SUBJECTS OF FREEDOM: PSYCHOLOGISTS, POWER AND POLITICS IN POSTSOCIALIST RUSSIA
A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE PROGRAM IN
MODERN THOUGHT AND LITERATURE
AND THE COMMITTEE ON GRADUATE STUDIES
OF STANFORD UNIVERSITY
IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Tomas Matza
June 2010
© 2010 by Tomas Antero Matza. All Rights Reserved. Re-distributed by Stanford University under license with the author.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial 3.0 United States License. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/us/
This dissertation is online at: http://purl.stanford.edu/ht219vj1183
ii I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
James Ferguson, Primary Adviser
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Gregory Freidin
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Matthew Kohrman
I certify that I have read this dissertation and that, in my opinion, it is fully adequate in scope and quality as a dissertation for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
ALEXEI YURCHAK
Approved for the Stanford University Committee on Graduate Studies. Patricia J. Gumport, Vice Provost Graduate Education
This signature page was generated electronically upon submission of this dissertation in electronic format. An original signed hard copy of the signature page is on file in University Archives.
iii ABSTRACT
This study is an ethnography of Russia’s psychotherapy boom following the collapse of the Soviet Union. It inquires into the new subjectivities that have taken shape with the passing of the “New Soviet Man” and the dawn of a psychologized homo
œconomicus. I draw on 14 months of fieldwork in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 2005-
2007 involving participant-observation in municipal and commercial organizations, textual and media analysis, oral history, and archival work. I explore how approaches in psychotherapy, marginalized after the 1930s in Soviet-Russia, have been welcomed back into state politics, combining with democratic and market reforms to enable a whole series of new governing projects. These projects extend from education policy to intimate relations in the family, and from the psychological development of children to self-improvement courses for Russia’s new middle class. The emergence of psycho- technical approaches to the self, I argue, is symptomatic of a broader shift in subjectivity following the collapse of the Soviet socialist order and the rise of capitalism, and offers an opportunity to study ethnographically the relationship between political transformation and “inner-transformation” as it concerns the practical ethics of “learning to be free.”
The current popularity of psychological self-work can be traced to a late-Soviet interest in “humanizing” socialist institutions during the 1960s “thaw” and again during perestroika. During the 1990s, however, as psychologists and therapists were incorporated into state institutions and commercial organizations, the late-Soviet progressive interest in “humanization” has followed divergent pathways. In the
iv marketplace, psychologists have been enrolled in the cultivation of Russia’s new elite, inciting a potential-filled, possessive individualism through the development of techniques of self-knowledge and self-esteem, entrepreneurialism and prudentialism.
By contrast, in state institutions, resource constraints, audit and loose legal structures have squeezed their services into prophylaxis for the “problem child.” As symptoms of a post-Soviet governmentality, psychologists have thus become integrated into the production of classed subject-positions. This results not from therapist-intent or “the state,” but the way psychotherapeutic encounters are structured by biopolitical forces under capitalism.
Psychologists and psychotherapists take a different view of the social and political effects of their work. Invoking the critique of the Soviet past as a way to give moral force to their efforts, they claim to be promoting social equality and “learning to be free” through the disruption of authoritarian social relations. Other practitioners invoke the critique of capitalist rationalization in order to argue that they are fostering social connection. These claims appear incongruent with the highly classed effects of their work and the way it is tied to projects of rule; I argue that it is precisely this incongruity that characterizes the politics of freedom in Russia today. Affiliated with both the unpopular neoliberal reforms of the 1990s, as well as the ongoing appeal of democracy with a small-d, “freedom” remains simultaneously a suspected term as well as a state of desire. This ambiguity is reflected in psychological work, which I suggest can be viewed as a post-Soviet practical ethics, where “inner transformation” and the pursuit of the “good life” is always mediated by state and market constraints. As a coda to communism’s “New Soviet Man,” what it means to be a “free” post-Soviet
v subject is being filtered through new technoscientific visions of subjectivity that are themselves caught between the state politics of population and the commoditization of self-work. Through an attention to the “rule of experts” and their ethical practices, this dissertation offers insights into the constraints and possibilities entailed in “learning to be free.”
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
It is a humbling experience to comprise the list of people who have given me the intellectual, moral, emotional and financial support for this project. Great thanks to
James Ferguson, whose arrival at Stanford ignited my interest in questions of governance and subjectivity, and gave me that essential sense of reciprocated interest.
His work continues to inspire me, and his guidance has helped me turn this project from an undifferentiated mass into something of which I feel quite proud. Matthew
Kohrman has been an essential interlocutor, pushing me to clarify what I mean to say, and giving me confidence at all the right moments. I am grateful to Gregory Freidin for so diligently wading through my anthropologese, and especially for his no- nonsense feedback and unalloyed enthusiasm—upon receiving the former, you know the latter is the real deal. Finally, I am extremely grateful to Alexei Yurchak, who, despite having no formal commitment to advising me, has offered incredibly detailed readings of drafts, and so generously shared his time and great wisdom.
Sylvia Yanagisako has, through our many stimulating meetings, helped me to understand what anthropology is all about, and how I might contribute something to it.
Liisa Malkki continues to offer invaluable support, and her suggestions always push me beyond my frameworks. Thanks to Li Zhang who has become an amazing colleague and source of advice and help in recent years. Monika Greenleaf has also provided encouragement at crucial stages. I also thank Sepp Gumbrecht for his feedback and interest in my project. Finally, I would like to acknowledge Melissa
Caldwell, Alexander Etkind, Akhil Gupta, David Holloway, Caroline Humphrey,
vii Tanya Luhrmann, Purnima Mankekar, Henrietta Moore, David Palumbo-Liu and Lee
Ross. These scholars have shown a collegiality that has helped me to feel part of a vibrant and generous scholarly community.
Without the good-humored engagement of my graduate school colleagues,
Stanford would have been a very different kind of place. I would like to thank Natalia
Roudakova, who has been a wonderful friend, reader and confidant. Special thanks also to my co-conspirators in MTL, Steven Lee, Nirvana Tanoukhi and Ulka Anjaria, each of whom taught me a tremendous amount inside and outside the seminar room. I am grateful to have had Jocelyn Chua and Kevin O’Neill and as incisive readers, and once and future collaborators. Special thanks, too, to Zhanara Nauruzbayeva, who has always been a wonderful conversation partner on all things postsocialist. I am also indebted to Tania Ahmad, Lalaie Ameeriar, Nikhil Anand, Hannah Appel, Elif Babul,
Mun Young Cho, Ramah McKay and Robert Samet, my “anthropology family,” all of whom have kept Stanford a light and sane place. The rigor and creativity of their work has inspired my own. Thanks to my Berkeley colleagues, Dace Dzenovska and Ivan
Arenas, for their willingness to cross the Cal-Stanford divide. And finally, thanks to the members of my 2010 undergraduate seminar on the anthropology of postsocialism.
Their engagement with these materials has helped me to clarify my own thinking.
Numerous colleagues helped me while in the field. Zoia Soloveva continues to offer reality checks, and helped me settle into and navigate St. Petersburg when much was still new and confusing. I am also grateful to Natalia Kiselyova, whose listening ear was more essential than she probably knows. I am also so glad to have shared those crazy months in St. Petersburg with Derek Brower and Sandra Fach, and Emily
viii Newman and Jon Platt. Our bond has undoubtedly been solidified by the experience of being new parents in that harsh winter of 2005-2006.
It is unfortunate that I cannot thank my informants with their full names.
Without their willingness to share their lives with me, there would not have been a project. Thanks to Tatiana and Sasha for being my first interviewee “guinea pigs,” and allowing me to keep returning with more questions and requests. Fedor and Masha became not just essential informants, but very good friends. Tamara, Diana and
Leonid were generous and productively inquisitive, forcing me to think about what I was doing in their midst. I am grateful to Olga for her no-nonsense attitude and invitation to her training, and to Natalia for her kindness and for including me in her camp. Galya and Irina were incredibly kind, discussing their work with me, while also taking an interest in my family, living in exile on the Petrograd side. Marina and Elena generously tolerated my loosely defined objectives at crucial times. Finally, thanks to
Misha and Oksana, whose openness to discussing their work with me was a gift.
Financial support for this project was provided by the Fulbright-Hays Program, the Social Science Research Council, and Stanford’s Center for Russian Eastern
European and Eurasian Studies. I am also grateful for the graduate support provided by Stanford’s Program in Modern Thought and Literature and the Department of
Anthropology, which, despite having no obligation to me, continues to treat me as one of its own. Special thanks are due to Monica Moore, who has been an intrepid guide through Stanford’s bureaucracy, as well as Jan Hafner, Shelly Coughlin and Ellen
Christensen. Write-up funds were provided by the Stanford Humanities Center, and the Freeman-Spogli Institute. I also received intellectual and logistical support from
ix the Center for Independent Social Research in St. Petersburg. Finally, thanks to
Eugeniia Khassina and Serafima Gettys, my wonderful Russian language teachers.
John and Elizabeth Modern, and Mark and Florie Elmore have been tremendous in their love and intellectual engagement. Thanks in particular to John, who inspires the writer in me, and Mark, who reminds me of the virtues of rigor.
Thanks also to David Hargis and Joanna Rosenberg, and Karen Levy.
Finally, my greatest debt is to my family. My parents, Ike and Eila, first inspired my interest in this part of the world, and in the beauty of study. More importantly, they have paved the way to the writing of this dissertation by continually reassuring me that I can do it. Knowing that they are unconditionally in my corner has given me great strength. I am grateful to my brother, Stefan, whose independence and unconventionality continues to remind me that there is a world outside of the little bubble I have inhabited for the last four years of writing. Great thanks to Tom and
Barbara, who have been surrogate parents, wonderful interlocutors and unflinching supporters. I also thank my “new” brother and sister, Matt and Sharon, for their support. A special thanks to my son, Aarno, who shared the fieldwork experience in
St. Petersburg (he single-handedly redirected my interests into questions of child- rearing) and my daughter Lilja, whose open inquisitiveness continues to inspire me.
Finally I would like to thank my wife, Nicole, whose strength and clarity of purpose inspires, whose optimism calms, whose sense of humor lightens, whose intelligence illuminates, and whose support never wavers. This dissertation could not have been finished without you.
x TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION Psychologists as Anthropological Subjects...... 1 Context for the Study History as an Analytic Problem Anthropological Approaches to Subjectivity The Differentiation Problem in Governmentality Studies The Problem of Freedom Methodology Chapter Overview
PART I – HISTORIES
CHAPTER 1 Cold War Figures: The “New Soviet Man” and the “Post-Soviet Person”...... 44 Some words on the History of Soviet Psychology Genres of the Soviet Past Genres and Schemas Post-Soviet Genres The Will to Know: Historicizing Conceptualization Conclusion: Beyond Novelty/Rupture
CHAPTER 2 Toward a Genealogy of Postsocialist Psychology...... 81 Surveying the Contemporary Non-governmental services Government services Ideological Histories of Soviet Psychology Applied psychology between scientism and Marxism The critique of psychoanalysis and Soviet psychotherapy Some conclusions De-Stalinization and Psychodynamics, Genealogically Post-Stalin developments in psychology and psychotherapy Late-Soviet progressivism Conclusion: Revisiting the Contemporary
xi
PART II – FUTURES
CHAPTER 3 Assembled Biopolitics: Child and Future between State and Market...... 136 “Total Crisis” and Assembled Concerns The anxious state and a fresh start The psychologist and vospitanie revamped The salesperson Assembled Biopolitics and the Smell of Uspekh A visit to “Childhood Planet” Tomorrow’s Builders and uspekh PPMS and uspekh Conclusion
CHAPTER 4 Liberal Imaginaries: Psychology and the Business of Self-Realization...... 183 The Freedom Lab “Individualism in the good sense” An “atmosphere of freedom” Revolutions within The Neoliberal Disposition The imaginary West Mimetic techniques Seeing Beyond the Neoliberal Questioning agents Blurry domains, class and the problem of choice Conclusion: The Negative Agenda
CHAPTER 5 “The Little Army of Psychologists”: Experts and the Post-Soviet Stat...... 237 The PPMS Center as an Historical Formation Inside the PPMS Center Working at the margins The case: crisis, poverty, illness Operations Under the Microscope Evolving Structures and Missions Drift The “Productivity” of Efficiency Conclusion: Rationality-Technique-Translation
xii
PART III – POLITICS
CHAPTER 6 “Learning to Be Free”: Toward a Post-Soviet Practical Ethics...... 285 Interlude: Crises of Subjectivation and Care of the Self Moment 1: Freedom and the Discourse of Soviet Constraint Moment 2: Freedom amidst Break-up Liberation: “It wasn’t part of the Soviet system. … It was for me.” Fate: “I decided [not to try], but [then] a magical image appeared.” A path to self: “I worked very closely, through tears, on myself.” Moment 3: Logics of Self- and Social Transformation Fear and time, order and authority Paradoxes of stability Soul as compass “Energy”: internal state/gendered phenomenon/unit of measure Harmony as means Conclusion: [En]gendering Freedom and Social Change
CHAPTER 7 Moscow’s Echo: Techniques of the Self, Publics and Politics...... 344 The Talk Show, Historically, or, “Democratization” in Miniature Neoliberalism and Psychotherapy in Russia For Adults about Adults The echo of the self: talk show technologies Political intimacy and publics Social problems Conclusion
AFTERWARD Ambivalent Subjects: Psychologists between Value and Virtue...... 390 Summary of Arguments Freedom’s Just Another Word The Moral Economy A Final Case: Nikolai’s Dilemma Last Words
BIBLIOGRAPHY...... 412
xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1. “Roaming for Travelers.” ...... 9
Figure 2. Gosha and Tolya’s internal worlds...... 137
Figure 3. “Beautiful! Grand! Comfortable!” ...... 156
Figure 4. “The traditional family portrait...”...... 157
Figure 5. The aesthetics of domestic personnel ...... 159
Figure 6. “Diplomat private school—the best for children”...... 160
Figure 7. “For the most ambitious”...... 162
Figure 8. “20% enriching knowledge:...... 164
Figure 9. “Yankee-killers!”...... 185
Figure 10. The relaxed psychological scene...... 198
Figure 11. Gosha’s deepest fear...... 201
Figure 12. Emotional self-portraiture...... 202
Figure 13. Serafima and Ilya’s internal worlds...... 203
Figure 14. “Our graduates”...... 404
xiv INTRODUCTION
Psychologists as Anthropological Subjects: Subjectivity, Governmentality & Ethics under Postsocialism
We are riding the metro deep below the St. Petersburg streets and canals, en route to a café date with Vera Aleksandrovna and her friend Irina, two children’s psychotherapists. Out of the corner of my eye I see two older women, or babushki, scowling at us, shaking their fur-capped heads, and then commenting to one other. They make no effort to hide their disapproval. Eventually, one gestures impatiently at her own shoes. Assuming they are concerned that our son, Aarno’s, stroller is unanchored, I point to my boot, which is firmly planted next to the wheel. As we exit the metro, one of them says to me sharply and with exasperation, “His shoes are on the wrong feet!” (They were not.) Such occurrences are common, and over time erode our self- confidence as new parents living in a country with its own practices surrounding children, upbringing, discipline and public behavior. Not surprisingly, on the heels of this experience, we were in no mood for more advice. Yet at the café, we find ourselves sitting opposite two children’s specialists with our cranky and hungry 1-year- old, and as we struggle to calm Aarno down, I once again feel the judgment. “All children should be walking by his age,” Irina, whom we just met, avers. “The reason he isn’t might be from your fears, which you project onto him.” She adds, “Children learn most of their emotions from their mother.” “Not from father?” I object. “Yes, father, too,” she says obligingly, and then falls silent. I turn flush. “I have noticed that many in St. Petersburg fuss over children, even the children of strangers, and often over meloch’ [small change]. This is good for nothing other than irritation. It’s my own business [Eto moe lichnoe delo].” Vera, sensing my frustration, contritely agrees that it could be an invasion of personal space.
I am struck by the affect in this excerpt from my fieldnotes. Consider the babushki’s irritation at the supposed incorrectness of our son’s attire; my resentment
1 of their unconcealed social discipline; Irina’s desire to give developmental advice to someone she had just met; my paranoiac awareness of “being read”; my hostility to my informants and the rejection of care. The affective charge marks the social field of subject-making, where conflicting ideas about children, propriety, fear and rectitude are brought into conflict. In the space of a few hours, I had confronted two attempts to govern my subjectivity. The first, condensed in the figure of the nosey babushka, could be associated with notions of proper vospitanie, or moral upbringing, present since the Soviet period if not earlier. Here, through mundane commentary on proper attire, vospitanie took place through the creation of a moral economy of care in which the elderly—often women—take it upon themselves to help raise Russia’s children
(and young parents). The second type, based on psychological expertise, is relatively new and post-Soviet and is part of a broader popularization of psychology. Here, the moral economy is replaced with an expert grid, developmental benchmarks, and a penetrative gaze, as experts seek to share their insights on the psychic needs of the child. Each of these approaches to governing has its own style, orientation and targets.
The focus of this dissertation is on how these attempts to govern—the socio-cultural- moral and the more expressly psychological—have intersected in Russia in the midst of communist collapse and capitalist arrival.
Since the late 1980s, an ensemble of psychological services, activities and products has appeared in Russia. Nowadays, psychologists can be found in schools, political campaigns, advertising firms, human resource departments, universities, private institutes, clinics, hospitals, and a bustling market for services. Psychologists have also dovetailed with the mass media, providing television and radio advice
2 programs with their experts, self-help books with their authority, and talk-show panels with their human depth. Diverse therapeutic practices bloom—from personnel management techniques and tips for achieving personal growth, to breathing exercises and live burials aimed at psychological re-birth. Indicating a profound re-signification,
“being in therapy” has become a status symbol among upwardly mobile Russians.
The flourishing of so many non-medical psychotherapies and “psychological trainings” in Russia is especially interesting because these were viewed as bourgeois for much of the Soviet period. Unlike in the West, where a wide range of client-based psychotherapeutic consulting forms took shape over the 20th century, in the Soviet
Union psychotherapy developed within the comparatively narrower confines of the psychiatric clinic—i.e. those Soviet spaces that came to be associated in the West with the so-called “political hospitalization” of dissidents (Bloch and Reddaway 1984;
Bukovsky 1977; Smith and Oleszczuk 1996). The reasons for these professional fortunes are complexly ideological, economic and pragmatic, but the key point is that, in and through its close affiliation with medical psychiatry, the psychotherapeutic approach to neurosis, depression or mania was pathological as opposed to social. As one informant described it, “In the Soviet Union, there was no need for therapy. When you have perfected society and the person is a product of his environment, then the person needing counseling is mentally ill. He needs a psychiatrist, not a psychotherapist.” Only in the post-Stalin thaw did new forms of psychological care begin to appear, and even then psychological practice was generally restricted to non- applied fields. “Therapy,” meanwhile, remained largely absent from public discourse.
3 How, then, are we to understand the recent popularization of psychotherapy and so-called psychological training in present-day Russia? In this dissertation I pursue the idea that this post-Soviet phenomenon approximates what Michel Foucault has called, in another context, a “crisis of subjectivation.” That is, under the conditions of profound social and political transformation that Russia has undergone in the last two decades, “the relations of oneself to oneself [are] intensified and valorized” in new sorts of ways (1988:43).
Of the many kinds of “crisis” in Russia, I highlight three. First, as President
Vladimir Putin put it in 2005, the Soviet collapse was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century [krupneishaia geopoliticheskaia katastrofa veka],” “a real tragedy [drama]” for the Russian people (2005). This catastrophe dislocated daily routines, moral orientations, social relations, heroes, aspirations, safety nets and notions of the good life. On the heels of catastrophe and tragedy, and in this space of transformation, psychotherapists (along with religious figures) have appeared as
“experts of the soul,” offering orientation in the absence of strong successor narratives to the Soviet socialist project. Second, in addition to the crisis of meaning, there continue to be grave concerns about Russia’s demographic situation which is sometimes discussed in terms of the “dying out” (vymiranie ubyl’) of ethnic Russians
(cf. Oushakine 2009; Rivkin-Fish 2005:1). This has brought renewed political and social attention to healthy ways of living and child-rearing. Here, too, psychotherapists have been among the key players in the state’s attempts to address these issues. Third and related, many Russians still view the loss of global standing in terms of a national-
4 economic crisis; psychotherapists have offered their “training” services in order to shape Russia’s next entrepreneurs.
Through their involvement in these three key areas of national life—meaning; health and children; and economic might—psychotherapists and psychologists have helped to bring talk of “the self” to bear on fundamental questions of Russia’s past, present and future. The emergence of the new psychological practices in Russia is thus an occasion to inquire into how cultural notions of subjectivity, social personhood, and selfhood have been reconfigured in the face of great social transformation, and in the terrain of what has come to be called “postsocialism.”1 This study thus attempts a fine-grained analysis of the intimate dimensions of transformation as it has been registered through the ways in which psychologists’ work in Russia has been shaped by political, social and economic concerns. Based on 14 months of fieldwork in St.
Petersburg conducted between 2005 and 2006, and again in 2007 the study examines governmental and non-governmental psychologists and psychotherapists and the services they offer. This work is based on participant-observation in municipal organizations that provide non-medical psychological consulting for children (whose work was primarily prophylactic), and in commercial psychology organizations that offer seminars on leadership, time management and “psychological education” camps.
I draw on these interventions around the psychologized child as a way to explore the discourse of the future as it is taking shape in Russia. Complementing this study of children’s-interventions, I also draw on research in personal-growth seminars for
1 Scholars disagree about whether the term “postsocialist” is an appropriate descriptor. Eastern European scholars prefer the term “post-Communist,” which they assert is an “emic” term (qtd. in Buchowski 2004:6; Skalnik 2002:194). I find this point valid, but keep to the convention among many scholars of using the term “postsocialist.”
5 adults; parenting seminars; lectures for psychologists-in-training; some comparative research in a city outpatient psychiatric clinic; interviews with psychologists and psychotherapists; and an analysis of mass-mediated pop-psychology. In all of these cases, I also attend very closely to the historical constitution of psychological practice, as well as its articulation with politics, in order to address, respectively, the histories and politics of the psychology movement.
I will argue that as psychologists and psychotherapists have sought to aid the nation by offering new ways to govern “the self,” they have highlighted some of the limits, potentials and contradictions of the politics of freedom in contemporary Russia.
Speaking of potentials, psychologists have undoubtedly helped their clients locate new
“internal reserves” in the face of a wide range of personal challenges and tragedies. By teaching self-esteem (samootsenka), empathy and “learning to be free,” psychologists have provided clients with strategies to overcome depression, low self-confidence and social problems. Yet the promotion of self-esteem, empathy and freedom have also been worked into the post-Soviet proliferation of neoliberal, market-based and instrumental understandings of self and other.
The politically ambiguous nature of psychological projects of “internal freedom” is reflected in how psychologists’ work has been shaped by different institutional contexts and has come to reflect forms social differentiation, where having a particular kind of self has become a mark of distinction for some, and a hindrance to others. Through a study of the intersection between freedom and social differentiation, this study seeks to sort out how “the self” has been reconstituted as an object of contemplation, action and rule. How have the practices of self-making
6 articulated with emergent forms of social difference? And what, finally, does the rise of the psychologist in Russia reveal about power, subjectivity and governmentality, as well as the ethics of self-care and freedom? I will argue that as Russians have sought to re-orient in the wake of collapse of one social order and the appearance of new rules of the game, “the self” has indeed become a particularly salient site of transformation.
Psychologists have helped to push this along through the way they have defined the terrain of “the self” and linked it to broader notions of freedom. Yet the divergent ways in which psychological work has been integrated into market and state structures indicates some of the features of an emergent post-Soviet governmentality in which different subjects are ruled differently. The political effects of their work appear to be quite ambiguous. Their projects are simultaneously postsocialist and liberatory, as well as confining and defining. They mirror inequality while providing many a source of healing and struggle against authoritarian social relations. The effects of their work are depoliticizing but also socially connective. This study thus testifies to the contingent relations between capitalism and governmentality, affect and power, and expertise and freedom in the construction of postsocialist citizenship in Russia.
Context for the Study
Two fundamental historical events frame this study—the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the arrival of market capitalism. The Soviet collapse marked the end of a Soviet socialist rationale for organizing life. As Verdery (1991) and others have noted, this rationale was premised on the “accumulation of allocative power.” The party-state exercised its power by controlling the means of production and distribution not just of
7 raw materials and finished goods, but of norms and culture as well. The huge investments in the Soviet film industry (Faraday 2000); socialist realist literature and visual culture (Clark 1981); Soviet comfort and taste (Dunham 1990); and space
(Boym 1994) resulted in a distinct Soviet socialist way of being linked not only to communist personhood, labor, gender relations, family and patriotism, but also traditions of subtle humor, dreaming and desire (Yurchak 2006). This way of life was also buttressed by a particular biopolitical arrangement of social services (Collier
2005); socio-spatial forms such as the communal apartment, the kolkhoz, the polyclinic, and the crèche; senses of time (Verdery 1996); and an “authoritative discourse” (Yurchak 2006) of socialist ethics and personhood that oriented the moral economies, informal practices, and forms of togetherness.
The unmaking of the Soviet way of life in the 1990s and 2000s has had an equally profound and far-reaching effect on daily life. After Mikhail Gorbachev resigned from the position of General Secretary of the CPSU on December 25, 1991,
Russia soon underwent “shock therapy,” a series of neoliberal economic reforms that had recently been undertaken with mixed results in Eastern Europe (approaches that were themselves drawn from work in Chile in the 1970s (Wedel 1998)). Neoliberal reforms were thought to weaken states—a desired outcome of many politicians and investors interested in driving a final stake in the heart of Communism (Harvey 2005;
Wedel 1998). Privatization and price and trade liberalization did indeed push
Communism over the cliff in Russia; but it also undermined state authority. This helped trigger a vacuum in legal, political and moral authority and trust. This enhanced social destabilization and led to wages in arrears, shortage, barter, disorder
8
Figure 1. “Roaming for Travelers.” St. Petersburg Cellphone Ad, 2004.
(besporiadok) (Humphrey 2002) and lawlessness (bespredel), while further entrenching the hegemony of the Soviet nomenklatura, or bureaucratic elite (Verdery
1996; Volkov 2002).
Many anthropologists of postsocialism have studied the impacts of these inter- related historical events on the ways in which people made sense of their social worlds and of themselves. My dissertation engages most closely with studies of how the collapse-transformation dynamic has reshaped subjectivity. This has been an important theme in the anthropological literature, and has been elaborated in relation to some other term, whether labor (Dunn 2004; Kideckel 2008; Lampland 1995); concepts of soul (Pesmen 2000); memory (Berdahl and Bunzl 2010; Berdahl, et al.
2000; Borneman 1992); everyday speech (Ries 1997); property and de-collectivization
(Humphrey 1998; Verdery 2003); ethics (Caldwell 2004; Rogers 2009); consumption
(Patico 2008); the press (Roudakova 2007; Wolfe 2005); religion (Wanner 2007);
9 gender and family (Gal and Kligman 2000a; Gal and Kligman 2000b; Kligman 1998); or changing healthcare regimes (Petryna 2002; Rivkin-Fish 2005). These studies offer a rich view of personhood, selfhood and subjectivity at an intersection of moral obligation, identification, social relations, repertoires and understandings.
Drawing on these works, my study offers a direct engagement with subjectivity in sites where the fabric of the self is the primary object—the psychology fields. This approach also has the advantage of studying an historically contested set of activities:
“making-up” persons (Hacking 1986) was of central concern to the Soviet state, which had sought to shape structures of feeling, aspirations and ethical social relations through a massive cultural infrastructure. This directly influenced the formation of the psychological disciplines. By taking up the post-Soviet formation of the applied psychology fields, I thus also open up questions of how the party-state’s interest in subject-formation has been transformed alongside other post-Soviet transformations.
This combination of synchronic and diachronic levels of analysis offers observations about the political and personal meanings of those big terms
“democratization” and “liberalism” in Russia. Work around these terms is vexed and crowded, both in the more prescriptive, social science fields, as well as in anthropology. Hann (1996; 2002), and Burawoy and Verdery (1999) have noted a tendency among political scientists to let normative assumptions drive analyses of
Russia, leading in some cases to echoes of Fukuyama’s (1992) “end of history” and the triumph of liberal capitalism. In contrast, anthropologists working in postsocialist and postcolonial contexts have been critical of liberal triumphalism as it has been promoted in Russia and other nation-states. Critiques have been leveled at the lack of
10 fit of reform policies with cultural or institutional conditions; the cynical use of democratic rhetoric to secure an entrenched elites’ hegemony (Paley 2001); and the paradoxical silencing effects of certain liberal politics and their invocations of freedom, equality and human rights (cf. Englund 2006; Mahmood 2005; Said 1994;
Spivak 1988).
When it comes to Russia, this polarized field obscures as much as it reveals about the complexities of post-Soviet transformation. This dissertation therefore plots an alternate path. Hesitant to dismiss the claims of “learning to be free” that I encountered as a Trojan horse for neoliberal capitalism, nor to accept them as a liberatory yawp after tossing aside the Communist yoke, I seek a middle course through “freedom” and its “subjects.” My arguments rest on an intentional
“ambivalence”—both analytical as well as ethnographic—that I suggest can yield numerous benefits, not only to policy-oriented analyses of Russia, but also to anthropology’s critical discourse on liberalism and the politics of freedom.
Throughout the dissertation I oscillate between two in some ways contradictory positions. On the one hand, I offer a critical analysis of the production of class inequality through psychological work. On the other, I take seriously the claims informants made about the sociopolitical importance of their work. In an attempt to
“move beyond” these contradictory positions, I find particular inspiration in Wendy
Brown’s (2003) call to disaggregate political from economic liberalism in order to avoid the surrender of values of equality, freedom and rights to the rationality of market-oriented governance.
11 History as an Analytic Problem
Under what circumstances did the kinds of psychological knowledge that Vera and
Irina displayed for us that day in the café become available to them in Russia? In attempting to answer such questions, it quickly becomes clear that “transformation” is not only a research problematic; it is also a research problem. This is because its dimensions are hard to describe without identifying a “before” and an “after.” For example, if one is interested in the transformation of subjectivity through psychological work at the seam of markets and new kinds of political rationalities, then it is important to know how subjectivity and psychology were constituted before.
How has psychological knowledge been governed historically (by state actors, theoretical discourses, and researchers)? How has it been practiced (constituting the patient/client as a particular kind of subject; creating social distinctions; providing technologies for self-work; pathologizing)? Similarly, what is “new” about post-Soviet subjectivities? Finally, what might these historical forms suggest about Vera and
Irina’s contemporary psychological knowledge?
Throughout the dissertation I pay close attention to these historical concerns in order to ground, as thoroughly as possible, my research questions and objects of study—psychological expertise, subjectivity and governmentality. Yet in attempting to trace what I have called the genealogies of these and other terms, I quickly ran into two related problems. First, a single informant could offer very different descriptions of the past: at times, it was as if the Soviet period (at least at its late stages) had little effect on the shape of psychological practice. At other times, however, the specter of
Soviet control seemed to loom large. Which was true? The historiography of Soviet
12 psychology was not much help in resolving this question. Like other more politically focused works in Soviet politics and history, it was quite ideological.2 It was mainly written either at the start of the Cold War in the 1950s, or near its conclusion, in the
1980s. While many historians appear resistant to acknowledge the overdetermination of their scholarship by Cold War politics, their hand-wringing prefaces appear resigned to it nonetheless. American social psychologist and historian Raymond
Bauer, writing in 1959, claims that his book “attempts to take one step beyond [books about political interference with science in the Soviet Union] and to inquire into the rationale behind interference in one science, psychology, and thereby to get further insight into the nature of the system.” That this should mark a qualitative shift in research gives some pause. And anyway, half a page later he adds the dose of realpolitik: “To deal with this [Soviet] system effectively we must understand it in its own terms. For this purpose we need to scrutinize it with cold objectivity, particularly avoiding the temptation to easy self-delusion about its internal weakness” (1959:xi).
Meanwhile the history written by the Soviet psychologist Artur Petrovsky (1990) appears hamstrung in its own way, generally sidestepping the politics of psychological knowledge, and sticking to the development of the science alone.3
2 The historiography of the Soviet Union is often described in terms of two opposed schools— the totalitarians and the revisionists (social historians). The former devoted themselves to the study of major political events, policy shifts, propaganda statements and utterances of the leadership, largely from afar and from the top down. These were seen to be the most relevant materials for judging the USSR’s formation and internal dynamics. Questions of political legitimacy and agency played a small role in these analyses. Revisionists, meanwhile, placed more emphasis on the study of everyday life, moving from the bottom up and focusing on the idea of dissembling behavior, whether in the form of masks and survival strategies (Fitzpatrick 2005), or tricks, forms of cheating and corruption (Kotkin 1995). For an overview of Soviet historiography, see Sheila Fitzpatrick’s (2008) recent reflections in the Slavic Review, and the responses and discussions that ensued. 3 Nonetheless, a number of studies are less anchored in the politics of the day. Here I would cite the work of Michael Cole on the journal Soviet Psychology, and Wolf Lauterbach (1984), as well as
13 Another related problem is that many of these studies share a presumption of a functionalism linking Soviet psychology’s evolution and Marxist ideology. Scholars have been drawn to Soviet psychology for reasons much like those animating other historians of science—transformations in the field’s concepts and practices were thought to illuminate broader social transformations—yet this conceptualization went beyond “symptomatology” (i.e. that a shift in psychology may reflect changes elsewhere in society, but is not necessarily functionally related). These studies begin from the assumption that, after the October Revolution, the Party apparatus was keenly interested in promoting a Marxist psychology (as well as other sciences and arts). Then, an argument is made whose coherence is based on ideology. As Raymond
Bauer states, “From the early days of the Bolshevik regime to the present [1959] the discipline of psychology in the USSR has undergone a number of fundamental changes—one might even refer to them as revolutions—which cannot be understood except as a function of social and political conditions in the Soviet Union” (1959:4).4
Of course Marxism did play an important role in Soviet politics, science, aesthetic movements and daily life. Soviet psychology, the science that was to deal with the the collection of “post-Soviet perspectives” on Russian psychology, edited by Koltsova et al (1996). These are essential to reading these histories “against the grain.” 4 Ideologically driven accounts of Soviet history continue to be very entrenched. Many recent cultural histories devoted to the topic of Soviet daily life have also used Communism’s ideological position on “privacy” as a point of analytic departure (See, for example, (Dobrenko 1997; Engelstein and Sandler 2000; Garros, et al. 1995; Lahusen 1997; Naiman 1997)). Kaier and Naiman (2006:1), for example, write that “Throughout the early Soviet period, private experiences of everyday life were understood to be in potential conflict with the ideally collective and public nature of Soviet experience. This volume examines how Soviet Russia and its citizens sought to resolve this conflict by taking the Revolution inside.” Whether or not it is a coincidence that this textual production of privacy has largely emerged the West, where privacy, in Svetlana Boym’s words, is “elevated to the status of state religion” (1994:40) is hard to say. Certainly some of these works fall into a trap: they become ensnared in excavating a “Soviet subjectivity,” which, nods to Foucault’s conception of productive power notwithstanding, seem to be seeking a particular, almost liberal, subjectivity in the face of Soviet political oppression. For a summary of Western historiography on Soviet subjectivity/ self/ identity, see Chatterjee and Petron (2008).
14 very politically sensitive issue of personhood, illness and the social as the utopia was under construction, was under constant ideological pressure. However, the tendency to reproduce analytically the Stalinist desire to bring all of society into line with ideology has foreclosed an attention to practices, a fact that poses obstacles to the task of historicizing contemporary psychotherapy.
In light of the analytic minefield, one might ask, why bother with the historiography? There are several important reasons to do so. The first is disciplinary: the “historic turn” in anthropology, as Sherry Ortner (2006:8-11, 17) terms it, was a response to several important theoretico-political interventions that had placed new urgency on locating ethnographic sites historically, including a Marxist interest in including in the study of cultures the dynamics of political-economy, class oppression and world systems (cf. Wolf 1982). This was part of an effort to counteract the primitivizing notion of a “people without a history,” but also to acknowledge the profound influence that global capitalism was having (and had had) on the cultures being studied. The influence of postcolonial theory also pushed the discipline to situate its sites in the contexts of colonialism and imperialism (e.g. (Cohn 1980)).
Village anthropology was transformed from a laboratory for the study of man, to a location caught in the cross-currents of imperial expansion, some of which were bearing the self-same anthropologist.
Historicizing is also important for the anthropology of postsocialism. One reason is primarily geo-political. Anthropologists of postsocialism wrote in the 1990s and early 2000s against the teleological view among political scientists and economic reformers that post-Soviet Russia was in a transition to “Democracy.” The critique of
15 “transitology” generated a motif of “transformation,” which was open-ended, processual, and contingent (Burawoy and Verdery 1999; Hann, et al. 2002). (This project is very much in keeping with such a focus on transformation.) At the same time, some anthropologies of “transformation” can appear complicit in “transitology” because they give comparatively less attention to the history of socialist practices, institutions and discourses with which current forms articulate. This outcome seems to be an effect of the logic of the prefix “post” and what Appiah terms, in another context, the “space-clearing gesture” (1991). Here, socialism is compressed into a flattened, lapsed experience, in order to address what happens “after”—after marketization; after democratization; after liberalization. In this sense, then, careful attention to genealogical lines of continuity and development across political rupture—institutional, practical, legal, illegal—can be a useful strategy for resisting narratives of “transition” (though of course it is no guarantee).5
As was mentioned, however, the promise that the literature offers for “finding out what came before” is also constrained. As a way of dealing with the “history problem” I pursue two different, and not entirely complementary, strategies. The first is in response to the unevenness of my interviews, in which a single informant could offer multiple accounts of the past. To make sense of this I draw on Hayden White’s
(1984) radical deconstruction of historiography, which highlighting the “imaginary way” the past is represented in consciousness and discourse. This fundamentally shifts the task from laying out “what really happened” to attending to history as a
5 This is more consistent, after all, with the way lives are lived. Caroline Humphrey puts it pointedly thus: “It would be perverse not to recognize the fact that people from East Germany to Mongolia are making political judgments over a time span that includes the socialist past as their prime reference point, rather than thinking just about the present trajectory to the future” (2002:13).
16 representative means through which certain discourses of power inscribe themselves in the present. Drawing on White’s (1987:47-8) notion of “figuration,” I show how both I and my informant used particular historical figurations to position ourselves in some relation to each other and the Cold War. I thus show how the collection of historical context is itself an important site of ethnographic production.
My second strategy is to offer a coherent narrative of the history of the applied psychology fields, while at the same time thinking carefully about the politics of representation. Here I draw loosely on Michel Foucault’s genealogical method to shape a series of reading strategies, and to raise questions about the presumed functional link between Marxist-Leninst ideology and Soviet psychological and psychotherapeutic practice; the lack of agency in the Soviet sciences; and the idea of the clean post-Soviet break. I emphasize conditions of possibility, contingency and pragmatics; agency within constraints; and continuity. This is consistent with
Foucault’s attention to practices in lieu of institutionalist functionalisms, and/or stories of evolution and origin (Valverde 2007:160-161).
As a whole, my wrangling with the history problem relies on a “genealogical” sensibility, which I understand to be an approach that begins with an acknowledgement of the instability of history writing, and the role of present concerns in framing. As Dreyfus and Rabinow remark, a genealogy develops a certain “grid of intelligibility” that illuminates some things, but not others. It is productive not of an account “fully adequate to the past,” but rather of a “history of the present” that begins with a diagnosis of the current situation, and approaches history with an “unequivocal
17 and unabashed contemporary orientation.”6 The objective is to identify “the acute manifestation” of some political technology or ritual in order to then “see where it arose, took shape, gained importance” (Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982:118-125). But the point of these exercises is more than just academic. Scholarship on countries in the former-Soviet bloc continue to struggle with the history question. My aim in this dissertation is to offer some new ethnographic tools for thinking postsocialist transformation historically.
Anthropological Approaches to Subjectivity
There are rich ethnographies conducted at the intersection of psychology and anthropology; this study is a little different than many of them. It is not a cross- cultural analysis aimed at deriving a theory of the psyche, the self, the personality, or any other combination of psycho-theoretical problematics, as in some early forms of psychological anthropology (e.g. Benedict 1959; Mead 2001). It is also not a comparison of psychological or psychiatric concepts in Russia and the US or Europe, as in cross-cultural psychiatry (e.g. Kleinman 1988; Lee 1999). This ethnography shares the view of cultural psychology that “eschews any notion of the ‘psychic unity of mankind’” (qtd. in Moore 2007:30; Shweder 1991:88-90), but also questions the naturalized object at the center of that subfield—“the psyche/self.” While I overlap
6 As Dreyfus and Rabinow (1982:118-119) note, genealogy is not primarily a matter of “capturing the meaning or significance of the past” (though neither is it a fiction): “The genealogist, having destroyed the project of writing a ‘true’ history of the past, has no recourse to its comforts.” Genealogy should not be confused with presentism, where current meanings and concerns—e.g. “democracy”—are projected whole cloth back into history. Nor is it finalist, whereby one tries to locate the kernels of the present in the past and then show them to be inevitable in their unfolding. Rather, a history of the present is a matter of “isolating the central components of political technology today and tracing them back in time”—a matter of asking “how did we get here?”
18 with the interest in ethnopsychology in representations of mind of self, my goal is not to shed light on “the Russian self” as such. Nor is this a project that uses psychoanalytic theory to fathom the depths of subjectivity (e.g. Moore 2007).7
Instead, this dissertation takes up the conceptual challenge of examining “the self” without attributing any particular content to it—that is, to view it in a
“nominalist” way (Hacking 2004), as a “moving resultant” (Donzelot 1979) that takes shape through the interventions like Vera, Irina and others. The research question, then, becomes a genealogical one: how has “the self” been problematized over time?
This approach is more consistent with the anthropology of emotions, which, following the linguistic turn, has approached the category of the self as itself a cultural category ( cf. Carrithers, et al. 1985; Lutz and Abu-Lughod 1990). The idea is not just that “the self” varies cross-culturally (as if cultures put different kinds of window-dressing on
“the self,” which is itself unchanging at the core). Rather, the very notion of “a self” must be also be queried. As Hacking might have it, we need to approach “the self”8 through an “historical ontology” (2004).
Russia, with different traditions of thinking about the self, is a very good place to do it, and, to a degree, Russian psychologists are drawing on new discourses and practices of the self. Starting with a nominalist interest in selfhood, I explore how the ascribed thingness of the self has been transformed in the decades of Soviet collapse and post-Soviet transformation, and what it reveals about politics in Russia. This
7 While I agree with Henrietta Moore (2007) that psychoanalytic theory take us further “into” subjectivity than the post-structural approaches can. This is because it draws on a much vaster conceptual vocabulary that opens onto affective/psychic processes that might be structuring different motives, practices and relations. Yet for the purposes of this study, it remained important to avoid the use of the objects of study as analytics. 8 Henceforth, I dispense with the quotation marks.
19 approach is indebted to Nikolas Rose (1996b), who approaches “the self” outside the
“psy” discourses (since he sees these discourses precisely as the research problem).
His view is that “psy” is an intellectual technology linked to making persons visible that is also, crucially, connected to political power. His idea is not that psychologists have a governing desire, but government has come, over the course of the 20th century, to depend on instrumentalizing the capacities of “subjects of sovereignty” in order to make the self an ally of government. His general argument is that, as “freedom” has become a technology of liberal government, so too have the psychologist’s tools, aimed at self-realization and self-esteem, come both to organize the way we experience of our world and our selves, and to render the self a surface for government. In a sense, then, psy can be thought of as a set of knowledge practices that is separate from the immediate concerns of power, but which, through the way it renders new technologies and ways of viewing the subject, becomes mobilized as a technique of rule.9
A key analytic concept in this study is subjectivity, which I understand to contain two paradoxical senses. On the one hand, to be a subject is to be an agent, as in the grammatical subject of action in a sentence. On the other hand, one is also a subject-object, as in a citizen who is subject to certain forms of authority. As both
Foucault (2000b) and Butler (1997) have suggested, this founds the paradoxical nature of agency, where subordination is simultaneously the condition of one’s agency.
9 See also Foucault’s discussion of the relationship between regimes of truth and the exercise of power (1980), and Donzelot’s discussion of how psychiatry and psychoanalysis become tied to liberal France’s “policing of the family” (1979).
20 Problems of Differentiation in Governmentality Studies
A key concern in this study has been to explore the relationship between the work that psychologists like my friends Vera and Irina do and “the state’s” interest in the formation of post-Soviet subjects. In straightforward terms, both Vera and Irina are state-workers. Vera, in her mid-thirties, is a psychologist in one of St. Petersburg’s municipal psychological assistance organizations, where children having trouble in school are sent for remedial work, therapy and consulting. And Irina, also in her thirties, is a psychotherapist in a state institution for disabled children. Their work is thus institutionally a part of Russia’s “psychological complex,” and can be viewed as an instantiation of state-based psychological pedagogies. At the same time, however, both Irina and Vera are also running their own consulting businesses on the side. From the standpoint of governance, the various positions they occupy pose more questions than answers. That is, the seemingly simple question about the relationship between their work and the state quickly fractures. What is “the state”? Given their side-work, to what degree are they “state workers”? What is the relationship between their roles as state workers and business people? If we conceive of these types of work as forms of governance, then what is the relationship between them?
