Russia on the Edge

Abstract

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphors—whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and border—have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. This book argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today. The book lays out several sides of the debate. It takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder of neo-Eurasianism, has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin, Liudmila Ulitskaia, and Anna Politkovskaia, whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses—in fiction, film, philosophy, and documentary journalism—form the body of this book. The book provides the keys to a vital post-Soviet writing culture; it is a guide to the variety of post-Soviet efforts to envision new forms of social life, even as a reconstructed authoritarianism has taken hold; and it introduces non-specialist readers to some of the most creative and provocative of present-day Russia's writers and public intellectuals.