in the decadent movement, particularly in France, where it originated. I also illustrate how Briusov, like the French, compared his own times to fourth-century Rome, and how his ambivalence towards the changes taking place in Russia and throughout Europe just before World War I is reflected in the novels. I also discuss Briusov’s unpublished lectures on the history of the late Roman Empire, as well as other fictional and nonfictional works by Briusov. My approach is comparative and cultural-historical, based on close readings of the texts in their cultural context.
Stuart Goldberg, “‘To Anaxagoras’ in the Velvet Night: New Considerations on the Role of Blok in Mandelstam’s ‘V Peterburge my soidemsia snova’”
In this article, the author first shows that Osip Mandelstam’s powerful engagement of Alexander Blok in “V Peterburge my soidemsia snova,” rather than integrating Blok into that curative cultural tradition represented by the hidden night sun of the poem, underscores most saliently the irreconcilable differences which distinguish their poetics and personalities. Then, the author proceeds, through analysis of the draft, appropriate contextualization of the nature of Mandelstam's challenge to Blok (which continues a poetic dialogue initiated by Mandelstam’s teacher of literature, the Symbolist poet Vladimir Gippius) and analysis of the structure of the Pushkinian layer of citation in the poem, to demonstrates that the unseeing and seemingly adversarial “ty” of Mandelstam's poem is, in its published version, primarily Blok--a correlation which, outside this multilayered contextualization, could only appear unfair and reductionist.