In approaching these questions, I have found very useful some recent interventions in anthropology and social theory that shift the terrain away from monolithic conceptions of “the state.” According to the monolithic view, the state was, a priori, a distinct entity, and place of origin of political process. Such a view had characterized much of Marxist functionalism, whose theories of capital accumulation enacted through the hegemony of elites had been grounded on “reducing the state to a
21 certain number of functions, such as the development of productive forces and the reproduction of relations of production” (Foucault 1991:103). And, as Timothy
Mitchell (1991) notes, political science had also resurrected a “state-centric” approach following a period of analysis of “political systems” more broadly. The state-as- monolith is insufficient for capturing the hybridity of Vera and Irina’s positions vis-à- vis governmental and commercial services.
Instead, recent moves away from state-centric approaches are useful for making sense of the positions of Vera, Irina and others. A key figure here is Timothy
Mitchell (1991), who argues that even the taken-for-granted line between state and society, which one might use to differentiate Vera and Irina’s “public” and “private” work, is internal to the exercise of power. In other words, the production of a state- society divide, according to Mitchell, should be considered part of state power, thus offering a link between Irina’s and Vera’s commercial and state-based projects. Are both types of projects, then, a function of “state power”? Echoing Mitchell, Aradhana
Sharma and Akhil Gupta (2006:9), have noted that “the state” is produced as much through fiat as through the everyday practices that unfold on the ground. “Disciplinary practices help shape both everyday understandings of what ‘the state’ is and what ‘it’ does as well as influence the practices of state agents.” Thus, to a degree “state agents” like Irina and Vera enact the state. But is that all? Putting a finer point on this question, James Ferguson and Akhil Gupta (2002) have developed the idea of “state spatialization”—that is, an important dimension of state power is that its political legitimacy and reification is produced through mundane bureaucratic practices that help construct both “vertical” (i.e. hierarchical) and “encompassing” (i.e. horizontal)
22 dimensions. Such insights offer us a language for exploring how Irina and Vera’s work can simultaneously constitute, enact and also alter “the state.”
This particular view of the state as something dispersed, locally enacted and produced through practices draws inspiration from the concept of “governmentality,” which Michel Foucault (2007) developed in his famous lectures of 1978. Analyitcally, this complex concept implies an attention to the practices of government—what states actually do—rather than legal or political pronouncements. Beyond this, governmentality also has a specific content: it is based on the observation that many liberal (and increasingly non-liberal) states have increasingly combined sovereign and disciplinary forms of rule with forms of governance from afar that are based on guided forms of self-rule. In Foucault’s terms, governmentality as an historical term is based on the idea of government as sets of tactics and practices aimed at “a new kind of finality”: “a right manner of disposing things so as to lead not to the form of the common good…but to an end which is ‘convenient’ for each of the things that are to be governed” (Foucault 1991:94-95; cf. Li 2007).
As Miller and Rose (1990) have argues, certain academic disciplines have facilitated the “government at a distance.”10 Through “technologies” like mapping, calculating, counting and census-taking, as well as forms of expert intervention in the
10 As Miller and Rose write (1990:1), “We argue that an analysis of modern ‘government’ needs to pay particular attention to the role accorded to ‘indirect’ mechanisms for aligning economic, social and personal conduct with socio-political objectives. We draw upon some recent work in the sociology of science and technology in analyzing these mechanisms, borrowing and adapting Bruno Latour’s notion of ‘action at a distance’ (cf. Latour 1987). We argue that such action at a distance mechanisms have come to rely upon ‘expertise’: the social authority ascribed to particular agents and forms of judgment on the basis of their claims to possess specialized truths and rare powers. And we contend that the self-regulating capacities of subjects, shaped and normalized in large part through the powers of expertise, have become key resources for modern forms of government and have established some crucial conditions for governing in a liberal democratic way.”
23 health of the population (termed biopolitics), it has become “possible to act on events, places and people that are unfamiliar and a long way away.” Among the most intriguing and relevant (for this study) technologies of rule has been the rise of psychological sciences. No longer exclusively a tool for patrolling the boundary of madness, psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry have also activated forms of self- management that have replaced the discipline of the internal policeman in us all with a drive for freedom and realization that is, at the same time, aligned with certain goals of governance. In sum, it is this formulation that helps us to explore the relationship between the practices of Russian psychologists like Vera and Irina, and a much larger set of issues tied to postsocialist governance: how have their therapeutic practices become and not become part of a relay of governance that extends across both governmental and non-governmental institutions?
Fieldwork raised a number of important issues, prompting several interventions in the governmentality literature. First, inasmuch as Foucault’s genealogy of governmentality has a particular location—i.e. Western Europe—and is not a theory of the state, it cannot be “applied” directly to places like Russia. For example, Laura Engelstein (1993) argues that tsarist Russia lacked the kind of legal culture that gave way to the disciplinary practices that Foucault charts in modern
Europe, and which were the stepping stones to “government.” As Saba Mahmood
(2005:77) puts it, a central challenge lies in “conceptualiz[ing] modes of secular- liberal governance in non-Western societies, societies that on the one hand follow the structural logic of what Foucault calls governmentality in the context of late-liberal
Western societies, and that, on the other hand, have modified this logic in historically
24 specific ways.” The middle ground, she adds, is that “governmentality [in non-liberal places] refers not so much to the ruling capacities of the state apparatus as to the management of a social field whose operations ensure that citizens produce and monitor their own conduct as individual subjects.” I understand this to mean that it is not the character of the state (weak of strong), or its genealogy (liberal or non-liberal) that justifies this analytic approach. Rather, what counts are the technologies of rule that incite forms of self-management.
Related, drawing on Georgio Agamben (1998) and Stuart Hall (1985),
Matthew Kohrman (2005) has cautioned against writing off the state the way that some governmentality studies have tended to do. “[O]ver much of his career,”
Kohrman points out, “Foucault was so interested in demonstrating that authority was always relational and diffuse that he overplayed the state’s insignificance as a sphere of biopolitical formation.” In some cases, Kohrman argues, “[T]he inner workings of states (particularly nation-states) may be as important, if not more important, than any other” within any particular sociopolitical formation (2005:9). Certainly in the Russian context, where a “strong state” is very much in evidence, and which has an entirely unique political genealogy, these are essential considerations.
My analysis of the government of psychological citizen-subjects in Russia thus draws both on the general research ethos of governmentality studies—that is, a way of looking at the state through its governing practices and experts that does not necessarily presuppose “the state”—while at the same time being attentive to the fact that in certain sociopolitical formations “the state” can be quite central to the management of daily life.
25 A key finding of this study is that the psychological governance of subjects in
Russia has blended in different ways with forms of sovereign rule and discipline to produce uneven, highly classed subject-positions. In brief, despite sharing a similar rationale—the development of patriotic and successful entrepreneurs—the methods, assumptions and goals of psychological consulting vary according to institutional location and population served. This difference was particularly apparent in Vera’s work. While her work in municipal services is busy with the “problem child,” her private services cater to an elite child’s “innate potential.” These divergent orientations, each of which marshals the weight of scientific authority, have potentially far-reaching effects because they offer authoritative languages that mediate how parents and teachers relate to the child as an individual and as a social being.
My study also identifies new areas of development and extension in the governmentality literature. First, the literature is often weak on differentiation—in place of actual people with social locations, identities and histories, we get discursively defined “subjects.” This makes it difficult to appreciate how governing techniques actually take shape on the ground. In pushing to make links between neoliberal government and social difference I join conversations started by Aihwa Ong
(2006), whose work has focused on instances where states suspend certain neoliberal projects and on the uneven social effects of those processes; Lisa Rofel (2007), who has connected the study of neoliberalism to questions of sexual difference and national desire; and Donald Moore (2005) and Tanya Murray-Li (2007), who have introduced questions of class difference into governmentality. My contribution to these conversations is in the way I draw on a discussion of habitus and disposition to further
26 elaborate the uneven kinds of subjectification that can take place through neoliberal governmentality. Drawing Bourdieu (1984) into dialogue with Foucault, I suggest that
“psychological governance” and its classed effects can be considered through the way psychotherapy promotes particular kinds of “psychic dispositions” and life trajectories.
I also work through how political rationalities—neoliberal, socialist, postsocialist—intersect with market versus state practices. Drawing on the concept of the “assemblage” (see, for example, (Ong and Collier 2005)) I find a range of governing “styles” that produce what I describe as an “assembled biopolitics”—a differentiated (and differentiating) approach to children that has helped to produce the classed-subject positions I found in my fieldsites. Related is the importance of geographic scale: while at the level of “discourse” commercial practitioners appear involved in the promotion of neoliberal-like psychological governance, when considered in the space not just of the global-neoliberal, but also the national, these pedagogies appear to take on quite a different shape. This suggests that the geographic and cultural scale of analysis is also essential to a consideration of how different governmentalities are enacted by experts with particular social locations. Finally through an ethnographic examination of municipal practitioners, I suggest another disjuncture within governing projects—one between ends and means. The state- endorsed rhetoric to help children become successful entrepreneurs (that is, the
“ends”) is, ironically, thwarted by other state-actions, such as the provision of limited resources, and the insistence on audit procedures. These, in turn, produce staffing
27 problems, in-fighting, time-wasting and the reduction of psychological purview to one of crisis management among the most vulnerable populations.
All of these findings can be thought of as having to do with a general problem of analytic slippage in governmentality studies between what scholars call
“rationality” and “technology.” In the governmentality literature, rationality is discussed as the “discursive character” of government, namely the representational aspect, the hopes and plans. In order for political rationalities to be translated into reality, so-called “technologies of government” are required. “It is through technologies that political rationalities and the programmes [sic] of government they articulate become capable of deployment” (Miller and Rose 1990:82). Despite the analytic distinction between rationalities of rule and the “humble and mundane mechanisms” that bring them into being, many early governmentality studies appear to conflate the two. In operating at only a high discursive level that considers not social actors but “subjects” and not national of local context but only the global, it is not surprising that many studies find what their frameworks predicted: a faceless population that runs like a clock and governs itself, the production of certain kinds of subject-positions, and a political rationality seamlessly translated into action.
Analytically, then, this dissertation agitates for an approach that combines an attention to the circulation of discourse through state rhetoric and practices, with an attention to the practices of government.
I will conclude that, at least in Russia, the forms of self-improvement usually associated with neoliberalism cannot be considered governmental in the usual sense.
While WTO membership and the monetization of social benefits confirm a neoliberal
28 ethos in Putin-Medvedev’s Russia, the state is generally not in the business of the neoliberal government of subjects. Although the state promotes the rhetoric of entrepreneurialism, its institutions emphasize not self-realization or entrepreneurial forms of conduct, but psycho-correction and “guidance” (soprovozhdenie) (Shipitsyna
2003:5-37), indicating more interest in a stable social economy than in the moral or ethical futures of the child (cf. Donzelot 1979). Since municipal organizations are also vastly under-funded, the “government at a distance” characterizing neoliberalism in many Western countries is better described here as the “government of indifference.”11
The Problem of Freedom
And what might Vera and Irina have to say about their work? How, as one-time clients, would they characterize the psychologization of Russia? Not surprisingly, they and other informants spoke little about the state or market and a great deal more about how psychotherapy has offered them relief from suffering and depression, and a means to pursue self-realization and internal freedom. How can these accounts be brought into dialogue with an analysis of psychological governance? Can this be done in such a way as to avoid collapsing the account into either one of resistance in the face of power, or enactment of a governmental script? Henrietta Moore (2007:27)
11 This arrangement (or lack of arrangement) can be contrasted with China and the West. Ong and Zhang have discussed “socialism at a distance” in China, where the socialist state has unleashed the “powers of the self” as part of a modernization strategy. They note, however, that the state continues to “regulate from a distance the fullest expression of self-interest” (Ong and Zhang 2008:3). The implication is that, in contrast to the West, this is a far more directed channeling of “liberation.” The Russian case suggests a third “type”: Here we find the same appeals to the powerful self, but the institutions that would bring it about are starved of funds and unable to carry it out. Thus, the “government of indifference.”
29 nicely encapsulates the ethnographic import of these questions: “The continuing difficulty [in anthropological theories of subjectivity] is about how cultural representations intersect with personal lived experience, and the degrees to which they determine that experience, and by what mechanisms.”
To address this problem of determination versus lived experience, I turn to recent work on the anthropology of ethics. This literature draws on Foucault’s later work, in which he shifted from questions of how we are made into objects and subjects by power/knowledge, to the question of how “we become subjects and objects for ourselves” (Foucault 1994). For reasons of ethnographic practice, I find struggling between these “two Foucaults” extremely important—both analytically as well as ethically.12 Analyses of disciplinary power can seem too determinative for ethnographies focused on actors, a fact that is both ethically problematic as well as analytically violent. And at the same time, analyses on the arts of the self can seem unanchored in relations of power. What is needed, therefore—and this is the challenge—is a way to let ethnographic surpluses see the light of day in ways that neither rest on rightly problematized tropes of agency and resistance, nor issue apologia on behalf of power. Practical ethics appears to offer a way through this problem in that it names the process of becoming “subjects and objects for ourselves” in terms of a set of “freely” engaged pursuits that are at the same time shaped by cultural values, social norms and relations of power. Thus, the solution that practical
12 This shift in Foucault’s work is indeed a part of his rapprochement with the Enlightenment, via Kant. It might be argued that this marks a betrayal of the bite his earlier critique of modern power had. But he is quick to add that “the thread which may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements but, rather, the permanent reactivation of an attitude—that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era” (1997b:312)— what he describes later in that essay as a “limit attitude” (1997b:315).
30 ethics offers to the problem of determination versus lived experience is one that defines personal experience in relation to cultural representations, but not necessarily subordinate to them. This is connected to the poststructural understanding of subjectivity, where agency is premised on a relation to authority.
Saba Mahmood’s (2005) reading of Foucault (1990) helps clarify what sense practical ethics can make for the task of exploring Vera and Irina’s views of their work in relation to questions of governmentality. In her study she examines Muslim women’s piety, which is often read by Western feminists as an example of either false consciousness or of patriarchal oppression—conceptions that she suggests rely on a particularly liberal-individualist understanding of agency. Drawing on the notion of practical ethics, Mahmood pushes against these feminist critiques by describing women’s piety in terms of a pursuit of virtue through embodied practices that at the same time unfolds within constraints. Mahmood succinctly describes practical ethics in relation to the “paradox of subjectivation”: “[T]he capacity for action is enabled and created by specific relations of subordination” (2005:29). What makes “practical ethics” useful, then, is the way in which it replaces the notion of ethics as a universal code to be applied, with ethics as a set of daily practices aimed at determining how to live. As Michael Lambek puts it, this entails a shift from obligation to judgment or evaluation; from ends to means; and from absolute values to contingent, culturally mediated values.13
13 This approach has recently been taken up by Saba Mahmood (2005) and James Laidlaw (2002). As Douglas Rogers (2009) has recently argued, this tradition can also be linked to the more outwardly focused conceptions of ethics stemming from Marcel Mauss’ notion of personhood (la personne morale). See also Lakoff and Collier (2004) and Lambek (2008). As Douglas Rogers has suggested in his assessment of ethical regimes and dilemmas in Central Russia, this conception is
31 This is a productive way to approach post-Soviet psychological work, which can also be described in terms of the pursuit of particular kinds of virtue within constraints.14 By viewing psychotherapy both as a pragmatic effort to determine how to live and also as a form of rule and political technology, we can begin to consider it in terms of Certeau’s notion of “tactics”—the small maneuvers of “making do” with the things one has been given (cf. Caldwell 2004; Certeau 1988), a kind of “escape without leaving” (Farquhar and Zhang 2005:321) perhaps not unlike the politics of vnye, or of living simultaneously inside and outside, a discursive feature of late- socialism (Yurchak 2006). Putting aside the call for resistance, what is left is a language to support inquiries that avoid reducing being a subject to processes of subjectification—in Certeau’s language, confusing production with use. I thread this idea of “escape without leaving” throughout the dissertation in order to highlight the ways in which psychologists’ projects can be simultaneously liberating and disciplinary, enabling, as they claim, forms of “internal freedom” and realization that has been threaded through market and state rationalities and techniques that also turn the self into a commodity and an object of management inscribed with new, highly classed dispositions (Bourdieu 1984). The notion of practical ethics gets at the complex ambiguities at the heart of post-Soviet governance, where “freedom” is betwixt and between the Soviet past and the capitalist present.
ethnographically preferable because of its similarity to practice theory, which brings the level of inquiry down to the everyday decision and pushes beyond structure-agent dichotomies. Moreover, it is historically preferable in that it enables investigations of how the layers of ethical repertoires have also shaped practices aimed at the good life (2009:14). 14 Interestingly, I arrive at a place that seems to be at cross purposes with her position. It is not the veiled women from whom judgment is withheld, but the proto-liberal.
32 The “paradox of subjectivation” is irresolvable. My main interest is in the tension that emerges between the “government” line and the “ethics” line, and how that tension captures something important about the work of psychologists in post-
Soviet Russia. Specifically, it opens a space for exploring psychological work in a way that loses sight neither of its encounter with economic value nor the subjective possibilities it enables. If we can grasp not only the politico-socioeconomic dimensions of the post-Soviet popularization of psychology and psychotherapy, but also its practical ethical ones, a richer picture begins to emerge that illuminates other kinds of everyday problems. My hope is that such an analytic move might be usefully paired with Wendy Brown’s (2003) suggestion to disarticulate economic neoliberalism from political liberalism—a move that my informants seemed intuitively to be making in their own pursuits of social and political alternatives through a psychological ethics of freedom. As I will suggest in the conclusion, this analytic move may enable ways of seeing Vera and Irina’s work in more expansive terms. This would account not only for psychology as technology of rule and self-commodification, but also as a form of moral economy and an interest in distinctly post-Soviet forms of social equality.
Methodology
Fieldwork for this project was conducted over 14 months between 2005-2007, the bulk of which took place between 2005-2006. It was set in St. Petersburg on the basis of the city’s historically leading role, along with Moscow, in the development of the psychology and psychotherapy fields in Russia. During the Soviet period, renegade developments in psychology were often started in St. Petersburg’s (then Leningrad)
33 Bekhterev Institute, and its university was one of the first two to regain a psychology faculty in the 1960s. The city thus offered a vibrant community for studying the post-
Soviet emergence of psychotherapy and applied psychology in parts of urban Russia.
Transported to St. Petersburg in 2005, I found myself in the midst of an intimidating variety of institutions, attitudes and expertise. In some sense, psychologists were practicing in what in the US might be divided into “private” and
“public” domains; however, the meaning of these “domains” varied depending on the context, and the line between them was also blurry. Additionally, within each
“domain” I found a wide range of activities. Private organizations (usually designated as commercial (kommercheskii) or non-governmental (negosudarstvenniy)) offered anything from the buttoned-down career development seminar, to the unbuttoned series inviting participants to come into contact with the deep subconscious. There were also numerous graduate training institutes serving a clientele interested in learning new psychological tools in their professional and personal lives. There were philanthropic organizations working with special-needs populations. Among state institutions, there were municipal assistance centers serving children, as well as clinics, hospitals, social workers and special reformatories. And there was all the psychological work being done in a theoretical and medical capacity. St. Petersburg
State University’s faculty alone includes a wide range of departments, including
Political Psychology, Crisis Psychology, Correctional Psychology, Medical
Psychology, Psychophysiology, the Psychology and Pedagogy of Professional and
Personal Development, Behavioral and Preventative Psychology, and
Ontopsychology.
34 Figuring out how to create something ethnographically manageable but also methodologically justifiable, was a challenge. My strategy was to focus on the forms of applied, therapeutic, non-medical psychology, such as psychotherapy, that were relatively undeveloped in the Soviet period and had began to appear in the late-Soviet period, becoming much more vibrant after 1991. I thus focused on those areas of psychology that were applied (thus eliminating the research fields), therapeutic (thus eliminating political and labor psychology), and non-medical (thus eliminating psychiatry). Delimiting the field helped to unravel the story of the gradual emergence of non-medical therapies, and offered a way into a fascinating set of historical and ethnographic questions related to subjectivity after socialism.
Once I had settled on a research strategy, a great deal of my time in the field was spent conducting interviews with practitioners all over the city. I interviewed 60 different practitioners, which I selected on the basis of several criteria, including institutional location (commercial; public; and non-governmental services), gender, and age (in particular people who had come of age in the late-Soviet period, and the post-Soviet period). This produced a range of perspectives on the history and status of the psychotherapy fields that resonated with my theoretical interests in the range of services in the city; the historical formation of contemporary Russian psychology; their theoretical and practical orientations; the professional histories; and their experiences as practitioners in state/market contexts. In many cases, these interviews lead to invitations to participate in “psychological trainings,” or treningi.
In time, treningi occupied more and more of my time. These quasi-group- therapy sessions ranged widely in content and form, and were my primary lens into
35 how psychologists worked, as well as what kinds of clients attend their seminars and what sorts their reasons for seeking assistance are. In all, I attended four different trainings for children at two different organizations; and five different trainings for adults at three different organizations. Those for children lasted anywhere between several days to two weeks in length. Those for adults could take place in three days, or else once a week for a period of two or three months.
As I was keen to study not only in commercial organizations, but also in municipal institutions, I also conducted intensive fieldwork in one of the city’s 19 regional Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social (PPMS) centers. I selected this center on the basis of the comparison it would afford to the commercial sector I was also studying, and also because, as a state institution, it would offer a picture of how the state’s interest in psychological governance had been concretized. In this center, I interviewed the staff, attended staff meetings in which cases were discussed, hung around, and also attended therapy/discussion sessions for both staff and local teachers.
Unlike in the commercial sector, their work with children was ruled off limits to me. I complemented this work with a visit to another PPMS center in a wealthier district.
In addition to these activities, I also collected printed materials, such as popular self-help books, glossy psychology magazines, brochures promoting self- work, website materials, and TV programs. I attended local conferences on psychology and conflict resolution. I also attended a product expo on childhood as a strategy to assess the broader market ecology in which children’s psychological services are situated. Finally, I did extensive content analysis of various kinds of
36 psychology-related media (especially talk shows and sit-coms). These latter activities afforded me a view of the popular discourse of psychology in Russia.
This project has been as much historical as ethnographic. While in the field I also collected some materials at the Library of the Academic Sciences (BAN) in St.
Petersburg. These were primarily Soviet-era documents concerned with conference proceedings in pedagogy and psychology, and Soviet-era dissertations written on the history of psychology. I have used these materials to complement my interviews on the Soviet psychotherapeutic practice and give this study a thicker historical contextualization. This work has also been combined with extensive secondary-source reading on the historiography of Soviet psychology, psychiatry and psychotherapy.
Overview of Chapters
This dissertation explores the way a new “psychological complex” is transforming regimes of living, relations of intimacy and subjectivity in the former Second World. It focuses on three broad themes—histories, futures and politics—in order to ask, how have these transformations come into being? How do they facilitate new kinds of aspirations, and to what social and political effect? PART I (Histories) traces the contemporary emergence of psychotherapy in relation to the formation of psychological expertise under socialism. In chapter 1, I attend to a problem endemic to postsocialist studies—the tendency to rely on a rhetoric of rupture and difference in order to ground studies of the ostensibly “new.” As became clear during oral history interviews, this problem had also haunted my project’s initial formulation. Just as I deployed a range of historical conceptions premised on notions of socialist difference
37 and postsocialist rupture in order to make sense of the psychotherapy boom, so did informants deploy their own conceptions. My efforts to “establish historical context” for the study ended up producing historical contexts in the field; “history” became internal to the practice of ethnography. Through a kind of auto-critique, I give the notion of “presentist histories” a centrally ethnographic significance and make a case for more careful historical attention in the anthropology of postsocialism.
These observations prompt me to argue in chapter 2 for an ethnographically motivated genealogy of post-Soviet psychotherapy. The Soviet past illuminates important dimensions of contemporary Russian psychotherapy and psychological services. For instance, the arrangement of services into distinct ministerial domains and spheres of influence and their related conceptualizations of the person are legible once one understands how the biomedical and clinical orientation of Soviet psychotherapy came into being against the backdrop of the Marxist-Leninist critique of “introspectionism” and “idealist psychology.” At the same time, however, a wide variety of alternative therapeutic practices can also be traced to the 1960s thaw, and again in perestroika when an interest in the “human factor” in production emerged as an important research imperative. This suggests that the simple opposition socialism/capitalism is insufficient to explain the pedagogies and effects of the current psychotherapeutic practices. Rather, the contemporary arrangement and conceptions of psychological services should be understood in terms of both its departures from as well as continuities with the past.
PART II (Futures) focuses on an important area of practice in St. Petersburg— psychological work with children—in order to follow psychotherapists into concrete
38 ethnographic locales. Here, psychological training and therapy is being offered to children by both commercial as well as municipal organizations. This opens an opportunity for a comparative approach. Both are heirs to perestroika-era reforms within the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in which practical psychology began to re-enter the school. And both have become tied to a federal discourse of developing
Russia’s future human capital. Chapter 3 takes a broad look at how children’s psychologists have been incorporate into the national interest in success and modernization. Here, Russia’s children become the emblems of the future, and psychologists, the means for constructing new kinds of citizen-subjects. A look at the resulting kinds of work in commercial and municipal contexts, however, suggests the production of classed subject-positions with divergent psychological content. This, I argue, is an outcome of the “assembled biopolitics” of psychological care.
Chapter 4 visits expensive children’s “psychological education” camps and finds the cultivation of an elite disposition for the next generation of business managers. Here children are told of their inherent personal potential and given various kinds of psychological “polish”—managing emotions, sensitive modes of social intercourse, communicative competence, time management—all of which are advertised as necessary to succeed in tomorrow’s Russia. And yet, an attention to the social location of the practitioners and their clients also suggests other kinds of articulations between psychological governance and politics. Specifically, at the scale of the national, it appears that practitioners are involved in a kind of “civilizing project” aimed at Russia’s emergent elite.
39 Chapter 5 focuses on municipal practitioners who, facing limited resources and weak social support, have become part of a tutelary complex—a “little army of psychologists” focused on mental hygiene and population management. Their work is also aimed at teaching children forms of self-realization, but resource constraints and waitlists have whittled the scope of work to crisis management. These divergent areas of practice, in which class difference is being reproduced through psychological enterprises, indicate how expertise is molded by institutional conditions. This suggests that it is not ideology per se, but assemblages of resource availability, biopolitics and traditions of care that make the psy disciplines complicit in the production of social differentiation and inequity. The ironic finding of this chapter is that the state’s own emphasis on accountability, audit and “rationalization” appears to be a central force in the “irrationality” of the centers’ practices.
PART III (Politics) focuses on the many ways in which informants linked their psychological interventions to the big picture problems of society, politics and transformation in Russia. Chapter 6 turns to the community of psychologists with whom I worked. At issue are the kinds of stories practitioners told about their
“pathways into psychology.” The main claim I investigate is that they are social reformers teaching people the care of self and other, and how to be free. Through a fine-grained analysis of the professional narratives, the chapter identifies several arguments for this claim. One is backward looking and grounds current ethical and political legitimacy of their efforts in relation to a discourse of Soviet constraint.
Another is to link their own stories of self-realization and liberation to narratives of overcoming and redemption. The chapter then explores the psychological landscape of
40 “social change” as expressed in their psychotherapeutic idioms. I find that their work tries to articulate an emergent language of the self with broader social concerns about chaos, fear and instability. Moreover, their work has also articulated a psychological language of social change, based on concepts of harmony and energy, that both go beyond the self, but are also caught between conservative and progressive types of self-action.
Finally, chapter 7 asks what kinds of political possibilities a revamped psychotherapy has constituted for its practitioners. Based on an in-depth analysis of popular psychology on a radio talk-show, this chapter dwells in the space between psychologist and caller to explore exactly how psychology has been instrumental in promoting new technologies of self and citizenship that promise forms of internal freedom. A close analysis of radio transcripts suggests that these technologies also prescribe a recalibration of relations of intimacy in the family, on the street and with the state. What is envisioned by the psychologist-host is nothing short of a new kind of
Russian society premised on self-esteem, equality, and civil modes of being; however, the neoliberal encouragement of callers to internalize political dissatisfaction suggests that these techniques may foreclose forms of political action. Moreover, listeners appear resistant to the calls for self-esteem, at times suggesting that the advice falls short of their psychological needs.
In the afterword I will suggest that the dissertation as a whole highlights the many pushes and pulls on subjectivity in Russia today. Psychotherapy is shown to be a mirror of inequality, but also a source of healing. It is a force for depoliticization and commoditization, but also a site for new projects of freedom. This underscores the
41 highly “personal” (and technical) nature of freedom in Russia, as well as the range of factors shaping the production of postsocialist subjects. The client and the psychological complex are both framed by a governmental assemblage that combines the techniques and discourses of liberalism, neoliberalism, democracy, patriotism and socialism. In dialogue with contemporary anthropological debates, this study testifies to the contingent relations between capital and governmentality, affect and power, expertise and freedom. The psychological disciplines can be thought of as facilitating numerous transformations in the way human subjects conceive of themselves (and others) as objects of government. The infusion of these techniques and practices by a capitalist instrumentality is undeniable. At the same time, however, the practices that have taken shape within this resignified space of the human subject overflow this analytic. Psychological self-improvement projects should also be considered as part of an ethical problem based on the practices of freedom. Psychotherapeutic forms of self- work can also become pathways to “liberation” (inverted commas emphasized), albeit a liberation that can constitute new power relations of domination. The fraught nature of liberation is apt in the Russian case, where discourses of democracy and personal freedom are pregnant with both a hegemonic neoliberal teleology of “democratic transition” and new forms of inter-subjective care, and where perhaps the most
“liberated” subjects are those with the means to hold their wealth in off-shore accounts.
42
PART I – HISTORIES
43 CHAPTER 1
Cold War Figures: The “New Soviet Man” and the “Post-Soviet Person”
I had arrived a few minutes early for my first meeting with Vitya Markov, a well- regarded male psychotherapist in St. Petersburg, with a copy of the Russian newspaper
Izvestiia, tucked under my arm to pass the time. As I stood there reading, I glanced at two others milling about as if waiting for someone. The first was a woman, and so I turned my attention to the diminutive man standing nearby. He had a salt-and-pepper beard and glasses, and was wearing jeans, a knit ski hat and a backpack. I briefly studied him, and then dismissed him as an American tourist. Our meeting time came and went, and no one arrived. The familiar worry that I had gotten the meeting place wrong crept over me. From the corner of my eye I saw the American tourist raise his phone to his ear. My phone began ringing. We turned to each other and laughed. “I was sure,” Vitya said, “that you, with your Izvestiia paper and those shoes, were
Russian.”
The fact that anthropologists and their informants often take the other for someone else serves as the frame for this chapter. In Russia, such commonplace instances of misrecognition are often enhanced by the legacies of the Cold War. As my friend Anatoli would sometimes put it in jest, “Tomas, are you a spy?” His joke exemplifies a much more subtle set of East-West discourses that shaped the
44 ethnographic encounter in important ways. My central concern here is to investigate how misrecognition reveals important things about post-Cold War relationships and perceptions of the Soviet past, as well as the imperatives of social scientific inquiry in postsocialist countries. Specifically, I will explore how the oral history interview shifts from a site of history-gathering to one of history-making. In my research, this would influence my understanding of both the relationship between the Soviet period and the psychological professions, and between history and ethnography. History was transformed from a background or context within which the present unfolds, to a conversational object with which ethnographers and informants do things.
The impetus for this analysis arose from many instances in which informants rendered the Soviet past in highly contradictory ways. For example, questions that loomed large in my investigation of the contemporary popularization of psychology had to do with the nature of Soviet psychotherapy: what were its ideological and practical features? How was it different from current forms? To what degree was it an expression of the Soviet interest in constituting New Soviet Men? In response to these questions, informants might foreground the freedom to practice; yet later on, they would highlight Party constraints. All of this made the task of historical contextualization frustrating.
I eventually recognized the opportunity in failure. In analyzing my conversations with Vitya Markov and other informants, a dialogical dance around different historical imaginaries began to appear. Suddenly, these contradictory responses looked not so much like a function of unreliable memory, increased rapport or obfuscation. Rather, they were generically and dialogically patterned: informant
45 responses fell into broadly generic patterns of either rejecting, or else embracing the
Soviet past; and the stance they (and I) adopted depended, in turn, on what the other had said.
As a way to discuss this complex phenomenon, I draw on Bakhtin’s notions of speech genre and dialogism. I adopt the term “speech genre” to describe the competing languages, patterns of thought, and resulting stances that Vitya and I each took in relation to the Soviet past. For Bakhtin, speech genres are “relatively stable types of…utterances” (1986:60) that take shape as part of the cultural and social history of language use. As he writes, “Utterances and their types, that is, speech genres, are the drive belts from the history of society to the history of language”
(1986:65).15 Conventional equivalents might be cliché, stereotype or even gesture. As
Bakhtin indicates, there is a diversity of such genres, infusing official documents and the ways we greet loved ones or friends with an embrace or just a handshake. I focus here on a relatively limited number of genres; no doubt one could find innumerable others.
This idea of speech genre illuminates the fact that we were drawing from forms of social knowledge about Russia that have been in circulation and negotiation since the Cold War.16 These are also informed by a long-standing Orientalizing discourse of
15 As Michael Holquist points out, Bakhtin here amends the Saussurean notion that speakers have a freedom to use langue as they wish through parole. Bakhtin writes that the utterance, “with all its individuality and creativity, can in no way be regarded as a completely free combination of forms of language, as is supposed…by Saussure…who juxtaposed the utterance (la parole) as a purely individual act, to the system of language as a phenomenon that is purely social and mandatory for the individuum.” He adds, “in addition to the forms of language there are also forms of combinations of these forms”—what Bakhtin terms speech genres (1986:xvi). 16 The term “genre” has also been used quite effectively by the anthropologist Nancy Ries (1997), who develops it to describe the patterned stories she heard in the late 1980s (e.g. genres of suffering or lament).
46 “Russia through Western eyes,”17 and the Russian response to that gaze. Like a speech genre, our stances appeared to have a certain stable forms, but at the same time were not bound, as with a “code,” “script,” or “schema.” Nor was what we said structured like a story or a narrative; it was open-ended, part of a repertoire. Generic speech was thus a stereotypical way of talking about the past, including and excluding certain kinds of information, emphasizing certain details and not others. Through the use of speech genres we sought a stable meeting ground in relation to history.
In surveying my informants’ statements, I find two diametrically opposed speech genres of the Soviet past. The first is a genre of rejection. Here informants invoked condemnation or moral outrage, drawing on widely recognized images of totalitarian state—the “etatization of time” and daily life (Verdery 1996), a gray reality, the bureaucratic arbitrariness, the destruction of social relationships. When speaking in such terms, informants opened a distance between themselves and the past. The second is a genre of defense. Here informants drew on other images—the authentic home life; the distance or even facilitating nature of the state; friendships; relative security; the ordinary; the possibility for foreign contact. When speaking in these terms, informants aligned themselves with the past. In any given conversation, an informant might draw on both speech genres interchangeably.
17 This discourse has always been centrally concerned with difference and comparison and has a long history. It includes several centuries of Orientalizing discourse motivated both by Western observers, as well as internally by Westward-looking Russian reformers (cf. Malia 1999). It includes Peter the Great’s efforts to build Russia’s new capital in the image of the “Venice of the North,” and the Marquis de Custine’s (1989) reproach to Russians not “for being what they are,” but for “their desire to appear to be what we [Europeans] are.” It includes Lenin’s desire to eliminate Russian backwardness through electrification. It includes Soviet Acmeist poets intent on breaking with the past through the invention of a new language, and the Western economic advisors that descended on Russia in the 1990s, sure that what Russia needed, at last, to join the West, were market reforms.
47 Meanwhile, embedded in my own questions were at least two different genres, which I term “post-Soviet.” These are tied to particular social scientific and historical models of understanding the Soviet period from the point of view of the present. One is a genre of rupture, whose logical structure is shaped by the prefix “post.” The genre of rupture led me on a quest for understanding “the transformation,” and created a whole series of binary oppositions related to socialist/postsocialist difference. Yet there was also a genre of continuity. Here, through appeals to being human, cultural forms pre-dating the Revolution, or a notion of lasting institutional or cultural practices, I offered my informants an alternate, genealogical understanding of history.
The appearance of any particular speech genre seemed dialogically related to another. To explore this further, I draw on Bakhtin’s (1984; 1981; cf. Morson and
Emerson 1990) notion of dialogism. For Bakhtin dialogue is not simply a transfer of content between a speaker and a passive listener, but a complex site of inter-subjective meaning-making that is conditioned by shifting conceptions of self and other.
Commenting on the fact that the listener can adopt a “responsive attitude” for the duration of listening, Bakhtin suggests that a “live utterance” (that is what the speaker is saying) is itself “inherently responsive.” “The listener,” he says figuratively,
“becomes the speaker” (1986:68).
Drawing on Bakhtin’s communicative model, I will suggest that the contemporary and the historical were brought together in ethnographically meaningful ways through the deployment of these speech genres. Vitya’s oscillations point to an ongoing ambivalence in Russia about the status of the Soviet period that can be seen playing out in today’s wars over memory and the meaning of the capitalist
48 transformation; nationalist discourse; and political indifference (Oushakine 2000;
2009). Meanwhile, my own oscillation highlights the historical features of conceptual interrogation: under-girding my own pursuit of “postsocialism” were understandings of Russia that have been strongly shaped by prior historical, anthropological and sociological inquiries of the Soviet Union. Through my own examples, I will draw attention to what Talal Asad’s interpreters have described as “the ideological character of objectification,” that is “the historical and political conditions of formation of the apparatuses of scholarly investigation” (Scott and Hirschkind 2006:4).
My goal in this chapter, therefore, is to offer a complex picture of one of the many ethnographic encounters on which this dissertation relies. Here “history” is seen as a performance, something akin to Johannes Fabian’s notion of “historiology”
(1996:249), and includes the subjectivity of the ethnographer in the analysis, and views conversation not just in terms of an exchange of information, but as an event.
Fraught with historiographically and culturally conditioned assumptions deployed in both directions, both informant and anthropologist enter into an eventful negotiation, each trying to anchor oneself in a particular place vis-à-vis the other. Understanding these dynamics highlights the fact that the legacies of the Soviet period remain far from settled, and are open to contestation. Any attempts at historical contextualization must, I will argue, begin with both an acknowledgement of this fact and an exploration of how, for whom, and in what ways the past continues matter. Under the best of circumstances, one may slip, even if momentarily, into the other’s shoes.
*
49 Some Words on the history of Soviet Psychology
Prior to the entering the field, I drew primarily on secondary literature in order to come up to speed on the formation of Soviet psychology and psychotherapy.18 What I wanted to know was whether what I termed variously as “applied psychology,”
“psychotherapy” or “clinical psychology” actually existed in the Soviet Union. The answer was yes and no. Based on my readings, I drew the conclusion that the forms of psychology and psychoanalysis that, in the West, would lead to a robust, albeit fractured, psychotherapy tradition were indeed almost non-existent in Russia after a brief interest in Freudianism in the 1920s. One reason for the marginalization was epistemological and related to the privileging of scientific rationalism over competing trends in European psychology, including introspection, hermeneutic approaches to psychological problems, and other so-called “subjective” methods. Such approaches had been critiqued in the nineteenth century by Russian scientists like Pavlov and
Sechenev as lacking empirical rigor. Another reason was ideological. As psychologists worked in the 1920s to outline a properly Marxist science, the emphases on materialism also tended to reinforce this earlier critique of idealism, now with the adjective “bourgeois” attached. Other important considerations were fundamentally practical—as the realities of building socialism in a largely rural country dawned in the late-1920s, what was needed were able bodies more than particular kinds of psychologically elaborated subjects.
18 The texts on which I relied included the work of Raymond Bauer (1959; 1962), Michael Cole (1977; 1969), Alxander Etkind (1997), David Joravsky (1989), Alex Kozulin (1984), Loren Graham (1987; 1990) Vera Koltsova et.al (1996) A. R. Luria (1979) Artur Petrovsky (1990) Joseph Wortis (1950), Isidore Zifferstein (1966; 1969), and Wolf Lauterbach (1974; 1984).
50 I discuss this fascinating history of ideas in more detail in the next chapter.
Suffice it to say that for the purposes of reading up before going into the field a few fundamental premises about the Soviet psychology fields in their formative years during the 1930s would emerge: 1. The individual was not set against environment according to a Freudian model of repression, but was understood as a fundamentally socially shaped being; 2. consciousness was not an a priori, but a product of a complex dialectical relationship between the material world and the psyche, a unity of material and psychic process, and an emergent result of being in the world; 3. since environment was determinative of psychological development, therefore the so-called new Soviet Man people could be made through the transformation of social conditions. The historians of Soviet psychology suggest that within such framework, concepts like motivation, personality, will and activity were somewhat out of place, as was the model of the human subject underlying ego psychology and psychoanalysis.
As for what this meant for the post-Stalin years—this remained less clear, and
I would have to go to the field to fill in the blanks. But what seemed fundamental to the shape even of post-Stalin psychology was that its applied forms—that is non- research oriented therapies—had continued to be primarily biomedical. They were developed and practiced in psychiatric clinics, taking the psychological problem as pathological—a fact that seemed to have important implications for the subsequent explosion of psychotherapy in the 1990s.
My efforts to assemble the pre-history of the contemporary psychotherapy boom also passed through Russian studies, where I sought some sense of how these sciences were part of a larger ecology. Were there, I wondered, also certain cultural
51 features in Russia that made the more self-centered psychotherapies in the West less appealing or less suited? Certainly the literature on Russian culture is abundant with examples of a more sociocentric as opposed to egocentric orientation, leaving aside the objections we might have to those terms (cf. Spiro 1993; Strathern 1988). In a more sophisticated sense, Oleg Kharkhordin (1999) looks to Russian Orthodoxy and
Soviet culture, to argue that there is, indeed, a notion of the individual; however, it was formed in and through collectivity.
Through these sources a certain perhaps not unexpected picture began to take shape: Given the project of constructing the New Soviet Man, and cultural claims about Soviet-Russian sociocentrism, it seemed logical that the field of possibilities for the emergence of a client-based therapy tradition premised on “self-work” would have been delimited culturally as well as ideologically. And therefore, in light of the subsequent collapse of Communism, this historical account seemed to enhance the novelty of the current psychotherapy interest in Russia. On this basis, a very compelling relationship between markets, individualism and expertise had emerged.
Such was my sense of things when I asked Vitya Markov, “Was there psychotherapy at all in the USSR?”
“In the Soviet Union, there was no need for therapy,” he replied as we were jostled back and forth in a silvery metro car deep underground. “When you have perfected society and the person is a product of his environment, then the person needing counseling is mentally ill. He needs a psychiatrist, not a psychotherapist.”19
19 The terms “psychology” (psikhologiia) and psychotherapy (psikhoterapiia) have different usages in Russia than in the West. The genealogies of these areas of practice are discussed in chapter 2.
52 There was something terribly satisfying in having this compelling narrative confirmed. As I would learn, however, Vitya had given a simplistic answer to a simplistic, albeit loaded, question. He had reflected back at me the stereotypical views of Soviet psychology, themselves rooted in the Cold War-era histories and cultural essentialism, which had informed my question. In other cases, he told me something completely different. Citing a variety of Western therapeutic forms that were not only possible under late-socialism, but in some cases officially sanctioned, he suggested that Soviet psychotherapy was somewhat less exotic than it had once appeared.
Indeed, on returning from the field I would begin to find accounts of officially sanctioned therapies and self-work excluded from studies of Soviet psychology and
Soviet subjectivity.20 At times, the question of “radical difference” (Dunn 2004) between East and West—not only in mental health practices, but even conceptions of subjectivity and “the self”—seemed to vanish.
Genres of the Soviet Past
Vitya Markov is a youthful fifty, by my estimate. He received his degree from
Leningrad State University as a psychotherapist in the 1970s, a profession which remains centered in the medical professions in Russia (see next chapter). As a practitioner he worked primarily in one of Leningrad’s narcology clinics, which are solely devoted to the treatment of alcoholism. Such centers had been described as undesirable places to work; Vitya had suggested to me that because his passport indicated that his nationality was “Jewish,” it was his only choice. From this one can
20 Much recent historical scholarship in the West has drawn on Foucault’s theories of subjectivation to study the everyday practices through which people became “Soviet subjects.”
53 assume that he was to a degree already positioned as an outsider within the Soviet professions. In the course of his career, he began moving increasingly toward the therapeutic model more common in the West—that is “client-centered” and therefore de-medicalized, based on talking cures, and committed to the idea that many psychological problems are in fact social problems. In the late 1980s he and another
“Jewish-by-passport” colleague founded what is now a leading psychotherapy training and consulting institute, which I term, pseudonymously, the Peace Institute. The Peace
Institute offers post-graduate psychotherapy training in various forms of psychotherapy, including in existential, humanistic and Gestalt. The Institute’s faculty also offers individual consulting, human resource trainings (treningi) for corporations, a consulting hotline, and pro-bono consultations for practitioners serving traumatized subjects. In other words, it was a busy place where, at any given moment, would be filled with young volunteers manning the assistance hotline, administrative staff, and psychotherapist/lecturers.
I met Vitya again, near the end of my fieldwork on a warm day in late August.
Despite having conducted many oral history interviews, I confessed to remaining puzzled about the status of Soviet psychotherapy. It seemed impossible, I confessed, to figure out what psychotherapy was like in Soviet times, and the degree to which it was state controlled.
Vitya’s responses on that day were equally slippery. “You can’t put your finger on it unless you were in it. If you write about it you’ll be outside it, and then you’ll be writing on that.” Then he tried to answer my question. Referencing the work of
Thomas Szasz, a prominent member of the US anti-psychiatry movement, he said that
54 one difference was that the West, “the client hires the psychotherapist,” whereas in
Soviet society, “the psychotherapist worked for the state.” He continued,
I once read Thomas Szazs,21 who compares psychiatry in the Soviet Union and the West, and he was accurate in many things. One specific accuracy [was that] in a capitalist or Western society, the psychotherapist is the agent of the client. The client hires the psychotherapist. At least it’s supposed to be that way. In Soviet society, the psychotherapist works for the government. The government hired you, gave you a room, your education, everything. … Psychotherapists were paid by the government, controlled by the government. It is the government who would figure out when you came to work, and when you should finish. The government would be interested in which methods and why. And those two things have to be in correspondence with recommendations approved by the government and spread among the professionals. So in this construction, the psychotherapist, or anybody, would not be interested in the client at all because the best thing is when there is no work. My colleague knit a sweater everyday, and any kind of disturbance from anyone was a disgraceful experience. She had to stop something she liked doing, and begin to do something else. So the Soviet person experienced him or herself as a bother. … It was a totally inhumane system. It broke the relationships between people. It was always coming in between, [like] a despotic arbitrariness [proizvol].
Vitya had begun with a familiar discussion of the de-humanizing experience of life in the USSR, as well as the state’s omnipresence in mental health services. But as he began recounting his work at a narcology clinic for alcoholics in the 1970s, his tone changed. He related how he and his colleague had started new forms of group therapy that broke from hypnosis and so-called rational psychotherapy. They approached their patients not with the assumption that alcoholism was either a genetic or moral failure, as was the common psychiatric understanding at the time, but a social problem. As he shifted from observations of “the system” to an account of his own work, or from the general to the particular, Vitya replaced the image of an oppressive life in a totalitarian
21 Thomas Szasz’s books, including The Myth of Mental Illness (1961), became important for the 1960s anti-psychiatry movement in the US.
55 society with that of an everyday that entailed a degree of freedom, integrity and agency. He said,
My director told me how terrible those people [the alcoholics] are. She hated them. Soon I saw that the patients hate the personnel. They lied to each other all the time and projected onto each other. The personnel would say that alcoholics are liars, but they also didn’t tell them the truth. It was mutual lying. There is a Soviet joke—we pretend we are working and the government pretends they are paying. One side pretends they treat. The other side pretends they get the treatment. They were all playing a game. It was natural to want to stop it somehow, because it wasn’t interesting to live in this way. So I considered psychotherapy as the possible way of coming to something true. I think I was rather free in what I did. … I didn’t feel I was doing something anti-Soviet. I wasn’t pro-Soviet, but I didn’t see it like I was the dissident.22 We could talk about [therapeutic approaches], but I didn’t publish books secretly. I didn’t print on the walls. In my mind, in my teaching, I was able to be open. To my family and friends. But I wasn’t doing acts. So I couldn’t see how they could damage me. Why? I am doing therapy in the way I believed it was true, so what?
I pressed Vitya, referring him back to his own description of the USSR as an oppressive totalitarian system in which the state was closely involved in psychotherapy. Having just heard him mention his therapeutic work in an official capacity I asked, “So therapy, conceived in terms of a relation between a client (not a patient) and a therapist, and something that might view problems as being potentially social in nature—these things were not considered anti-Soviet?”
“No,” Vitya answered, continuing,
If you read Soviet books on consciousness they did reinterpret Freud very critically. They’d be against psychoanalysis, and it’s true, there were no books on Freud. But at the same time, there was quite a big interest in the 1960s and 1970s in group work, and group therapy became one of the main interests, supported by the state. There were conferences on that. At the Bekhterev Institute [a famous clinic in then-
22 This formulation is reminiscent of what Yurchak (2006) describes as living ‘vnye’—both inside and outside. This form of “normal life” in Soviet times that rejects the polarity of being either “for” or “against” the regime.
56 Leningrad] there were some people who developed this. I am not speaking of the quality of what they did, but they were trying to figure it out. Of course they were reinventing the bicycle because there was a wall dividing us from the rest of the world. […] But it wasn’t that such things would be considered anti-Soviet because there was nothing political there, it was just pure psychology.
“So,” I persisted, “there is nothing in group therapy that would have contradicted Soviet Marxism?”
No,” he said again.
All the more, there was autogenic training [autogennoe trenirovka; a form of calisthenics aimed at psychic healing through the body], progressive relaxation, and there were from the 1950s or ‘60s meetings at big cultural centers. Hundreds would come. It was absolutely official. I was once just to see. It was interesting. It was a big room with 200 to 300 people, and then there was a doctor, she was proposing the session of relaxation. It was a big session for everyone. And afterwards they shared their experience and asked questions. That’s it. And that existed from the 1960s and 1970s. There was also a big interest in Eastern philosophies—karate, martial arts, though the state did try to control these because they were afraid of some uncontrollable criminal activity. There were lots of strange activities at that time.
The difference in characterization of the past was intriguing. On the one hand there was “no psychotherapy because a perfect society should have no need for it,” and a situation in which the state closely controlled psychotherapists. On the other hand, there were a variety of therapeutic forms that were not only possible under late- socialism, but in some cases state-sponsored.
Genres and Schemas
As these transcripts show, Vitya is shifting back and forth between the genres of rejection and embrace that I outlined earlier. He is very quick to critique the Soviet medical system and society as a whole, painting the Soviet project as dehumanizing
57 and one that “broke the relationships between people” like an “arbitrary despot.” But he also adopts a position that subverts the view that the Soviet Union could be ideologically totalized based on its medical systems. And in fact, when pressed, Vitya offers a highly differentiated view of psychotherapeutic services. What are we to make of these shifts in position?
The work of Claudia Strauss (1997), a cognitive anthropologist, is a useful comparative point of departure. Responding to Fredric Jameson’s baleful vision of postmodernity’s “fragmented subject,” whose consciousness is characterized by historical amnesia, waning affect, distraction and pastiche, Strauss sets out to find this subject. Like my transcripts with Vitya, her interviews with several working class
Americans reveal somewhat “fragmented” and contradictory subject positions. She finds that people can lament the oppressive nature of “the system,” yet in the same conversation affirm the American Dream under the free market. She adopts the term
“cognitive schemas” to describe these different “voices,” and the term “horizontal containment” to describe the fact that a person can “hold discrepant ideas that are equally easy for him to express but that he typically voices in distinct contexts”
(1997:369).
Strauss suggests that the schemas her informants used—whether that of the little guy always loosing, and the boundless opportunity of the US economy—drew from circulating social discourses. Vitya’s own oscillation between the genres of rejection and embrace also partake of particular social discourses in circulation in
Russia even today about the legacies of the past. Memory studies remain central to
Russia scholarship (see Berdahl and Bunzl 2010; Berdahl, et al. 2000); outcries over
58 the Russian Federation’s rewriting of school history books continually flare up; public debates continue about whether Stalin was good or bad for Russia as do national survey results by the polling organization VTsIOM; Soviet iconography now appears in the post-Soviet revamped “Victory Day” signifying the USSR’s triumph over fascism (see Oushakine 2000; Oushakine 2009). In short, despite the passing of nearly two decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, an ambivalence about the past, seen in Vitya’s shift in stance, continues to haunt the national imaginary.
Strauss also points out that any cognitive schema entails different assumptions about agency, time, temporal horizon, society and even affective tone. Thinking of
Vitya’s statements, one can see how, with regard to agency, the genre of rejection implied a lack of agency, a sense of being “glued” and stuck. And as we will see below, people lived in “prisons,” and needed to find things to do to keep their minds occupied. They surrendered will to authority. When telling me these things, his affective tone was subdued, and conjured a grey unrelenting reality from which there was no escape save suicide. Temporally this was an existence “without a future” beyond the party’s next “five year plan.” By contrast, the genre of embrace emphasized agency, placing authority at a distance. While the difficulty of daily life is acknowledged, this genre also includes descriptions of the range of possibilities people had to make meaning. And when talking about these things, Vitya’s tone was defensive, while at the same time suggesting a kind of contemplative attitude toward the past. Temporally, this is a genre with a future—one where people made plans, tried to change things in their own small ways, and strove. To Strauss’ categories, one could also add that of scale: while the scale of the genre of rejection was broad, speaking
59 very generally about “the Soviet past,” the genre of embrace was highly particular, often referring to specific cases and individuals.
In Strauss’ analysis, she suggests that there is evidence of a “partially integrated” schema, which she locates in the childhood pasts of her informants. She suggests that the use of their personal histories seemed to unite the disparate “voices” through some partial logic. Yet for Vitya, the tension between these genres appears unresolved. The general and the particular, the rejected and the embraced, the oppressed and the relatively free—these remained generically distinct, pointing to an unsettled tension in Russia about its Soviet past. Some, like anthropologist Serguei
Oushakine (2000), have argued that there has been a lack of integrating languages in the immediate post-Soviet period. Oushakine draws on the neurological condition of aphasia, when one does not have the words to express thoughts, to describe this cultural-symbolic condition. In his more recent work, he finds that informants continue to struggle with assimilating the spread of capitalism and the “stylistic invasion” that many felt in the social fabric.” “Fragmentation and ruptures precipitated searches for missing links and hidden connections,” he writes (2009:77). He suggests that this has resulted in stitched-together narratives and plots, filled in many cases with contradiction, and resulting in conspiracy theories, xenophobia, and mild anti-
Semitism. Whether or not one accepts the notion of rupture and lack that structure
Oushakine’s arguments, what is most relevant here is that legacies of the past remain unsettled.23
23 See also Shevchenko (2009) on Muscovite’s postsocialist discourse of “permanent crisis.”
60 Vitya’s ambivalence is of course remote from these kinds of responses, but they do share a commonality with the highly polarized forms of thought that
Oushakine documents. Of particular relevance were nationalistic juxtapositions of the natural versus the artificial, the alien versus the local, the foreign versus the national.
Though for Vitya, and in fact for many psychologists, the issue was less a nationalistic one, than a struggle around humanization and dehumanization.
Post-Soviet Genres
One dimension that Strauss gives little attention to is the role of dialogue. As I have suggested, there was an unmistakable dialogical relationship between my questions and Vitya’s responses. The shift was brought out most clearly when I confronted Vitya with my own interest in socialist difference. Tapping into a social-scientific post-
Soviet genre of rupture, I had asked him to reconcile his contradictory stance. He then abandoned his earlier stance, and took up the genre of embrace, as he shifted to a somewhat defensive statement about the highly unpredictable and relatively free nature of the late-Soviet period. Thus, his description of the past as either totalized or particular was dialogically related to my own efforts to render the post-Soviet period as either a matter of continuity or rupture.
This interplay came to light in a conversation in which I asked Vitya to speak generally about “the Soviet person.” A short detour through the literature on “Soviet subjectivity” will give some sense of the rationale behind my questions. In the last decade, “Soviet subjectivity” has become a topic of central concern to many historians, including Jochen Hellbeck (2006) and Igal Halfin (2003). The animating
61 question in this research has been, to what degree did people internalize the
Communist ideology under Stalin? This question is a response to a bifurcation in
Soviet historiography between the top-down “totalitarian school,” and the bottom-up
“social revisionists,” neither of whom seemed to have an adequate conceptual approach to this question. While the totalitarians tended to assume an absorption of
Soviet ideology, the social revisionists honed in on tropes of resistance, dissimulation and the wearing masks. It was Stephen Kotkin’s study of the town of Magnitogorsk
(1995) that laid the groundwork for a new approach. Drawing on Foucault’s conception of the micro-physics of power, Kotkin located Stalinist power in the everyday enactment of “Soviet civilization.” Historians like Hellbeck and Halfin have built on this approach, but also given more focus to how actively and consciously
Soviets pursued self-making through the revolutionary language of the Party state.
This has undoubtedly helped bring further attention to the general avoidance in historical studies of questions of lived experience. Yet scholars like Svetlana Boym
(2002) and Alexander Etkind (2005) have since argued that this work has also reduced
Soviet lived experience to texts and thus reified socialist difference.
Leaving these debates aside, exploring the new and not-so-new about particular forms of psychotherapeutic work in contemporary Russia was also linked to my interest in how subjectivity has been refashioned in the post-Soviet period. Vitya had made no secret of his distaste for Soviet power or its therapies, and he had referred to his work as a therapist as “social reform.” He had also generalized about how post-
Soviet subjects suffer from a kind of PTSD. In our final interview, I pulled these remarks together and found what I thought was an arrow pointing to a key difference
62 in Soviet subjectivity vis-à-vis the psy disciplines, namely an absence of the intense focus on the kinds of self-actualization found in American and Western European streams, and supposed emblem of capitalist modernity. There was thus a resonance between his statements and the literature on “Soviet subjectivity.” When we sat down,
I asked him to speak generally about “the Soviet person.” The conversation that resulted, however, showed me more about the questions I was asking. He struggled to provide the kinds of claims that my academic genre of post-Soviet rupture was demanding of us both.
He began, “I think that we have this capacity to design some picture of the world. We have an image of what it is. We always have some vision.” Then, he attempted to answer my question:
So to speak about the Soviet person, the one word would be shablon.24 There were many walls, many prints you had to follow. But if you followed them, nobody would follow you further. If you didn’t drink at work, if you didn’t commit some crime. The Soviet person [was] totally dependent on the state. He has a very small salary. Everybody did, and this made him feel almost equal to everyone else. […] He had a clear picture of the structure of the society. There was some kind of politburo vaguely present somewhere, but having a big impact on everyone through newspapers. They were stupid but you had to read them, listen to them. Life was very boring. What you had was your room, your family, your friends. Everything was boring. At work it was boring. You were kind of glued. You couldn’t move quickly. There was this energy. I just watched a movie […] [on the TV channel] Kul’tura, […] A Vacation in September. Otpusk v sentiabre—Utinaia Okhota. Duck hunt.25 And this movie is fantastic. I suddenly found myself in the Soviet time. My body experienced all those feelings, and the movie is brilliant and you get all this experience of how it is. All this misery. Being locked, unfree. There was nothing horrible there. A person just
24 Shablon can refer to a routine, model, pattern or template, but also a stereotype or “rubber- stamp.” There is an ambiguity, clarified subsequently, as to whether by shablon Vitya intends to give a stereotypical view of the Soviet person, or of his social environment. 25 The film “Vacation in September” was based on the play “Duck Hunt.” Vitya gives both names.
63 wanted to kill himself. He didn’t want to live anymore. You want to kill yourself when you watch it. Nothing horrible happens, but you don’t want to live. It was a typical Soviet situation from the beginning of the ‘70s. So the society was very inertial. To change something in this society was impossible. To imagine that something would happen, very impossible.
Vitya’s preface of the “picture of the world” was suggestive. As if to say,
“what I am about to offer is another such picture—and perhaps even your questions are premised on your own picture.” In highlighting the situated nature of our statements, he underscored the wholly constructed nature of this historical figure—
“Soviet Man.” Then, as if playing along, he proceeded with the figure. His description, though, was less about subjectivity, than the Soviet environment, and a kind of embodied experience of the inertial.26 This emphasis on the Soviet environment rather than the Soviet subject was consistent with his generic division between the rejected and the accepted, the general and the particular.
Responding to his separation of the subject from the environment, I provoked him with the stereotype that Soviets actually internalized the propaganda. “Some scholars write about the idea of what a Soviet person was supposed to be—oriented to kollektiv, building the socialist future…”
“But,” he interrupted, “that is not about you. If I tell you that you will have to build socialism, how will you feel? If I tell you that the happiness of the world will depend on you, how will you feel? […] It’s a kind of joke. There were principles everywhere that were not about building socialism but about being honest with your friends.”
26 This resonated with what Caroline Humphrey describes as part of a “growing sense” in the 1970s and 1980s of “being removed, by being entombed in the Soviet Union, from another more real but curtained off history, that is, from the history of the world” (2002:53).
64 After rebutting the tendency to confuse Party plans with lived experience,
Vitya then tried to elaborate, through reference to his father, a particular Soviet person operating within this “glued” atmosphere. Relating his father’s favorite quotation—“in any useless task there is something of the divine [v liubom bezpoleznom zaniatii est’ shto-to bozhestvennoe]”—Vitya then emphasized the word “useless”:
My father loved this quote because it described what he did. He thought it was important to work as best you can. I have no idea why; he wasn’t a Protestant and he felt the uselessness of many things he did. But being driven to the divine, it’s something very interesting. That is how I think about the Soviet times and those big ideological things. People may say, “All Soviets thought that way.” Nobody thought that way. “The Soviet people are the best people in the world.” I don’t know if anyone believed it. “The Communist Party is the best part of the Soviet people.” I didn’t think so.27 Instead, it was like the garbage. Everyday you walk through the garbage and after a while you get a little dirty. You may be aware or unaware, but you are [dirty]. So [the Soviet Man] would experience some kind of guilt about not being able to change [anything], hopelessness because it was not possible anyway, helplessness, these kind of experiences. You only can be better the way you are. But the future didn’t exist. We lived in these five-year plans.28 So people had to figure out how to live in these prisons. They developed funny existences. They concentrated on buying food, food- hunting activities. It structured people’s time, made life safe. You weren’t dong anything heroic and you were busy. You come home, eat, go to sleep. That’s it.29
27 Humphrey attributes this disconnect between being told that Soviets were “at the forefront in every sphere” and “disorienting glimpses on the television” of a world outside to a developing “culture of disillusionment” (2002:53). 28 Starting in 1928, so-called “five-year plans” (piatiletka) were centralized economic development plans which set the goals and means for accelerating the Soviet Union’s industrial development. There were 13 in all between 1928 and 1991. As Alexei Yurchak (2006:26-27n39) has noted, “the plan” was a “central symbol of industrial production in late socialism” and that “it was crucial that the plan was successfully fulfilled at the level of form (in numbers, figures, statistics, reports, etc.).” Martha Lampland (1995) has termed this the “fetish of plan.” The fact that Vitya is referencing a particular kind of future-temporality here is interesting in light of the current focus, among business-oriented psychologists, on one’s future (see chapters 3, 4 and 5). 29 This description accords with Katherine Verdery’s (1996) discussion of the “etatization of time” in socialist Romania. For an interesting contrast to the kinds of subjectivity Vitya indicates here, see Yurchak’s (2006) use of Deleuze and Gautari’s concept of deterritorialization.
65 Engaging in useless tasks; stuck in prison, locked in survival mode; living without a future—this grim portrait of daily life suggested a portrait of an almost unconscious existence, so I provoked him further, relating how another practitioner, with reference to the psychologist Abraham Maslow’s (1968) hierarchy of human needs—with food and shelter at the bottom and self-realization at the top, had made the provocative claim that the question, “Who am I?” would have been unusual.
“Not for me,” he retorted.
It is a strange question [you ask] because I remember when [some psychologists] came from the US [to lead a psychology seminar] and the first question was, “Who are you?” and people liked it so much. I remember it, and we kept doing it. It was a question that people were asking themselves all the time. It’s a human question.
Then, continuing the story of the session with the American practitioners, Vitya reframed my question:
These people came to Kiev or Moscow and they wanted to get [participants] into contact with…the will as experience. The person who led it, he said, “Stand up.” Everyone stood up. He said, “Sit down.” Everyone sat down. He said, “Stand up.” Everyone stood up. He said, “Now sing a Soviet hymn.” Everybody sang. He’s thinking, “Oh, my god.” Then he said, “Stop it.” They stopped. He said, “Get undressed.” And one person said, “Shall we take our pants off, too?” [Laughs] He said he wanted to shoot himself. He was waiting for when people would say, “We don’t want to do this.” Will they, in his mind, be in touch with the will? No way. […] Once they accept you as the leader they will follow you.
In this reformulation, Vitya suggests that to think of Soviet subjectivity is not to posit some kind of alternative relation to oneself (i.e. one not preoccupied with self-identity or fulfillment), but rather a different relationship to authority.
I recall becoming frustrated that my questions were clearly being read as essentialist, so I took a new tack. I returned to something Vitya had told me about how
66 Russians needed to “learn to be free.” Is this business of not resisting the commands of the American practitioners such an example? I wanted to know.
“Yes,” he said. “This is the first thing. Everything is based on this. Because there are some people who are now dead…my uncle, he died a few years ago, he didn’t learn to be free. He was not even getting this as an idea. He was struggling with this. I spoke with him many times.”
Vitya then adopted his uncle’s voice: “‘If I am free,’ he would say, ‘I will do something which somebody doesn’t like, or somebody will do something that someone else won’t like. It’s disorder. Look what’s happening now! It’s disorder.
That’s freedom? I don’t want such freedom. Look how people live. They work without even legally filling the papers, and won’t have a pension. And this is freedom?’”
Vitya continued in his own voice: “‘But is anybody forcing this person to work without feeling or is it the choice of the person—because if it’s his choice, then it may be a stupid choice. But why would this person do this if he didn’t want to?’ This,” concluded Vitya, “was far beyond my uncle’s capacity to understand. And at that moment he was fading a little bit. This responsibility thing was too hard, because it was very scary.”
Our interview had shifted to two key concepts of Reagan-Thatcherism— freedom and personal responsibility—that I had been tracing in contemporary Russia through the rise of the psychological disciplines. Vitya’s suggestion that his uncle had difficulties with these concepts prompted me to ask what distinguished these notions of responsibility. I probed, “Is it because it is somehow internal, as opposed to someone else saying this is how it is?”
67 “You know, I think he was very responsible in a way,” Vitya replied thoughtfully.
When I would say ‘responsibility’ he wouldn’t understand me because I meant a different kind—I would mean responsibility for what happened if you do this or that. And in his mind responsibility was to go every morning to work, to work until 5 o’clock. To go to vacation on time. To wake up on time. To have his soup. To buy bread.
We had arrived at a place, over the body of his uncle, where we were mutually assembling a particular historical figure—the “post-Soviet person,” and in the back of my mind I was thinking about the discourse on “personal responsibility” so common to contemporary neoliberal political rationalities. I spurred Vitya onward, by repeating key phrases.
“So it was a matter of structure and discipline.”
“But he would call it ‘responsibility.’ When I would talk about it, he wouldn’t understand this.”
“So is the difference ‘having’ to do something, as in ‘dolzhen’ [ought]?”
“Absolutely. For him it’s dolzhen. It’s something you ought to do. And from my point of view, responsibility is something you may do, you keep possibilities. And he didn’t want to hear about that. Because possibilities are close to impossibilities.
You may, but you also may not.”
Interested in how he might generalize from this point, I asked him, “Your uncle’s dilemma, do you see that a lot?”
“Yes, I think that this is something,” he said, acknowledging that we had struck upon something valid. But then he reframed his statements as a response to my inquiries rather than an unprompted one, and reestablished the relationship between
68 the general and the particular, the rejected and the embraced: “I am trying to bring everything to my mind about this question of ‘the Soviet person.’ I think there is something in it about Soviet people. It’s people who live their life very hard, who close themselves [off], and de-learn to let go.”
“And yet,” I said, “you followed a different path. How do you account for your own trajectory?”
It’s very hard to say. Unfortunately I wouldn’t give you any satisfactory answer from a scientific point of view. I think I was very lucky.[…] I have a lot of very good friends in different countries who support me. I feel very close with them. When we speak with each other we understand. We are as if from one planet […] and I feel lucky that I met them. I’m closer [with them] than with people here. I don’t feel opposed to people here. I just feel luckier. And I am trying to share with people what I receive. The wave came and I happened to be there.
At this point my recorder was filled up, and we shifted to discussing other matters.
In this conversation we see how my genre of post-Soviet rupture, conditioned by an interest in “Soviet subjectivity”—the collectively oriented subject living in a grey reality, disinclined to obsessive self-searching—became a prominent frame in the interview. Rather than simply eliciting observations, it loomed large and seemed to push us both to make statements that we may have felt to be problematic. Numerous times Vitya qualified his statements, as with the phrase from a “scientific point of view,” or by underscoring that his statements were prompted by my questions.
Similarly, I recall thinking that my question about whether “who am I” would be unusual for Russians was ridiculous and essentialist, yet I fished nonetheless for a
69 particular set of statements that might help me to fathom the nature of both therapeutic objectives, and thereby subjectivities, in the Soviet Union.
The Will to Know: Historicizing Conceptualization
The research impulse to identify “the new” in Russia, historically conditioned by Cold
War-era studies of the Soviet Union, has become an important framing device within the anthropology of postsocialism. A good example of how this works is Elizabeth
Dunn’s (2004) study of the managerialization of a Polish baby food factory that was purchased by an American company. Filled with sophisticated theoretical argument and rich ethnography, the study hangs its hat nonetheless on a notion of “radical difference” between socialist and postsocialist personhood. These polarities are the essential point of departure for any discussion of “change,” even in its more sophisticated “discursively produced” form.30
Talal Asad (1975; 1979) has drawn attention to the conceptual frameworks that underwrite anthropological investigation. I want to suggest that my conversations with
Vitya—particularly the way we both shifted between genres—helps bring the conceptual framework in the anthropology of postsocialism to light. To illustrate this further, consider a predecessor project, which was conducted in the 1950s and was also premised on assembling a picture of “Soviet man.” I have in mind the Harvard
Project for the Study of Soviet Society (HPSSS), a US Air Force-funded project
30 Andrew Kipnis’ (2008) critique of the broad application of the governmentality framework, which Dunn also uses, has played into this conceptual problem. Namely, by drawing on Nikolas Rose’s characterization of “neoliberal subjectivation” (entrepreneurialism, responsibilization, self-work) to make an argument about the spread of those political rationalities, scholars have also had to rely on somewhat oversimplified models of transition. This chapter is, in a sense, an attempt to acknowledge this problem in my own research.
70 directed by Clyde Kluckholn and led by Alex Inkeles and Raymond Bauer
(coincidentally, a key historian of Soviet psychology), in which Soviet refugees were interviewed between 1950-1954.31 This ambitious study used interview scripts to assemble information on personal and professional histories of ex-Soviets that would be amenable to subsequent systematic analysis. The idea was to produce a broad picture of the day-to-day life in the USSR and to generate insights into “strategic psychological and sociological aspects of the Soviet social system” (Brandenberger).
It resulted in numerous books, including Inkeles and Bauer’s The Soviet Citizen
(Inkeles and Bauer 1959) and Bauer’s The New Man in Soviet Psychology (1959).
In examining some of those transcripts, one is struck by the interviewer’s insistence on the mundane. Take, for example, this fragment between Raymond Bauer and “Case 25s” (HPSSS):
RB: Now, what I would like to discuss with you is a typical day when you were last back in the Soviet Union. When was the last time you were back there? Respondent: A typical day for example, in what year? RB: Well, what was the last you were there? Respondent: It was 46 [sic.]. RB: 46, was it summer? Respondent: 46. RB: That was after the war. Respondent: Yes. RB: Well, now what I would like you to do is to take a typical working day and start out [when] you get up in the morning.
31 As the background materials for the project note, this was a large scale, unclassified project, based largely on interviews with Soviet émigrés. The project was also known as the Harvard Refugee Interview Project. The project was influenced by the then-predominant frames in social analysis— theories of totalitarianism developed by Hannah Arendt and others, and economic modernization theory. Interestingly, in his retrospective assessment of the project, Brandenberger (n.d.) suggests that the project “was premised on neo-liberal assumptions about individual and group identity and a belief that people are fundamentally rational actors and generally capable of critical, independent analysis of their surroundings. Although fashionable in the 1950s, these assumptions about individual subjectivity today seem more applicable to citizens of western liberal societies than to those of authoritarian, illiberal regimes like the USSR.”
71 Respondent: To make it better I describe a typical working day in the academy. RB: You say typical working day in the academy. Were you in the academy in that year, in that summer? Respondent: Not this summer. No, but in 45, before I left. RB: I think more interesting is 46, because 46 was after the war. Respondent: You see, it will be not a typical day, because every day was a different [sic]. RB: And what were you doing? Respondent: I was on leave in Moscow, and really, I don’t remember what I was doing, because every day I had done something else. RB: Okay, that’s fine. Respondent: Or my work here? RB: No, I think probably a day in 45 would be better then. Respondent: Then I can describe this? RB: Yes, sure. Now, just start out when you get up in the morning, and just describe. Respondent: You know, I got up at 8 in the morning. I washed myself, and then at 8 I was in the academy. RB: You said you got up at 8? Respondent: Yes, at half past 8 I was in the academy [emphasis in original]. There we had to line up. RB: Maybe, I can slow you up here a little bit, because you say you got up and washed; were you living alone? Respondent: Yes, I had my apartment in the city. […] Most of us lived in the academy, but some of us had the means to live private. RB: Aha. You didn’t eat in the apartment? Respondent: No. […] We have eaten in the academy. RB: Aha, certainly. Respondent: After lining up we had our breakfast. […] And at 9 o’clock our lessons started. RB: Well, can you tell me what breakfast was like? Respondent: Usually it was coffee or cocoa. RB: Then I would like to know where you ate, with who [sic], and what it was like. Give me as good a subjective description as you can. […]
What is striking about this and other similar exchanges is, first, the exoticizing nature of the questions, and the fascination with the mundane: “You say you got up and washed….” These betray a particular kind of anxiety—as if people in the USSR
72 were of a distinct human kind whose practices of washing, eating and sleeping also deserved study. It is unclear whether the researchers were keen to confirm the commonsense about the USSR—that Soviet daily life was bounded by the gray realities of repetition and routine—or to controvert it. Secondly, there is an interesting gap between the demand for a “typical day” and the fact that for the informant, “every day was…different.”
Several things resonate between these interviews and my own: the intensity of the will to know; a thirst for the most mundane details of Soviet daily life; an assumption of socialist radical difference; and also an irreconcilable difference between the particular and the general. While hardly equating my interests with those of the HPSSS project, one must at least recognize how, despite having very different research agendas, analytic assumptions about the Soviet past have a way of reproducing particular forms of knowledge and interaction.
The point is not to undermine research into subjectivity and governance, but to use the inevitably asked wrong-headed question as a site for productive insight. In this case, questions have also created opportunities to speculate about the failures of
Western scholarship to grapple with Russia, both then, and now. For in this exchange with a willing Vitya, one can see the disciplining effects of the conjuncture of social scientific forms of knowledge acquisition, and history. Premised on the fallacies of radical difference and a quest for intimate knowledge and definitive statements, this combination can be seen pushing us both from statements about the diversity of practices in the Soviet Union, to the singularity of the subject “from a scientific point of view.”
73 As a way to make sense of this interplay between what I have termed speech genres about the Soviet and the post-Soviet, let us now return to Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogue. In his thinking about the nature of the linguistic utterance, human interactions, and humans in interaction, Bakhtin elaborates a compact, but also complex model of communication. He begins, “[N]o living word relates to its object in a singular way: between the word and its objects, between the word and the speaking subjects, there exists an elastic environment of other, alien words about the same object.” He continues, “Indeed, any concrete discourse (utterance) finds the object at which it was directed already as it were overlain with qualifications, open to dispute, charged with value, already enveloped in an obscuring mist—or, on the contrary, by the ‘light’ of alien words that have already been spoken about it. It is entangled, shot through with shared thoughts, points of view, alien value judgments and accents. The word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex inter-relationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group” (1981:276).
This statement illustrates the highly contingent nature of any dialogue involving two speakers. Perfect communication would involve not only transparent or unambiguous language, but also a transparent kind of inter-subjectivity, where the speaker’s idea of herself is homologous with the listeners’, and where her idea of the listener is the same as the listener’s self-identity. But of course all of these aspects of communication—the speaker, the message, the view of the other—are unstable. For instance, Vitya (and, indeed, many informants) was clearly aware of the West’s
74 historical figuration of the Soviet man, and he played with it accordingly. He used it to level a critique of the Soviet period, to enunciate his own status as a kind of dissident figure, to preserve the agency of Soviet subjects, and also to elevate the status of post-
Soviet psychotherapy, of which he was a part. At times Vitya seemed to make statements about the past in anticipation of what kind of judgment I would make in response. Thus, he might reify the Soviet Union as a way to appeal to something I had said, or to constitute himself as a Western-oriented therapist. Or he might argue for a more nuanced view as a way to resist stereotype. And I also deployed these figures selectively. I might summon a genre of rupture in order to “nail down” what was new about the present, but at other points, draw on the genre of continuity to express mutual disdain for stereotype. Similarly, eager to show myself to be not just another stereotyping American, I would at times signal my appreciation of the irreducible complexity of the Soviet everyday; yet, in the role of the investigator, I would use precisely the prompts inclined to reduction. In both of our cases, in other words, we were drawing on particular views of history to construct particular subject-positions.
Conclusion: Beyond Novelty/Rupture
Vitya Markov, as well as other informants not included in this account, had all suggested that psychotherapy was an official part of Soviet psy practices, thus overturning the idea that the Soviet Union was too bound to its utopian visions to have room for experts who recognized and worked with social neuroses. And yet, in other circumstances they, too, spoke to its severe limitations, and the oppressive conditions in which they practiced. For example, in another remarkable interview, a practitioner
75 working in an official capacity, after spending nearly an hour legitimating Soviet psychotherapy by distancing it from ideology and politics, ended his interview by sharing with me what he tells his students: “Remember one simple thing: those who were my teachers, they were 100% liars, and only sometimes, perhaps, maybe 2% truthful. I am a liar 50% of the time; you should only believe me 50% of the time. I hope that you will only lie a quarter of the time, that is, in your ideology there will only be 25% lies, and sooner or later, we will change from a generation of liars to a generation of normal people.” And there also many extra-disciplinary accounts of
Soviet psychiatric abuse: Vladimir Bukovsky, a dissident famously imprisoned in the
USSR’s psychiatric clinics, noted in his autobiography that Khrushchev had in 1963 declared that “the USSR no longer had any political prisoners and that no one was dissatisfied with the system—the few who still expressed dissatisfaction were simply mentally ill” (1977:194). This sounded a lot like what Vitya had told me on that first day, as we were tussled back and forth, deep underground, on the metro car. What was true?
Hayden White suggests that what historians do is rely on various tropes to imagine the past and constitute their own “specifically human truth” (White 1984:33).
The same might be said of the ethnographic scene. There, between informant and anthropologist, “history” becomes dually imagined, subject to a dually human truth. It becomes a site for different stakes and analytic concerns—consciousness and agency; practices, institutions and discursive fields of possibility; ideology, difference and marginalization; East-West relations; stereotyping; and uncertain epistemologies.
Inasmuch as my ethnographic engagements, in the end, offered yet another layer of
76 historical figurations, the task of getting to the bottom of “what actually happened” was eventually eclipsed by paying attention to the ways in which the canvas of history became a way to comment on the contemporary. Here, history was not so much a research tool as a means through which actors—historians, ethnographers and informants—position themselves in some ethical, moral, political, social or cultural relation to the past.32
I have argued that what seemed to be contradictory accounts of the Soviet past were in fact different speech genres dialogically related to my own questions and research frames. The oral history interview, initially conceived as a strategy for assembling a still background against which ethnography unfolds, was in fact a complex site of negotiation where ethnography, history and social-scientific conceptual frameworks collided. The interview was less about “history,” than about the way in which discussions between an American and his informants took shape around an invisible post-Cold War wall in the room. It involved dialogic performance through which history and human subjects were multiply inflected, unstable, and open to reinterpretation. And it was a site where discourses shaped by war and suspicion intersect and are negotiated, deployed, retracted, and amended, and where words uttered are, as Bakhtin puts it, “laden with alien words, value judgments and accents.”
With reference to Claudia Strauss’ work on cognitive schemas, Vitya’s speech genres of rejection versus embrace had several distinctive features connected to
32 The shift is related to what Stoler notes has happened with the “archival turn,” in which a move from “archive-as-source to archive-as-subject” has occurred (2009:44). The difference in this chapter, however, is that I am less interested in the archive, than in the “archivist”—historians, but also informants and anthropologists who draw on their own particular “archives” to assemble present- relative figures of the past.
77 conceptions of agency, temporality, power and affective tone. That these are underwritten by an irreconcilable distinction between the general and the particular seems to reflect a widely circulating ambivalence about the status of the Soviet past, particularly among liberal-leaning Russians who find themselves, on the one hand, highly critical of Soviet repression, but on the other, highly resistant to dehumanizing characterizations of that period.
With reference to Talal Asad’s (1975; 1979; 2006) critique of the conceptual framework, my own concern with historical background in post-Soviet contexts also produced several speech genres specific to the social scientific endeavor in postsocialist places. The conceptual frameworks that under-girded my research strategy for making subsequent arguments about post-Soviet novelty, rupture and difference, led, as the flame for the moth, to a socialist essentialism that bore a peculiar resemblance to earlier Cold War stereotypes condensed in figures such as homo-Sovieticus (a.k.a. the “New Soviet Man”), kollektiv, totalitarian, totalization, etc.
This is because the quest for novelty and historical difference situates contemporary studies of postsocialism in the space of binary thinking, simplification and compression. And once again, these two sets of speech genres were brought into conflict, also demonstrating the conversational conditions within which I was operating.
The remaining question, then, is what sort of a “history chapter” should, or indeed could, one write? Faced with a Bakhtinian infinite regress of unfinalizability, can we have any history at all as a basis? If the “Soviet Man” was an historical figure imagined by both Cold War adversaries, is it wise to raise his specter again? If our
78 histories are inter-subjectively “entombed,” can anything be truer than anything else?
Perhaps ironically, the disavowal of one kind of history is at the same time a call for the inclusion of history of another kind, to which I turn in the next chapter. Moving beyond the traps of rupture, novelty and difference in studies of postsocialism can only be accomplished through a more sustained, and I would argue, genealogical approach to history. I hope to show that such an approach may afford a more measured assessment of the Soviet past, sensitive to contradictory accounts as well as accounts of the everyday. This helps to reverse the dehumanizing process by which
Soviet subjects have been seen as drones, dupes or sociopaths. Second, a genealogical approach circumvents the emphasis on novelty in social sciences without losing sight of historical transformation. The payoff is ethical and ethnographic—namely a refusal to be complicit in ongoing misunderstandings about Russia, its people, and its place in an evolving geopolity.
Beyond these broad, and perhaps overly abstract points, as I will show in the next chapter, knowing something about the Soviet psy disciplines also illuminates important dynamics underlying contemporary Russian psychotherapy and psychology.
The arrangement of contemporary services into distinct ministerial domains and spheres of influence and the conceptualizations of the person are all difficult to understand without some knowledge of how those forms came into being. By connection, psychological knowledge as a mode of governance of self, citizen-subject, or consumer is difficult to understand without some knowledge of how it was made a part of the Soviet medical infrastructure.
79 The next chapter develops several strategies that follow the arguments put forward in this chapter. First, I move from the historical terms that made sense to my informants, and which seemed to be motivated not by analytic questions, but by what helped make sense of the fields of psychological services as they appeared in 2005-
2007. Second, I will highlight the contexts of production of the “problematic historiographies” on which I rely. Themes raised in the current chapter—specifically related to the emergence of Soviet psychotherapy in the 1960s; the heavily medical orientation of the field; and the profound influence of Marxism in its development— will be discussed more fully. From this chapter’s “history in the present,” therefore, I move to an elaborated “history of the present.” This will enable us to explore how the arrangements of psychological services, the practices surrounding them, and their effects reveal something about the concepts and practices of subjectivity as they have emerged into a new intersection of state and market in Russia.
80 CHAPTER 2
Toward a Genealogy of Postsocialist Psychology
The 1930s brought to a close the period of post-Revolutionary experiment in the psychological sciences. Stalin’s consolidation of power through purge prescribed a strict adherence to Marxist-Leninism. In the politically consequential area of psychological research and practice, which seemed to reach directly into the New
Soviet Man’s interior, straying from the Party line could cost one’s career, even one’s life. In this tense environment, many of Soviet psychology’s applied forms, including mental hygiene, labor psychology, and psychoanalysis were severely constrained. This period culminated in 1936, when pedology, a holistic applied science of children’s development, was also banned, and psychological testing was deemed bourgeois and pessimistic. The pedagogue, not the psychologist, became the authority on children’s education. And for much of the remaining Soviet period, psychologists generally only worked with human subjects in laboratory research, while psychotherapists practiced primarily in medical contexts.
Fast-forward to 2005, the time of my fieldwork. The forms of psychological research and practice have been expanding in scope and authority since the 1980s.
University psychology departments have grown dramatically. Schools and other state institutions now employ psychologists. Free hotlines take personal questions from
81 people of all ages. A self-help market offers a wide variety of tapes, book and seminars on personal-growth, family problems, leadership, transpersonal exploration and even live burials aimed at rebirth. Talk shows regularly employ psychologists as guests, and radio programs hosted by psychologists invite callers to broadcast their concerns. Together, these indicate a transformation in the discourses and practices of subjectivity in postsocialist Russia. How did we get here?
In attempting to answer this question, this chapter moves from critique to the contested terrain of historical writing. I draw on the historical literature of the Soviet
Union in order to offer a genealogy of the different ways in which the psychological disciplines have constituted “the person” as a political technology, object of intervention, and ethical substance throughout the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. The conceptual challenge here is finding ways to avoid reproducing the core assumptions about the Soviet Union that exists in that literature. Chief among these is an assumed functionalist relationship between Marxist ideology with Soviet institutions and practices. As I have suggested, reading the Soviet period solely through the prism of
Marxist ideology has produced a form of Orientalism that has, in many ways, also provided a conceptual basis for post-Soviet studies where certain kinds of problematic substitutions can be made on the basis of the “transition” from socialism to capitalism.
One example would be mistaking the correlative relation between market reforms and the 1990s expansion of psychology for a causal one. As I will discuss in this chapter, the many examples of the diverse psychological self-work that existed in the post-
Stalin period make this rupture narrative difficult to sustain. This chapter’s strategy will be to work sympathetically, but also critically, reading the historiography “against
82 its grain” (Guha 1999; Stoler 2009). This means highlighting the conditions of production of those studies; focusing on back stories and things that do not add up; having the genealogist’s interest in reversal, contingency and random events; and, ultimately, finding ways to complicate the more heavily ideologized conceptualizations of the USSR produced during the Cold War.
Since this is an ethnographic study of contemporary psychologists and psychotherapists, it is important to ask, how is the history of Soviet psychological fields, fascinating as it may be, ethnographically relevant? I will argue that several key features and social and professional dynamics underlying the contemporary arrangement of psychological practice in St. Petersburg can only be understood through this history. The division of talk-therapeutic versus biomedical approaches into distinct ministerial domains; the ongoing tension between medical psychiatrists and psychologists; the different professional distinctions between psychiatrist, psychotherapist and psychologist; and the significance of the shift from medical and psychodynamic approaches—all of these become much clearer through tracing the genealogy of Soviet and post-Soviet psychotherapy.
Surveying the Contemporary
Non-governmental services
Commercial, along with philanthropic, services are by far the largest and most diverse and dynamic areas of psychological work. The difference between the commercial (kommercheskii) and non-commercial (ne-kommercheskii) is often
83 difficult to distinguish (one organization can serve multiple roles), and so these two types of activities are lumped together as “non-governmental services”
(negosudarstvennye uslugi), as they are in practice by practitioners. Such services can include commercially oriented organizations, such as the Institute of Training, whose main goal is human-resource development for major multi-national corporations. But it can also include more “new agey” organizations like the Center for Humanitarian
Technology “Dusha” (Soul), which promotes the “synthesis of contemporary psychological technologies…realize[d] brightly, emotionally with an open soul.”
While the commercial emphasis differs, judging from the services offered the most targeted groups/orientations are children/development, adult personal growth and professionals/training.
Most, though not all, nongovernmental psychological assistance organizations were founded in the early 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. And most have some relation to Western psychology and psychotherapy. For instance, Dusha’s founders were trained in Texas at the Global Relationship Center, a US franchise that has sought to establish psychological assistance centers around the world. Another organization, the Temenos Institute, sprang from a series of seminars that took place in
Petersburg between 1992 and 1994 with transpersonal psychologists from the UK.
Despite the popularity of psychological self-help and training, the prefix “psy” continues to carry a stigma. This poses challenges to practitioners interested in promoting their services. I was repeatedly told that therapeutic confession is relatively new in Russia, a cultural claim that was usually accompanied by the expression “don’t air out your dirty laundry” (ne vynocite sor iz izby). In accordance with studies of
84 Russian personhood, many suggested that the proper place for talking about one’s problems was in intimate environs like the informal cultural institution of the kitchen, a gathering place for close friends in Soviet times, rather than in a semi-public among strangers and involving money. The psy stigma seems to have been least pervasive among middle-class and wealthy Russians, suggesting that fee-for-service psychology has made most inroads among those who can afford it.
Perhaps in response to the stigma of mental illness still associated with the prefix “psy,” most practitioners package their services as “trainings” (treningi). These short-term, group sessions meant to teach self-help techniques can be found in just about any area of human concern. They are popular among human resource departments, as well as individuals interested in personal development. Adults and parents can find treningi in “personal growth”; “women’s power”; “music of the body”; “holotropic breathing”; “raising your children”; “harmonious relations”; “the art of parenting”; “style of life”; “etiquette”; “how to learn to love yourself”;
“energomeditative practice”; “psychodrama” and many others. There are also numerous organizations that provide treningi for children focused on “leadership,”
“time-management,” “self-regulation,” “professional orientation,” “friendship,”
“creativity,” “discovering one’s talents,” “building self-esteem and confidence,” and
“developing life skills.” On the whole, this diversity constitutes a domain of practice where the concepts like self, person, and identity are subjected to expert scrutiny and thereby “technologized.” In and through the training, “psychology” has attained a kind of brand status, symbolizing a desirable personal product in the same way that one might think of a computer course. Also new is that trainings are often articulated with
85 the market logics of success, entrepreneurialism and particular forms of self- development. Trainings have become the bread-and-butter for many psychologists, who find clients somewhat less interested in deep personal or relational work, as well as the primary means by which the psy disciplines have become more normalized in
Russian society, where the prefix “psy” has historically been closely associated with illness.
Government Services
If non-governmental organizations serve a relatively wealthy clientele in the capacity-building mode—from children to adults, and individuals to families or even corporations—government services, by contrast, remain much more devoted to population management, mental hygiene and prophylaxis. These organizations fall under the jurisdiction of either the Ministry of Health (Ministerstvo
Zdravookhraneniia) or the Ministry of Education (Ministerstvo Obrazovaniia), and are supported by some combination of federal and municipal funds.
Among adults with mental health needs, the assistance options are somewhat limited. One available source are Psychoneurological Clinics (Psikhonevrologicheskie
Dispansery; PNDs for short), located regionally throughout the city. As these operate under the Ministry of Health and are part of the medical establishment, PNDs tend not to offer “softer” forms of therapy and training. More like out-patient clinics, they are staffed mostly by psychiatrists in white coats, not psychologists, and work with severe forms of schizophrenia, depression and addiction problems. While they offer a number of treninigi, too, the majority of their work is involves drug therapies and patients with
86 more severe pathologies who, in some cases, are unable to work. Apart from the wide- range of needs served in the PNDs, informants suggested that another factor might limit the number of clients (not patients): while technically supposed to offer anyone free consulting in confidentiality, many fear being put “on the registry” (na uchet), a blemish on one’s record that can make it difficult to get work, is actually not often kept confidential.
In contrast, the state has invested in the development of some non-medical consulting for children in the form of its Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social Centers
(Psikho-Pedagogicheskie Medico-Sotsial’nye Tsentry; PPMS for short). Established in the mid-1990s on a mental-health-services model borrowed from Belgium, these offer a closer equivalent to the psychodynamic forms of therapy and personal development that are found across the non-governmental sector. In contrast to the PNDs, these are administered by the Ministry of Education. Each of the 19 regions of the city has one such center, whose task it is to provide that region’s schools services, including diagnostics for students, speech therapy, individual and some family consulting, and some treningi. The PPMS network also acts as an important intermediary, making referrals to either the PND for more intensive psychiatric attention, or the local authorities in cases of truancy or suspected domestic abuse.
The PPMS Center serves a dual role vis-à-vis the feared psychiatric services.
For some parents it can be the only place to turn and get counseling for children with behavioral problems without risking the stigma of medical services. But in cases of suspected mental problems, the PPMS Center can be where children first get caught in the nets of psychiatric services and put na uchet, or else sent to an institution, such as
87 special schools. The emphasis on one or the other of these positions depends largely on the attitude of the practitioners forwarding cases. That there is a waitlist for services tends to overburden staffs, and keep their work focused on crisis-control, rather than capacity-building trainings. This crisis-oriented nature of their work, coupled with the fact that the centers are relatively new, constantly pushes their work to the fuzzy edge of their prescribed legal domain. As I discuss in chapters 3 and 5, balancing delicate ethical, legal and therapeutic concerns related to this administrative biopolitical tension is one of the central dilemmas practitioners face.
The difference in jurisdiction, status and orientation between the PND and
PPMS Centers was indexed by a crucial distinction in professional terminology. The
Russian term for psychotherapist, or psikhoterapevt (fully, vrach-psikhoterapevt, or doctor-psychotherapist), describes someone trained in medical school and is closer to what is known in the US as a psychiatrist. Psikhoterapevty were more likely to be found working in PNDs and hospitals. Thus it is the Russian term for psychologist, or psikholog, which is a closer analogue to what in the US is known as a counselor or psychotherapist. Psikhologi (psychologists) were more likely to be found working in consulting and counseling in the private sector.33
The resulting survey of psychotherapeutic services in St. Petersburg, then, looks something like this: while non-governmental services (including commercial, not-for-profit and philanthropic) have proliferated and follow a client-based psychodynamic model, public services remain oriented to biomedical approaches, with
33 For the purposes of clarity, I use the English language terms to describe these different professional positions. Thus, I use “psychotherapist” to describe what is in Russia usually called a psikholog, and a “psychiatrist” to designate someone with medical training—what is called either a psikhoterapevt or vrach-psikhoterapevt.
88 doctors in white coats mixing talk therapies with psychotropic pills. The exception, however, are the PPMS Centers, which target children with problems in school (or at home to a degree), do diagnostics, family consulting, as well as career counseling. The consumers of psychology vary, depending on the cost of the training or consultation.
Not surprisingly, class is strongly predictive of who consumes which type of psychological service, with the wealthy concentrated in the non-governmental organizations, the less well-off in public assistance.34
Having started with this basic map of the contemporary field of practices, over time these elements began to crystallize. It became clear, for example, that client- based services remain most robustly developed in marketplace, where psychology has been deployed alongside a range of personal-capacity-building initiatives—some of which are linked to fulfillment, others to more instrumental concerns like making money. Meanwhile, the state sector is dominated by patient-based services. In addition, I also noted that the main area of development for client-based services in public institutions has been through schools, with children, under the authority of the
Ministry of Education (not health).35
Perhaps not surprisingly, there was a fair amount of criticism across (as well as within) the governmental/non-governmental divide. Many working for non- governmental organizations were critical of public services. Psychologists working in
34 One outcome of this class-stratified pattern is that each group is psychologized differently: Although the lines are not black and white, the private sector generally provides more self-improvement and self-help techniques; whereas the public sector is more engaged in crisis-management, prophylaxis and family problems. This pattern is a reactive one, not a proactive one, on the part of the psychological organizations. Different notions of the family, the child, and subjectivity, in turn, are deployed in each of these institutionally based and classed locations. 35 As I discuss in chapter 5, the PPMS Centers were the legacy of a much broader emergence of client-based services in Russia that had started in the 1980s and sought to reform Russian education on the basis of new psychological assumptions about children’s development.
89 the market held the general view that therapists in the PNDs and PPMS Centers were unprofessional, hamstrung by an endless amount of bureaucratic red tape, and cared very little for the well-being of their clients and patients. Practitioners in state institutions, on the other hand, were less concerned about their for-profit colleagues but nonetheless viewed them as lacking scientific rigor, or nauchnost’, and motivated by profit.36 There was even tension within government services: PND psychiatrists viewed PPMS Center colleagues (who in some cases have less-intensive schooling outside medical institutes) as inferior and occasionally verbally chastised them for encroaching on their territory of biomedically legitimized care. Interestingly, where a practitioner worked—i.e. primarily in the non-governmental vs. public sector— frequently coincided with their view of the history of the psy fields. Practitioners who offered some version of the narrative of post-Soviet psychology as being derived from a rupture or break with the past tended to work in the non-governmental sector, while those who emphasized continuities tended to work in public institutions like social services and universities.
My survey of the array of services in St. Petersburg in 2005-2006 helped to illuminate some of the dynamics and relationships within and between various domains of psychotherapeutic practice; however, it said very little about how these relations came to be, and, by connection, how contemporary patterns might also be reflective of particular historically sedimented tensions and trajectories around the
36 The importance of scientism in the social sciences was apparent in the way informants conceived of my own discipline of anthropology. As a way of understanding my project, they would frequently ask me to map my plans onto a standard epistemological grid: goal (tsel’), methods (metody) and hypotheses (gipotezy). This signaled to me a particularly positivistic notion of social science that also seemed to permeate their field. For an overview of the interesting interplay of nauchnost’ and its partner term, partiinost’ (party-mindedness) in the Soviet period, see Pollock (2009).
90 psychotherapeutic care of “the person” in Russia. For instance, what might have been at stake politically, scientifically, and ethically in and through the transformation of psychological services—for the state, for individual practitioners, for the person— remained stubbornly out of reach. To return to my starting question, I found myself continually wondering: how did we get here? More specifically:
1. What explains the tensions and differences in approach between the public
and non-governmental sectors, especially as related to the biomedical/
psychodynamic distinction?
2. Why were client-based services generally limited to the market and so
comparatively under-developed in state services?
3. When and how (i.e. through what institutions, agents, policies, or practices)
did psychodynamic approaches re-appear?
Ideological Histories of Soviet Psychotherapy
To begin to answer these ethnographic questions, it is essential to determine why the types of applied psychology (non-medical mental hygiene; psychoanalysis) that in the
West led to the development of client-based psychotherapy disappeared in the Soviet
Union. Given that many of these were present in the early Soviet period, why did they fall on the wrong side of the Soviet project? The sense one gets from the historical literature is that the reasons were simultaneously ideological and practical. In a very interesting way (which I trace below) certain key dimensions of the psychotherapized subject—the psyche, consciousness, desire, motive—were themselves being rethought in relation to Marxist theory, and as that rethinking unfolded, so, too, were the psycho-
91 technical approaches to the person. The genealogy of the psychological and psychotherapeutic fields, then, illuminates not only the specific histories of the psychological fields, but also the way in which notions of subjectivity evolved throughout in the Soviet period. This will be fundamental to making sense of the post-
Soviet context.
Inasmuch as discussions of practices and even concrete institutions of Soviet psychology are commonly excluded from the historical literature, getting a sense of the applied fields is difficult. Instead, the historical literature has tended to focus on philosophical/theoretical debates within Marxism and psychology, and Party politics of the 1920s and 1930s. Nonetheless, since the main contours of Soviet psychology— both its theoretical and applied forms—were drawn at that time, a kind of partial view of practice does come into view. My discussion below relies heavily on Raymond
Bauer’s The New Man in Soviet Psychology (1959), and secondarily on David
Joravsky’s Russian Psychology (1989), Alex Kozulin’s Psychology in Utopia (1984),
Loren Graham’s Science, Philosophy and Human Behavior in the Soviet Union
(1987), and Artur Petrovsky’s Psychology in the Soviet Union (1990). These texts provide a good sense of how the evolving ideological positions on the discourses of self, person, consciousness, and the psyche impacted applied work.
Applied Psychology between Scientism and Marxism
Before beginning this account of the ideological debates of the 1920s, it is important to keep in mind that these were also shaped by the fundamentally material dimensions of Soviet the social uplift agendas in which psychologists were to take
92 part. The February and October revolutions of 1917, World War I and the Civil War had severely impacted Russia’s industrialization, triggering famine, homelessness and unemployment. Production in many areas had fallen below 20% of 1913 levels
(Hosking 1993:120). In 1924, already seven years after the Bolshevik Revolution, only 23.3% of the population of the USSR was a part of the industrial-urban matrix,
(10.4% workers, 4.4% white collar, and 8.5% bourgeoisie). The remaining 76.7% were peasants. These figures were mostly unchanged by the end of the decade
(Hosking 1993:518). The point is that Stalin’s task was as much psychological as sociological and economic. It involved, on the one hand, turning “peasants into proletarians,” and on the other, overcoming the Soviet Union’s economic backwardness relative to the capitalist west (Hosking 1993:150).37 His first Five Year
Plan addressed just that by directing tremendous resources into heavy industry as a means of economic development. The effects were quite significant. Working class numbers doubled during the first Five Year Plan, and tripled between 1928 and 1940
(Hosking 1993:154).
It was in the midst of this massive social mobilization that Soviet psychology took shape. According to Raymond Bauer, in the two decades following the Bolshevik
Revolution, at the intersection of Bolshevik social uplift agendas and philosophical debates about Marxism and science, the Soviet psy disciplines were given their fundamental shape. Of central importance in these debates was the future place, and also type, of Marxism. As was true in the arts and economy, Bauer suggests that in the years between 1917 and the early 1920s, psychology was a field of experimentation.
37 With the exception of hygiene campaigns, the “civilizing missions” linked to taste, consumption and self-fashioning would come somewhat later (cf. Dunham 1990; Hellbeck 2006).
93 This included efforts to enjoin Freudianism and Marxism (until 1927 there was a
Moscow chapter of the International Psychoanalytical Association (Wortis 1950:72)); to develop behaviorism; to extend physiology to brain science; to create a system of mental hygiene; and also to integrate the study of culture and history into human psychology. None of these were exclusively concerned with Marxist theory, though most were sympathetic to it as a sociological and/or philosophical position. This period was also characterized by a great interest in psychology’s potential contribution to the uplift of the proletariat, and the building of a socialist society (cf. Cole 2006:12;
Miller 1985). According to the Marxist principle of economic determinism, it was thought that social conditions, not genetic factors, had held back the working classes and the Soviet Union’s national minorities. In this spirit, the famous psychologists Lev
Vygotsky and Alexander Luria had gone to Uzbekistan to study cognitive function among school children. They found evidence of socio-economic determinism: the backward upbringing or lack of schooling had indeed produced “lower” forms of reasoning that could be amended through psychologically grounded pedagogy.
By the middle 1920s, however, as calls for a properly Marxist psychology gathered force, the period of diverse activity became hamstrung by philosophical debates—in particular, the place of categories like consciousness (soznanie) and psyche (psikhika) not just in psychological research but also Marxist theory more broadly. According to Bauer, “If there were a single problem around which the history of Soviet psychology could be written it would be the role of subjective factors in
94 behavior” (1959:67).38 Even before the October Revolution, Russian psychology had been trending toward objectivism and away from an “introspectionist” approach concerned with subjective reactions to experiences.39 As an object of hard-science, the psyche had been deemed empirically unreachable. This prior trend was compatible with the vulgar Marxist determinism, and fetishism of “science” by the Bolsheviks in the early 1920s. Psychologists rejected introspectionism, Bauer asserts, “because it reflected a contemplative approach to life, setting off thought from action, and because it was tainted with concepts like freedom of will and therefore was anti-deterministic.”
“Soviet psychologists…almost without exception, either rejected or did not deal with subjective and conscious factors in human behavior in a systematic way” (Bauer
1959:67).
This produced several ideas about human beings and behavior. With regard to motivation, “man was viewed as an adaptive mechanism that responded to external forces in such a way as to maintain an equilibrium between himself and his environment.” Equilibrium was the basic source of motive, and little attention was given to “needs and interests,” because these could all be described in the more precise language of reflexes. And even in the area of applied practical work, it was assumed that “the reshaping of human nature would take place automatically as the institutions of society were changed.” For these reasons, psychology, which had already whiffed of subjectivism, was vulnerable to being subsumed by neurophysiology, the much
38 Much of the controversy that would erupt in the later 1920s, and whose resolution would lead to a consolidated Soviet psychology, was concerned with “whether or not there was adequate doctrinal support in Marxism for the inclusion of the concept of consciousness or the psyche in psychology” (Bauer 1959:67). 39 Psychology had been in a so-called crisis since the late-19th century, when a division between objectivism and subjectivism had been heightened (cf. Joravsky 1989).
95 harder and more materialist discipline of Pavlov. A science of the mind that treated it as an empirically accessible part of the body, rather than a kind of metaphysical substance, stood much more firmly in the currents of materialism. Indeed, psychologists like K. N. Kornilov (the first psychologist to call, in 1923, for a psychology derived from Marxist tenets) asserted that consciousness was incompatible with materialist philosophy (Bauer 1959:67-78).
One might assume that this mechanistic vision of the figure of the automaton- subject characterized “Soviet psychology” as a whole; however, by the late-1920s, after Lenin’s death, the mechanist trend had begun to loose its hold. Still at issue was the relationship between materialism and subjectivity. The mechanists had occupied the hard-line, dismissing “subjective” categories like “psyche” or “consciousness,” and viewing the mind as a bundle of material processes.40 Bauer speculates that by the late-1920s, as the first Five Year Plan was rolled out, and, later, as the collectivization of agriculture unfolded, the mechanists’ view became incompatible with a call for socialist initiative and creative thinking. Timed with the release of Lenin’s posthumous writings, an alternative view emerged that re-centered in psychological theory a notion of human capacity, and used the theory of dialectics to transpose
40 There seems to be some disagreement on this particular issue. Miller, a historian of Russia and psychoanalysis writing several decades after Bauer, argues, “Articles on the mind, the unconscious, and human motivation in a socialist context disappeared from the journals that had stirred such interest in these problems during the 1920s. In their place emerged a contrived elaboration of Pavlovian neurophysiology as the sole approved theory of a Marxist concept of human behavior and motivation” (Miller 1985:643). This is the reverse position adopted by Bauer, who suggests that “consciousness came to man” starting in the late 1920s. The fact that these are polar opposites, I suggest, points to the difficulty of discerning “trends” based exclusively on theoretical debates and policy decisions. As Etkind (1997:225) suggests, these were often without a necessary logic, more closely tied to career strategy than science.
96 formally “subjectivist” theories into the terms of Marxism.41 This “dialectical position” took up the Leninist line in philosophy, the “theory of reflection,” which posited consciousness as a “reflection” of, but also action upon, the objective world.
By the 1930s, after heated debates at various conferences and through polemical writings, the dialectical position had become dominant. This had several important consequences for the Soviet Man as he was understood by the psychological sciences. First, room had been made for “the psyche,” albeit as a “qualitatively new synthesis of matter, the laws of which were not reducible to those of physiology.” And second, consciousness, while carefully couched in materialist language as a form of
“highly organized matter,” had been assigned a relative independence from its material substratum, and was “therefore restored to an important role in the direction of human affairs” (Bauer 1959:29-30).42 In other words, dialectical materialism had offered psychologists a way to move beyond the subject-object dichotomy without dispensing with the subjective entirely. It proposed a material basis for the psyche, created an argument for the existence of consciousness, and integrated the social into the individual in a way that did not, at the same time, reduce the individual to a mere function of environment.43
41 As Bauer suggests, this disagreement was linked to the much broader Marxist doctrinal conflict between spontaneity and consciousness, which he glosses as spontaneity vs. intervention; or genetics vs. teleology. At the level of politics, the former was allied with a deterministic attitude by which the laws of history would bring about the development of Soviet society, and thus no intervention was required. The latter was a call for social planning. 42 These developments foreshadow the development of theoretical Marxism in France and elsewhere. Here I am thinking particularly about Althusser’s theory of the relative autonomy of the superstructure, a shift made to break from vulgar Marxist economism, except “in the last instance.” 43 This enabled Soviet psychologists to move beyond the binary then defined by phenomenology on the one hand, and objectivist materialism on the other. In fact, Yaroshevky asserts that far from hindering psychology, Marxism offered scholars a studied way of resolving the “crisis” in world psychology between objective and subjective approaches. (165)
97 From the standpoint of psychology’s disciplinary autonomy, the turn from the mechanistic to dialectical theory of the person was fortuitous: under the strict materialism of the earlier position, psychology was vulnerable to being swallowed up by Pavlovian neurophysiology, which was solidly materialist in its description of all of human behavior in terms of reflexes and conditioned responses. Under the new paradigm, the extreme objectivism of the early 1920s was somewhat softened.
Consistent with the new interest in active, conscious, socialist workers, in the early 1930s many speeches reflected the new preoccupation with individual responsibility and initiative, marking an upsurge in the importance of training in
Soviet society (Bauer 1959:46; cf. Kharkhordin 1999). This was also the period of the so-called Stakhanovite movement, when new forms of socialist competition were created by rewarding workers who surpassed production records. At the same time, however, this was inscribed inside a discourse of social constraint. As Bauer writes,
“The individual Soviet citizen, according to the new formulation, is a conscious, purposeful actor. But he is free to act only within the limits circumscribed by the regime, free to act only in the pursuit of socially accepted goals” (1959:48).
The effect on Soviet psychology was to some extent double-edged. Liberated from the full-court press of physiology, the psychological disciplines were nonetheless
“brought more directly under Party control and more closely coordinated with the needs of society” (Bauer 1959:66).44 Researchers in the most active areas of applied
44 Nonetheless, there was a final hiccup in the Stalinist period for psychologists—the brief renewal of the onslaught by neurophysiology in the late 1940s and early 1950s. It reappeared in the form of a patriotic rally around Pavlov, retroactively named a true Russian and a contributor to world psychology. As Loren Graham notes, the resuscitation of Pavlov was initiated at the June 1950 conference sponsored by the Academy of Science and the Academy of Medical Science, along with an
98 psychology—labor psychology (psychotechnics), child/developmental psychology
(pedology) and psychohygiene—incorporated the dialectical-materialist view of the person into work. These fields reached their “peak” in 1932 and 1933 (Bauer
1959:120; Graham 1987:167); however, as David Joravsky notes, the new problematic of the active, conscious citizen also created pitfalls for psychologists keen to apply their work to the task of building socialism. In becoming more essential to socialism, psychology also became more politically vulnerable. Along with the theory of reflection was an accompanying notion that theory should follow practice (Joravsky
1989:335-354). In the 1920s, according to Bauer, most researchers assumed that a
Marxist approach to science entailed an “adherence to certain principles of methodology, but that, by and large, the empirical findings of science, no matter what assumptions of method or methodology were involved in their discovery, were to be accepted as ‘facts.’ Now, in the early thirties, facts’ themselves came to be scrutinized on a political basis, and ‘objectivism’ came to be a term of abuse” (1959:105-106).
This created a dilemma. Writes Bauer, “The more psychologists attempted to apply their techniques to concrete social problems, the clearer the political and social implications of their work became. In many instances these implications conflicted with the interests of the regime” (1959:109).
According to most historians, this is when the applied fields, whose empirically based scientific conclusions could be a problem from the point of view of their unpredictable results, came under pressure. With increased attention to “party- mindedness” [partiinost’] in science, psychologists could produce numerous announcement of the return to Pavlov’s “straightforward materialism” (Graham 1987: 175). Petrovsky calls this reminiscent of the swing against psychology by physiology in the 1920s (1990:365).
99 problematic conclusions, including the “pessimistic” findings of Vygotsky, Luria and their researchers in Uzbekistan (see above).45 Pedologists following Lev Vygotsky were scrutinized for accepting Piaget’s “bourgeois” concept of the “antisocial period of the development of the child” (Joravsky 1989:108). Hit particularly hard were
“attitude studies.” With the start of the first Five-year plan, such studies were thought important in such a period of “accentuated ideological conflict” as a “guide to political reeducation of dissident groups” (Bauer 1959:110). Psychologists queried people on the existence of God, and which people are best? But in the framework of Stalinist praxis, the answers they came up with were ideologically problematic. Their findings were brushed aside and attributed to the researcher’s reactionary tendencies. After six years attitude studies were virtually stopped. In the area of psychohygiene, the early
1930s also brought to a close the concerns of practitioners to initiate mental health prophylaxis. This had been developed initially in response to increasing reports of neurasthenia—a response, it was thought, to the Civil War of 1918-1921 and the stresses of collectivization. Leaders of this movement had looked approvingly to the
United State’s mental health services as a possible model, but by 1931 this ended.
Grashchenkov, a new leader in psychoneurology, phrased the revisions this way: “In our country, [the mental health movement] must be an instrument for mobilizing the
45 As numerous scholars have noted, the relationship that Stalin prescribed between party- mindedness (partiinost’) and the scientific rigor (nauchnost’) changed over the course of his rule. In the 1930s, partiinost’ had been determinative of nauchnost’ under the premise that even objective science could be corrupted by bourgeois idealism, and also that theory should follow praxis. This had played out in agriculture with the installation of Lysenko, whose disavowal of genetics is well-known (cf. Pollock 2009), and also Stalin’s own interventions in linguistics (cf. Yurchak 2006). Before the end of this life, however, Stalin had reversed course, insisting that certain things are subject to “objective laws” that cannot be determined by policy. This undoubtedly shielded psychologists from what could have been another brutal swing against their field in the name of objectivity and materialism. And when de-Stalnization began in 1953, the last assault on psychology was brought to an end.
100 masses for the execution of the tasks of construction, an instrument for creating a personality that fully meets the requirements of socialist society” (Joravsky 1989:340).
Krol’ another new psychoneurological leader, was more direct: “[T]he mental health of workers and collectivized peasants was assured by their dedication to labor as a matter of honor, glory, and heroism; by their participation in the sociopolitical life of the native land.” Socialist labor itself, not therapy, had become the chief means for achieving improving health [ozdorovlenie].
One of the most cited Stalinist documents in the historical literature is the July
4, 1936 decree criticizing pedology, the holistic field of child studies that had held promise in the construction of socialist society, and of which Vygotsky and Luria had been a part.46 Stalin accused pedologists of being better at finding defects than merits, noting that special remedial schools were growing alarmingly fast, and that it was mostly the children of workers and peasants who ended up there (Joravsky 1989:347-
348). The decree also banned psychological testing, including intelligence tests, which were considered to be based on bourgeois psychology that perpetuated class distinctions. Gilgen and Gilgen argue, “Taking the test away from psychologists deprived them of a tool that no doubt greatly inhibited the growth of the discipline in the USSR” (1996:14). The decree also radically de-psychologized the Soviet education system, replacing it with pedagogical expertise premised not on individual child attention, but duty, discipline and tough love.
46 Notes Joravsky of the early use of intelligence tests by those pedologists: “[In Russia the pioneers of IQ testing] shared the populist ideology that prevailed in the educational profession of their country, the conviction that poor people at the bottom did not put themselves there, that great talents were imprisoned within the uncivilized (nekul’turnye) masses, to be set free by revolutionary abolition of social constraints and by educators bearing modern culture to the liberated masses” (1989:346).
101 Bauer links these transformations in applied psychology (psychotechnics, pedology, psychohygiene) and Soviet education to Stalin’s announcement that socialism had been achieved in the same year. Brutal purges accompanied that declaration; once the utopia had been constructed, the argument goes, there was little room left for divergence, lags or difference. In the area of criminal justice, for instance, “Stalin’s declaration … meant that the social basis for crime had been eliminated, and that any subsequent deviations from the moral norm are an evidence of ‘capitalist remnants in the consciousness of man’ and must be eliminated” (Bauer
1959:42).
The Critique of Psychoanalysis and Soviet Psychotherapy
The fate of Freudian psychoanalysis—both as theory and clinical practice—in that same period gives a clue to how the consolidation of Soviet-Marxist psychological theory in the 1930s shaped the development of clinical psychology and psychotherapy. In the West, the application of Freudian psychoanalysis in clinics was fundamental to the eventual development of a full-fledged, client-based psychotherapy movement (Hunt 1993). And in the current age of pharmaceuticals, short-term behavioral therapies, and managed care it is easy to forget that psychoanalysis once dominated psychiatry (as well as popular culture more broadly) from the 1950s until the 1970s, and eventually gave rise to a non-clinical set of services. Psychoanalysis had developed in the US in the 1930s just as it was on the wane in the Soviet Union.
After the Second World War, in the US psychoanalysis was viewed as cutting-edge science that offered a detailed and broad theory of mind (Luhrmann 2000). An early
102 psychiatric interest in psychoanalysis’ “talking cure” would spur the development of a range of other theories and therapies—Melanie Klein, Anna Freud, Alfred Adler, Erik
Erikson, Karen Horney, Erich Fromm. Lumped under the term “psychodynamic,”47 these would in turn shape psychotherapy.
In the Soviet Union, by contrast, psychoanalysis and psychodynamics more broadly, followed a different trajectory. To be sure, psychoanalysis did enjoy a period of popularity in Bolshevik Russia. Psychoanalysis was popular in the 1920s, particularly among the intellectual and political elite (Etkind 1997:179-224; Miller
1985; 1990). For example, Trotsky and Bukharin were both interested in the prospect of wedding psychoanalysis and Marxism.48 Clinical practitioners were slower to take up psychoanalysis, but in the early 1920s, Alexander Luria worked to arrive at a
Freudomarxist clinical approach that combined psychoanalysis with physiological psychology. His 1925 article in the journal Psikhologiia i Marksizm, was based on
47 The term “psychodynamic” is a broader term than psychoanalytic, and encompasses the latter. Freud is generally considered to have coined one of the first psychodynamic theories of mind. Psychodynamic theory emphasizes the interplay of different psychic elements, whether cognition and emotion, or, in Freud’s case, the ego-id-superego constellation. According to one historian, dynamic psychology “conceives of psychological problems as resulting from intrapsychic conflicts, unconscious motivations, an the interplay of external demands with components of the personality structure” (Hunt 1993:564). 48 Miller cites a 1923 article by Bernard Bykhovskii, a Bolshevik philosopher, in the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of Marxism), which articulated the theoretical project of a Freudomarxism. As Miller summarizes, “In his study Bykhovskii asserted that Freud is deterministic, dialectical, and monistic. He argued, moreover, that Freud's thesis can be interpreted from a materialist point of view. The conflict between our psychological needs and the social demands placed upon us, which is censored, mediated, and transformed (‘displaced’ or ‘transferred’ to other acceptable realms of everyday existence) in our unconscious, moves irrevocably toward some resolution. This resolution, however, may take a number of directions, which are to some extent determined by heredity and by the conditions of our environment, society and family in particular. The structure of conflict resolution Bykhovskii found to be, if not analogous to the social class struggle in historical periods, at least consistent with it methodologically. … Closer examination of the links between Freud's emphasis on "psychic sources" of conflict and Marx's stress on the oppressive nature of social class conflict could only expand our efforts to improve the world of the postrevolutionary order, Bykhovskii concluded” (Miller 1985:629).
103 several years of application of psychoanalysis in a psychiatric hospital in Kazan’
(Miller 1985:635-636).
Despite these efforts at theoretical and practical synthesis, the attack on
“Freudianism” was well underway by the middle 1920s. Miller cites one particular
“counterattack” on Freudo-Marxism in 1924, an article by Iurinets, a party philosopher, in the journal Pod Znamenem Marksizma (Under the Banner of
Marxism). Iurinets wrote sardonically that in reading Freud, “we are carried off into the semi-oblivion of a modern Walpurgisnacht [a pagan rite of spring], with its wild cries and frenzied dances, … on the waves of the unconscious contours of Prussian logic” (qtd. in Miller 1985:634). Iurinets also labeled Freud an “idealist,” decoupling his work from materialism by claiming that Freud merely used biological analogies.
Finally, he critiqued the social implications of Freud’s work, especially his tendency to “generalize about unresolved sexual conflicts from questionable individual case studies” (Miller 1985:631-632).
In the 1933 Medical Encyclopedia entry for psychoanalysis, one author, V.
Vnukov, criticized the application of psychoanalysis to too broad a range of domains.
Psychoanalysis “wipes away all the barriers between a neurotic personality and a healthy one” because “so-called” laws established from the study of neurotics “are then applied to healthy personalities.” Psychoanalysis was a “fragment of bourgeois democracy,” misreading “complex class relationships in primitive societies which emerged on the basis of definite socio-economic structures… as phenomena of neurotic mechanisms, as something biological in their very essence” (qtd. in Wortis
1950:76). Finally, its effectiveness in treatment was “too complex.” “Patients who are
104 being analyzed for two years and more become too submerged in themselves, they are constantly stewing in their own juice and are torn away from reality” (qtd. in Wortis
1950:76).
But it was the unconscious, psychoanalysis’ central concept, which was most problematic for Soviet Marxism. The view of the person as being subject to primitive, unconscious desires was anathema to Stalin’s active, conscious person. As a 1946 editorial put it:
Soviet psychology and bourgeois psychology oppose one another in this respect: bourgeois psychology takes the “unconscious” as a point of departure, as though it were the basic determinant of human psychology, and as though it were the central core of man’s personality. Soviet psychology has explicitly fostered the theory that consciousness in the highest, most specialized human level of development of the psyche and has indicated the dominant role which conscious influences play as compared with unconscious influences. In this regard Soviet psychology is in accord with Soviet pedagogy. Soviet pedagogy maintains as the basic principle of didactics the doctrine of conscious instruction. And, in questions of training, it holds to the principle that it is the conscious personality of man, his conscious behavior, and his conscious discipline that are to be molded (Wortis 1950:119-120 emphases added).
Such critiques make it clear that, by the time consciousness (soznanie) was re- established in the official conception of the Soviet subject in the late-1920s, psychoanalysis was all but totally excluded from clinical practice. While many acknowledged Freud’s contribution to psychiatry (e.g. to understanding certain mental disorders, and the sexuality of childhood and development), by the middle-1930s, few if any practitioners associated themselves with psychoanalysis (Etkind 1997:225-285).
In addition to the objection that psychoanalysis was “idealist,” the materialist approach to psychology also “cannot conceive and does not accept a concept of mind
105 which blocks off any large segment from interaction with reality. Hence the strenuous objection to the concept of the Freudian unconscious, to the instinct theory, to mental telepathy, or to any other concept of mind which endows it with qualities not divided from material reality” (Wortis 1950:71).
Does this mean that there was no “psychotherapy” in the USSR? No. Only that it did not grow from psychoanalytic roots, as it did in the US. According to Wortis,
Soviet psychotherapy was being developed in clinical psychiatric contexts as a junior partner to medical interventions. Its special feature lay “in [the] conception of how ideas can best be changed” (Wortis 1950:81). He adds that Soviet psychotherapy was seen as having much more limited possible use in the Soviet Union. At the base of
Soviet psychotherapy (as well as much of psychology) was Pavlov’s theory of higher nervous activity and the secondary signaling system. Within this framework, Soviet psychiatry and psychotherapy carried a very particular conception of neuroses.
Consistent with the centrality of dialectical materialism discussed in relation to psychology, neuroses were also viewed through the prism of physiology—that is, theories of and treatments for various neuroses were sought through Pavlov’s model of cortical activity, stimulation, and the healthy/unhealthy balance of excitement and inhibition.
Among Soviet psychotherapy’s most fundamental methods by the middle-
1940s was what is called “rational psychotherapy” (RPT) (Lauterbach 1984:69). RPT is based on the idea that “neurosis is the result of false reasoning, and the doctor can cure the patient by explaining his false notions to him” (Lauterbach 1984:61-62) by means of “a direct appeal to rational consciousness [using] logic, persuasion, scientific
106 enlightenment, group pressures and the creation of positive incentives” (Wortis
1950:82).49 The result should be a transformation in the patient’s personality, his sensitivity to certain problems, and the resolution of “pathological ideas,” all of which should be organized according to an “ethic of socialist society” (Lauterbach
1984:63).50 Hypnosis and suggestive therapy were also frequently employed. Derived from Pavlov’s theories, these targeted “physiological factors which may support tendencies to persistent obsessive ideas” (Wortis 1950:82). Once in the hypnotic state, the therapist would use one of several methods, including direct or indirect suggestion and suggested dreams (Lauterbach 1984:70-91). Finally, there was also “work therapy” and direct interventions in the patient’s life with the goal of altering the patient’s social environment (Wortis 1950:82). Zifferstein’s and Lauterbach’s studies
(both conducted in the Bekhterev Institute in Leningrad) suggest that these techniques remained central to late-Soviet psychotherapy, confirming the ongoing centrality of the conscious, rational actor in Soviet psychological conceptions of the person.
Some conclusions
The historical writing of Soviet psychology and psychiatry offers several valuable insights: first, contrary to the view that, for all of the 20th century, the discourse of the “New Soviet Person” was conceived as a collectively minded automaton shaped through social engineering, it is clear that the psychology of the
49 Interestingly, Soviet RPT bears a striking similarity to the now-popular forms of cognitive- behavioral therapies (CBT) in the US. For a discussion of CBT’s origins and relationship to psychoanalysis in the US, see Smith (2009). 50 For a more substantive discussion of all of these methods, see Lauterbach’s Soviet Psychotherapy (1984).
107 1930s had already placed consciousness, will, activity, and self-training at its center, albeit in a materialist sense.51 This accords with Oleg Kharkhordin’s (1999) point that a full-fledged notion of the individual was integral to socialist pedagogies. Any inquiry into post-Soviet governmentality should address this fact.
Second, the ironic outcome of the return of consciousness in the late-1920s and
1930s was that psychology’s practical applications in the area of education, work and mental health for the masses were curtailed. This impacted psychoanalysis as well as practical avenues of psychological work in schools that might otherwise have been developed into a popular non-medical form of therapy. Some of their features, whether too introspective, idealist, or just too pessimistic, appeared incompatible with the socialist person as he was being re-imagined.52 More palatable in the area of human development was the discipline of pedagogy, with its language of the training of the will. This tended to relegate non-medical psychological theories (theories of child development, family dynamics, individual fulfillment, happiness, empathy, grief) to the fairly narrow domain of academic laboratory research.
In becoming immersed in these accounts, though, one immediately has the sense of a larger project in which Western scholars sought to construct their own figure of the “New Soviet Man,” an image that corresponded, as a kind of obverse, to the USSR’s version. What is revealing about this construction is the lack, even in later histories, of much discussion of the post-Stalinist years, suggesting that those
51 Katerina Clark’s (1981) research on socialist realism supports this by demonstrating the shift toward more individualized heroes in literature, which she notes was timed with the Stakhanovite movement, tales of individual heroism in exploration and war. See also Kharkhordin’s (1999) discussion of individuation. 52 As an aside, it would be interesting to compare the psychological assumptions invested in the recent economic theory’s rational-choice actor with that of the Stalinist subject. My suspicion is that we would find an ironic, and broad, area of overlap.
108 scholars’ have been strongly interested in the formation of that figure. In this vein, it also is worth considering the research context for Bauer’s work in particular, since his book (based on his doctoral thesis) has influenced subsequent histories. As we saw in the previous chapter, Bauer, a social psychologist and historian, was a researcher in the Harvard Project for the Study of Soviet Society, helmed by Clyde Kluckholn, and undertaken in cooperation with the US Airforce in the 1950s.53 In the course of the project, Bauer interviewed many psychologists, psychiatrists, and doctors, who supplied him with materials for his history of Soviet psychology. These transcripts, now available online through Harvard’s Davis Center, show that Bauer was keenly interested finding support for his theory that the debates in philosophical Marxism in the late-1920s and 1930s were the central driver of psychological theory and practice.
Generally, his respondents confirm this view, adding strength to his claim that these fields were politicized because they touched upon politically sensitive issues such as the relationship of human capacity to socialist environments, social position and nationality, and also the relationship of theory and practice.
But there are also a number of responses that don’t accord. One informant suggests that the “determinist” orientation of some psychologists in the 1920s (i.e. the mechanistic idea that social environment determined personality and consciousness) was completely spontaneous and not decreed from above (HPSSS n.d.-a:4). This informant adds that the research directions people adopted were less a matter of decree
53 An influential social science paradigm of the time were the functionalist theories of Talcott Parsons, who trained Clyde Kluckholn (the HPSSS head), and whose Harvard center may have also influenced the scope and methodology of the HPSSS. This may explain part of the rationale for focusing so much more on philosophical debates, ideology and top-down Party decisions—an approach appropriate to certain kinds of research interests and topics, but not others. But another reason was certainly the paucity of available sources.
109 than funding: people would read the Party discussions as a clue to how to orient their work (HPSSS n.d.-a:7). Meanwhile, Bauer’s own notes following his interviews underscore his own interest in high-level philosophical debates and the ideological character of psychological work. These points suggest that Bauer’s focus on ideology and policies is but one historical approach among others. As Alexander Etkind has argued, “Western literature on the history of Soviet psychoanalysis tends to attribute a disproportionate significance to the ideological debates that took place at the end of the 1920s. In an oblique way, Western scholars are in agreement with the Soviet
[philosophical] debaters they study, many of whom really believed that the force and ideological purity of their arguments could shape something tangible in the future”
(1997:225).
De-Stalinization and Psychodynamics, Genealogically
On the surface, the post-War legacy of the 1930s ideological debates would seem to have been disciplinary narrowing, increased specialization and the elimination of the conditions of possibility for the emergence of what in the West is known as “therapy.”
There are many accounts of how the purges prompted confusion, a closing of the ranks around Marxist-Leninism, much finger-pointing, self-criticism and revision.
Concretely, there was also a shake-up of the heads of various psychological academies, and, ultimately, the closure of the USSR’s faculties of psychology and their re-designation as sub-fields of philosophy, thus isolating them institutionally from applied work (Bauer 1959:128). But to leave things at that would be to neglect
110 what I heard from psychologists and psychotherapists about practicing in the late-
Soviet period. While hardly romanticizing the Soviet past, many underscored the diversity of practices in the 1960s, and offered evidence that countered a theory of
Soviet psychology’s ideological coherence.
Take Egor Eisenberg, a well-known psychotherapist who had been trained in the early 1960s at Leningrad State University in psychiatry, and who now takes family-therapy referrals from a PPMS Center. According to most historical accounts,
Eisenberg would have been schooled in the standard Pavlovian methods with an antipathy to Freud; however, his description of the two most significant moments in his professional development belies this theory. The first moment was when he read
Pavlov and Freud, by Harry Wells,54 in the scientific library in the early 1960s. As he told me,
At that time we had this rule: it was written on the spine of this book “only for the science reading room.” That is, it was impossible to buy it. You could only read it in the science library. But there were no [other] prohibitions: you come in, sign it out, and you could say that you are reading it, come back later, and so on. The most widespread way to get it? Someone stole it, and passed it around so that everyone could read it.
They gave me the book for a week. This was not samizdat,55 this was an official publication in our literature. I read it, and, of course, I understood what psychology and psychiatry was (at that time I didn’t know the term psychotherapy at all)—and this, naturally, was very important. For me the principle thing was that it was interesting. I had
54 Published by the Marxist press, International Publishers, Wells distinguishes the Soviet Union from the West by the orientation of each one’s psychologies. Wells notes that in the USSR, China and Eastern Europe, “the Pavlovian conditioned reflex approach is having a profound influence on diverse sciences and institutions, whereas in the West, especially the USA, “the Freudian psychoanalytic approach today … spreads throughout the world wherever it can penetrate” (Wells 1956:12). In the book he offers parallel accounts of these “two giant figures [who] stand out in the field of psychology, each with powerful influence and backing” (Wells 1956:13). 55 Samizdat, literally self-published or made, is a common Soviet term for censored texts, often obtained by people who had visited other countries that were copied by hand and distributed in sections.
111 already been to the psychology department in order to learn (then it was called the philosophical faculty) who the psychologists were, how to study them.56 And, of course, I liked the fact that in this book there wasn’t some indiscriminate attack on Freud, but a good pathology, that is a biography of Pavlov and Freud. And it was shown that each was a genius in his own right: Pavlov as a physiologist and Freud as a psychologist.
There was an American film [Inherit the Wind] in the 1920s about the evolutionary theory of Darwin. There were these people who took the Bible in their hands, and tried to judge it in the world of ideas, those who taught Darwinism. Yes, and there was this really wise good judge, who, when the film was over, picked up the books, weighing each one in a hand: Darwin and the Bible, holding them together, and left with a happy look. […] My own impressions about this book were similar. I spoke about this for the first time [then], just like many psychologists my age and younger said: “You know, that book also made a huge impression on me.” Some started studying the physiology of higher neural activity while others did psychology.
The second moment—this was my own personal experience. I was considered a good student, and a good young doctor, but I started to feel that something was lacking in my work. […] Just engaging with the symptoms, treating symptoms, the prescribed biological methods of therapy—these were unsatisfying to me. Only then did I guess that, probably, they were unsatisfying for patients, too. I then read somewhere that, it turned out, many psychiatrists, those who proceeded to become psychotherapists, both American and Russian, had passed through this and had a similar fate.
The moments he describes raise doubts about two supposed orthodoxies of
Soviet psychotherapy: the intolerance for Freud, and the tyranny of Pavlov.57
Eisenberg first emphasizes that one could read and learn about Freud’s ideas not just
56 As of 1961, the psychology faculty had been closed for nearly three decades, and the psychological disciplines had been folded into the philosophy department. That Eisenberg was wandering between the two already suggests a loosening of the boundaries between psychiatry and psychology. 57 The veracity of any oral history can be questioned. As I discuss in the previous chapter, many informants, Eisenberg included, often contradicted themselves, deploying various “genres” of speech when discussing the past. It is likely that, in an act of personal revisionism, Eisenberg has projected his current views onto the past. Yet the fact that I encountered many similar accounts inclines me to accept what he says as reliable.
112 through samizdat, but also through official publications.58 Then, invoking Inherit the
Wind,59 he even suggests that an ecumenicalism in the Soviet psy disciplines existed: at the time of his education in the 1960s Freud was viewed as a legitimate
“psychologist.” In the second part of his statement, he suggests that already in the
1960s there was a split in the field between those who went on to study the problem of
“higher-neurological activity”—the Pavlovian way of dealing with the problem of consciousness—and those who went in a “psychological” direction, including himself.
What Eisenberg is referring to here is a key moment when Pavlovian materialism began to loose its stranglehold on the concept of consciousness in clinical practice.
Finally, he underscores how Soviet and American psychiatrists had a similar frustration with excessively biologized approach to human psychology and the treatment of mental illness, a point which seems to undo another assumption about
Soviet psychology—namely its paranoid parochialism and isolation from the world.
This example, one among many, suggests that the Bauer narrative of Soviet psychology cannot just be mapped onto the remaining Soviet period.
Fortunately, from a series of studies describing the practices of the Soviet psy disciplines we can piece together a sense of the practices of therapy in the post-war period. One such key text is Wolf Lauterbach’s Soviet Psychotherapy (1984), which a
58 Indeed, as another female practitioner educated in the 1970s told me, another common way to read Freud was through “bourgeois criticism” (burzhuaznaia kritika), in which an in-depth discussion of Freud was permissible so long as it included the usual perfunctory remarks about the superiority of Marxist-Leninist psychology. Such invocations are reminiscent of what Yurchak (2006) describes as a “performative shift” that occurred under late-socialism, under which authoritative discourse was reproduced in a wooden way, and bent to other ends, causing it to loose its meaning, and also to open up a series of “deterritorialized mileus.” 59 Inherit the Wind dramatizes the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in which William Jennings Bryan prosecuted on behalf of the state of Tennessee a science teacher arrested for teaching evolution to his class.
113 practitioner had recommended to me. Lauterbach, a German psychotherapist, had spent seven months at Leningrad’s Bekhterev Institute in the late-1970s studying their methods. The detailed accounts Lauterbach gives of clinical practice offer good evidence that the critique of Pavlov, the partial rapprochement with psychoanalysis and the emergence of new forms of psychotherapy had already begun in the 1960s.
Lauterbach’s work thus counters the notion that psychodynamically inscribed concepts like personality or the unconscious did not appear in Russia until the market reforms in the 1990s.
Post-Stalin Developments in Psychology and Psychotherapy
A brief mention of the social situation starting in the 1950s helps to contextualize the more general atmosphere of relaxed ideological constraint that psychologists experienced. Despite the ravages of the Second World War, which exacted huge losses of life (particularly men), neglected infrastructure and production systems, (Hosking 1993:296), the Soviet Union had slowly begun to reach an increased scale of industrialization and urbanization. The rough ratio of proletarian to peasant from the 1920s had reversed: in 1959 nearly 70% of the U.S.S.R. was made up of workers and bureaucrats, with only slightly more than 30% defined as “peasants”
(Hosking 1993:518).
In cultural terms, starting from this period, a range of new personal practices emerged that, in the 1920s might have been deemed bourgeois, including all kinds of creature comforts. Vera Dunham’s study of Soviet middle-brow fiction of this period finds an interesting array of curious possessions, including perfume, colored postcards,
114 embroidered pillows, and pink, scalloped paper. Whereas Bolshevik asceticism had ruled the roost through the 1930s, this marked a seeming embourgeoisment of at least one segment of urban Soviet society, which Dunham views as a compromise the party leadership made with the ruling elite to allow them to develop their “middleclass values” (Boym 1994; Dunham 1990; cf. Volkov 2000). According to Russian sociologist Vladimir Shlapentokh, a kind of “privatization” had even taken place in the
1960s, which he defines by the rise of personal entertainment through the television, personal automobiles and more broadly available consumer goods (1989). And as
Alexei Yurchak notes in his study of the “last-Soviet generation,” the generations that came of age in the 1960s and after cultivated a variety of personal styles, listened to
American jazz music, and distributed pirated music and fiction (2006).
In light of this proliferation of urban culture, personal style and new possibilities of consumption in the “thaw” years under Khrushchev and beyond, it becomes less surprising that the psychology fields also underwent a degree of liberalization. As the psychology, psychotherapy and psychiatry were de-Stalinized after 1953, new psychotherapeutic approaches resembling the West’s “dynamic” forms began to appear.60 Much work was done further elaborating a Soviet-Marxist psychology, but without the pressure of purges.61 For instance, in the 1950s and
60 Again, strictly speaking, these would have seemed problematic on two grounds: First, psychodynamics, with its emphasis on intra-psychic phenomenon, would have been viewed as excessively individualist and insufficiently social. Second, its tendency to focus on psychological, as opposed to physiological or neural causes of problems would have been viewed as excessively subjectivist and idealistic. 61 While it is true that debates like those of the 1920s between physiology and psychology, would erupt on occasion, in the absence of heightened ideological warfare, both perspectives were sustained. As an example, Graham cites the 1962 All-Union conference on Philosophic Questions of Higher Nervous Activity and Psychology at which point new techniques from neuropsychology and information theory were introduced that, again, pushed up against psychology’s relevance as a science
115 1960s, Leontiev, a former collaborator with Vygotsky on those ill-fated studies in
Central Asia, developed a theory of activity [deiatel’nost’] that became central in post-
Stalinist Soviet psychology, and would posit one of the early theories of the personality. For Leontiev, “social activity was the mediating influence forming the human personality” (Graham 1987:212). Labor was the most important type of activity, but not the only.62 In this period, Vygotsky’s theories on the development of thought through language were resuscitated—ideas that were in many ways harmonious with Leontiev’s social understanding of activity.
After the thaw of the 1960s, the unconscious even made an appearance as a viable research topic. The work of the Georgian psychologist Uznadze was developed into a theory of the unconscious (Kozulin 1984:95). Uznadze’s experiments had shown that an illusory effect in perception could be caused by prior conditioning, pointing to a non-conscious physiological basis for mental processes (Kozulin
1984:98-99). While far from Freudian, the idea of the relevance of unconscious sensory-motor regulation flew in the face of the Stalinist notion that human behavior
of the mind. Nonetheless, these areas of inquiry were not pressed out of existence as they had been in the 1930s (Graham 1987:191). 62 To illustrate his theory of activity, Leontiev gave the example of the child playing in the same way as an adult. In the example of a child playing with a doll, Leontiev argued that what is important is not how the doll looks, nor how the child sees the doll, but the social relationship the child establishes with it. The child is imitating the activity or practice that she/he has seen among adults. “Behind perception there lies, as if rolled up, practice.” In contrast to behaviorists, who grounded their views on a simple, mechanical model of stimulus-response, Leontiev linked the appearance of a subjective, sensual image with not only sensory organs and the material effect of an object, but to “penetrate into the activity of the subject that mediates his ties with the objective world.” Here previous activity became important. He denied the existence of an “innate human personality” and instead asserted the formative influence of social activity on personality. A baby at birth is only an individual, not a personality (presumably individ, a ne lichnost’). He was also critical of psychologists who developed theories of personality based on human needs like sex or hunger (i.e. Freud). “Personality cannot develop within the framework of need; its development necessarily presupposes a displacement of needs by creation, which alone does not know limits” (Graham 1987:212-213).
116 could be entirely explained through conscious activity. Indicating a much less charged atmosphere in the late-1970s, both Uznadzeans and Leontievites confessed:
[I]t cannot be concealed that in those years [the 1930s to the 1950s] Soviet psychology made a mistake and threw the baby out with the bath water. The negative reaction of Soviet specialists to the defects of psychoanalytic methodology…was so strong that criticism of the weaknesses of psychoanalysis developed into a disregard for the very object of psychoanalytic studies…Little by little, it becomes clear that insufficient elaboration of the problem of the unconscious and absence of appropriate methods of study retarded the growth of the most important fields of contemporary scientific thought within psychology as well as beyond it (qtd. in Kozulin 1984:99-100).
On the practical front, an important development was the reopening of the psychology faculties at both Leningrad and Moscow State Universities in 1965
(SPbGU 2010), just a few years after Egor Eisenberg told me he’d been making trips there to find out “who the psychologists were and how to study them.” As was mentioned, after the debates of the 1920s and 1930s psychology faculties had been folded into philosophy. The re-establishment of psychology as a distinct discipline marked a re-evaluation of its status as a science of mind.
Equally, if not more significant, was the fact that a new specialization in clinical psychology was created, reintroducing a possible avenue for work outside laboratory settings for people with training in psychology. This would become a basis for the intensification of talk-therapies in Soviet psychiatry. As we saw, under Stalin, psychology had been pressed into a research domain because it appeared on the wrong side of two issues: it was potentially “subjective” and therefore insufficiently materialist; and it also conflicted with the Stalinist etiology of mental illness. As
Lauterbach notes, “The [Soviet] psychologist is not at all concerned with treatment.
117 To him, treatment is a medical matter by definition. This attitude is logical in view of the Soviet notion that ‘in a psychiatric illness it is not the psyche but the brain that is affected’ and that the reason for the disturbance of normal psychological function must therefore be physiological” (1974:483). The creation of clinical psychology was therefore symptomatic of a discursive shift in Soviet conceptions of the person. Its appearance implicitly deemed the “psyche” a possible seat of mental health problems, and opened a space for clinical practice that stood to the side of Pavlovian theory, as psychology had historically done.
There was also a revolution of sorts within Soviet psychotherapy. A particular irony of Pavlovian psychiatry was that, for all the critiques of psychoanalysis’ neglect of the social, Pavlov’s approach also downplayed the role of the social in neuroses because of its objectivist/materialist parsimony. Starting the 1960s, this model of the person and neurosis came under criticism. Among the most vocal and well-positioned critics was Vladimir Nikolaevich Miasishchev, a psychotherapist and educator, who directed the Bekhterev Institute until his death in 1973. Miasishchev’s work is significant because it marks another shift in Soviet psychotherapy away from Pavlov’s models of mental illness, the person and therapy, and toward one of the first Soviet dynamically oriented approaches to psychotherapy (Lauterbach 1984:108). A student and colleague of Miasishchev, Ekaterina Yakovleva, explained that although Pavlov’s theories of the “pathophysiological mechanism” of various disorders was useful (i.e. a model of mental illness that takes the physiological characteristics of the brain as its object of diagnosis and intervention),
118 the clinical investigation…of…neuropsychiatric illnesses requires a knowledge not only of their pathophysiological basis, but also of the specific characteristics of the personality, its conscious relations, and other aspects of the psyche. Only by taking these into account can we understand the pathogenesis of the illness and work out a rational system of treatment (qtd. in Zifferstein 1969:352).
Several aspects of Miasishchev’s work are worth highlighting. First, his focus on neurosis was unique in that it focused almost exclusively on what had until then been seen as a marginal disorder more or less solvable through rational and suggestive techniques. On the earlier Soviet psychiatric model, a patient suffering from an irrational fear of public speaking would be “reconditioned” through some combination of RPT and hypnosis, on the assumption that something neurophysiological, something in the brain, was interfering with his life, and also that the disorder could be apprehended and transformed rationally. Miasishchev was the first to “deviate[] from the conventional medical attitude of viewing the neurotic person as a patient who either lacks something which must be replaced through medication, information, supplemental training in rational thinking, or who must be operated on, repaired or modified through suggestion techniques” (Lauterbach 1984:93).
Second, Miasishchev introduced a concept of personality (lichnost’),63 which had been out-of-place in the Pavlovian model, into Soviet psychotherapy. He viewed
63 Kharkhordin’s discussion of lichnost’ is useful context here. He notes that in the 19th century, influenced by the translation of Rousseau and the Russian Enlightenment, the term developed a dual meaning—one “high,” one “low.” The high meaning referred to the notion of a unique individual; the low to a basic notion of the person. He argues that in the Soviet Union this duality was extended and re-channeled. The tension between the high meaning and bourgeois individualism was addressed in the early Soviet period by asserting that it is socialist society that gives rise to developed, harmonious and unique individuals, thus preserving the fundament of individualism. This was extended under Stalin, when stories of the heroes of socialism became common. Still, becoming an exceptional individual was not necessarily a mass phenomenon, and the average person remained a lichnost’ in the “low,” or basic sense. This basic lichnost’ was, however, important in the “mass individuation” that accelerated in the post-War period in which Makarenko’s disciplinary collective was deployed not to create spectacular individuals, but “a man that socialist society needs” (Kharkhordin 1999: 184-201).
119 the personality through the lens of one’s relations, or otnosheniia. One has otnosheniia with one’s friends, family, co-workers, society and, ultimately, with oneself, which defined one’s personality and experiences in the world. Through the otnosheniia concept, he also began to develop a language for discussing the concept of needs
(Lauterbach 1984:94).
This revised personality concept also enabled a reworking of the theory of neurosis: neuroses arise when a conflict emerges in one’s life that shifts, displaces or disrupts one’s otnosheniia, making a rational recovery impossible. A conflict between abilities (what is demanded versus what one is capable of giving) can lead to neurasthenic fatigue. A conflict between desires (what one wants versus what is possible) can lead to hysteria. And a conflict between various internal needs (loyalty to the state versus loyalty to friends) can lead to obsessive-compulsive disorder
(Lauterbach 1984:105). Lauterbach suggests that the politico-ethical and scientific breakthrough lay in the bases Miasishchev posited for the disorder. Whereas Pavlov
“emphasized the importance of neurophysiological characteristics” in neuroses,
“Miasishchev expresses his disagreement with the idea that there exists a pre- disposition to become neurotic and that a ‘weak nervous systems’ is of central importance in generating a neurotic disorder. … Specific situations can lead to neurosis even in relatively stable and experienced individuals if they are unable to master them…” (Lauterbach 1984:106).
While it may seem like a miniature step, Miasishchev’s suggestion that neuroses were disorders arising from social and other relationships (in his language linked to external “pathogenic” events) was revolutionary: since the 1930s, the
120 “subjective” had been difficult to insert into Soviet science’s dialectical-materialist view; the idea that the psyche, not the brain, was the seat of disorder ran against the
Pavlovian grain. Miasishchev therefore was replacing the Pavlovian somatic conception of neurosis with one premised on the personality in interaction with the social world. This also posited an actor somewhat less consciously in control of his faculties, and implicated the social environment in disorder. At the height of Stalinism, when socialism had supposedly been achieved, the arrows of “blame” had been pointing the other way.
Late-Soviet Progressivism
These developments in new modes of intervention continued in the 1960s,
1970s and intensified in the 1980s through international exchanges. In her study of
Soviet psychotherapy, Anna Vasilyeva (2005) notes that in the 1960s increased academic exchanges with scholars from other socialist countries in Eastern Europe, where there were more firmly established psychotherapy traditions, introduced new methods and approaches. There was also, according to written sources as well as informants, a home-grown New Age movement in the Soviet Union. Likely tied to the centuries’ long tradition of Russian mysticism, this took the shape of so-called ekstrasenzy, or psychics and healers, who were so popular as to have, in some cases, have been given their own TV programs (see chapter 7), but also research scientists who began probing the field of “parapsychology.” As Kripal suggests, the state was interested in parapsychology as a possible undiscovered technology that could release human potential. He reports a story that the Soviets, having heard rumors that the US
121 was using ESP on the Nautilus submarine to communicate with their shores, began research on ESP (2007:319). The story may be apocryphal, but there is evidence of a strong interest in parapsychology and the paranormal in the USSR: in 1970, the
Moscow Academy of Pedagogical Sciences hosted a parapsychology conference, and in the late-1970s there were reports of Soviet research in areas including psychoenergetics, information transfer over long distances, interactions between separated cell cultures, telepathy, to mention a few (Kripal 2007:324-327). Finally, in
1979 an International Symposium on the Unconscious—itself a remarkable event in light of the earlier critiques of Freud—was held in Tblisi, Georgia, where a wide range of parapsychological talks were given (Kripal 2007:326).
This collection of research fields and practices are a far cry from the Marxist-
Leninist line that supposedly hamstrung Soviet interest in the psyche. To be sure, dialectical materialism remained a central premise in Soviet science, but as Kripal reports, Soviet researchers had by then coined a materialist language that mirrored what was being called in the US “human potential.” As two Esalen psychologists visiting the USSR noted,
There is a remarkable symmetry between Soviet and American interests in this field. The Soviet term “hidden human reserves,” for example, is almost identical to the American “human potential” as a guiding idea. Soviet concern with “maximum performance” resembles American investigations of “peak experience.” Soviet studies of “bioplasma,” “biophysical effects,” and “distant bioinformation interactions” resemble American studies of “energy fields,” “dowsing,” and “remote viewing.” Training in “psychical self-regulation” techniques is the Soviet equivalent of “biofeedback” and “stress management” programs in the U.S. In both countries these ideas have stimulated new approaches to education, health-care, and sports (Kripal 2007:331).
122 More frequent exchanges between American humanistic psychologists and
Soviet researchers, also played an important role in expanding the therapeuric orientations in the USSR. Particularly influential was the Esalen Institute, which pushed forward what came to be called “track-two diplomacy.” Esalen’s director,
Mike Murphy initiated these visits in 1970. What began as a series of research trips to learn about Soviet work on the parapsychological were eventually formalized into the
Esalen Soviet-American Exchange Program in 1980, which attained a high level of power and influence under the Reagan Administration. Alongside Esalen, the closely linked Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) initiated its own track-two diplomacy, sponsoring the trips of various famous psychologists to give seminars.64
These visits, which would sharply increase after 1991, fostered the development of non-medical therapies.65 One of the most well-known of these was by the famous psychologist Carl Rogers in 1986, whose “client-centered” therapies based on self- realization remains central to American psychotherapy.
One gets a sense of the atmosphere in which these seminars took place from the account of Alexander Bondarenko, a Ukrainian psychologist, who had to work rather hard to get into Rogers’ seminar. He begins his account with a discussion of his scientific skepticism and disappointment. In a way typical of Soviet practitioners, he had hoped to learn “something ‘scientific’…some new theories, experiments,
64 The exchange of psychological knowledge was complemented by the exchange of mass- mediated confession in the form of the Phil Donahue show, which was recorded and aired on Soviet television in 1987 after a series of so-called “telebridges” had connected various US and Soviet audiences via live feed. For more on this, see chapter 7. 65 The American Association for Humanistic Psychology (AHP) hosted numerous diplomatic trips to the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, and included numerous accounts in its journal, the Journal of Humanistic Psychology. For some articles on these exchanges, see Bondarenko (1999), Cole (1986), Greening (1984; 1989), Hassard (1990), Macy (1987) and Rogers (1987).
123 hypotheses and their proofs and disproofs [sic],” and instead, Rogers had mused about his youth, and spoke in generalities about empathetic listening, caring and congruence
(Bondarenko 1999:10). Yet in the second day Bondarenko had a revelation: “I myself was the truth in the world, that was the essence, however bad this truth might be”
(1999:12). He writes,
It is difficult to render this in words, but this revelation came as a shock. From the time that I was a child, I had heard that I had to live for people. I was brought up with the idea that my life was necessary—to my parents, to the family, to the state, to the motherland. But it was needed as a part of a universal sacrifice or as a duty. And no one, myself included, needed my life as my own particular life, as the truth of my being in the world.
I looked at Carl Rogers and I felt and I understood that this wise old man was neither adapting himself to the world nor adapting the world to himself. He was being in the world. I knew I was lonely. I realized how lonely I had been. But I was feeling the truth of my being in the world and that feeling purified me and gave me strength to exist, and I sensed tears of joy as well as bitterness in my eyes (1999:13).
The almost religious tones here were echoed by other older non-governmental practitioners I interviewed, who compared the arrival of psychotherapy to the first drops of water coming to a person dying of thirst.
All of this psychotherapeutic foment began to trigger other changes in the
Soviet system. During perestroika, the gradual and uncoordinated incorporation of a wider array of psychological approaches began shifting the bedrock foundations of
Soviet education and upbringing, or vospitanie. Since the 1930s the dominant approach in Soviet education had been one of discipline and rote learning shaped by the Soviet Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (APS). But as “the personality” became a more central research topic in the 1980s, appearing with increasing regularity in the
124 main journal, Voprosy Psikhologiia (Petrovsky 1990), a kind of mini-revolution within the APS occurred: a working group comprised of psychologists and philosophers began pressing for reforms of the APS, including shifting in educational approach from the imposition of knowledge, skills and abilities through rote learning to one attentive to the child’s needs and interests, and the recognition of the “autonomy of childhood, freedom in choice, and self-government” (Eklof and Dneprov 1993:8). At this time, psychologists began to be placed in schools.66
Historians and scholars have continued to query the “why” behind the spread of something resembling the American human potential movement in the USSR. Such questions are premised on the idea that the movement’s interests are inevitably ideological deviations and therefore in need of explanation. For example, traveling to the USSR in the mid-1980s, an American journalist named Sheila Cole (1986) had set out to discover: “Why were the people in charge of the Soviet Union interested in
Americans who are known in the United States for the extremes to which they have taken self-involvement?” Cole explored this question through observation of Soviet
“family clubs” based on the popular teachings of Boris Nikitin. These involved certain practices like physical fitness, vegetarianism, spending time in the countryside, home birth, herbal medicine, T’ai Chi, EST, meditation—all of which were aimed at free[ing] natural human potential.” Cole’s supposition, echoed by the historian Loren
66 As I discuss in chapter 5, the humanization [gumanizatsiia] of education continued after the collapse of Communism, facilitating the further spread of school psychologists, and the growth of what would later become the PPMS Centers that I referenced at the beginning of this chapter. These centers are charged with providing “guidance” [soprovozhdenie] to students, as well as building into state pedagogical imperatives an even more psychologically oriented approach to human needs and development. Drawing heavily on Western humanistic psychology, these new imperatives take emotions as the relevant pedagogical target, and strive to develop emotionally healthy learning environments while reorienting the aims of education to self-realization.
125 Graham, was that “the human potential movement fosters many attitudes valued by the authorities, such as expanded labor productivity, positive feelings about work and play, large families (at a time of declining birth rates), and close family ties (at a time of rising birth rates)” (1987:219).
Richard Rawles, a British sociologist, develops another, related, explanation: such trends were symptomatic of a larger reckoning under perestroika, whose political-economic counterpart appeared in Gorbachev’s attempt to address the
USSR’s economic recession and perceived social stagnation through a renewed attention to the personality at the center of the production process. Rawles quotes
Gorbachev at the 1986 27th CPSU Congress: “Party work has to do with the human factor…. Hence the main task of this work today is to inspire, by all possible means a change in the minds and moods of personnel from top to bottom. … Little can be changed in the economy, management and education without changing mentality and developing a desire and ability to think and work in new ways” (1996). If labor had at one time been viewed as a form of therapy and fundamental to the development of fully realized persons, it was here redescribed as part of, or at least ancillary to, the problem.
In light of this chapter, the questions of Cole, Graham and Rawles seem wrongly put. A great deal of attention and research had already been devoted to the self, and the needs of the personality in the Soviet period, much of which was being developed not outside, but within the Marxist tradition.
*
126 The sections above have explored how and when the psychodynamic approaches so widespread in contemporary Russia actually appeared and took shape.
It was the distrust of the subjective in the late-1920s and 1930s that led to the closing down of possibilities to practice psychology in contexts like factories and schools.
And the same distrust seemed also to place psychoanalysis in the territory of dangerous knowledge for psychiatry. The exclusion of the subjective from applied areas, in other words, forestalled the development of softer psychotherapeutic forms.
At the same time, informants and later accounts of Soviet psychotherapy caution against overstating the anti-subjective elements in Soviet psychology. To be sure, the behaviorist/mechanist tendency was part of the history of disciplinary formation, but it was later replaced by a dialectical view of consciousness—marking a kind of partial return of “the subjective.” This fact makes problematic the argument about the
“liberation” of psychology, consciousness, personality, etc. in the post-Soviet period.
Based on surveys of the journal Voprosy Psikhologii, it also seems clear that even in the times of harshest ideological pressure, there were a broader set of possible discussions than ideologically derived accounts would have one believe. As the Soviet psychologist Artur Petrovsky asserts,
The fact that [since the 1940s] psychology was based on Marxism did not do away with the diversity of theoretical concepts, which evolved and interacted in Soviet psychology alone and the same time. Neither could it preclude the coexistence of various scientific schools and trends. This state of affairs was consonant with the creative nature of Marxism-Leninism—a circumstance which is sometimes ignored by Western historiographers of Soviet psychological science (Raymond Bauer, Josef Brozek, Gregory Razran and others), who attempt to present the matter as if Soviet psychology’s shift to Marxist philosophy amounted to rejection of the struggle of views, termination of all theoretical debates, leveling of principled controversies among
127 psychologists, and erosion of distinctions between different psychological schools. History has proved that such views are both erroneous and biased (1990:362).
Petrovsky is a partisan, to be sure, but no more so than anybody else. And his point is backed by a range of studies of then-contemporary Soviet practice. These materials suggest that the period after Stalin was one in which the conditions of possibility for the emergence of a psychodynamically oriented psychotherapy had already begun to take shape. The significance of this perhaps seemingly technical point is that it forestalls the argument that individual psychology is exclusively post-
Soviet. As we saw, the discourses of the self and the person had been in a state of flux for nearly three decades, reaching well beyond the “forbidden” unconscious and into the parapsychological.
Conclusion: Revisiting the Contemporary
In an effort to identify a more modest and responsive mode of inquiry for anthropology, Paul Rabinow coined the phrase “anthropology of the contemporary.”
The contemporary designates both a field and a way of looking. For Rabinow, the contemporary is where “old and new elements…coexist in multiple configurations and variations,” and its anthropology should involve exploring “how older and new elements are given form and worked together, either well or poorly…” (2008:2-3). As
Tobias Rees rephrases, anthropology should “decompose emergent phenomena…into different elements that are assembled into one form.” It should “choose—or find—an appropriate field site and…document and analyze such assemblages in the course of
128 their emergence, to name them, to show their various effects and affects, and to thereby make them available for thought and critical reflection” (Rabinow, et al.
2008:58).
This idea has added some historical thickness to the currently influential concept of the assemblage (cf. Ong and Collier 2005)—a way of looking at contemporary phenomenon as contingent configurations. But it should be asked how much of the past lays claim to the present? Rabinow has suggested that “the
‘contemporary’ indicates a mode of historicity whose scale is relatively modest and whose scope is relatively short in range” (2008:58). He admits that while historical conditions are undoubtedly partially determinative of the present, “they aren’t everything,” and that “there is a great deal of contingency and under determination in most situations” (2008:56).
The analysis above suggests that, at least in the case of post-Soviet societies, a strong argument can be made for the relevance of the distantly historical. Socialism involved efforts on multiple fronts to alter social life and individuals, through the sciences, visual culture, public ritual, education and propaganda. And it involved numerous rounds of transgression and reformulation of those sciences. Not necessarily submitted to, nor resisted wholly, the language of socialism, its ethics, and associated subjectivities became deeply woven into the texture of everyday life under socialism.
As with the modern for the postmodern, the postsocialist is difficult to describe
129 without its socialist referent, which was elaborated over a period of many decades in a way centrally concerned with its 1917 origins.67
The genealogy above illustrates a particular, professionally bounded discursive formation in motion, which, I have claimed, has had a bearing on the contemporary. It illustrates the interplay between biomedical, materialist, Pavlovian, and scientistic discourses, and how the juggling of these elements was consequential in shaping
Russian psychotherapy and its conception of the person. It also shows how the demands of social uplift for so many living in illiteracy and poverty placed the psychological sciences in a precarious position vis-à-vis the Party apparatuses. And yet, more modest practice-focused texts also showed the supposedly smooth edifice of ideological coherence to be flexible, changing and responsive to research interests and social needs, particularly in the post-Stalin years. Together, this set of constraints and options created the conditions of possibility for post-Soviet psychotherapy.
Consider, now, the way the psychological disciplines appeared in 2005—with a strong, but also somehow ill-defined, stigma attached to its prefix. Based on this genealogical excursion, a good argument can be made that there are scientifically engrained assumptions about what “psychology” is and does that are specific to Soviet socialism that have given the prefix “psy” pejorative connotations in Russia.
Psychotherapy had been developed primarily in psychiatric clinics in close relation to a pathologized model of mental suffering (and in some cases political repression.)68
67 For a discussion of this constant recovery and reinterpretation of history, see Susan Buck- Morss’ (2000) discussion of revolutionary political culture, and its reliance on an iconography that reached, in some cases, into the 19th century. 68 “Political psychiatry” was the term given by scholars in the West to the Soviet practice of using psychiatry to suppress dissent by institutionalizing political dissidents on the grounds that they
130 People’s sense of what it means to seek psychological help has been shaped at the intersection of a pathological-somatic conception of psychic disturbance and a patient- based model of care.
Or consider the term “trening” (training), which many practitioners use to sell their services. In light of a desire to de-emphasize these pathological or the politically repressive associations, the concept of trening poses the comforting and familiar language of sustained, disciplined, able-bodied work, as well as a paradoxically non- psychological association, developed under communism. Today, for instance, what one does while “working out” at a gym in Russia is “trenirovka,” which shares the same root. It also resonates with the pedagogically oriented approach to shaping human beings, with its emphases on training the will. Consider, also, the fact that it is the term psikholog (not psikhoterapevt) that has become synonymous with what in the
US is regarded as a psychotherapist or counselor. This only makes sense when we know that the gradual de-medicalization of therapy that began in the late-1960s emerged from the sub-specialty of clinical psychology. Indeed, some informants who were practicing talk therapies upheld the view that “we are not practicing psychotherapy.” Or, consider the story of Soviet subjectivity. More subtle than the concept of the “dividual,” Soviet psychology worked with a concept of the individual that privileged both social values and self-sacrifice and self-development. This insight, which is explored ethnographically in subsequent chapters, is important for putting post-Soviet developments in perspective.
were pathological. There is no doubt that Soviet psychiatry was often used for political ends; however, the extent of the problem, and its periods, are somewhat less clear. For early accounts, see Bloch (1984). For a more recent overview of psychiatric repression in the FSU, see Smith (1996).
131 Finally, consider the way psychological services have been institutionally instantiated in St. Petersburg today. The bulk of Russia’s state-provided psychological assistance remains biomedical and patient-centered. And while public services are of course free from the commitment to Marxist dialectics, they remain hamstrung by a politics of expertise conditioned by the way biomedical and scientific discourses were shaped by Marxism in the Soviet period, and which remain embedded in institutions like the university system, post-graduate training, credentialing and professionalization, clinical protocols, and scientific conferences. Yet for all its red tape, practitioners in public clinical services continue to enjoy a broad, historically legitimated jurisdiction for their interventions. For instance, they maintain the right to institutionalize a person without their consent, and also to intervene on the behalf of a child against the will of the parents.
These benefits (as well as constraints) continue to accrue to those practitioners who operate within the biomedical structures (like the PND). This is made especially clear by the relative struggle practitioners in the PPMS Centers face. PPMS Centers, we will recall, are relatively unique as psychodynamically (not biomedically) oriented public services. As such they are rather like upstart organizations, in some cases cooperating with the PNDs, but other times vying for control of some of the territory of those organizations. That they operate under the Ministry of Education, not
Health—signals their link to the revolution in the 1980s in the Academy of
Pedagogical Sciences mentioned above, and the earlier emergence of medical psychology, which was also lumped under the Ministry of Education (Lauterbach
1984:34). Yet unlike their PND counterparts, PPMS Center practitioners continually
132 complain that their legal domain is constrained. They lack not only the ability to prescribe medication (a constraint shared by most counselors in the US), but also the possibility to intervene in family issues the way their medical colleagues can. That state constraints remain in place around these more psychodynamic types of practice is an interesting facet of post-Soviet governmentality. By contrast, the market has become a largely under-regulated place into which those psychodynamic alternatives begun in Soviet clinical psychology have flowed. Unfettered by accreditation, licensing and reporting requirements, the market offers practitioners both money and relative professional freedom. At the same time, knowing that the de-medicalization of psychotherapy had been underway since the 1960s helps us to see that the emergence of non-medical contemporary services cannot solely be explained through a state- market binary.
It turns out, then, that at the heart of the psychology renaissance in Russia is not so much an emergent capitalist technology, but rather a tension between biomedical and psychodynamic orientations in late-Soviet psychology and psychotherapy that have articulated in different ways with capitalism. Each has followed a different pathway (and to different effect) in the marketplace and state institutions.69 What should be explored, therefore, as a way into the social, political and cultural significances of the post-Soviet boom in psychology, are the various struggles around the meaning of psychological expertise, their institutional
69 For a comparison with the US context, see Tanya Luhrmann (2000). In the US, Luhrmann notes the gradual decline of psychodynamic psychotherapy from its hegemonic position in the late-20th century, and the rise of the biomedical model and managed care. In effect, the USSR and US trajectories appear inversely related: in the USSR/Russia, biomedicine has been dominant, but psychodynamics has appeared more recently on the scene challenging its hegemony. In the US, it has been precisely the opposite.
133 instantiation and practical effects. It is the struggle over scientism—either its appropriation, or its rejection—that has, in turn, articulated with pathology, improvement and healing in the space of Russia’s developing market society. As I show in the next chapters, the way these struggles have played out has resulted in the production of a variety of post-Soviet subject-positions. Among practitioners, psychological knowledge has been paired with a range of personal and social reform projects, giving way to new kinds of political projects. Yet as this work has entered concrete institutional spaces, in particular work with children (and Russia’s children), different kinds of classed citizen-subject-positions have also appeared.
This foray into the distant past has therefore uncovered important ethnographic questions: how is this tension between biomedical and psychodynamic orientations being worked out in contemporary public services? What does this tension suggest about the legacy of state involvement and the role of capitalism in shaping the human sciences? How has the privatization of services in the non-governmental sector articulated with state and municipal organizations to create new discourses of post-
Soviet subjectivity? How are these various governing projects playing out in concrete sites? Addressing these questions is the task of the rest of the dissertation.
134
PART II – FUTURES
135 CHAPTER 3
Assembled Biopolitics: Child and Future between State and Market
Image 1: in a small town in eastern Finland, eight Russian adolescents sit in a circle with two psychologists, and one anthropologist. They are attending a “psychological education” camp on the theme “Controlling Emotions and Behavior” (upravlenie emotsiiami i povedeniem). The camp is run by an organization called, pseudonymously, Tomorrow’s Builders, which promises an elite parent clientele that they know what it will take to be successful in Russia. The children have just spent two days discussing the concept of self-regulation and the nature of emotions, and are now being asked to draw a map of their “internal emotional world.”
After twenty minutes, Alexander, a handsome psychologist in his late-twenties, invites them to share. Twelve-year-old Gosha, constantly fiddling with a fancy cell phone and with a fashionable hair-do, has put himself in the middle of the map. Lines lead outward like spokes to different emotionally infused locales. This exteriorization of affect includes “the place of emotional experience” (a home-entertainment system with flat-screen TV), “the lake of joy,” “the scary scary forest,” “the house of love
(family),” and “the place of knowledge” (with a drawing of bespectacled Tolya’s head skewered atop a mountain). Tolya, meanwhile, is sinking lower and lower in his seat.
He has folded his map into a square, and begun to tear it in half. Irina, the other
136
Figure 2. Gosha’s and Tolya’s internal worlds, 2006. psychologist, intercedes, touching his arm. He refuses to share. It is frantically drawn and divided into two halves. The top represents “reverie,” but its nauseous pinks, greens and blues drawn with erratic pen strokes suggest unease, or even irony. Grey rivers turn blood red in the lower “dark” half, and flow into a red lake with black shores surrounded by jagged cloud-enshrouded mountains. Two black towers loom, one crowned with a brain sitting inside a movie camera, the other with a giant yellow eye surveying the landscape.
137 Exercises like these invited the children to see themselves, for better or for worse, anew. By asking them to “draw an emotional world,” they were asked to circumscribe an interior domain, and create introspective distance. The exercise also offered a normalizing language of “positive” and “negative” dynamics, and a means for understanding how this world shifts in relation to outside stimuli. It raised the question of which details are appropriate for disclosure and which are not. It skirted questions of difference and raised instead questions of management. In other words, it initiated them into the idea of a “self” as an object for work.
“Knowledge is power,” noted Tomorrow’s Builders’ promotional materials.
“In order to be successful in life, a person has to understand himself, to know his plusses and minuses.” This is “the first step on the path to self-perfection
[samosovershenstvovanie]. [Yet] knowledge alone cannot guarantee progress if it’s not embodied in real results. And it’s precisely through self-management that everything that a person knows about himself appears and is used.”
Established during the post-Soviet psychology renaissance, several dozen organizations in St. Petersburg offer similar courses and camps for a loosely composed social group known as “New Russians”—upwardly mobile parents in white-collar professions known for their showy consumption habits. These organizations are part of a much broader, psychotherapeutically inspired, movement that offers people
“psychological training [trening]” in leadership, success and other forms of self- improvement. These offerings are often pitched as vital life-strategies in the post-
Soviet market context. Forming a subset of this “self-work movement” Tomorrow’s
Builders and their competitor organizations cater to the children of the elite, framing
138 their services in terms of “extracurricular education” (dopolnitel’noe obrazovanie),
“early development” (rannee razvitie) “harmonious development” (garmoniia razvitiia), and “preparation for school” (podgotovka k shkole). Regardless of packaging, all promote psychological exploration and revelation as both a parenting resource, and a set of necessary skills.
Image 2: while the children of the elite are being taught forms of emotional and behavioral control in places like Finland, back on the Russian side of the border a group of state-hired specialists is discussing a different sort of child around a humble table. These psychologists, educators and speech therapists—mostly women between forty and sixty—are attending a weekly meeting, or konsilium, in one of St.
Petersburg’s dimly lit and poorly heated Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social (PPMS)
Centers, where they are encouraged to discuss their difficult cases, to seek and give advice, and also to vent. The feeling is institutional, resource-constrained and bureaucratic. Unlike at the camp in Finland, the child-client is off-limits to me, and appears only as a case in a handwritten tetrad’, the flimsy blue school notebook that stands in for computers, and sits in piles in a place that doubles as the staff coffee room.
As snow covers the mud outside, Anastasia, the psychotherapist overseeing the konsilium, invites someone to share. As usual, there is a long, uncomfortable silence, a fear, perhaps, of the heated exchanges that can take place if a breach of protocol is accidentally revealed. Finally, Natalia Konstantinovna, the head psychotherapist begins to talk. While flipping through a tetrad’, she offers a punctuated case history:
139 A boy, twelve years in age. First came into the Center on a crisis call from his grandmother. He is unwilling to go to school and has nightmares. His father has left the family and God knows what mother is doing. Binet test and hand test were administered, showing no psychiatric problems; however, on the drawing test he shows some abnormality, representing the leaves of trees with magic letters.
As she continues, the boy’s drawings are passed around the room.
These two scenes highlight a bifurcated concern with the child in contemporary Russia that can be roughly characterized as one of capacity-building versus crisis-management. While both rely on similar forms of interior exploration and transparency (enacted through pictorial representation), one is fed through humanistic psychology’s language of potential, the other through the prophylactic language of diagnostics and abnormality. One envisions the child as a bundle of unleashed talent, the other as a broken machine. These differences in expectations, tools, and therapeutic environments also reflect socioeconomic class distinctions: while one group works with the children of Russia’s nouveau riche, the other manages the working-class problem child.
The differentiated management of the population is a central part of modern governmentality, whose effectiveness often depends on division and categorization
(Donzelot 1979; Procacci 1991). Thus we should not be surprised to find a difference in the kinds of psychological practice, of the populations served, between paid versus publicly available work. Instead, what interests me, and what I will focus on in this and the next two chapters, is how these differences have come to be, and what kinds of subject-positions they produce. As we saw in chapter 2, the psychologists working in these diverse milieus share a great deal, including a late-socialist history of
140 progressivism, a shared orientation to humanistic conceptions of the person, a sense that their psychological work has a deeply social-reform purpose, a de-medicalized view of emotional disorder and a commitment to care through the talking cure. That the shape of the work in these two spaces, and indeed the psychologist’s own socioeconomic status, has followed divergent pathways raises important questions about the way expertise and experts are shaped by political, economic and social forces in Russia. The transformation of Russian psychological care for children thus offers an important case for exploring how and under what kinds of conditions governing through psychological help can take different forms. To put things in more specific terns, how was the progressive promise for emotionally sensitive education of perestroika transformed into elite courses in polish and psychological disposition on the one hand, and crisis-management and prophylaxis on the other? How is this transformation registered on the figure of the child?
I will suggest that a part of the story of the post-Soviet trajectories of psychological help for children is connected to two national concerns that have emerged under Putin—the demographic and the economic. The first, Russia’s demographic decline, has become an important source of anxiety for many, and is sometimes hyperbolically described by nationalists and the Communist Party as “the ongoing genocide of the Russian population” (Rotkirch, et al. 2007:351). The second,
Russia’s perceived economic decline after its Cold War loss, relates to question of how Russia can better compete economically, and resume its place as a global player.
Children, their birth, development, and finally maturation into citizens, consumers, soldiers and producers, have become vital targets of these two contemporary
141 biopolitical problems, and psychologists have been well-positioned to contribute to both national tasks because of a general surge in interest in their expertise as an instrument for governing life (either one’s own, or someone else’s). Thus, the placement of psychologists in schools, the creation of regional networks of psycho- social assistance, the de-medicalization and normalization of therapy, and of course the growing market of psychological services have together linked psychological expertise to the kinds of personal development that the state is seeking in the face of its problems. One result is that emotions, personalities, and developmental criteria have become important surfaces of governance. What appears to bind these developmentalist projects to psychological work is a discourse of success, or uspekh, on which many psychologists have drawn to articulate their work with national-level concerns. However, as I explore in chapters 4 and 5, as the drive for demographic and/or economic success has articulated with different political rationales and economic possibilities, very different kinds of client subject-position have resulted, as was evidenced at the start of this chapter.
This chapter explores how forms of economic, demographic, national and psychological success have been brought together inside the figure of the child. I draw on two of Michel Foucault’s central concepts for the analysis of modern political projects—governmentality and biopolitics. I understand governmentality to refer to a rationale and set of techniques by which populations are not just ruled, but in fact invited to become participants in their own regulation. Biopolitics, on the other hand, is one particular set of concerns any governing rationale that is concerned with health, life, bios, and, indeed, the psyche. In the case of post-Soviet psychology, the
142 biopolitical concern with the healthy child has been linked to demographic, economic and national improvement through, among other kinds of intervention, the psychological. What is interesting about this conjuncture of biopolitics and
“psychological success” is that, as it has been picked up in commercial organizations like Tomorrow’s Builders, and municipal centers like PPMS, it has taken rather different kinds of shape. This suggests that it might be more useful to think in terms of two distinct kinds of governmentality at work in Russia today—one broadly neoliberal and the other statist. As a way to grapple with this, I develop the phrase assembled biopolitics. This phrase is meant to highlight how, as the biopolitical concern with the next generation articulates with neoliberal and statist governmentalities, child and psychologist become yoked to the socioeconomic hierarchies that characterize a
Russia society “dizzy with success.”70
“Total Crisis,” “Success” and Assembled Concerns
In the last decade and half tremendous worry has fallen on Russia’s children. The sense of crisis is tied to Russia’s dropping birthrates, as well as a concern over the quality of those children who are being born and raised. As Michele Rivkin-Fish points out in her study of postsocialist health reforms in Russia, an anxious discourse of “dying out” [vymiranie ubyl’] and “depopulation” [depopuliatsiia] pervades public discourse. She quotes two dramatic newspaper headlines in the late-1990s: “Russia has 100 years to live,” and “Pediatricians Confirm that Russian Children Everywhere
70 The use of the phrase is intended as a provocation. It is drawn from one of Stalin’s famous speeches, delivered in 1930, in which he praised the USSR for the success of the collectivization drive, but also warned against becoming “dizzy with success” (Stalin 1955).
143 Are Physically and Mentally Deficient” (2005:1). Such imagery has also been a response to other grim social indicators, including low life-expectancy, particularly for men; and high infant-mortality, abortion rates, incidence of alcoholism and heart disease.71 The figures have only improved slightly since the late 1990s.
No less significant has been the ongoing experience of postsocialist capitalism’s uneven distribution of wealth, Russia’s loss of global standing and its
“shame” before the West’s Cold War victory. Serguei Oushakine (2009) has noted the way these experiences have led to a general loss of potentially unifying narratives, as well as an upsurge in conspiracy theory, nostalgia, patriotism, xenophobia, and attempts to “repatriate” a capitalism that can still feel like a foreign imposition.72 This has made for what Olga Shevchenko (2009) has described as a sense of total, routine, pervasive, everyday crisis. The responses, she notes, can be varied, and can include depression, anxiety, violence, a conservative concern with stability, as well as an atomized interest in beautifying one’s personal quarters.
71 Unfortunately, in the ten years since Rivkin-Fish first conducted her fieldwork the picture remains largely unchanged. Life expectancy at birth has still not returned to 1990 levels (Anderson 1997). As of 2007, the average male life-expectancy at birth remains low at 60, putting Russia among the lowest in the Former Soviet bloc and at the level of many much poorer nations in Africa (WHO 2009b:44). Women’s life expectancy is also low. As of 2006, suicide rates for men are 53.9 per 100,000 (tied for 2nd highest in the world with Lithuania) (WHO 2009a). Combined with low fertility rates (1.3 per woman), the Russian population as a whole has been contracting by .4% per year since 1997 (WHO 2009b:136-137). 72 Nationalist, anti-immigrant paranoia are common even among the “educated.” At a university psychology conference, I one heard a young man complain, “If we compare the Russians that go to work in Silicon Valley to the people coming to Russia from the southern republics, they are categorically different people.” The student sitting next to him, nodding in approval, then couched the discussion of falling birthrates by saying that “it’s a known fact that more blondes are marrying negry [people of African descent]” in Russia.” Even Putin has stoked these flames, replacing the commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution with “Unity Day,” which celebrates an obscure day in 1612, when Polish-Lithuanian occupiers were pushed from Moscow. Unity Day has become a platform to demand that all “outsiders” go home.
144 The anxious state and a fresh start
At the time of my fieldwork, in response to, but also of course in advance of, the public awareness of demographic decline and economic stagnation, Putin was making much of his administration’s turn from an exclusive focus on economic and security issues to social issues—primarily by making the demographic situation into a problem of economic and national security. Thus the family and the child became important regulatory axes stretching across several policy areas.73 In his annual address to the federal administration on May 10, 2006, demography was situated between calls for infrastructural investment, “technological modernization,” energy efficiency, protecting private property, and creating an “innovating environment that will get knowledge flowing” on the one hand, and “the importance of continued national security and building up the military” on the other. “What is most important for our country?” Putin asked rhetorically.
The Defense Ministry knows what is most important. Indeed, what I want to talk about is love, women, children. I want to talk about the family, about the most acute problem facing our country today – the demographic problem.
The economic and social development issues our country faces today are closely interlinked to one simple question: who we are doing this all for? You know that our country’s population is declining by an average of almost 700,000 people a year. We have raised this issue on many occasions but have for the most part done very little to address it. Resolving this problem requires us to take the following steps.
First, we need to lower the death rate. Second, we need an effective migration policy. And third, we need to increase the birth rate (Putin 2005).
73 For a discussion of Soviet-era worries over children and families, see Catriona Kelly (2007: 70).
145 “Love, women, children.” Putin’s implied normative view of the Russian family, presuming both consummation and an absent father, here asserts that today’s children are tomorrow’s soldiers and workers. This was evident in the way that the first comes- love-series falls on the heels of what the Defense Ministry “knows” is “most important” (conscripts have been falling for the last ten years).74 Putin also linked children to Russia’s “economic and social development issues”—both in the sense of
“who are we doing all this for,” but also in the implied sense of who will do all of this?
He then announced his “mother’s capital” incentive as a way to boost child-birth.75
There is every indication that this trend will continue: 2008 was named the “Year of the Family,” and a new social initiative consisting of public events, media campaigns and a website (which includes a place for parents to ask psychologists questions) have been launched.76
As columnist and former Putin advisor Vladimir Frolov (2008) writes, these efforts did have a positive, if moderate effect on birthrates. The first half of 2007
74 Legislation approved by the State Duma in 2008 increased the surveillance of the movements of young men in the country by forcing them to report to a local military commissariat if they will be absent from their home for more than 15 days. This is presumably intended to cut down on draft-dodging. Journalist Paul Goble (2008) posits that these steps are in response to Russia’s demographic problems: “The number of draft-age males has been falling for the last decade and will reach a level next year that will not permit Moscow to fill the ranks unless it changes existing draft rules.” 75 In the months following the speech, Putin encouraged the Duma to implement the “basic mother’s capital” incentive, which would pay out 250,000 rubles for a mother of two children, to be paid out gradually. In January 1, 2007 the incentive was implemented, though some have written that the cash payments have not been as forthcoming. In any case, as Rotkirch et al. (2007) write, this has set the politics of the family on a narrow path between various parties in Russia—social conservatives, liberals and feminists—returning the gender ideology expressed therein, they argue, to the arrangement that had existed between the Soviet state and women in the realm of family policy—that is, women as both weak wage-earners as well as single parents. 76 From the point of view of propaganda, if not actual budgetary allocations, it is significant that the public figure appointed to lead the natsproekty, and whose name graces the top of the Year of the Family website, is Putin’s heir appointee and current president, Dmitri Medvedev. Lilia Shevtsova describes the national projects that Medvedev has overseen as “a populist formula of stability” that has been used to “divert…attention to consumer aspirations” (Shevtsova 2007:87).
146 showed a 5% increase in the number of children born versus the same period in the previous year, and also more than all preceding years since 1999. But Frolov asserts that this is “far from sufficient to stop the population decline,” and that birthrates would need to grow by 50 percent from current levels to achieve that. Short of what he calls a “massive shift in social behavior,” or an unsustainable boost in the government’s “hiring out women to produce children,” this “is simply not in the cards.” He asserts that Russia’s population decline can only be reversed through the much more difficult task of reducing death rates. “Mind-blowing by a developed economy’s standards,” he adds, “Russia is the only developed country in the world that has seen a decline in life expectancy during the last 40 years, while death rates in certain working age groups have increased twofold.” This raises the interesting point that the child may prove a more effective biopolitical target than that adult, who poses for the state a far more vexing set of issues, including professional retraining, risky sexual behavior, addiction and other ingrained patterns of unhealthy living. From the point of view of not just boosting numbers but also altering norms and behavior, children thus give the state a chance at a “fresh start,” while those for whom it is too late are rendered as “lost generations.”
This biopolitical response to demographic decline is part of a broader slate of policy efforts called the natsproekty, or national projects, that Putin initiated and
Medvedev has extended. First announced on September 5, 2005, the natsproekty were meant to signal a shift in federal attention to social reforms (a move enabled by the growing federal coffers buoyed by oil revenues). Focused on four areas of reform— agriculture, education, housing, and health care—the natsproekty have since become
147 the touchstones in the administration’s casting itself as socially concerned, and while debates continue about whether the projects are real or just PR puffery, at least $6.4 billion was reportedly allocated in the first year to foster farming, build housing and schools, provide study stipends, improve medical facilities, and raise lagging wages of public sector workers like doctors, nurses and teachers.77
Through the natsproekty, biopolitical programs have been extended into education. There should not only be more children, these children must be raised in a particular way. Initiated by decree on 29 August 2001 and receiving great momentum from the natsproekty, the Ministry of Education’s “modernization” drive has framed education reform in terms of developing human capital in order to make Russia more democratic and more competitive in the global economy. As stated in a 2001 report of state advisors, education should provide the foundation for several main political tasks, including the transition to a democratic society and a market economy, the establishment of a just state (pravoe gosudarstvo), and overcoming the “accumulating dangers” stemming from Russia’s “lag behind global trends in economic and social development.” Further, education is even more important because of the role it plays
“in the formation of a new quality not only economically, but also socially in general.
77 The actual effects of the projects have been routinely debated in the Russian and English- language press. Western reports of infrastructural improvements are usually couched within quotes, citing mismanagement, corruption and a failure to implement fundamental changes. Conversely, the perception that this is nothing more than a way of maintaining appearances are couched within reports of actual money dispersed. Making things more complicated is that the public views these projects skeptically. In a poll conducted by the Levada Center, a Moscow-based research group, in August 2007, 53% of respondents said they believed the national projects were unlikely to have a significant influence on their lives. Only 31% thought the efforts would make a difference (17% had trouble answering). The same poll found that 52% of respondents believed that money allocated for the projects would be misspent, and just 15% thought it would be spent well (Center 2007).
148 Its role continually grows along with the growth of influence of human capital”
(Dneprov 2001).
The psychologist and vospitanie revamped
Thanks to a number of reforms since perestroika in approaches to education and children’s development (see chapter 5), psychologists find themselves in a position of influence when it comes to shaping Russia’s “human capital.” Starting during perestroika a transfer in authority from pedagogues (who were charged with creating New Soviet Men, moral character and discipline) to psychologists (who were focused on “releasing every child’s unique gift” or creating “free-education” environments consistent with Montessori or Dewey’s ideas) has occurred.78 This was spurred by a liberal faction within the conservative Academy of Pedagogical Sciences in the 1980s. I explore this shift in authority in greater detail in chapter 5; what is essential to underscore for this argument is that this liberal movement not only eroded the decades-long dominance of Soviet pedagogy, it also made emotions a relevant area of educational concern, thus initiating the “psychologization” of vospitanie.79 This
78 Catriona Kelly highlights two of the main pedagogues shaping Soviet vospitanie, Anton Makarenko (also discussed extensively in Kharkhordin (1999) and Oushakine (2004)), and Vasily Sukhomlinsky. Makarenko developed his theories of the “rational collective” in the 1920s and 1930s, and became a forefather of Soviet pedagogy. Kelly argues that Makarenko’s emphasis on duty and social discipline, cast within a telos of developing outstanding socialists, led to an emphasis on conformity over strictly individual expression. His work guided school pedagogical methods as well as child-rearing more generally for the entire Soviet period. For instance, his Pedagogicheskaia Poema stayed in print throughout the 1940s and beyond, reaching its 70th edition in the glasnost era, and his Kniga Dlia Roditelei, translated as The Collective Family, went through 13 editions between 1953 and 1987 (Kelly 2007: 615, n137). One of his American translators, the clinical psychologist Urie Brofenbrenner, has called him the “Soviet Dr. Spock” (Makarenko 1967: ix). His successor, Sukhomlinsky, while introducing discussions of spiritual values and individual traits in children, “also stressed the need for dutiful self-abnegation in the face of social demands” (Kelly 2007: 134). 79 These liberal reformers were no doubt influenced by numerous delegations of the American Association of Humanistic Psychology and the Esalen Institute in the 1980s. See Hassard (1990) on the
149 prompted a general shift in teaching priorities from the imposition of knowledge, skills and abilities through rote learning, to one attentive to the child’s needs and interests, and the recognition of the “autonomy of childhood, freedom in choice, and self- government” (Eklof and Dneprov 1993:8). These reforms culminated in the 1990s with the formation of the PPMS Centers referenced earlier, which are now charged with contributing to the national project of modernizing education. Through the melding of the population’s somatic health and education, psychological expertise has thus become both a tool of national security and an important resource for child- rearing. The biopolitical and what Nikolas Rose (2007) calls the “ethopolitical” have thus come into contact through psychological expertise.80
A glimpse at the Ministry of Education’s “modernization” criteria suggests that it has tapped into the globally circulating and almost bland language of the neoliberal subject, and merged it with the similarly bland language of nationalism. For example, in a report in 2004 to UNESCO on modernization, the Russian authors noted that as a result of new social and economic requirements in the global economy there is a need for “moral, enterprising people educated in line with present-day standards who can make decisions independently in a situation of choice, can cooperate, who distinguish mobility, dynamism, constructive thinking, who are open for cross-cultural interaction,
AHP delegations, and Bondarenko (1999) on participating Carl Rogers’ 1986 seminars in Moscow. For details on this history, see chapter 5. The reformers formed a faction within the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences known as the Temporary Research Committee on the Schools (VNIK). This moment mirrored, in many ways, the utopian moment after the Revolution, when the Bolsheviks tried to implement “free-education” in all schools (Eklof and Dneprov 1993). Both of these ultimately ran aground. The first fell on the rocks of shortage, civil war and Stalinism, and the second the pragmatics of resource limitations and the realities of crumbling Russian families in the 1990s (Iasiukova 2005). 80 The term “biopolitics” is most often used in relation to the corporeal; however, I find this reading of biopolitics both too narrow, and also productive of a problematic mind-body dualism. For more on this argument, see O’Neill and Matza (forthcoming).
150 feel responsible for the destiny of the country.... [The] Russian education system is called upon to prepare people who are not only able to live in civil society and a lawful state, but also to build them (2004).81 The report adds that the project to
“prepare people” is not a matter of “the assimilation of a certain amount of knowledge” (as critics argued it was in the Soviet Union’s dominant model of undifferentiated, rote learning (Zaitseva 2005)), but one oriented to “the development of their personalities, of cognitive and creative abilities.” The school should “not only form a new system of competencies” but also provide the “experience of independent activity and personal responsibility, i.e. modern key competencies” (2004). This shift in educational philosophy entails “a reconsideration of the objectives of upbringing
[vospitanie] as the first priority in education,” transforming vospitanie from “a separate element of extracurricular pedagogical work into a necessary constituent of pedagogical activity integrated into the common process of studying and development” (2004). This new, institutionally integrated, form of vospitanie should strive to cultivate “civil liability and legal consciousness, Russian civic identity, spirituality and culture, initiative, independence, tolerance.” Prioritizing the creation of the “versatile advanced person” who is focused on both tradition and modern values, vospitanie ought to foster things like making independent choices regarding career path, “self-education, and self-improvement.”
As the UNESCO report notes, the culture in the classroom appropriate to a modernized system is to be built on a “psychological-pedagogical conceptual base”
(13) meant to facilitate “the formation of common academic skills and…cognitive
81 This and other emphases cited in the report were emphasized in the original.
151 activity” which will “predetermine success” at subsequent stages in schooling. The activation of this “conceptual base” has been brought about through the spread of school-based psychologists, and the creation of a network of Psycho-Pedagogical
Medico-Social (PPMS) centers through Russia. Psychologists working in these institutions are responsible for grounding the new pedagogy, giving objectives like
“the free development of personality” (11), and education’s “personal orientation and individualization” an authoritative, scientific underpinning. Concretely, this has meant doing what one school psychologist named Tatiana calls “psychological enlightenment
[psikhologicheskoe prosveshchenie],” which involves exposing parents to the basics of child developmental psychology, as well as working with school teachers on new play-based pedagogical methods.
The Salesperson
Along with federal programs aimed at population growth, fortifying the institution of the reproductive family, and re-engineering human capital through psychologically sensitive education, there has been a dramatic expansion of markets for children’s goods and services since the 1990s. Public buses, billboards, televisions, metro cars, magazines and leaflets are filled with children’s product advertising.
Petersburg’s book kiosks are filled with how-to parenting books. And psychologists offer many courses on the art of parenting. At least in the case of wealthy New
Russians, the market has provided ways to replace formerly kin-based child-care arrangements with commercial nannies and governesses. Parents frustrated with public schooling can also turn to boutique private schools. The “child development”
152 organizations of concern in this dissertation encourage parents to make decisions about intellectual, cognitive and emotional development in their children. Taking direct aim at children’s psychological interiors, psychologists insist on the importance for success of a range of “skills, know-how, and knowledge” (navyki, umenie, znanie), even of developing “brain connections” from an early age.
As I show below, through a visit to a product expo called Childhood Planet, this market has not just appealed to “good parenting”; it has also helped to re- constitute it. In and through the incitement of parenting decisions, the many advertising messages denote new zones of concern, adding consumer choice, market research and caveat emptor to the list of parental responsibilities, and structuring formerly kin-based relations of care within the logic of hiring and firing.
Assembled Biopolitics and the Smell of Uspekh
While diverse in origin, and ranging from diaper cream to governmental developmentalism, this range of concerns, programs, practices and incitements have come together to form what I call a postsocialist “assembled biopolitics” of the child.
This phrase draws on Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, which names a set of governmental actions and interventions that take fostering the health of population as its object.82 By the addition of the term “assembled” I mean to suggest that these
82 Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics helps us to do two things: First, it underscores the importance of a “politics of life” for modern forms of rule—in which both Soviet and post-Soviet modernities are to be included. Second, it highlights the fact that the populations meant to be managed are in fact constituted as particular objects of government (state, self or otherwise). That is, biopolitics does not govern what it finds, but rather governs through definition; indeed, this is perhaps power/knowledge’s most efficacious dimension. Seen in this light, psychological trainings are important features of population management because they help to redefine what a child actually is within the purview of government.
153 interventions can take different courses, depending on their articulation with other political rationalities. In the Russian case, two seem particularly consequential, one tied to the market and the other to the state. 1 The market/state distinction is not one normally made in discussions of biopolitics, which usually presume that the management of populations moves across and between state and commercial enterprises. But the distinction is worth making here to underscore the fact that biopolitics in post-Soviet states state-market coordination has a different historical relationship as well as contemporary configuration from liberal states.83 By
“assembled biopolitics,” then, I am suggesting that the psychological management of children is unfolding place at the intersection of both Russian capitalism and governance.
To give a concrete example: Putin’s mothers’ capital initiative could just be read as a form of state biopower. Yet this would not account for the tremendous symbolic production and consumption of “motherhood” on television, in magazines, on billboards and stores, and among paid experts that works in tandem with the state’s policies. Rotkirch et al. even argue that (2007) certain gendered assumptions about parenting and family structures have framed the policy discussions. They point out that Putin’s mother’s capital initiative has essentially returned to Soviet notions of
83 One finds evidence of this link between governance and capitalism in Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics, where the emergence of a politics of population in the 18th century was part of a wide range of new knowledge practices in which political economy played a part. The link is in the “discovery” of the “naturalness” of various flows—of commerce, trade and national fortunes; of disease, births and deaths—that new types of human knowledge like statistics, demography, sociology and political economy facilitated (Foucault 2007: 76-79). Foucault thus saw a connection between biopolitics and the transformation of economic theory in the 18th century from a mercantilist/cameralist type to a physiocratic and ultimately liberal type. While this link isn’t explored in much detail, one can conclude that biopolitics does not only refer to state interventions, but also to a much wider array of interventions that flow between state institutions and market enterprises, and from multiple, seemingly disconnected kinds of power/knowledge.
154 gender and parenthood, where femininity is defined in terms of the wage-working mother symbolically (and slightly financially) supported by the state, and where masculinity is defined through military service. Then as now, women were not so much liberated from domestic drudgery as saddled with the “double burden” of domestic and factory work.
The point is that the biopolitics of population extends across policy-making, to consumption habits, cultural orientations, moral economies, habitus and daily practices, all of which contribute to the symbolic production of a biopolitical target— in this case, the child. Thus, whether driven by moralizing or civilizing campaigns, health prophylaxis, or national security, biopolitics is “assembled” in relation to any number of political rationalities. In the Russian case, as I have mentioned, a biopolitics of natalism and economic success has been assembled with both neoliberal and statist governmentalities (cf. Kagarlitsky 2009). In the sphere of psychological practice with children, these conjunctures can be mapped, respectively, onto fee-for-service commercial practices, like Tomorrow’s Builders, and publicly available services, like the PPMS Center. Thus, the difference in form of service and client subject-position is reflected in the way psychologized forms of up-bringing, or vospitanie, have been popularized and institutionalized, with neoliberal technologies of governance appearing in the marketplace, but rather more statist and prophylactic technologies appearing in public institutions.
The significance of these perhaps overly schematic points, as I will discuss in the conclusion, is that the class differentiation that appears woven into the practices of
155 psychologists can be traced to the rather happenstance ways in which population management has taken shape, rather than to any particular cultural or economic logic.
A visit to “Childhood Planet”
How have these biopolitical projects overlapped and diverged, and what clues does this give us about the bifurcated pattern of “governing” Russia’s children and its
Figure 3. “Beautiful! Grand! Comfortable!” private schools, extracurricular programs, lectures, and activities, was, for the most part, an aspirational event—that is, a place for window shopping. The products were generally too expensive for the average Russian parent. (A particularly choice
156 example is an advertisement from a company called Limousine World promoting “the first motorcade in your child’s life for $99. Greeted at the maternity hospital in a chic limousine.”) But as an aspirational event, the expo also created an atmosphere of consumer desire and pleasure, presenting visitors with a set of material goods with which to dream.
Figure 4. “The traditional family portrait in Great Britain comes from the royal family.”
The figurative child at the center of this atmosphere was celebrated as an object of adornment, education, preservation, concern and presentation. “Carousel,”
157 specializing in children’s haircuts and fashion, offered “fase-art” [sic], “contour drawings” for boys, and for girls over 10 something called “vizazh” (defined as “a harmonic composition of make-up, hair and overall look”). Studio K promoted its professional children’s portraiture with images of girls wearing lily-white gowns in aristocratic poses. There was also a pavilion for children’s entertainment, a huge children’s art exhibition, and later a beauty contest to crown “Miss Childhood Planet,
Miss Image, Miss Style, Miss Charm, Miss Extravagance and, naturally, Miss Crowd
Favorite.” This particular form of celebrating the child was distinctly post-Soviet.
According to Catriona Kelly, while beauty contests for children were becoming popular in pre-Revolutionary Russia, the Soviet ideal of gender egalitarianism had ended this trend. Attractive children were of course often displayed in Soviet publications, but usually as social representatives rather than individualized icons
(2007:374). According to Elizabeth Waters (1993), the first Soviet beauty contests did not appear until the late 1980s.
These new celebrations of children were complemented by an outsourcing of child-rearing, or vospitanie itself. Many companies offered nannies for parents occupied with their own careers. Viewing the family as a kind of corporate enterprise, such firms collectively called themselves “agenstvo domashnego personala,” or
“domestic personnel agencies.” Domovenok appealed to the working mother: “Career, ambition—the contemporary women has something to lose. That’s when the question arises: ‘Where can I find a good nanny?’” Along with nannies, Domovenok also offered services including the “Husband by the Hour,” “Autonanny,” “Sunday
Father,” and drivers/bodyguards. A firm called Dobraia Niania (Dear Nanny) assured
158
Figure 5. The aesthetics of domestic personnel. would-be clients, “We care about your future!” Only Vasha Tiotia, or Your Auntie, invoked a different, kinship-oriented, language in describing its services. These organizations essentially seek to privatize vospitanie in two senses. On the one hand, they are meant to replace the socialization of vospitanie through the Soviet Union’s network of work unit daycares and crèches.84 On the other hand, they seek to integrate
84 In the Soviet period, vospitanie was supposed to take place through the network of state kindergartens and daycares. These were meant to accomplish numerous goals—caretaking, of course, but also the education of the next builders of socialism, the liberation women from domestic drudgery, the erosion of the bourgeois family and the increase of the workforce. In practice, however, the
159
Figure . “Diplomat Private School—The Best for Children.” into the formal economy the formerly kin-based relations on which many parents, who opted out of the socialized system, relied for childcare.85
childcare network never fully met the needs of families, and alternatives to the state childcare institutions appeared, as did alternative practices of vospitanie (Kelly 2007: 342-345). 85 Many parents opted to keep their children at home until they were school-aged, relying on grandparents, siblings and neighbors. (See, for example, Sheila Cole’s (1986) description of the “family clubs” that have spread throughout the Soviet Union.) These were based on ideas of home schooling. Domestic services also existed in the USSR. Known as domrabotnitsy, or “home-workers,” well-off families could hire nannies, who were supposedly in unions and had work contracts (Kelly 2007: 408- 415). But compared to the current range of services, the Soviet precursor operated at a smaller, and of course less commercial, scale. In a paradoxical way, then, the supposed liberation from domestic drudgery which these and other social institutions had promised women, resulted for many in an embrace of motherhood as a proper way to raise one’s children.
160 The outsourcing of care was most intense in the context of boutique private schools, day cares, kindergartens and other programs for developing children’s talents and abilities. Appealing to parents’ desires to get the best education for their children, these emphasized individual attention and the virtues of choice. Epigraf, a private kindergarten, asked clients, “Are you choosing a school? Do you want to know about private education? Does your child need an individual approach?” Petershule, taking its pre-Revolutionary Russian name (the Russian absurdist poet Danil Kharms is one graduate), promised education in the German tradition in an “elite private
Gymnasium.” The private school, Diplomat, boasted its 100% admission rate at the top Russian and European universities. The well-known Business School Vzmakh
(meaning a wave-like movement) called for the “attention” of 8th to 10th graders who are the “future bankers, top-managers and bigwigs of show-business (vorotily shou- biznesa)”: “Do you see yourself as a successful and confident person? Do you want to get more? That means that Vzmakh is the school that needs YOU. Take the decisive step—try to get into Vzmakh! Vzmakh is a school that really prepares students for work in the spheres of economics and entrepreneurialism.”
This was the context in which the commercial psychology organizations that I studied were operating. Specializing in children’s development, these organizations, too advertised products, only theirs were of a cognitive-emotional sort. 12 Colleagues, an organization affiliated with St. Petersburg State University, advertised the
“balanced development” of intellect, emotions, self-regulation, and skills of conversation; a “growth of intellectual success”; obshchenie (conversation; see chapter
7) as a “laboratory of success”; managing emotional states; accepting one’s own
161
Figure 7. “For the most ambitious—10 grants for free classes.” uniqueness; and preparedness for life’s call [gotovnost’ k zhiznennomu vyzovu].” Their camps promised the “development of life skills for successful self-realization in a changing world.” Other organizations focused courses on “psychological preparedness” for school, developing one’s professional self-definition, and
“developing one’s personality,” where teens learn to “develop the skills of self- analysis, understand themselves and others, define their strengths and weaknesses, change themselves and their behavior, and develop conversation skills.” Another
162 organization, proTrainings, offered a course in “Confident Behavior,” which aimed at
“developing in children a sense of their own value and the acquisition of confidence in any situation and relationship.” And the US-franchised (and trademarked)
FasTracKids exhorted parents to “Develop talents and abilities in your child” through programs in “Enriched Learning for Tomorrow’s Leaders”:
New research shows that the first 5-6 years of a child are decisive. In the course of that time the neurons of the child’s brain build connections. This moment should not be neglected; otherwise the child will not be able to embody his potential in full measure.
This solemn advice was then supported by the following quotation:
“Different areas of the brain of the child achieve maturity at different times. As a result every part of the brain is most susceptible to impressions at a given age. Give your children the necessary stimulation then when they need it, and there will be nothing impossible for them. Wait, and the train will have left.’—Newsweek Magazine.”
What is striking about this highly commercialized approach to children’s development is its resonance with the Ministry of Education’s modernization rhetoric discussed above. In both cases, “success”—whether as an entrepreneur, a patriot, a self-realizing individual, a thinking person, or an aesthetic object—is a master referent.86 Operationally, both commercial psychology enterprises and the Education
Ministry have also placed a premium not just on knowledge, but also on problems of psychological and cognitive development. Here, the child is neither a Rousseaun innocent, a wicked Hobbesian, nor a builder a socialism, but a bearer of talents to be
86 By the same token, “success” is not really a precise point of reference. As Slavoj Žižek has written of nationalism, the issue is how people relate to it—whether protectively or pleasurably. So with “success”: While federal projects have framed psychological development as an important way to harness human capital for national and economic success, commercial projects have deemed psychological development important as a strategy for preparing one’s children to attain personal success.
163
Figure 8. “20% enriching knowledge; 30% applying knowledge; 20% communication and socializing skills; 15% developing creative abilities; 15% development of personal and leadership qualities.” harnessed, a bundle of brain connections needing stimulation, a creative talent for the nation, a person whose time is a career.
Following Löfgren’s (1987) discussion on the development of bourgeois culture in Sweden, these state-commercial developments around the child can be read as a particular form of embourgeoisement that takes place around particular
164 conceptions of personal time. As Katherine Verdery (1996) has suggested, time in the
Soviet Union was flattened, unpredictable and immobilized.87 The production of personal time at the Childhood Planet expo was, in contrast, more akin to the notion of a “lifetime” in which one seeks to leave a name for oneself and one’s children through successful works, through a career. “Time in bourgeois culture,” writes Löfgren,
“becomes geared toward the future, obsessed with development, and the goal is to gain control over it. The important new message is that people create their own future.
Time is in short supply and must be properly managed” (1987:27).
The link between commercial and governmental biopolitics was not only discursive. Childhood Planet was actually organized in partnership with the government of St. Petersburg. Gathered under the rubric of “the popularization of the old truth: ‘it’s wonderful to have children (imet’ detei—eto zdorovo),’” the expo was also aligned with Putin’s natsproekty, announced just six months earlier and implemented that January: in addition to featuring “every possible children’s product and service,” the expo would also include “educational and health programs—those that the President of Russia named priorities.” It was to be “not simply a commercial project, but an important socially meaningful event both for our city and for Russia as a whole” and
a single professional space for bringing together the strengths of producers and commercial structures, specialists of children and the
87 Verdery argues that the Soviet socialist state “etatized,” time, through required public rituals, altered calendars, labor plans, practices in reaction to perpetual shortage, and even the “‘scheduling’ of intimacy” (1996: 45), practices that came to impact peoples’ sense of self: “By stripping individuals of the resources necessary for creating and articulating social selves, it confronted them repeatedly with their failures of self-realization. As their bodies were forced to make histories not of their choosing and their selves became increasingly fractured, they experienced daily the illegitimacy of the state to whose purposes their bodies were bent” (1996: 56). She contrasts this with the “flexible” and fast-paced time of late-capitalism that David Harvey (1989) describes.
165 social sphere, educational associations, centers and clubs, representatives of educational programs.
As the organizers acknowledged, “with every year more and more products and services for children appear” facing parents with the question “which of these to choose, which of these are useful to me?” Childhood Planet, they assured “is designated to give you an answer.” As a map through the labyrinth of choices, the expo would not only enable parents to comparison shop, but also to familiarize themselves with “how the government of our city helps vulnerable families, how at the city level questions are decided about the organization of medical services and the leisure time of our children.” Even would-be parents could learn about “social programs aimed at increasing the birthrates and what measure the government of the
Russia and Petersburg are undertaking in this area.”
In this “single professional space,” then, a biopolitics was being worked out that constituted parental responsibility as both a wisely exercised choice and a national responsibility, and that reconstituted notions of personal time. By bringing the parenting choices of citizen and consumer into positive relation, ordinary questions such as which diaper, which school, or which article of clothing could take on national importance.88 At the same time, its elite nature also brought into being a particular regime of care that links citizenship, consumption and love under a particularly classed umbrella.
88 Dunn (2008), citing Manning (2007), writes of the need for consumer guidance in postsocialist countries following the semiotic and material collapse of the state and its “standards.” The problem of trust became a real in many areas. One psychologist working on the issue of professional standards told me that their organization has co-opted the old name “Gosstandard” or “State standard” dating from the Soviet period. As she put it, “the State” is still “a brand [brend]” that people trust.
166 The vital glue between commercial and state projects is not only the flexible and magnetic telos of success, but also its perpetually fed response, anxiety. Just as parenting is turned into a practice necessitating preparedness, management, foresight, expert knowledge and even a bit of palm greasing89—so has the production of anxiety been essential to that language. At the expo this was evident in the way that psychology organizations, while bringing a caring attention to the child’s “inner- world,” also tapped into parental anxieties about doing things correctly: what if my child is on the wrong path? Is it too late? Is he abnormal? Perhaps worse, is he merely normal? Such questions are reflected at the macro-level of biopolitics as well, where citizens and agencies can find resources for voicing concern about what others are doing wrong, or not enough of. The intersection of commerce, state programs and biopolitics has therefore lent these vospitanie projects sustenance, reach and authority at the same time that it has shaped those into uniquely “classed” projects.
To a degree, then, a neoliberal concern with autonomous entrepreneurial subjects and a statist one with managed subjects have together constituted this new landscape of success, or uspekh. In this landscape, the child is highly individualized, an object of adornment, education, preservation, concern and presentation, and cast in terms of some improved future prospect. In locating the child and the parent in such a
89 An article on the news service ITAR-TASS (2008) reported that bribes at Russian Universities are on the rise. UNESCO’s tally of bribes in Russian Universities totaled 520 million USD in 2007. The article reported that law, finance and international relations departments (i.e. those most well-remunerated professions) are the most corrupt. An official at the All-Russia Education Fund, Sergei Komkov, explained that, “[T]he universities specializing in technologies and arts are the least affected by corrupt practices. This is because those professions have middling prestige. Artists and engineers are usually low-paid specialists in this country.” The chairman of the education committee at Moscow City legislature, Yevgeny Bunimovich, contrasted Russian students with those in the West who “realize their future career hinges on the quality of knowledge they get, and that's why bribery doesn’t flourish there.” Russian students, on the other hand, “need graduation certificates just for the sake of a mere formality.”
167 developmentalist frame, parents are hailed as managers, amateur developmental psychologists and career counselors. Meanwhile, under the gaze of the psychologist, the child’s “personality” is passed through different languages of competence.90
Tomorrow’s Builders and uspekh
How have particular commercial, or non-governmental psychological organizations positioned themselves within this larger ecology of the “childhood planet”? A visit to Tomorrow’s Builders makes it clear that the children’s psychology business is hardly a place to get rich. A few weeks before the Childhood Planet Expo,
I stopped by their offices, a few metro stops from the city center. It had been a busy year for them so far. After the New Year they had moved from offices leased to them by a public school into their own building. Half of the floor was shared with another organization. As Aleksandr offered sarcastically, he didn’t realize that his psychological training would include setting up their computer system, and shuttling furniture, files and equipment in his personal car. In the new space, they had had enough room to create a pleasant waiting area, where I sat on a chilly February afternoon. Marina and Zhenia, two young psychologists in their twenties, were preparing to discuss their strategy at the upcoming expo, and as I waited for them, I glanced at the magazines like Elite and Car and Driver that had been strategically
90 Neither the notion of child development nor of success is strictly post-Soviet. As Catriona Kelly’s study of childhood in 20th century Russia shows, the Soviet period was nothing if not an ongoing attempt to modernize Russia through its emphasis on the rationalization of upbringing through its institutionalization. Moreover, consumerism can be traced to the 1950s and 1960s, when commercial goods, including even foreign ones began to appear in greater numbers. What has shifted, rather, are the norms underlying the modernization drive, explored in this chapter, as well as the fact that access to consumer goods has increased significantly. For different perspectives on consumerism in the Soviet period, see Kelly (2007) Dunham (1990), Yurchak (2006) and Shlapentokh (1989).
168 placed on the coffee table in their waiting room. Ivan, one of the co-founders of the organization, walked by, and offered to answer my long-standing questions about their advertising strategy. I followed him expectantly to his desk, at which point he told me that there really was no strategy. Of their annual profits, they allocate roughly 10% to print advertising, but had still not seen much impact, other than from one free circular, when their ad had randomly appeared right next to an article on children’s development. Instead, said Ivan, they relied primarily on sarafonnaia radio, or word- of-mouth.
When I rejoined Marina and Zhenia they were leaning over a small table locating their stall on the expo map, discussing the likely flow of visitors, and the best orientation for their tables. Tamara, the director, a diminutive woman in her 50s, suggested that several staffers hand out brochures. Tomorrow’s Builders had also just completed a parent’s handbook based on questions about raising children they’d collected over their ten years in business, and they were keen to showcase this at the stall. This was the extent of their promotional plans. As I heard Tamara, the director, tell a group of university psychology students some weeks earlier, “We are for the most part inventing this market ourselves.”
On the day of the expo, I found the staff looking quite professional. The psychologists were not wearing the usual sweater and jeans, but their most polished business attire. They stood in front of the stall, handing out attractive 4-color brochures printed on expensive card stock to passersby who mostly tried to sidle away unnoticed. They had set up a large table featuring a range of psychological books, including their newest, the Parent’s Handbook. After visiting them, I stood aside for a
169 few minutes, letting them do their jobs. At which point I noticed that this was but one node among numerous children’s development organizations, which were in turn, a small cluster in a larger sea of solicitations. Truly, the market they were inventing was still in its infant stages, and consisted of advertising “strategies” (if one can even call it that) that are mostly experimental, seeking traction within the larger field of parenting concerns.
Some months later, I had time to read their Parent’s Handbook. I was curious, having thought more about the number of exhortations to success and individualization at the Childhood Planet Expo, about how they might present themselves as advice-givers. How would the telos of uspekh make its way into pages that were about psychological advice? In a section entitled “We will learn to control ourselves” I found the following introduction:
One of the most widespread errors of parents is the anxiety, most of all, of intellectual or physical development of the child. We are speaking of his success [uspekh] in school, reaching Olympic or sports competitions, worry whether he is ill or wins. Before enrolling in school we teach him to read, write and count. But attention is given least of all to what he feels, how he goes through this or that event. … the sphere of feelings is an important area of human development. The way that a person knows to recognize and identify his emotions is simply connected with the way that he knows how to manage them, to regulate his condition. … Well-being in emotional development speaks, in the first instance, of the person’s self-valuation. By the highest standards, self-valuation is in the first instance the emotional relation to oneself: ‘Do I like myself or not?’ and that means do I believe in myself or not. But an adequate self-valuation, then, to a large degree tells of self-confidence and activeness, of the ability to define and reach goals, and of the know-how to be on friendly terms and occupy leadership positions. At the same time, one’s own emotional comfort and knowledge of how to be aware of and control one’s feelings is the guarantee of knowing how to see and keenly respond to the emotions of others. Thus, if we want to see our child as a really successful [uspeshnyi], confident [samouverennyi], and happy person, it follows to
170 be attentive and sensitive to his feelings and experiences, accept them, supporting the positive and helping to manage the negative.
This excerpt suggests a very delicate dance around the question of uspekh. At first, there is a distancing from it—as if to suggest that success isn’t everything and that parents should not focus too much on achievement and comparison. At the same time, the real problem is not so much being oriented to Olympic heights, as ignoring the child’s emotional realm (not coincidentally their area of expertise). The key to succeeding turns out to be attending to this emotional realm. It is this kind of ambivalence that I would encounter at their camps as well, where psychologists like
Tamara, Alexander and Ivan would struggle to marry the techniques of marketing and the subjectivities valorized therein with the kinds of work they wished to do.
PPMS and Uspekh
Given the nature of the Childhood Planet, it should come as no surprise that the representatives of the PPMS Center, huddled around that small table at the beginning of the chapter, were not even, as it were, in orbit. While there were a few governmental organizations scattered amidst the commercial enterprises, these primarily represented the cream of the crop—the Dom Kul’tury of old— extracurricular-activity centers that had received much money and prestige in the
Soviet period, and to a degree still did. Nor was it clear why the PPMS Centers should have been there. Vadim, one of the PPMS Center’s psychologists in charge of the professional development seminars told me one day that he was starting a little business on the side because he wasn’t able to organize many “positive” seminars at
171 the Center. He complained about the red tape as well. Indeed, the day-to-day work of the PPMS Center was too embroiled in crisis cases, which were constantly being bumped ahead of other kinds of consulting work, to contemplate devoting staff resources to the kinds of developmentalism found at the Childhood Planet expo.
A comparison to Tomorrow’s Builder’s handbook entry considered above illustrates what this difference makes for the constitution of the “successful” child.
This excerpt, from “Lessons on the Development of Intellectual Abilities among
Young Pupils” culled from the PPMS website, addresses a similar set of concerns— namely the child’s success in school—but with very different assumptions about what is possible:
Parents often turn to us regarding the difficulties of children in mastering the programs in elementary school. … The cause of these problems is frequently an insufficient level of development of abstract- logical thinking, memory and attention for that age. For purposeful development of these functions for young pupils in our center, lessons are conducted according to a specially organized program. … Before the beginning of the lesson we conduct an in-depth psychological investigation, in the process of which is highlighted the level of development of his intellectual functioning, and the particularities of the emotional-volitional sphere. After this we will select work and design a lesson plan on an individual basis. (For example, if a pupil has difficulties with math, then basic support will be made for the development of: abilities to establish cause-effect relations, skills to reason, to build deductions and make conclusions, know how to generalize, to analyze, classify.) … During the course of corrective-developmental lessons for children we steadily work with parents. The parents are given interpretations and recommendations: how to explain a task, how to best teach poems, what kind of demands are worth demanding of the student, and what kind at a given moment are unjustified. After the conclusion of the course (usually 10 lessons) the pupil of course does not become a straight-A student, but a part of the problem with falling being in school will have been resolved. Parents report that the child has become better able to cope with homework; and that the teacher notices that the student has given more precise
172 answers and coherently expresses his thoughts. There is great pride for children and parents when the first ‘4’ or ‘5’ [‘B’ or ‘A’] on a test appears. In the process of lessons, as well, we manage to raise the confidence of the child and to form an active positive relationship to studies. This is very important. As unsuccessful [neuspeshnye] students often feel like social outcasts in the school collective, they are continually told that they’re the worst of all, they are beaten up without end at home and school. Children react differently to this—one insolates himself, becomes sluggish, passive, is afraid to answer even if he knows. Others, on the contrary, become irritable, aggressive, pugnacious. It’s well-known that this will come to nothing good in the future. Not having found himself a merited place in class, not having realized himself in school activities (that is very important for students) the pupil henceforth will be driven to prove himself not in studies, but in something else. He can connect with asocial teens, bad company, etc. Our lessons help a child feel that he also can manage difficult exercises, is no worse than others in deciding tough problems. To the pupil it becomes easier to understand new material in lessons, he begins more quickly and easily to complete homework. All of this enables the decrease of nervo-psychic stress, improves the mood and broadens the circle of cognitive interests. In this way, in the course of the development of intellectual abilities the optimization of the development of psychic functions and prophylaxis and correction of social-emotional problems of the pupil are realized.
When compared to Tomorrow’s Builders’ Handbook, the remedial and pessimistic tone of this document is immediately striking. While both of these can be considered part of the discourse of uspekh, the discussion of abilities and skills is couched within a wholly different problematic. If the first example takes as its object the child on the path to success, the second speaks to the under-achiever, and the term uspekh only appears in its negative adjectival form, neuspeshnyi. If the first orients the discussion of emotions to a relation of self-to-self through the one’s own efforts, the second orients it toward the efficacy of “correctional-developmental lessons.” Here, the emotional sphere is not primary: if the child’s performance can be improved, his
173 confidence is bolstered. Moreover, positive emotions are usually discussed in negative terms (“all of this enables the decrease of nervo-psychic stress, improves the mood…”). If the Parent’s Handbook relies on a language of potential, the second deploys a language of insufficiency, along with a cluster of diagnostic terms: levels, metrics, investigations, exercises, intellectual functioning, optimization, psychic functions, and planning. The task of the training is not to teach self-knowledge or emotional self-management, but to develop certain mental abilities. The locus of empowerment is different, too. It is not the client, assisted by his knowing parents, so much as the expert that is the “doer” here. The language is more systematic and functionalist. The goals are also quite distinct. If the first excerpt is aimed at fostering self-valuation, the second never mentions the concept. In a sense it is less “deep.”
Rather than focusing on the development of potentials, its general cast is that of prophylaxis, mentioned in the last line. On the other hand, the presence of the social and its impact on child development is more clearly seen. Here the “unsuccessful student” can feel like an “outcast,” and may even be “beaten” at home and at school.
While these are just two texts selected from many possible, as I show in subsequent chapters the differences in tone, approach and objective indicated are fairly consistent with the kinds of work that practitioners did. And it is these differences, finally, that speak to the different kinds of psychological possibility available to two different kinds of children in Russia today. For the problem child, often from an unstable family, we should aim that he be “no worse than [others].” The objective is not so much reaching goals as “managing difficult exercises,” and lowering “nervo- psychic stress.”
174 We might chart this difference by thinking the way Anagnost (2006) does about how wealth and poverty have been given new “value coding” in China through the way urban and rural subjects have been understood in relation to a discourse of human quality, or suzhi. Suzhi is a measure of human capital produced through education and other investment. Through this suzhi discourse, some bodies are of high value, and worthy of investment, and others of low value.91 In the comparison between commercial and municipal psychological enterprises we see a similar divergent value coding, where one child is worthy of cognitive and emotional investment, and the other for control.
Aihwa Ong has argued that neoliberal techniques loosen the link between citizen and nation-state in the sense that mobility has become a new feature of citizenship under neoliberalism. The elements that constitute citizenship—rights, entitlements, territoriality, a nation—“are becoming disarticulated and rearticulated with forces set into motion by market forces” (2006:6). This metaphor of citizenship mobility, used to describe the movements of privileged bodies across geographical lines and spaces, can be extended, I think, to describe a kind of “interior” movement that traverses and at the same time constitutes the behavioral and developmental boundaries expressed in the two distinct biopolitics I have outlined in this chapter.
Subjectivation, in this case, has thus also been folded into the citizenship regime, and the constitution of a feeling, thinking and behaving subject provides the basis for the
91 Anagnost uses this differentiation according to suzhi to argue that the desire to be recognized as a body of high value draws rural migrants into turning themselves into “willing bodies for exploitation,” as in the case of increased blood donation for money (2006:510-511).
175 new flexible citizen, ready to work for the next multi-national in Moscow. As Ong writes,
In some milieus, the neoliberal exception gives value to calculative practices and to self-governing subjects as preferred citizens. Meanwhile, other segments of the populations are excepted from neoliberal criteria and thus rendered excludable as citizens and subjects. Variations in individual capacities or in performance of market skills intensify existing social and moral inequalities while blurring political distinctions between national and foreign populations (2006:16).
In other words, in a market economy certain dispositions will be predisposed to receive the benefits of flexible citizenship, while others, caught in the nets of psychology in the psycho-hygienist mode, will be subject to containment and decreased mobility and benefits.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. As I discuss in chapter 5, education reforms that had begun in the 1980s were intended to incorporate the humanistic, potential- oriented psychological knowledge found today in commercial organizations into schools. Indeed, throughout the 1990s humanistic orientations were rampant: at the beginning, in the 1990s, PPMS Centers were charged with providing soprovozhdenie, to students—a term which translates as guidance, but also the kind of accompaniment involved in playing a duet. The PPMS Centers were also to build into state pedagogical imperatives a more psychologically oriented approach to human needs and development. These new imperatives took emotions as the relevant target, and strove to develop emotionally healthy learning environments while reorienting the aims of education to self-realization. But in the years following Putin’s assumption of power in 2000, the project of “humanization” seems to have shifted from one
176 emphasizing self-realization to psycho-correction. A telltale sign of this is that PPMS centers have turned their attention to batteries of diagnostics, prophylaxis and crisis management.
Conclusion
It would be too much to suggest that there is a causal link here between the “value coding” of persons, bodies, psyches, intellects and futures, and socioeconomic difference among children, as in theories of class reproduction. In this case, the differential treatment of children seems to reflect what happens when certain biopolitical concerns, easily extended across social domains discursively, actually take shape in policies, techniques and practices and in relation to different rationalities of government and social realities, a set of processes I explore in more detail in the next two chapters.
To illustrate this complex assemblage, let’s reconsider Putin’s 2006 speech which cast so much of the psycho-biopolitical attention on children and family. As
Katherine Verdery (1996) has argued, the socialist state didn’t destroy the family so much as socialize more and more reproduction, making childbirth and family life the business of what she calls the “state-patriarch.”92 She suggests that in the postsocialist
92 With regard to the family, it is important to point out that the trajectory of the family took a different path under socialism than in the West. In the 1920s feminism and Bolshevism merged to constitute a powerful critique of the institution of the family. Numerous Bolshevik feminists were great proponents of the liberation of women from “domestic drudgery,” including, most prominently, Lenin’s wife, Krupskaia, as well as the author Aleksandra Kollontai. The formation of a network of kindergartens and crèches, the communalization of daily life, and the recruitment of women in the workforce merged to create a multi-pronged reform the family. Artistic literature of the 1920s had dramatized the idea of a utopian family, often exploring the kinds of gender relations that would result from this domestic, as well as the relations between the citizen-subject and the state. In Sergei
177 period, this has prompted much scapegoating of women in the face of demographic decline, a conversion of nationalism and gender politics, and increased pressure pushing women back into their “proper” roles as mothers. A decade after her observations, we find something a little different. Indeed, at Putin’s 2006 address the
Soviet relation of state-patriarch vis-à-vis mothers and the socialization of reproduction have been rearticulated through the mother’s capital initiative. But what of the marketplace? Consider the Childhood Planet expo, with its multiple messages encouraging women to leave home for her career. This illustrates one way that a common biopolitical concern with the birth and education of the next generation articulates differently with different political rationalities. That is, progressive gender norms are being pushed from commercial enterprises. We might say the same of child- care: if vospitanie was (and is) being socialized through state programs, it is being privatized (and professionalized) through market endeavors. Thus, the complimentary nature of state and commercial biopolitical aims related to a vague notion of “success” has an outer limit, and it is at this outer limit that the class differentiation takes place.
The French sociologist Jacques Donzelot (1979) offers some conceptual resources for understanding how class stratification results from the implementation of biopolitical norms through different means. Exploring the family as a “social surface”
Tretiakov’s play I Want a Baby (1995), for instance, the heroine, Milda, contracts a loveless copulation with a certain Ivan of good proletariat stock, and then promptly surrenders her baby to the local crèche. As numerous scholars have noted, Stalin would tone down the erasure of the family after World War II, when population rates needed uplift, and the family was seen as an important structure for these ends (cf. Dunham 1990; Kaier and Naiman 2006; Naiman 1997; Rosenberg 1990). David Hoffman (2004) argues that this was not a “return” to the traditional family as much as a means to its own ends of socialist education. The family thus was subsumed by the “Great Family” of the state of which Stalin was head (Clark 1981; Popovsky 1985). Nevertheless, the reform of the domestic that was started in the 1920s extended throughout the Soviet period. One of its material legacies was an extensive network of daycares and crèches and the kommunalka, now a kind of mythological site of socialism (cf. Boym 1994).
178 shaped and reshaped through government interventions in France, he suggests, the
“psy” disciplines came to occupy a partnering role in managing the family. That is, psychotherapists offered workable solutions to the state’s liberal problematic—how shall freedom be governed. There, the “autonomy” of the “private family” was preserved, he argues, while at the same time smoothly integrated into biopolitical management through the spread of psychoanalysis, which offered a much more supple mode of government—one that appeared to work on its own. These experts replaced the atmosphere of penality and judicial action that had characterized sovereign power with the soft power of the social worker, the psycho-hygienist, the therapist as a way to “respect” the boundaries of the private family while at the same time opening up its internal relations to a series of psychotherapeutic interventions. However, through maneuverings of diverse interests in relation to a liberal politics and the different kinds of governing options offered through the “psy” fields, Donzelot argues that a bottom line social differentiation was produced. The moralization and normalization of the family was ultimately carried out “via two completely different channels.” “The bourgeois pole,” Donzelot writes, “is where families willingly seize on medical institutions...constructing around the child an educative model…termed ‘protected liberation.’” This model was ensured by what he calls a “system of contract” wherein the liberalization of relations are promoted, leading to greater individualization, a diminution of family roles, and fluidity in relational combinations. The working class family, though, is “reorganized on the basis of a set of institutional constraints and stimulations that also make the child the center of the family, to be sure, but according to procedures much more deserving of the terms ‘supervised freedom’” (1979:xxi).
179 This was ensured by a “system of tutelage” where working-class families were placed in a relation of dependence vis-à-vis the state. This divergence had its effects on children’s worlds: “The home begins where the children are let out from school. There are those who go home all by themselves and those who are waited for at school. The first have the street, the vacant lot, the shop windows and cellars, while the others have yards, jungle gyms, afternoon snacks, and educative parents. Here the image is not longer of encirclement, but or preservation. Not suffocation, but liberation within a protected space” (1979:4).”
Of course Russia has its own history. The biopolitical shifts, and their assembled nature with differing political rationalities is not part of an exclusively liberal problematic, but what we might think of as a distinctly postsocialist one, interacting with neoliberal reforms and statism, capitalist self-styling with social care.
Nonetheless, Donzelot’s analysis does offer a frame in which to make some sense of these materials. The socialist state governed the family through a muscularly developed system of tutelage, reliant on pedagogy more than psychology, to create relations of dependence between itself and Soviet families, along with a much less developed system of contract largely available to urban elite and those with Party connections. In the post-Soviet period, that system has been both psychologized as well made subject to new governing rationalities. This has also constituted a two-tier system—one in which the need to manage order is achieved through public institutions’ psycho-hygienic crisis management, and the development of new kinds of flexible citizens is achieved through the market. This unfolds in the absence of any plan. It is an effect. Through the happenstance intersection and divergence of
180 commercial and federal objectives, and the appearance of new, postsocialist forms of expertise, different kinds of developmental projects have taken shape.
This analysis has explored the appearance of a widely circulating discourse of success, or uspekh, in Russia, and pointed to the emergence of class distinctions, offering a more complicated view of the democratic reforms in Russia as they have unfolded in relation to markets and state interests in shaping and governing its citizens. Further, I have shown how the articulation of biopolitical aims with neoliberal and statist governmentalities has produced two parallel class-based kinds of intervention. In each case—the commercial and the state production of the figure of the child—the politics of the self intersect with different economic interests in the
“human factor”; in each case something different results. This amounts to a critical difference both in how expertise and governance intersect around and through persons, and in the rather “personal” nature of freedom under postsocialism.
This enfoldment of psychologists, children and their vospitanie in the context of market transformations and state concerns shows how fluid teleological languages of success—whether socialist or capitalist—can be. Forms of expertise, when worked into the circuits of commerce, are distributed across these languages, and help, with their authoritative languages, naturalize behavioral norms. And biopolitics seems to move nimbly, too, turning almost any child-rearing imperative into a matter of national security, or global economic dominance, or, in the case of the social outcast, of social stability. This may also show us something strangely familiar. Consider child enrichment in the West, so commonplace as to be almost banal, which now, we are told, ought to begin while the child is in utero. The soldering together of state policies
181 and commercial logics has led to new regimes of psychological citizenship, where the psychic economy inside the child and the household are subject to market forces and governmental projects.
In the next chapter, I focus on the work of Tomorrow’s Builders and one of its competitor organizations. I take a closer look at their work and the subtleties of their ostensibly neoliberal projects. An examination of their claims to be building democracy reveal an ethical tension being worked through in privatized psychological services. This tension speaks directly to the “impure” nature of democratic reforms— that is, the extent to which they are both implicated in the formation of bourgeois subjectivities and social mobility, but also potentially sources of political alternatives.
Then, in chapter 5, I turn to the PPMS Center for a closer ethnographic look at how state efforts at rationalization and standardization seem to have redirected an initial interest in “the whole” child into the kinds of psychological work that I have described in this chapter.
182 CHAPTER 4
Liberal Imaginaries: Psychology and the Business of Self-Realization
We thought we were on the frontier of a democratic revolution. We weren’t. We were witnessing a market revolution (Mendelson 2008).
-Democracy-promoter in Russia National Democratic Institute
We are moving west, toward the Russian-Finnish border, in a drafty zhiguli sedan. Aleksandr, a young Russian psychologist, is at the wheel. Old concrete lookout-towers and rusting barbed wire—aged monuments to the Cold War—flicker past the window frame. They mark an erstwhile border between market-democracy and communism that no longer takes very long to cross. Since the collapse of the
Soviet Union, the main impediment has become traffic jams caused by a bustling shuttle trade in luxury cars, Finnish dairy products and tourists. On this day, we have joined the westward flow. We are on our way to one of Tomorrow’s Builders’ one- week camps, where a group of roughly 40 kids between 8 and 16 years old will learn how to control their emotions and behavior.
Aleksandr is giving me an earful about Democracy with a capital “D” in between cigarettes. Referencing both the self-serving reform agendas of the American
183 economic advisors who swarmed into Russia after the USSR’s collapse, and the US’s democracy-building escapade in Iraq, he says, “Russian democracy has to follow its own course, like in the Islamic countries.” When I ask him what democracy in Russia would look like, he replies, “A democratic Russia would mean being able to cross the border and not be asked lots of questions by the police; to be able to go to the housing authority, make a complaint and know that something will be done about it.” He was optimistic that this future would eventually come to pass.
After the tumultuous 1990s, many Russians view big-D Democracy with skepticism—the way the victims of a bait and switch do. The bait: a promise of freedom, elections and prosperity pushed aggressively by US economic advisors and their Russian contacts (cf. Wedel 1998). The switch: wild capitalism, bargain- basement sales of state assets, opaque transferences of wealth, massive currency devaluations, wages in arrears, empty store shelves, and a general feeling of bespredel—lack of limits, rules or obstacles (Oushakine 2009:1). As indicators of the prevailing skepticism, the word privatization has been re-signified with the nearly homonymous “prikhvatizatsiia,” or “grabitization,” and democracy and related terms like “liberal” (liberal’nyi) have become much like dirty words in Russia. Even the abbreviated Russian equivalent for “liberal values” (La-Ve) became a slang word for
“cash” (Oushakine 2009:35). Putin has exploited this skepticism in order to marginalize much of his political opposition by mobilizing a nationalist fervor against
“puppets of the West,” which in reality is a small liberal-progressive political opposition led by a disparate coalition including the former chess champion Gary
Kasparov. In this way, Aleksandr’s criticism of big-D democracy also contained not
184
Figure 9. “Yankee-killers!” Pensioners’ demonstration in St. Petersburg. (Photo by Mark Elmore) only a critique of the Bush Administration’s maligned “democracy-building” in Iraq, but also something specific to the Russian context.
As we drew nearer to the border and he shifted to discussing the work of
Tomorrow’s Builders, it became clear that he and his fellow psychologist colleagues viewed their “psychological education” work as a kind of “strategic” (his word) wager based on the eventual arrival of this future, small-d democratic Russia. “Psychological education,” he said, “will be a necessary technology to succeed in the Russia to come.” Why psychological education, and what is “necessary” about it? I wondered.
Was he referring to a tolerant attitude that, once spread across society, would render the rule of law operable? Or did he have in mind something connected to personal
185 success in a market democracy? The answers depended on what kind of Russian future, and indeed what kind of “democracy” Aleksandr had in mind.
Fieldwork in several children’s psychological education camps suggests that the answer is far from clear; his and his organization’s “strategic” efforts articulated with multiple visions of liberal democracy.93 While these strategic efforts were not explicitly political (i.e. there was no discussion among practitioners of institutional reform, fair elections, or political parties), they were certainly concerned with a micro- politics of intra- and inter-personal relations that strongly resonated with liberal democratic discourse. The terms freedom (svoboda), autonomy (samoupravlenie) and responsibility (otvetstvennost’) were omnipresent in their work and in my discussions with them about it. The links between psychological education and liberal-democratic discourse were expressed through modes of relating to oneself and others. In practice, this meant teaching children to learn about their impulses and to train their behaviors while at the same time listening to each other, being personable, learning to socialize, to practice their public speaking, to manage their time, and to quell aggression.
As we explored in the previous chapter, these sorts of projects have also been aligned with the national interest in releasing human potential and developing self- management skills in order to shape children into successful players in a competitive
93 Using children’s leisure for pedagogical purposes was no stranger to the Soviet project. The Pioneers, a Soviet version of the Boy Scouts, had camps throughout the USSR to provide children opportunities for children’s leisure and relaxation, as well as preparation for Communist Youth League (Komsomol) Party membership. Games were interspersed with political lessons, songs, parades, and rituals affirming the ideas of communism (Kelly 2007:547-560). Tomorrow’s Builders draws on several social technologies from those erstwhile centers of Soviet children’s leisure, including using the camp- as-total-environment to manage carefully influences, interactions, daily regimes and experiences; and the belief in the pedagogical benefit of countryside living, as well as time spent away from home with one’s peers. But in place of terms like kollektiv is komanda, or team, and in place of the Pioneer goal of cooperation and socially useful work is the teaching of “freedom.”
186 market society. Moreover, the majority of Tomorrow’s Builders clients were elite
Russian children: their programs are expensive, and sometimes involve foreign travel.
Of the 38 kids at the camp in Finland 29 had one or more parents working in finance or law, or running their own businesses. Twenty-eight were from either St. Petersburg or Moscow. Some were dropped off for the first day by their parents’ drivers. As
Aleksandr explained, while some kids have behavioral problems, most are sent because the parents want their children to learn particular skills for taking over the family company. This locates their clientele squarely among those known, pejoratively, as “New Russians”—a post-Soviet nouveau riche of business elite known for their political connections and boorish tastes.
As a matter of social analysis, this conjuncture of promoting empathy and autonomy, and class formation suggests a compelling link between specific liberal discourses on freedom and responsibility, and the cultivation of an elite disposition.
But what does it mean that liberal-democratic values in Russia are here being sold as a kind of psychological “skill”? One answer I explore draws on recent elaborations of
Foucault’s concept of governmentality in the context of advanced liberal societies. As scholars have argued, advanced forms of liberalism are defined not only by a prescribed relationship between state and market, but also by the centrality of subject- making to the neoliberal enterprise. In this formulation, the feeling, responsibilized, liberated self becomes the neoliberal state’s most dependable foot-soldier, and psychology, then, plays a key role by bringing the substance and architecture of the self into contact with neoliberal political rationalities (cf. Cruikshank 1996;
Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979; Rose 1985; Rose 1990; Rose 1996b). Indeed, the
187 “skills” being taught at Tomorrow’s Builders that were aimed at self-control, time- management, leadership skills, and communication are reminiscent of the flexible citizenship that Nikolas Rose (1996a; 1996b), Aihwa Ong (1999) and others have described as part of a neoliberal governmentality. They included hermeneutic techniques for representing and coming to know one’s internal world; an ontological understanding of how that inner world is related to the world “out there”; tactics for intervening in that interiority as well as reading others’ interiors, all of which is part of a particular formula for success (see also chapter 3). By these arguments, emotional competence appears as a locally adapted neoliberal technique of the self, where the citizen is expected to become an entrepreneur of the self, where “profit and loss” is her own problem (cf. Anagnost 2006). Thus, the psychologists’ efforts to build empathy, social equality and create “atmospheres of freedom” for their clients could be read as the candy coating around the bitter pill of rampant capitalist individualism.
While offering insights into some psychological dimensions of neoliberal subjectivation, this approach to Tomorrow’s Builders’ work illuminates little about the psychologist’s vision of Russia’s future “democracy.” It brings us no closer to understanding the cultural and political significance of what Aleksandr in mind as we moved closer to the border. As I will show, one piece of this puzzle can be found in something Tamara Grigorievna, the director of Tomorrow’s Builders, said in response to my direct question about the classed nature of their clientele: weren’t they just in the business of applying polish for elite children? She replied frankly: “We hope to work with the 20% of Russia that will make decisions for the other 80%.”
Acknowledging the elite status of their clientele and the fact that Russia continues to
188 be run by those groups, Tamara Grigorievna also distinguished her staff from their clients, signaling an intent to transform them through their children. It is thus worth asking whether this marks a legitimate class countercurrent.
At issue here, then, is the conjuncture of what might be called the practitioners’ particular liberal desire as a form of “deep” pedagogical work, and the elite status of their clients. Rather than collapsing these two phenomena into a single story about the spread of liberal capitalist individualism in Russia through psychological means, in this chapter I will hold them apart. I am interested in exploring the ways in which
Aleksandr’s work exemplifies what I call competing “liberal imaginaries” in Russia that have taken shape in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse and the tumultuous
1990s. Here I understand “liberal” in the way Elizabeth Povinelli does—not as an index to a set of policies or principles, but rather “subjective, institutional, and discursive identifications, dispersions and elaborations of the enlightenment idea that society should be organized on the basis of rational mutual understanding” (2002:6).
In order to excavate these liberal imaginaries this chapter further unpacks the social and class contexts within which psychological education work with children is being done in commercial enterprises. In examining what, if anything, lies beyond the training of feeling elites, I will consider the psychologists’ and clients’ class positions, and also the much longer history of East-West desire within which psychological education is taking place. I will also attend to the ways in which psychological education is proffered as a proxy for other sorts of social reform practices. Such considerations suggest that “psychological education” is part of a complex post-Soviet social reform project that defies easy categorization within our models of cultural
189 critique. That is, the narratives of capitalist conversion and a rising cult of the self, while certainly part of the picture, may also prevent inquiry into the complex social formations that have emerged in Russia. The question becomes not whether or not these kinds of projects are political, but in what way.
The Freedom Lab
In my fieldwork in several camps organized by psychology organizations, I routinely encountered terms like “self-sufficiency” (samostoiatel’nost’), “autonomy”
(samoupravlenie), “freedom” (svoboda) and “individualism in the good sense
[individual’nost’ v khoroshom smysle].” When balanced with an attention to discipline and structure, the camp appeared to be a place to learn how to be a different kind of political subject. To train children in these new psycho-ethical subjectivities, practitioners deployed a range of technologies, including the cultivation of particular kinds of atmospheres, techniques of self, and what I call “regimes of rule breaking.” In the pages below, I draw on my fieldwork in several of Tomorrow’s Builders’ camps in order to explore these technologies and practices as they were articulated in psychological terms.
“Individualism in the Good Sense”
Just what the psychologists hoped to achieve in their work was quite clearly expressed to me when, at lunch one day, in the midst of their three-week camp on
“friendship,” I found myself sitting with Marina. In her mid-twenties, Marina was leading the teenage group’s activities. We took our places around the lunch table,
190 which had already been set with our cafeteria-style meal. This particular camp was being held at a large complex outside of St. Petersburg where other camps were being held simultaneously, including a youth soccer camp. As Marina and I chatted, campers started trickling in. The kids from the soccer camp came in calmly, taking their places around the table in an orderly way, and waited for the signal to eat. A few moments later, loud noises started coming from the entrance to the cafeteria. A hurly burly mass of Tomorrow’s Builders’ kids followed, laughing, running around, and making a scene. There was musical chairs and flirtation as they found their seats. Some sat quietly, but others started eating prematurely, scooted their chairs back into others passing by, or flicked around bits of food.
“Just look at our kids,” said Marina approvingly. “They are so filled with life.
Not like those poor kids from the soccer camp.”
Marina’s way of looking at things surprised me. Having seen Tomorrow’s
Builders’ kids in various settings, I had formed a different impression. While I liked them all very much, I also found them to be somewhat disrespectful, the way spoiled children can be. And at that moment, I identified more closely with the “poor kids” from the soccer camp. But Marina’s statement stuck with me. It seemed more than something a parent, blinded by love, says to justify her child’s boorish behavior. Their disregard for discipline was being cast in positive terms and was actually part of what
Tomorrow’s Builders was trying to accomplish.
As Tamara Grigorievna, the director of Tomorrow’s Builders put it some months later, the transformation in behavior they were trying to bring about is a response to forms of upbrining (vospitanie) that had shaped so many Soviet children:
191 Oftentimes the administrators of our camps tell us that our children are bad kids, that they lack discipline, and that we should be more strict, that we just let them do what they want and give them too much freedom. But we believe that we are creating an atmosphere where the children have more freedom than they do at home so they can find their own way, become more self-sufficient. The cultural norm in Russia until the time of perestroika with regard to vospitanie was very strict, and very directed. The problem is that you still have these multi- generational families with everyone living under one roof. Nobody learns to be self-sufficient [samostoiatel’nyi]. Many children get married and then move in with their parents. Often we say everyone in Europe is so free, all so relaxed. Now, finally, we are starting to relax. It’s a form of individualism in the good sense of the word and it’s happening slowly.
Their approach to fostering self-sufficiency and independence in the children was fostered not exactly through anarchy, as it might have appeared that day in the lunch room. As Tamara Grigorievna pointed out:
Compared to when we first started doing the camps, the freedom is now much less. Their days are much more structured; the free time is also structured. Boundaries are there. It’s also a psychological idea—that is, if the child is very young and you give them lots of freedom without structure they will feel abandoned, disoriented. So regimes and ritual, these are the main things necessary.
Tamara Grigorievna and her colleagues thus viewed their camps as a place to allow children to experience freedom and autonomy in the midst of different norms, expectations and disciplinary forms—specifically ones she argues are still uncommon in Russian households. And by invoking keywords like autonomy, freedom, self- sufficiency, and “individualism in the good sense,” a link was made between their psycho-ethical efforts and what Barbara Cruikshank has called “technologies of democratic citizenship—discourses, programs, and other tactics aimed at making individuals politically active and capable of self-government” (1999:1). Couched in the language of psychology, freedom was not so much a relation vis-à-vis political
192 authority as a relation to oneself, a psycho-ethical practice involving forms of self- management, candor, confession, and, as the director indicated, even forms of relaxation.
The promotion of self-individuation was central to their teaching of autonomy and freedom. Tomorrow’s Builders emphasized individual uniqueness through recognition and adulation: lollipops were awarded at each morning’s general assembly for good works or exhibiting “brave” psychological work. And in an exercise typical of group meetings, the psychologists invited the children to pay each other compliments. They had cut out little squares from construction paper, written a superlative judgment on each one, and asked the children to pick one and hand it to someone while the group looked on. This exercise involved them in the creation of a positive emotional atmosphere, but it also empowered them to re-script their interactions with one another according to particular normative sorting and classifying operations (prettiest, handsomest, funniest, smartest). This play with individuated depth of field, shifting the children’s focus between group and individual, brought the camp’s particular form of individualism into practical existence, showing that individuals can be highlighted from within the group, that there can be pleasure in being recognized by the group, and, perhaps, disappointment in the absence of that recognition.
Best Trainings, a competitor organization, approached individuation not in a literal sense, but through hypotheticals. The children always worked as a single group.
(The hierarchy between psychologists and children was also much less fixed, thus also subverting individuation through the figure of the teacher.) In one activity, for
193 example, each person wrote an ethical question on a piece of paper, which was then discussed as a group without pausing to consider who had written it. One that was drawn asked, “If I like a boy, but he doesn’t like me, should I change?” Grigori, one of chaperones less schooled in the psychological imperatives of the camp, jumped in with a typically masculinist view. “It’s a woman’s job to be the ideal woman, the woman of the man’s dream. So, yes, you should consider what kind of girl this boy is interested in if you wish to attract his attention.”
Natalia’s cheeks turned flush. “No,” she interrupted firmly. “That’s not right.
You can only be yourself. If a boy doesn’t like you for who you are, and if love isn’t in his heart already, then there is nothing you can or should do to change that.”
Individuation in this case was being taught in the form of “staying true to oneself,” a lesson that was taught through group discussion.
Thus, different camps struck upon different solutions to the problematic of discipline and freedom. These were primarily expressed through motivational technique (external vs. internal forms) and individuation practices (adulation vs. abstraction).94 These contrasting approaches mark important differences in organizational philosophy; however, both Tamara Grigorievna and Natalia placed this work in some relation to the West as Other. Tamara Grigorievna’s invocation of how
94 Relevant to these differences may be the fact that the organizations have different origins. Tomorrow’s Builders’ has close ties to a training institute in the city that works with multi-national corporate clients on HR development. Their director sees the work in the terms of a business—with the central task as marrying therapy for children and business management. In contrast, Best Trainings was originally part of an extensive US franchise formed in the late-1980s. This franchise was less interested in professional development than in the “track-two diplomacy” started by the Esalen Institute and the Association for Humanistic Psychology (cf. Hassard 1990)—while of course making some money. Best Trainings was therefore tied to late-Cold War peace initiatives, more versed in American human potential psychology than in social psychology, and also less tied to the professional trainings movement.
194 things are in Europe, her reference to children being motivated by a what’s-in-it-for me ethos, and her critique of the dependence that Russian grown children exhibit all made reference to the forms of individualism and autonomy that characterize liberal- democratic societies. And Natalia’s insistence on staying true to oneself, along with her mention at a later meeting that her work was about replacing “totalitarian parenting” with “democratic parenting” also invoked similar alternatives.
An “Atmosphere of Freedom”
Getting the kids to experience this particular form of freedom, while at the same time activating in them particular self-governing techniques, was the tricky part.
To find this balance, practitioners relied less on lecturing than on creating an
“atmosphere,” within which subject-making was to unfold. One vital ingredient in this atmosphere was the use of time. Days were rigidly structured, and children were expected to participate in every activity. Even free time was defined within certain parameters: children could choose one of a few approved activities. In what seems a fitting statement about some of the political features of freedom in many industrial societies, idleness at the camps was generally discouraged. Once submerged in the camp atmosphere, there were few opportunities to step outside it. This tended to wear down any resistance, including, it seemed, immune resistance: many got sick because the booked schedule disallowed informal interaction aside from late at night, and because, absent parental figures, most didn’t eat much besides candy at meals. The schedule also lent itself to a nearly constant role call, and was peppered with affective work.
195 The central tool in this atmosphere was the twice-daily general assembly.
Ostensibly a place to make announcements and organize group fun, the general assembly was also a way to keep order, manage the big picture, handle bad (and good) behavior, model inter-personal relations, and in a general way, inscribe particular understandings of sociality, individuality and ethical behavior. Different camps had different ways of using the general assembly to handle questions of motivation and discipline. For instance, Tomorrow’s Builders, whose more expensive camps drew children from wealthier families, relied on competition, incentives and rewards. A points-based competition dividing the children into two teams lasted the entire camp, and during the general assembly they participated in many games with the goal of winning the grand prize at the end. Score-keeping also extended outside the assembly; kids could earn points for keeping a clean room or being helpful. This gave the children a sense of both constant opportunity, as well as constant assessment.
From the point of view of teaching social-psychological values of empathy and care, this seemed questionable at times. One day, after several hours of trainings on
“friendship,” the children again assembled into their teams for a singing contest. The exercise was meant to teach about the concept of chivalry (rytsarstvo), and involved a heteronormative courtship ritual, where male volunteers were to sing a love song to a girl seated passively in a chair. Much laughter and quavering off-key singing ensued
(with the exception of one interesting twist, where a boy mouthed a song while a girl,
Cyrano de Bergerac-style, sang for him—this was later ruled out of bounds). The psychologists acted as judges, keeping the score neck-and-neck, and the kids became engrossed in the competition. But there could be only one winning team. When the
196 winner was announced and the prize—a large bottle of Coca Cola and plastic cups— distributed, Misha, a hyper-active twelve-year-old in loosely tied high-tops, began to throw a fit. “That’s unfair!” he complained, circling the room. “Our songs were better.
You’re biased,” he said, pointing accusingly at the psychologists. As the winning team enjoyed their soft drink, he stormed out of the room.
I later asked Tamara Grigorievna about the reliance on competition in a context in which they were supposedly working on social connection, empathy and friendship. When there are winners, there are also losers. As she explained,
In Europe and America, the main tendency, unfortunately, is a model based on good behavior/reward, bad behavior/punish. When the kids come to us they already have this in place. This is how they are used to behaving. In psychology we say there are two types of motivation— internal, when you do something because you want to, and external— when you do something for an external reason. In general, external motivation trumps internal. Our children are used to external motivation. So there is a psychological mechanism at work. You aren’t the first to ask about this. Also, a lot of good things can come from competition. For instance, child has to study the situation where he looses, to learn from it. He has to learn to loose. Sixty percent of the competition is for discipline, Forty percent is to motivate the quieter, lazy kids to become active.
This statement is interesting because it begins by Othering the children with whom
Tamara Grigorievna and her colleagues work—placing them on the side of what was once, in the late socialist period, the “Imaginary West”—a kind of elsewhere through which particular a socialist everyday was created (Yurchak 2006). The fact that their kids are “already” motivated by carrots and sticks means that they must respond in kind, trying to direct this somewhat calculative and acquiring disposition into productive directions.
197
Figure 10. The comparatively more relaxed psychological scene at Best Trainings.
If learning to win (and to loose) was Tomorrow’s Builders’ way, Best
Trainings adopted other means. Natalia, their comparatively younger organizer said,
“We don’t think that competition and the emphasis on points is healthy. Loosing makes the children feel badly. Instead, we rely on games requiring group participation and teamwork.” Best Trainings’ general assembly was avowedly non-competitive, and relied instead on internal motivation. The only points they tracked were “overall psychological growth,” to which everyone contributed. These differences were reflected spatially as well: at Tomorrow’s Builders, children were separated into smaller groups by age, and sat in a circle of upright school chairs, while Best
Trainings took a less formal approach, holding meetings in a large room covered with mattresses, where children could lie on the floor and move around.
198
Revolutions Within
The techniques outlined above were part of the psychologists’ toolbox for creating particular kinds of atmospheres of freedom and modes of individuation. But the most important work took place in the actual lessons (zaniatie), which lasted between three and five hours daily. In zaniatie, psychologists lead children through a set of psycho-technical exercises and discussions aimed at self-transformation. I was in Aleksandr and Anna’s group, along with eight other adolescents between eleven and thirteen years old. Together we would be moved from the initial constitution and exploration of our interiors, to intervening in them with our capacities of reason.
Below I describe some of the exercises at one particular camp.
After cleaning the snow from my boots, I settled in for the first lesson along with eight other kids—six boys and two girls—between the ages of eleven and thirteen. Anna, the other young psychologist in charge, distributed our workbooks, and we read the following two epigraphs, which made the tenor of the week clear: “Get to know yourself” (Fales Miletski), and “The very first and most important thing in life is being in control of your self” (Wilhelm Humboldt).
Our journey inward then began with an affirmation of emotional ignorance:
“How are you?” Aleksandr said as he turned to Gosha, a young boy with stylish hair highlights.
“Normal’no,” Gosha said, momentarily lifting his eyes from his cell phone game. He had used the common Russian response, “normal,” meaning, fine, or OK.
199 Aleksandr drew a bell curve on the board. “This is the full range of human emotions, and this,” he said, pointing to the middle 60%, “is what most people call
‘normal’no.’ It’s quite a wide range. So how are we really feeling?”
We were then paired and told to respond to our partner’s question, “How are you?” for a solid minute without saying “normal’no”. The effects were remarkable. As
I began to describe how I was to Tolya, a heavy-set boy with glasses, I, and the others, quickly ran out of things to say. In my case, I confronted the paucity of my emotional vernacular, the hesitation to say certain kinds of things, even a self-consciousness at speaking solipsistically at such length.
The point was to demonstrate that our current states could be broken down into layers and levels far beyond what we were accustomed to describing. Beginning with this sense of limitation, Aleksandr and Anna would try to provide us with those resources using a series of interpretive and representational exercises that help us first constitute, then turn out our insides for examination, and finally develop skills of self- management. We drew pictures. We mapped internal worlds. We modeled behavior.
We played emotional charades. We completed and then shared such sentences as “the scariest time in my life was….” We were encouraged to discuss instances in our lives when we lost control of our emotions. We described our “ideal inner state” in terms of weather conditions. We used our bodies to represent various emotions.
These exercises often produced fascinating results. In one, we were handed a lump of clay and told to mold our “deepest fear” with the idea that its materialization would neutralize it. As an expression of social judgment, I made a little green man
200
Figure 11. Gosha’s deepest fear. with a mean expression and an oversized index finger pointing mockingly. Gosha, who was obsessed with electronics, surprised me with his poetic (albeit claustrophobic) sensibility, making a “house without any doors or windows.” (In another exercise where we were supposed to describe our ideal inner state in terms of weather conditions, he described his to “a single tree on a snowy hill under a clear, starlit sky.”) Sasha, a brash thirteen year-old, made an “animal claw which can expand and oppress, but also contract and disappear.” Igor had made a simple, mysterious black box representing darkness. Dima had made a scorpion with a halo holding a harp. Masha made an almost cartoonish looking devil, and melancholic Tolya made a green “alien” holding guns. (When he saw my little green man, he remarked wryly,
“Tomas, we are brothers.”)
201
Figure 12. Emotional self-portraiture.
In another exercise we were asked to draw maps of our “internal world.”
Sonia’s was a harmonious composition, “The sun,” she explained brushing her bangs aside, “was a manifestation of joy that gives off ecstasy and enjoyment, but also nervousness and anger.” Ilya’s, on the other hand, was a chaotic map in motion: a tangle of overlapping roads, mountain passes, and dead ends, complete with a mood teleport, showed the succession through which his moods may travel.
As diverse as these results were, however, we spent little time delving into the details. The point seemed to be to constitute a relation to oneself, rather than to submit anyone to particular scrutiny. (I learned that some of this individual attention was
202
Figure 13. Serafima and Ilya’s internal worlds. handled outside the zaniatie, beyond the view of other campers (and anthropologists)).
Having created an internal world, we were then taught to intervene in it, to control its atmospheres and movements, to mobilize reason over knee-jerk behavior. As
Tomorrow’s Builders had promised in their promotional materials, we were being
203 moved beyond the Socratic imperative to “know thyself” (samopoznanie) into the terrain of doing, toward the management of self (samoupravlenie).
“What things do you do to help you through tough situations?” Anna asked us one morning. “What do you do when you feel uncomfortable?” When Gosha, Ilya, and
Grisha cited playing with, throwing, or just pushing the buttons of their mobile phones, Anna observed that these could be thought of as forms of self-regulation. We were then asked to draw a picture of a person who is self-regulating—what is she doing, how does she handle himself? I worked with Serafima and Lara, the two girls in our group, and we drew a person who was calm, wearing comfortable clothes and slippers and reading her favorite book. Realizing that disturbance is what necessitates self-regulation, we added some distractions—loud music, a cat scratching at her leg.
When we were all finished Aleksandr asked us to write a formula for self-regulation, which we did using the analogy of a scale with two arms—the tools used for self- regulation should always outweigh the impact of the distractions. Judging from the hodgepodge collection of drawings (heavily mediated by material objects that were figured both as tools for and challenges to self-regulation) it was unclear what general
“formula” could be drawn from them. One group had counter-posed brains (mozgi) and desires (volia), both of which were to be mediated by self-regulation. Another group put forward the less intuitive formula “emotions + thoughts = self-control.”
Aleksandr and Anna then offered “the answer”: a circle linking emotions<-
>thoughts<->behavior. “This is the ‘eternal engine,’” said Aleksandr, “and is what drives the human being.”
204 We nodded our heads, jotting this in our workbooks. On the next page we learned more about the elements of this eternal engine. An emotion is “our appraisal
[otsenka] of and personal attitude toward the signals of the external and internal world
(sreda).” It is something closer to an unmediated response. A thought, on the other hand, is more mediated: it is “a mental representation, idea, judgment, opinion, reasoning, conclusion or supposition.” Finally, behavior is “a person’s conduct and actions,” and the way in which “the personality of the person, the particularities of his character, temperament, his needs and tastes are manifested.”
We were then asked to list all the emotions we could think of. We made all kinds of guesses, ranging from ecstasy to dreaminess and confusion. Is an emotion unmediated (by thinking) “feeling”? Or do cognitive processes have a role in emotion?
What is the role of language? Is love, which is both feeling and thought, an emotion?
Aleksandr informed us that love is actually not an emotion, and that there are ten basic emotions, according to a source they were using: happiness, surprise, interest, sadness, wrath, disgust, insult, fear, shame and guilt.
The workbooks in our laps had linked these three elements, roughly corresponding to feeling-thinking-acting, with bi-directional arrows, indicating circulation without a necessary point of origin; however, it became clear over the week that the basic model of subjectivity with which we were working was:
external stimulusÆemotional response and/or thinkingÆbehavior.
“All we do depends on how we feel,” said Aleksandr. Indeed, he seemed to mean this not only in the mundane sense that feeling depressed means acting depressed, but also in the technical sense emphasizing the instrumental nature of
205 feeling: how—meaning by what means—and where do we feel? By using reason to bring emotional responses under control, we could also control our behavior.
The relationship between the terms that they offered rested on two assumptions about the phenomenology of human experience. First, by isolating an internal process intervening between stimulus and response, it broke experience down according to the division thinking/doing, where thinking precedes doing (leaving aside kinds of doing that may be constitutive of thinking, like prayer or yoga). Second, by delineating that internal process, it posited the familiar Enlightenment distinction affect/reason. The result of this was to assert an autonomous subject on whom was bestowed the capacity for intervention at multiple levels of experience—not just feelings and actions, but also thinking itself—a kind of psychologized rational-choice actor.95
We spent the remainder discussing self-regulating techniques. There was a variety of practical things one could do to make oneself feel better, but all of them relied on a single proposition—one first had to train in the art of “reading” oneself by honing skills of self-observation and interpretation. This took on interesting dimensions when projected into social situations, as one exercise demonstrated.
Aleksandr started by writing five emotions on the board and giving a corresponding color: sadness (blue), irritation (red), wrath (black), happiness (yellow) and satisfaction (green). He told us to use this key to note our current mood. I made a yellow and a green box for “happy” and “satisfied” in my workbook, as did most others.
95 This was not inconsistent with Soviet pedagogies of self-training, which were premised on a model of the conscious actor. Moreover, thanks to the ideological rejection of the Freudian unconscious under Stalin, Soviet pedagogies of self were even less tied to emotions. See chapter 2.
206 Then, in answer to the complaints the kids had been making about the fact that the lessons did not include enough games, he told us that if we could find consensus, we could plan the rest of the day. If not, then he would decide for us. Several of the more boisterous kids immediately began talking about just playing games. One suggested one game, another, another one. Then they began to argue over which game was good and which one stupid. Sasha began making lewd jokes with two others.
Serafima and Lara, while not participating nonetheless provides an amused audience.
Tolya, the only serious one, protested, saying, “Our parents didn’t send us here to play games, but to learn.” Sasha threw some crumpled paper at him.
The psychologists, Aleksandr and Anna, who had been sitting back and watching in silence, instructed us to stop and note our emotional state. I scratched a black box for “irritation,” and continued to watch in dismay as the kids squandered their chance to address their own dissatisfaction with the trainings. As things continued off track, so did my emotional barometer—using the color code I noted irritation, anger and sadness.
The inability to agree went on for some 15 painful minutes, until finally some of the class clowns began to shift roles. Gosha was the first to say that perhaps Tolya was right, we shouldn’t just play games. He reminded his cohort that they might loose the chance to decide the day’s schedule. The joking slowly ebbed and more children became attentive. Aleksandr asked us again to note our emotions and I noted satisfaction mixed with a lingering irritation. Ten minutes later we had come to an agreement—we had proposed a mixture of games and lessons. We made our final emotional check, and I had again returned to a state of happiness and satisfaction.
207 This exercise demonstrated how much an “emotional barometer” could say about ourselves and the situation. It charted a trajectory of emotional experience for the group, and also that everyone, regardless of role in the mayhem, had experienced the exercise similarly. This seemed to have a kind of disciplinary lesson: in showing us our emotional inter-dependence, we also came to appreciate, perhaps more profoundly, the importance of personal responsibility—crucially, even the clowns ruined the experience for themselves. Further, self-regulation appeared as a natural outcome of self-knowledge: the curve-like movement of the group dynamic— traveling from positive to negative to positive—suggested that the collective realization of dissatisfaction had helped bring about a change in behavior. It was a perfect expression of the camp objectives.
Aleksandr also pointed out that these kinds of skills of observation and self- control could be helpful in influencing other people’s states. “What bothered you in the exercise?” he asked rhetorically. “Your mood may have been affected by your level of nervousness in making your ideas heard; by certain new, unfamiliar ideas; by your personal point of view; and by social conditions.” He said that by exercising self- regulation, and moderating the influence of these experiences on our emotions, our self-regulation would also feedback more calm into the collective discussion.
In later days this link between self-control and social control was posited in the context of other techniques. For instance, we were given some tricks for avoiding fear and anger. To be less afraid one might “orient oneself to success” by thinking about one’s achievements, “sing a happy song,” “list one’s strengths mentally,” or “draw that which scares you, look at it from another angle, and then destroy it.” And to be
208 less angry one might “break something unneeded or tear a few sheets of paper into tiny pieces,” “punch a pillow,” or stamp one’s feet.” We were also advised how we could help others to calm down: “respect the person’s point of view,” “use humor,”
“discuss your own mood and the other person’s mood,” and “use I-statements.”
Like the techniques of self-regulation, these also rested on observation—in this case a kind of hermeneutics of the social. For instance, we were told that it was possible to “read” how a person is feeling or even what they are thinking by paying attention to how she moves or looks, how she speaks, and what she says—what they called non-verbal, paralinguistic, and verbal levels. What makes a calm person, noted
Aleksandr, is called “congruence” (kongruentnost’). He singled out Ilya as someone with good congruence in that these different behavior cues align in a way that is consistent with how one is feeling.
As the end of the week neared, it was clear that we would not cover everything planned. But what we had covered was how two simple acts, on the one hand recognition—of our internal world, our feelings, its stimuli, and the feelings of others—and on the other confession/revelation, was what made behavioral modification possible. As a kind of capstone to these lessons, the discourse of success emerged in the final pages of our workbook, where several figures were offered for us to emulate, having developed the skills of self-regulation. They were all famous athletes whom the kids would recognize—Formula 1 driver Mika Hakkinen, hockey player Pavel Bure, footballer David Beckham. A picture and a short quote about working hard, trusting in oneself, and achieving appeared. Said Beckham,
209 “Manchester’s trainer played a huge role in our success. He inclined us toward winning, forced us to believe that we are the best. And so we really were.”
Of course not everything at the camp was devoted to psychological projects.
Late at night, as psychologists sat around a table planning the next day, funny stories about the kids were exchanged, sometimes over alcohol, while Ivan would routinely get up to chide the older kids for not being asleep yet. I also learned as much about the kids on the ski slopes as in the lessons. And the point was that there would be a life outside the camp. As Tamara Grigorievna said, “We aim to do our work so that people have experience, get skills and bring these things to their schools and other people.”
The Neoliberal Disposition
The tension at Tomorrow’s Builders between their project to create a free atmosphere, and the highly structured nature of “free time” highlights the disciplinary (in the
Foucauldian sense) nature of their work. They were not interested in liberating their clients and letting them run hog-wild through the cafeteria; rather, they were concerned with turning them into particular kinds of self-knowing, emotionally competent, and self-controlled subjects. What more can be said about the kind of subjectivity they were trying to constitute, and its relation to what I have been referring to as their liberal imaginaries?
In the pages below, I explore these “psychological education” project in terms of a form of neoliberal subjectivation that has been articulated with two important, interrelated culturally specific contexts: the emergence of new forms of elite culture that have accompanied the growth of consumerism and self-fashioning in Russia; and
210 the historically constituted role of the “West” as a desired other. I will suggest that the intersection of particular liberal subjectivities with these post-Soviet, market driven modes of being have been tied together by the language of psychology to produce what might be thought of as a “psychic disposition.” Then, in the final section, I complicate this picture through a closer look at the social contexts within which subjectivation is taking place.
The imaginary West
The work of Tomorrow’s Builders and the competitors was not only mediated by developmental psychology; it was also premised on a kind of cross-cultural mimesis. Consider, for example, the many references by Tamara Grigorievna,
Tomorrow’s Builders’ camp director, to “the way things are in Europe/the US.” I would like to suggest that the West, particularly the US and Western Europe, is an important point of reference for this analysis, whether as a model for imitation, or a cautionary tale. As Yurchak has argued, the West has historically served a desirable
“elsewhere.” In the late-socialist period, he identifies a set of discourses and cultural practices surrounding music, art, style, film and jokes which he terms the “Imaginary
West.” The term “imaginary” is important here for both geographical as well as subjective reasons. Under socialism, the West was a dream for many Soviets—and also the source of a paradox: while the Soviet Union touted itself as the example of internationalism and allowed certain Western cultural forms into circulation, such as jazz music, foreign travel remained off-limits. This created a form of “internal emigration,” as Yurchak calls it, by which Soviets developed a kind of interior travel,
211 where flights of fancy and imagination took the place of actual travel. In this spatial paradox of the Imaginary West—that is, a far-off place that is constituted here—
Western products and ideas could become highly symbolic, valued not only as objects, but also as topoi of this elsewhere. As the Soviet joke goes:
“I want to go to Paris again.”
“What!? You’ve been to Paris before?”
“No, but I have wanted to go before” (Yurchak 2006:158).
After the collapse of Communism, this elsewhere has become real for many. A new leisure class of Russian tourists now flocks to Turkey, Europe, the US and points beyond. (And, in some cases, children are sent abroad for psychological education.)
Many of the wealthiest continue to hold their substantial riches, in some cases wealth made from the theft of state assets in the 1990s, in offshore bank accounts. But while the Imaginary West has become more attainable, one can also easily see how its symbolic value has remained. In the 1990s currency fluctuations, when value was so uncertain, many spent their money as soon as they had it on imported goods, or converted them immediately to dollars (Lemon 1998; Oushakine 2009:27). And in the streets of Petersburg in 1994 I still remember the seemingly ubiquitous baseball cap that read “USA California,” a distinctly Russian way of addressing country before state that nonetheless symbolized a desired elsewhere. Nearly a decade later, in 2003, I saw a billboard in Petersburg in which a man was holding a cellphone in the air in front of the Statue of Liberty, mirroring the statue’s iconic pose, along with the text—
“Roaming for Travelers” (see figure 1). Despite critiques of the US and EU policies, the symbols of bounty, fashion and style from zagranitsa, or abroad, continue to entice
212 many Russians through what Caroline Humphrey calls “content consumption”— where “the goods themselves confer their identity on people” (2002:176). As an example, she cites the villas of the New Russians, which become “the ground for two specific self-images, that of an haute bourgeoisie within an imagined ‘historical’ empire and that of sleek, efficient Europeans within a globalized vista of modern business elites” (Humphrey 2002:176). The discourses of freedom and possibility are inevitably fused into the practices of consumption, mutually constituting one another.
As such, the West can also be a standard against which the quality of things is measured, as in the term “evro-remont,” literally Euro-fixed, designating European- style renovations. And in political discourse, the West is a constant referent for either what is wrong with Russia—and thus a marker of its lack (of rule of law, transparency, stable institutions, real democracy)—or else what is right with it (not hypocritical, decadent, or devoid of sincerity).
This economy of comparison and desire also draws on several centuries of etiquette campaigns in the pre-revolutionary Russian empire. The entire era following
Peter the Great’s so-called “Westernization” of 17th century Russia was an effort to overcome Russian “backwardness” (otstalost’) through the imitation of European lifestyles, including speaking French, cultivating an aristocratic country life, and attending balls—things vividly described in Tolstoy’s 19th century novels. The Soviet period, too, had its civilizing campaigns. According to the historian Francine Hirsch,
“The Bolsheviks took state-sponsored evolutionism very seriously, putting far more effort into realizing its ends than the European colonial empires had put into their own civilizing missions. Characterizing ‘backwardness’ as the result of sociohistorical
213 circumstances and not of innate racial or biological traits, Soviet leaders maintained that all peoples could ‘evolve’ and thrive in new Soviet conditions” (2005:9). Stalin also attempted to redefine the notion of kul’turnost’, or culturedness, by lifting it from the 19th-century intelligentsia’s polished sensibilities and turning it into a virtue for the
Soviet elite (cf. Volkov 2000).96
At the same time, the forms of this desire have changed with the introduction of market capitalism. The self has become an important site for working through this particular desire. Alexei Yurchak’s work, for example, describes the emergence of career-oriented business magazines in Russia in the 1990s, noting that these put forward a discourse of becoming a “true careerist” which was more than a matter of doing business. “It also means learning a whole set of norms that demarcate everyday practices, dispositions, and one’s relationship to the self and to the world. These norms function as disciplinary effects of the new neoliberal regime of truth and power in the
Russian business world” (2003:74). Quoting from Colin Gordon (1991:44), he notes that “the ascendancy of this neoliberal model of the subject…marks a broad shift in the logic of everyday existence toward ‘the managerialization of personal identity and personal relations’ and ‘the capitalization of the meaning of life’” (2003:75).
Similarly, Elizabeth Dunn (2004) has commented on the way that those entering managerial positions as opposed to shop-floor jobs in newly privatized firms in Poland in the 1990s felt it important to fashion themselves as new “slick,” “flexible” and
“modern” kinds of persons.
96 On the history of etiquette in Russia, see Kelly (2001). On Soviet kul’turnost’ see Dunham (1990) and Boym (1994). On the intelligentsia in Soviet film, see Faraday (2000). As Patico (2005) notes, the Party sought to twin imperatives of kult’urnost’ and tsivilizovannost’ (civilizedness) through consumer goods.
214 The underside of this push for what might be called “global manners” appears in envious critiques of the arriviste “new Russians,” said to lack manners and taste and described by Humphrey as a “widely detested social category” (2002:176), and also in jokes about the sovok, a “hyperbolically crude” person who is a remnant of the late
Soviet period (Pesmen 2000:246n). These are also symptoms of a collision in social norms and disposition whose stakes are cultural, and even economic, ascendancy.
The efforts of Tomorrow’s Builders to constitute particular kinds of subjectivity can thus be connected to a long tradition of civilizing projects in Russia.
Their efforts, it seems, share not only the tendency to compare, but also an economy of desire, where particular symbols, whether material or subjective, take on value in and through their association with the West. Their work is also endowed with a particularly comparative, and forward looking, temporality, where, as we saw in the last chapter, it is not just a couple of kids, but Russia’s very future that is at stake. And practitioners even suggested that there was a kind of “backwardness” that had to be overcome through their work that resonated with centuries-long battle against Russian
“backwardness” (otsatlost’). Many viewed the parents as the problem in that they were the vehicles for social reproduction that made their work—the work of reforming social relations—difficult. For that reason, the separation of children from their parents in camps was fundamental to disrupting the reproduction of bad habits.
Mimetic techniques
How was this economy of desire inflected through Tomorrow’s Builders’ work? The constitution of what I have been calling liberal subjectivities was brought
215 about through both techniques of the body and of the self. Recall Marina’s admiring comments in the lunchroom, where particular kinds of unruly behavior were venerated on the grounds that they indicated a liberated personality. At the same time, the separation of children into chairs during lessons reproduced the forms of docility required for the passive acceptance of psychological knowledge. If the body was freed in some instances, in others it was immobilized and turned into an emotional text. In addition, kinds of public being were transmitted through teaching which performances were appropriate in the psychologically charged environment of the general assembly.
At the same time, a wide range of techniques of self were also passed along in and through the exercises aimed at constituting and exploring one’s interiors. In light of the economy of desire shaped by the Imaginary West, psychological education became part of a class-making process, where social distinction was being taught at the level of a person’s habitus. As Norbert Elias has shown, drawing on the work of Marcel
Mauss (1973), civilizing projects are not just about manifested civil behavior, manners, polish, they are perhaps more centrally concerned with the “psychic habitus”
(2000:x)—that is a set of honed bodily and psychic techniques brought to bear on the person through etiquette manuals and other texts on living. Crucially, these are embodied forms of being and are often practiced without thinking. This habitus could include the development of self-restraint, shame and repugnance, and, Elias argues, was a central feature in plays for supremacy through the language of civilization.
Relevant to the children’s camps, Elias notes,
[T]he specific psychological process of ‘growing up’ in Western societies, which frequently occupies the minds of psychologists and pedagogues today, is nothing other than the individual civilizing
216 process to which each young person, as a result of the social civilizing process over many centuries, is automatically subjected from earliest childhood, to a greater of lesser degree and with greater or lesser success (2000:xi).
This suggests that practices of socialization and child development (along with notions of good behavior, good parenting, or growing up) must also be a part of the establishment of social difference. Different styles of vospitanie are also reflections, to use Elias’ phrasing, of different “civilizing projects.” That is, they are efforts to shape children into polished, mannered, and psychologically literate subjects.
In many ways, Tomorrow’s Builders was keying into the widespread practice of “content consumption” of Western products as a way to increase the status of their organization and their clients. But it was being done in an interesting way. Recall, for instance, the range of appeals discussed in the last chapter—Consider your child’s future! Take steps to develop their cognitive skills! Teach them time-management and confidence! Train them in self-reliance! Show them how to succeed! Just as some ads used Latin script, these messages appealed to, but also simultaneously tried to construct the future Russian citizen—drawn up in this case through the mimetic appropriation of the kinds of subjectivities imagined to characterize the US and
Europe. It was fundamentally, of course, a way to drum up some business. But it was also a way for them to do the psychological work of social reform.
To a degree, though, the means could become the message. If we consider again Aleksandr and Anna’s internal worlds exercise, at issue was not so much an exploration of psychological difference, but its management; not so much in personal differentiation as in social differentiation; not so much in individuals as individualism.
217 Thus organizations like Tomorrow’s Builders could be seen as finishing schools, teaching techniques of body and self that convert, for example, an everyday notion of self-restraint into a psycho-technical operation. These efforts unfold while human resource departments, self-help books, glossy magazines and schools continually extol the same virtues of sound psychological behavior—an emphasis fueled by capitalist discourses linking psychological self-improvement and market success. These have combined to make a psychologized disposition a possible mark of distinction.
Of what specifically did the psychological disposition consist? The techniques taught at the psychology camps can be summarized as a creation of internal distance— constituting interiority, developing the means to access and analyze it, and finally providing methods for transforming oneself through self-knowledge, understanding the links between emotions, thoughts and behavior, and learning self-management.
This pedagogy is reminiscent of the cognitive-psychological model of “executive function.” As Emily Martin notes, executive function describes a brain capacity that involves remembering and pursuing goals; internalizing self-directed speech, allowing self-reflection; controlling emotions and reigning in passions; and finally, having the ability to behave in more socially acceptable ways (2008:23-24). It is something that people (specifically people with ADHD) can lack. Such norms of self-management are also reminiscent of what Bourdieu terms a bourgeois ethos of elective distance where, when speaking of taste, representation is superior to things represented, the abstract or avant garde to the merely realistic, the soul to the body, the ethereal to the base
(1984:34-41). This “Kantian aesthetic” prioritizes contemplation over the interest of the senses, and relies on the familiar reason/passion binary. At the camps similar kinds
218 of internal distance were being cultivated that relied on the separation of thought and action, and the subjugation of emotion to reason.97 On top of these imperatives, a camp like Tomorrow’s Builders had the added emphasis on competition, learning to loose, all of which created a sense that life was an individual enterprise. In experiencing the high of all-around confession, too, kids learned the pleasure of emotional openness at the same time that they were exposed to the kinds of confessional practices that Foucault links to modern forms of pastoral power (2000a;
2000b).
These kinds of pedagogies become marks of social distinction through the ways in which particular dispositions, in this case “psychological,” come to be associated with particular social positions. That is, “taste” need not be limited to aesthetic judgments, and can be extended to modes of embodiment, sociality and self- relation. In its acquisition, taste is informed by one’s habitus—that orienting atmosphere each person inhabits that provides a sense of “the normal,” grounds point of view, and shapes intuitions, ways of moving, standing or talking, and interacting with others.98 This concept of habitus suggests that class formation entails not just the
97 The orientation to psychotherapy has also been linked to leisure time by its practitioners. Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs places self-realization at the top as something only attainable after basic needs like food, shelter and security, as well as social needs like family, and friends, have been attained. Feminist anthropology has also critiqued the affect/reason distinction on various grounds. Rosaldo writes that this perspective “appears wedded to a bifurcating and Western cast of mind.” Moreover, it remains blind to the fact that “thought is always culturally patterned and infused with feelings, which themselves reflect a culturally ordered past, suggests that just as thought does not exist in isolation from affective life, so affect is culturally ordered and does not exist apart from thought” (1984:137). Yanagisako, in examining the oft-neglected role that sentiment can play in kinship formations (as opposed to just law), argues instead for the “emotionally constitutive power of law and the structuring power of emotion” (2000:54). Emotion, she says, does not “stand outside law as a pre- jural, pre-political, psychological force, but rather [is] conceptualized as a constitutive force itself, incited by law and other social forces” (2000 67). 98 Crucially, the habitus is both a “structuring structure,” organizes our practices and the perception of practices, as well as a “structured structure.” Our schemes of perception and action bear
219 struggle over capital, but also the cultivation of accompanying attitudes, dispositions, points of view, and tastes that constitute what we might think of as a social identity.
Class differences settle inside subjects, and can be expressed not just in judgments of aesthetic taste, but also in manners, for manners, too, are markers of status and means of maintaining in-group social hierarchies. The practice of politeness, specific ritualized modes of address, the exercise of self-control, the well-chosen word and other forms of “appropriate” public behavior are therefore potential sites of enrichment and social struggle. In this way, then, developing certain psychological- behavioral skills in children could be seen as an intervention at the level of habitus with particularly “classifying” effects. As a prime example of this emergent “elite disposition” consider the suspension, in the name of liberation, of the rules. This particular “regime of rule breaking” sanctioned a spoiled elites’ sense of entitlement to transgression.
In sum, then, the tactics of self-control and social sensitivity, folded into the psychologically tensile environment, constructed a bourgeois habitus (Bourdieu 1984;
Elias 2000) that, as Aiwha Ong (1999), Lisa Rofel (2007) and others have noted, is in global circulation among flexible citizens. Following this line of argumentation, psychological education can indeed be read as a post-Soviet finishing school for the elite. Psychological self-improvement was posited in relation to market success; self- the imprint of different types of social differentiation—for instance class. Bourdieu puts it strongly thus: “[T]he principle of division into logical classes which organizes the perception of the social world is itself the product of internalization of the division of social classes” (1984:170). Thus, frameworks for conducting sorting operations in life (this picture is gauche, that beautiful; this person is dangerous, that dirty; this child is feral, that charming) are structured by social differences that are, according to Bourdieu, fundamentally material. With respect to its manifestation in practice, Bourdieu says that after the habitus is internalized, it is then “converted into a disposition that generates meaningful practices and meaning-giving perceptions…” (1984:170). Having a certain disposition, and adhering to tastes and distastes, more than declared opinions “forge[s] the unconscious unity of a class” (1984:77).
220 restraint was converted into a psycho-technical operation befitting people with leadership qualities; emotional “sensitivity” was converted into a mark of distinction.
Considering the incitement, and instrumentalization of the self in light of the competitive atmosphere that the psychologists had created, the camp can thus be read as a site of neoliberal subjectivation. This particular hermeneutics of the self, premised on investigation and intervention with the aim of management directed toward self- sufficiency and responsibility as much as freedom. At the heart of this schema was a masculinist ontology—what Michele Rosaldo has called “a bifurcating and Western cast of mind”— a subject whose reason is supposedly separate from and mobilized against emotions to intervene at multiple levels of experience and behavior.
Seeing Beyond the Neoliberal
But is this “psychological education” solely a matter of class differentiation and neoliberal exceptionalism (Ong 2006)? Having explored some possible ways to approach this post-Soviet phenomenon tied up in children’s development, business practices, and social action, in this final section, I turn to some other, more socially situated, understandings of the camp phenomenon. In particular, I revisit the basis of
Tamara Grigorievna’s claim that they were promoting “individualism in the good sense.” The goal is to augment the preceding analysis, which has drawn on a neoliberal governmentality framework, through an attention to post-Soviet cultural and social particularity.
*
221 Questioning agents
One way in which this analysis can be complicated, but also extended, is through a more sustained focus on the Soviet referent entailed in Tomorrow’s
Builders’ work. Consider Tamara Grigorievna’s view of her work: this diminutive woman, trained in social psychology in the late-Soviet period suggested that their work was also a kind of wager, a way to bring about the reversal of the “totalitarian” parenting styles of Soviet vospitanie by fostering a new generation of Russians. She was especially interested in allowing children to behave in ways that would otherwise be disciplined with some harsh words, or even spanking. (And, indeed, based on my own unsystematic observations, physical abuse of children in public was rather common.) Her staff, consisting almost entirely of practitioners in their twenties had come of age after 1991, and seemed to implement this approach intuitively. Recall, also, Tamara Grigorievna’s words about creating a free atmosphere, teaching kids to find their own way, her critique of the multi-generational family and the lack of children’s independence, the importance of feeling relaxed. Taken in their postsocialist context, these “democratic technologies of citizenship” must also be viewed as part of a post-Soviet response to “traditional” forms of parenting and
“Soviet” modes of being.
The articulation of psychotherapeutic work with the project of teaching freedom was also a way for practitioners to work against what they viewed as Soviet psychotherapy’s legacy—as one therapist put it: an almost obsessive concern with
“ideological purity”; its abuse as “a tool for ‘reforming’ patients and correcting
‘wrong’ behavior”; and its lack of a “concept of internal human experience and
222 humane therapeutic relationships.” In viewing their work as having a social task, that is the fostering of “individualism in the good sense,” Tamara Grigorievna aimed at the development of equality and empathy through the simple recognition that if my feelings matter, so might those of others. The practitioners also spoke of the benefit of helping nervous children to be calmer, and children lacking confidence to be more so.
The sensitivity training with boys was a way of resisting a Russian masculinism according to which it is, as another informant put it, “womanly” (zhenopodobny) for men to show their emotions. In short, Tamara Grigorievna and her colleagues situated their work (and indeed their own subjectivities as post-Soviet psychologists) in terms of a vision of social equality and self-determination that were also directed at as a critique of authoritarian relations inside and outside the home. Here was a related, though not identical, kind of liberal imaginary to that of the constitution of young competitive individuals.
Follow-up work would be necessary to see whether these social reform aspirations actually influence the kinds of choices their clients make as adults. But
Tamara Grigorievna and Aleksandr claim to have seen some effects. “We don’t know for sure,” says Tamara Grigorievna, “but anecdotally I would say that on the positive side there is a growth in the assertiveness of children, their communication skills improve, they have many friends that they develop at the camps—they write letters to each other, call, participate in the online forums, rarely but occasionally this will also have a positive impact on their relations with their parents, it can also be the case that they study better. On the negative side, they start to live from camp to camp, unable to return to their normal lives.” And Aleksandr suggested that they have seen their kids
223 “take the lessons learned in the environment of the camp with very caring adults and begin to apply them in more intolerant environments, in the midst of harsh adults.”
Another way in which the reading of the camp as neoliberal staging ground can be complicated, but also extended, is through an attention to the child-clients themselves. In many cases, they almost never simply adopted the psychologist’s lessons. Take Sasha, the brash 13-year-old, whose comedic abilities (often at the psychologist’s expense) were matched only by the wide range of strategies he used to disrupt the lessons. In a context in which self-management was the rule, Sasha was the exception. And as the perennial good student, I was often bothered by his behavior.
Yet upon reflection, his back-talk was not just an incisive critique of the camp, it was also an example of an uncontained subjectivation. One day we were asked why it is important to self-regulate. “It helps a person behave ‘properly,’” he said, while gesturing the irony-soaked air quotes with his index fingers. Another time, during a confessional exercise in which we were asked to name an emotionally difficult situation, he said, affecting the voice of the spoiled child, “…when I wanted something and didn’t get it…” providing meta-commentary on the transparent objectives of the exercise. Later he added, affecting an exaggerated masculine pose, “I am a man. I can’t cry in front of other people.”
Sasha and I came face-to-face near the end of the week, in an exercise in which we were told to make a critical judgment about our partner in order to help him or her practice the techniques of self-regulation. I asked Sasha, “Why do you interrupt the teacher all the time?” He looked at me intently. “I know it’s bad and that I shouldn’t do it, but human beings should break rules. If they just followed rules all the time
224 they’d become robots.” Then it was his turn to question my behavior: “Why,” he asked, becoming uncharacteristically serious, “are you so good?”
Sasha had indeed prompted some important questions about the forms of self- care that were being taught: why must one behave properly, or even feel compelled to participate in confessional? What is meant by “good”? He seemed keenly aware of the subtext of his question: at the end of camp he left me a note thanking me for my friendship in which he reminded me that “good can be bad.” At the bottom he drew a happy face with devil’s horns, and above the horns, an angel’s halo. Sasha’s refusal of his interpellated position as a “good boy” demonstrated the range of ways psychological education could be construed and used by kids, including as materials satire, parody and social critique.
The case of Tolya is interesting, too. This somewhat melancholic boy seemed wise beyond his years, rolling his eyes as Sasha embarked on another of his escapades.
Over the week he became more comfortable with me, and started to share his unsolicited observations of the others. Referring to his grandmother’s stories of the
Pioneers, the Soviet equivalent of the Boy Scouts, he wondered whether things might have been better “when people didn’t laugh at others, and just throw trash on the ground without caring for anything but themselves.” His appeal to respect, personal responsibility, and kindness echoed the practitioners’ teaching; however, his attribution of these practices to socialist ideals highlights the political multi-valence of particular subject-positions, modes of being and social practices.99
99 For a critique of the wide application of neoliberal subjectivation, see Kipnis (2008).
225 Blurry domains, class and the problem of choice
A consideration of how psychological education fits into the post-Soviet political economy highlights some other ways in which liberal forms of subjectivation take on new forms. As anthropologist Julia Hemment (2004) has noted, post-Soviet
Russia has seen a growth (and subsequent shrinking) of the so-called “third sector
[tretii sektor],” or “civil society,” of which organizations like Tomorrow’s Builders are a part. The third sector began to consolidate in the 1990s largely as a legacy of both late-socialist progressivism as well as post-Soviet Western aid imperatives: comprised of various kinds of social groups (obshchestvennyi organizatsii), the third sector was viewed by Russian reformers as a staging ground for social solidarity, and by Western reformers as a way to circumvent government-to-government aid disbursements (much as was the dominant neoliberal mode of development work in the 1990s) (Hemment 2004:218-219). In theory, the third sector was to comprise one of the three legs of a stool on which a new Russian liberal-democratic society would sit, the others being the state and the market. Both historical context and intervening events have moved Russian politics and economy in new directions. Historically, of course, the market existed for years in the form of a “second economy,” within which both social redistributive and commercial activities took place. Political reforms sought to constitute and bolster the boundaries around the formal economy and the third sector; however, the diminution of Western aid dollars in the late 1990s, and
Putin’s eventual reining in of NGOs following the various “color revolutions” in CIS states, has maintained an often indistinct quality of these supposed institutional domains.
226 The organizations under discussion in this chapter reflect one piece of this story particularly well: the overlap between the third sector and the market. For example, when describing their financing, Tamara Grigorievna and Ivan both referred to Tomorrow’s Builders’ as a “commercial organization [kommercheskii organizatsiia].” By this they meant that they were not dependent on grants, and operated on the basis of their own sales. Yet when describing their institutional location, they described themselves as “non-governmental [negosudarstvennyi].” By this they meant that their organization was not subject to bureaucratic requirements and structures. In short, the organization could be seen in terms of either designation, depending on context. (As was discussed in chapter 3, the discursive blurring of these once mutually exclusive sociological categories is also evident in the way psychological work is promoted.)
This institutional background helps us to recognize one important context within which the blurring of languages of capitalist subjectivation on the one hand, and civility and tolerance on the other, is taking place.100 It is the lack of distinction between commercial and non-governmental enterprises in the post-Soviet context that has contributed to their melding into a conflated “non-state” domain consisting of both commercial and third sector activities. Tomorrow’s Builders has at its disposal a flexible language of legitimation. In some cases they describe their work in the non- profit terms of social work; at others in the for-profit terms of success formulae. Each
100 Slavoj Zizek (1997) has suggested that there is no inconsistency between the norms of tolerance and capitalism (see also Salecl (1994). Here, by contrast, my assumption is that there is no natural relationship between capitalist self-formation and tolerance. I prefer to take Wendy Brown’s (2003) genealogical, as well as strategic view, that the political and the economic need not be collapsed into one another. For more on this discussion, see chapter 7.
227 has its appeals to particular social actors. This flexible repertoire has not only offered them more symbolic resources for advertising, but also a frame within which the tension between commercial and civic action can be reconciled and made meaningful.
The way that this works can be thought of in terms of an appropriation of commercial languages and modalities in order to effect change, and vice-versa.
But I want to go a step beyond this structural explanation for what we might think of as a post-Soviet marriage of economic and political liberalisms. If one logic of appropriation has it that they deploy languages of tolerance for economic gain, it could also be argued that they deploy languages of economic gain (success, leadership, etc.) for ethical and political purposes. To appreciate this, consider, again, Tamara
Grigorievna’s statement about the 20% and the 80%. As she put it, Tomorrow’s
Builders intends to work with the few elites who will make decisions for the rest of
Russia. As a commercial enterprise, it is her goal to attract the wealthy clients; for it is they who are able to pay for the work. Yet as a non-governmental organization, it is her goal to make some kind of social difference through that work. (And there are ample examples in my interviews to suggest that this is not solely a marketing ploy or thin justification.) The suggestion that “we” will work with “they,” the elite, posits both a qualitative difference between psychologist and client, as well as a form of being that is absent among those elites. Their work with the children of those elites is therefore a strategic political calculation that the seeds of new kinds of disposition,
228 presumably with some socio-political benefit to their vague goal of “individualism in the good sense,” may be sown through “psychological education.”101
This we/they takes on further sociological concreteness in light of the historical struggle in Russia between what Vladimir Shlapentokh (qtd. in Patico 2005; 1999) calls the “mass intelligentsia”—teachers, doctors, engineers—and the emergent elite.
Starting in the post-World War II period, the former had become accustomed to a middle-class quality of life that largely disappeared in the 1990s at the same time that a new “petite bourgeoisie” was ascendant. If the former group has maintained their place as the moral standard bearers of Russian culturedness, of kul’turnost’,102 the latter have been defined by philistinism (cf. Boym 1994; Dunham 1990; Volkov
2000). In the Soviet period, critiques of the bureaucratic elite known as the nomenklatura, were common among the dissident intellectuals.103 In the post-Soviet period, what remains of this loose category of the intelligentsia, the critique of low culture has been leveled at the nouveau riche. Without presuming any neat boundaries or homology, it is reasonable to assert that many of the psychologists working with
101 Nor was this the only statement that reinforced the we/they division. I was warned at one point to be careful not to let the children taunt Igor in English, a language that they were being schooled in, but that he, as a member of the last-Soviet generation with less access to capital, did not speak. Aleksandr also often referred to the children as “clients,” and they, the psychologists, as the “people who work for the parents.” 102 As Rivkin-Fish puts it, the intelligentsia was said to have conveyed “a ‘sacred’ quality, merging and condensing the symbolism of kul’turnost’ (culturedness), high education, and the attendant respect and authority that derive from honesty and moral righteousness” (2009:81). According to Patico, this category of kul’turnost’ continues to be a very salient “trope of value” by which a person’s moral worth is judged (2005). 103 After the collapse of the Soviet Union, these two groups, plus a new hybrid business elite, have constituted the groups with power, wealth and status. The nomenklatura in particular was ideally situated to capitalize on the sale of state assets, and converted political into economic capital. The intelligentsia, however, have fared less well, comprising a disgruntled social class of intellectuals, teachers, and artists, many of whom have seen their former status wane along with the value in non- trade-based higher-learning. This group has filled the teaching positions in schools and universities, the white coats in medical and psychiatric clinics, the reported and commentator positions in media, writers and artists.
229 children in St. Petersburg, both in public and private/NGO sector, could be counted among this group of mass intelligentsia. And so, when Tamara Grigorievna targets that consequential “20%” she is also expressing a kind of social reform project, aimed particularly at the new elite,104 who are also consistently considered to lack in
“manners”—a project that she expressed to me as one of creating new, autonomous, empathetic subjects. And this sense of lacking manners is part of the long history of civilizing projects Russia between the intelligentsia and petty bourgeoisie, known by the term meshchnanstvo.
The ethical re-education of the elites has a particular urgency given that they continue to be viewed by many ordinary Russians as hopelessly corrupt. Each year
Russia’s president announces a war on corruption, but each year little seems to change: Russia continues to be hounded by poor corporate governance, selective law enforcement, and extortion, not to mention state capture, the pervasive shadow economy, and incomplete institutional transformation. In the words of Yeltsin’s prime minister, Viktor Chernomyrdin regarding the reforms of the 1990s, “We hoped for the best, but it turned out as it always does [khoteli kak luchshe, a polichilos’ kak vsegda]”
(qtd. in Ledeneva 2006:11). Alena Ledeneva suggests that Chernomyrdin’s words summarize a sense of “Russia’s entrapment in its own ways,” and “alludes to routine
104 The question of whether this constitutes a “new middle class” is of some dispute. As the darling of neoliberals, this figment of the Western imagination was assumed to be the keystone of the formation of civil society in Russia. But as Mokrzycki (1996) points out, writing in the 1990s, this designation is less a social reality than a vision of those who would lead Russia’s economic march in the future, and reform society. As it has turned out, the middle-class is less a broad-based group whose wealth will prompt grassroots politics and institution-building, than a repackaging of the old elite. The most visible of these groups has been the so-called New Russians, a category of description, rather than self-identification, as Humphrey notes, that designates the simultaneously envied as well as reviled nouveaux riche.
230 practices of the elites—from local bosses to transnational networks—that continue to benefit from such an order of things” (Ledeneva 2006:11).
Many scholars have written about the vacuum in social trust created after the
Soviet state collapsed (see Humphrey 2002; Oushakine 2009; Shevchenko 2009;
Verdery 1996; Volkov 2002). The idea is that the perceived solidity of late-Soviet institutions had anchored a wide variety of social practices. Its absence in the 1990s and the lack even of any succeeding national idea had thus given rise to the variety of improvised structures about which many anthropologists have written. These include suzerainties, private security and mafia bosses, as well as, at the symbolic level, conspiracy theories and new habituses structured in a logic of permanent crisis. The experience of the 1990s thus continues pose questions about how to structure new forms of social constraint, social order and trust as a way to arrive at increased social equality—a goal that has remained, throughout the 2000s, elusive. In effect, what reformers of all kinds in Russia seek are forms of governmenality that have served as a socio-political guarantor in other states.
In the face of problems of social trust and inequality, my psychologist informants appear to believe that psychological education has both a moralizing and socially re-ordering potential, operating one self at a time. The way they articulate this lack of order is through a focus on “the problem of choice” that followed the Soviet collapse. Explaining why Tomorrow’s Builders’ work was necessary in a changing
Russia, Aleksandr said,
In the Soviet Union you didn’t need to think about the future. You went from university to the institute, or from the army to work. Today the problem is choice. The problem is that it is too easy to make no choice
231 about your future. If you do this, you get left behind. Also, there is the problem of unpredictability that this new idea of choice opens up. Things have more recently gotten more stable. There is a president. There will be an election. With the emergence of some kind of middle class, there is more opportunity to do psychological work. If we think of Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of five human needs [sex/food; defense of life; society; recognition; self-realization], most in Russia are still living only according to the first two needs. But those who have managed to find some stability can now turn to the matter of the self— those needs linked to recognition and self-realization, that is, the ability to use all of your skills. This is where the psychologist can help.
Merging together the language of market competition with self-realization (and also implying that psychological work is a pastime that only the wealthy can afford)
Aleksandr thus also identified how their work could give people the psychological
“skills” for confronting the new problem of choice and self-realization.
Like Tamara, he used the Soviet period as the comparative frame, and added that the route to self-fulfillment in the Soviet times was “freedom inside.” Going back to the matter of choice, Aleksandr drew two pictures with the individual at the center of a surrounding state. “In the Soviet Union, everything was absorbed, except the elite, by the state. The smallest unit, the individual, was figured into a structure that included work and life with little place [outside this]. Around this was the social.”
Then, he pointed to the drawing representing contemporary Russia, which had similar concentric circles, but the social surrounding the immediate circle of the individual “is a zone of conflict, choice, that also brings a higher degree of freedom.” “Each,” he concluded, “brings its own challenges to the task of self-fulfillment.” He explained that in the one it was a matter of creating the self as an alternative space of freedom; in the second, the self becomes a vehicle for taking full advantage of the surrounding opportunities and avoiding the obstacles.
232 After saying this, Aleksandr added that Maslow himself added a sixth human need later in his life: that of facilitating other people’s self-realization. In statements like this one can hear echoes of Russia’s past internal-civilizing missions, where the intelligentsia have always been the cultural and moral standard-bearers. Only now these projects are being expressed in explicitly psychological terms and articulating very closely with liberal discourses of choice and freedom.
These statements help to bring into relief how Tomorrow’s Builders’ efforts in many ways in accord with neoliberal projects based on the creation of subjects whose self-realization is closely linked to capitalist success, but not necessarily reducible to them. On the one hand, the language of freedom and choice echoes the rhetoric of entrepreneurial, innovative, apolitical, choosing consumer-subjects. At the same time, the “civilizing” work they were proposing to do also prescribed kinds of social connection that had the potential to lead to better, and presumably more fair, decision- making among elites. This helps to show how these psychologically expressed social reform projects, viewed here in terms of related but not homologous liberal imaginaries, take shape polysemously at the intersection of the psychologist’s pedagogy, social distinctions, political rationalities, and historically shaped attitudes about the future.
Conclusion: The Negative Agenda
In the final analysis, what sense can be made of Tomorrow’s Builders’ work— either as a kind of “inside-out” social reform, an elite finishing school with the global labor market in mind, or both? How to square their undeniable class-making
233 pedagogies with the post-Soviet discourse of “social change” and small-d democracy?
Barbara Cruikshank has written that democratic discourses “are both enabling and constraining…the will to empower contains the twin possibilities of domination and freedom” (Cruikshank 1999:2). As a potential site of democratization with a small ‘d’, psychological education in Russia contains a similar tension.
Certainly, the strongly classed nature of their work seems to diminish their intended social interventions. As in the US, by working with only the most entitled children, their efforts dovetail with neoliberal governing projects seeking to turn citizens into the next “liberated” (that is multinational, flexible) entrepreneurs. Even the political project of elite reform from within reflects the broader development discourses about, and solutions to, the perception of corruption and the lack of transparency in developing countries. And through the unrelenting emphasis on self- reliance and self-management, they also seem to reproduce the common critique of those “discredited” rationalities of equal access to social, educational, cultural and political capital: by re-scripting these in terms of an equal access to one’s own personal capital, those rationalities are stripped of social import and personalized.
Such work risks substituting self-perfection for social improvement, affective engagement for political action.
But as the practitioners’ own sense of their work and the contexts within which it unfolds suggest, there was more happening at the camps than the instantiation of neoliberal subjectivities. This included efforts to displace old models of child-rearing and modes of social interaction that they found socially and psychologically problematic. It involved an interest in reshaping Russia through interventions aimed at
234 future decision-makers, and the creation of camp atmospheres as surrogate-familial environments in which children might learn empathetic and other skills that, in turn could be spread outward into broader forms of social equality. It was also premised on an ongoing interest in the Imaginary West as a projected space for home improvement.
And it entailed, at least rhetorically, the cultivation of certain politically important, albeit vaguely defined, notions of freedom, equality and responsibility. In recognizing these nuances, we begin to see how the complexity of these projects is not very well captured by their critique as local versions of neoliberal governmentality.
Let us now pull these various pieces together: the constitution of neoliberal psychological dispositions through emphases on competition, comparison, freedom, and self-knowing; the competing discourse of progressive social change, tolerance, empathy, and respectful social relations among equals; the dialectic of desire and attraction to the West; the question of agency; and the wish to break from the Soviet past. I have suggested that each of these is a slightly alternate inscription of a liberal imaginary in Russia. If we consider them in this regard, while at the same time attempting to locate the multiple pathways that the liberal imaginary takes in Russia today, it becomes possible to locate a certain ethical surplus that may be important not only for honing our tools for understanding the connection between subjectivity and governance under global as well as national and local conditions, but also for the sense of possibility that ethnography can identify.
Such an approach suggests that sites of subject-formation such as the camps may be more productively read not in terms of “good or bad” practices, but as expressions of a particular and highly contingent vision of democracy “with a small-
235 d.” As this dissertation has argued, the management of self through psychology has become a proxy for a new kind of politics in Russia—a politics, as one person put it to me, with an almost exclusively “negative agenda.” That is, everything about it, from its emphasis on emotional competence, self-control, self-knowledge, reading others’ emotions, developing empathy, learning to communicate feelings, and civility are all defined in a subtractive way, and in opposition to either the Soviet past, or else to the boorish manners of the current Russian elite. If we are to comment on these projects as
“political projects,” this is a more useful place to begin. The question then becomes, what are they “for”? This is a question I take up in chapters 6 and 7.
First, however, I turn to psychological work in public institutions in order to track the parallel fate of psychological knowledge as it has been folded into the post-
Soviet state projects of mental health. These are the psychologists who work with “the other 80%.” If the democratization of young subjects is playing out in close proximity to both freedom and neoliberal techniques of the self in psychological education for elites, in Russia’s municipal centers a different sort of intervention is at work. Here, amidst calls for new, innovative, emotionally competent children and environments, a politics of exclusion, audit and management plays out as practitioners struggle to balance difficult legal, ethical and judicial constraints in their work.
236 CHAPTER 5
“The Little Army of Psychologists”: Experts and the Post-Soviet State
Facing…disarray, there is only the little army of counselors and psychologists, and they are always insufficient in number to meet the demand of defenseless parents, of lost children and unhappy couples, of the misunderstood, of those who have not learned how to live.
-Jacques Donzelot (1979:219)
The previous two chapters have traced various elaborations of psychological expertise in the marketplace, where since 1991 those forms that had been banned, marginalized or ignored by the Soviet Party state, have proliferated. Has the psychologist’s knowledge found similarly hospitable environs in Russian state institutions? In this chapter I turn to a key institution under Russia’s Ministry of Education in order to explore how psychological expertise has become incorporated into the governance of postsocialist citizen-subjects. Which state actors have promoted the expansion of psychology into state institutions, and why? Who receives publicly funded psychological assistance, and who offers it? How do those services figure in a larger mental-health system? My objective is to use the story of psychology’s state institutionalization as a way to understand what kinds of “selves” are both desired by, and produced within, Russia’s post-Soviet state institutions.
237 I address these questions by drawing on participant-observation in one of St.
Petersburg’s Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social (PPMS) Centers. These centers offer a range of free psychological services to public school children, and are appropriate sites in which to explore the fusion of psychology with postsocialist governance because the formation of the PPMS system itself mirrors a broader shift from late- socialist to postsocialist approaches to schooling, children’s development, civic education, and mental health. Discussions about the need to create PPMS Centers began in the 1980s, during perestroika. The dominant approach to child development in schools had been undifferentiated and often strict, premised on both standardization as well as collective discipline. But many began calling for a new approach as the economic stagnation that had begun in the 1960s wore on, and as the Soviet Union confronted crises in industrial production, professional training and shortage (Verdery
1996:30-35). Psychologists jumped into the fray, suggesting that the “human factor” in production had been too long ignored. They began advocating for a “differentiated”
(variantnyi), or tailored, approach to education that would take account of the “whole child,” and succeeded in transforming the priorities of the Soviet Academy of
Pedagogical Sciences. These reforms bore fruit in the 1990s: in 1998, by Federal mandate, the first PPMS Centers were created on a model of psychological guidance
(soprovozhdenie) imported from Belgium, and since then the PPMS system has spread throughout Russia.
I will explore the formation of the PPMS system in Russia in terms of a shift in governmentality from the late- to post-socialist periods. By “governmentality” I refer to Michel Foucault’s (1991; 2007) concept, which brings into one analytic frame state
238 institutions, techniques, and those who are governed. In other contexts, this approach has been used to make the argument that one of the features of modern governmentality is that the constitution of particular kinds of subjectivities has become one of the primary aims and methods of governance. The contemporary example to which scholars often point is the spread of neoliberal reforms like privatization, which are premised principally on the replacement of relations of “welfare dependency” with personal responsibility and autonomy. This is taken to be a sign of governing “from a distance” (Rose 1996a) through freedom (Burchell 1996) (a pattern that, as chapter 4 discussed, is apparent in fee-for-service counseling and training). The PPMS Center appears to have brought together two of the central techniques of modern governmentality. One is psychological expertise, which, as scholars note, has helped to define, elaborate and disseminate notions of self-help, self-empowerment and self- esteem that have also been tied to “good governance” (Burchell 1996; Cruikshank
1996; Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979; Rose 1985; Rose 1990; Rose 1996b). Another is the way in which the psychologists’ work has been managed through particular kinds of audit. Here heavy-handed intervention has been replaced with various autonomously undertaken “rituals of verification” (Powers 1999) that more easily render activities legible, comparable and manageable (Strathern 2000).105
There is no doubt that the rise of the PPMS system in Russia signals a shift in governance in Russia. Yet like the social and cultural particularities discussed in
105 While the initial research on these topics was limited to Europe and the US, in recent decades neoliberal reforms, psy self-help and the spread of techniques of audit and risk management have been examined in Africa (Ferguson 1994; Ferguson 2007; Hart 2002), Latin America (Paley 2001), China (Kohrman 2004; Ong 2006; Ong and Zhang 2008; Rofel 2007); India (Gupta 1998; Sharma 2008) and Russia (Collier 2005; Dunn 2004; Matza 2009; Rivkin-Fish 2005; Yurchak 2003).
239 psychological education for elite children in the last chapter, the view inside Russia’s
PPMS system shows processes of subject-making that are far less clear. As was introduced in chapter 3, while state modernization rhetoric and education policy call for certain kinds of liberated interpretations, a look inside one particular PPMS Center shows something different. In the pages below I explore this in terms of a disjuncture between rationality, technique and institutional practice. I will suggest that this can tell us something about the ad hoc nature of postsocialist governmentalities and the highly differentiated kinds of subjectivities that it produces. Furthermore, the PPMS case also suggests something important for governmentality studies. While such studies help make sense of the evolving links between “the little army of psychologists” and the state, it is also necessary to insist on some analytic distinctions. In particular, although
“rationality” and “technique” are always distinguished in studies of expertise and subject-making (Barry, et al. 1996b; Rose 1999), there is nonetheless a tendency to collapse these in order to produce broadly historical arguments. Moreover, while there is often reference to “practices”—that is what the state “does”—practices, too, tend to blur into rationality and technique. The case of the Russian PPMS Center highlights how the political rationality, technical forms of management, and day-o-day running were all very different things. What authorities wanted to happen (rationality), how they went about pursuing those goals (technique), and finally what their experts did with those ideas and techniques (practices) created a highly flexible field of social practices, rather than a governing logic whose ends are always met.
I elaborate on these points in the conclusion. My main argument will be that, in exploring particular policy interventions as “governmentalities,” unbundling
240 rationality, technique and their translation into practice has two benefits. First, it frees us from epochal visions of any particular rationality of government (whether neoliberal, socialist, or social-democratic), which make it more difficult to see how certain kinds of governing techniques (the “how” of managing states) can appear under a range of political rationalities (the “why”). Second, and related it enables us to see how governmentalities are haunted by implementation problems. This is evident in how, inside the PPMS Center, both rationality and technique were constantly being reordered through negotiation, prejudice, personal relationships, “making do” within constraints, and certain ossified procedural forms. Thus, governmentality is not only limited by political contestation from non-state actors (Li 2007) or the shortcomings of its experts (Mitchell 2002), but also problems of implementation within government institutions.
Such points may seem almost commonsense. It is hardly a revelation that government plans do not end up unfolding as designed. Thus, the important empirical question is, what do the shifting configurations of governing rationality, technique, and implementation ultimately produce for the subjects the PPMS Center is charged with governing? Using the example of the imposition of audit systems within the
PPMS Center, I will show how this purportedly rationalizing scheme ends up producing organizational irrationality and, ultimately, reinforces the social stratifications that are becoming more and more entrenched in Russian society. The suggestion will be that it is these “managed selves,” not liberated entrepreneurial patriots, that are the actual outcomes of this post-Soviet governmentality, something that has been rather elusive in this approach to political interventions.
241 The PPMS Center as an Historical Formation
At present, the Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social (PPMS) assistance system is spread throughout Russia, though it is most well-developed in urban and semi-urban areas. In St. Petersburg, there are 19 PPMS centers—one per administrative region
(raion). They are also found in Moscow, Perm, Novgorod, Tver, Yaroslavl, the
Karelian Republic, Orel, and other places. PPMS Centers are small in size, ranging from staffs of ten to thirty specialists. They operate under the Ministry of Education, as opposed to Health, which signals both an administrative as well as legal distance between their work and the biomedical fields. In essence, this means that PPMS
Centers are not licensed to work with severe psychiatric cases, and should forward those on to other, more qualified agencies. Instead, their work is non-biomedical, involving short-term therapeutic interventions in emotional or behavioral problems, memory and speech difficulties, as well as family concerns.
By their lengthy acronym, the centers are designed to offer a “complex” approach to the child, drawing together experts in psychology, pedagogy, medicine and social work. In practice, however, this “one-stop shopping” has primarily ended up being either psychological or pedagogical in nature, leaving aside the medical and the social.106 Finally, PPMS Centers are “municipal” (municipal’nyi)—which means that their budgets come from the city (gorodskoi), not the federal government. In
2006, recent budgetary reforms had just freed each center to manage its own
106 My fieldwork suggested that the paring down of functions was at least partly due to territorial disputes between psychotherapists (vrach-psikhoterpevty) who have medical degrees, and psychologists, who do not. Though I do not explore this in much detail, as was suggested in chapter 2, these tensions within the psy fields indicates a professional struggle that has been conditioned by the emergence of talk therapies and that has staged a broader cultural shift around post-Soviet subjectivity.
242 budgets—a privilege that the director of the PPMS Center suggested was a mixed blessing.
The story of the emergence of the PPMS system is an interesting case for thinking about how the psychologization of a particular dimension of post-Soviet state governance—its schools—has taken place. The first thing to note is that in many ways the PPMS Center marks the return of pedology, a similarly “complex” approach to the child based on Vygotsky’s theories, which had been banned by Stalin in 1936. The rationale for the 1936 ban was its “pessimistic findings” that bourgeois children continually outperformed the children of the proletariat on intelligence tests (Bauer
1959:116-127). Accordingly, along with pedology, psychological testing was also banned (today’s PPMS Centers rely heavily on testing). Another important factor behind Stalin’s ban of pedology was that progressive schools were failing to produce the new generation of factory workers, technicians and professionals that the building of socialism required (Dunstan and Suddaby 1992:5; Rosen 1971:39).107
Alongside Stalinism’s turn against pedology came a broader shift away from the “child-centered” education that had characterized the 1920s and early 1930s and had been influenced by the progressive ideas of John Dewey (Dunstan and Suddaby
1992:1). In its place came more conservative, de-psychologized forms,108 lead by
Anton S. Makarenko (1888-1939), a Ukrainian educator who became the director of a labor colony of war orphans and juvenile delinquents in 1920. Makarenko’s success at
107 The Marxist-Leninist argument against pedology, and its effects on the applied psychological fields is explored in detail in chapter 2. 108 The ideological coherence of parenting and schooling practice should be questioned. While there were consistent themes and periods—the period of free education; the period of centralization— the practices of schools and nurseries undoubtedly remained hybrid, retaining traces of even “bourgeois methods” (cf. Kelly 2007:112).
243 “civilizing” waifs, delinquents and addicts attracted the attention of the Party, and he eventually became a kind of Soviet Dr. Spock (Bronfenbrenner 1970), providing parents advice on moral upbringing, or vospitanie (Bozhovich and Slavina 1967). His books became “the bible of Soviet education” and psychology (Joravsky 1989:350).
His methods were based on militaristic approach, emphasizing individual subordination to the group, and complemented by uniforms, flags and parades (Rosen
1971).109
In fact, Makarenko was a vocal critic of pedology, psychology and their
“individualized ‘child-centered’” approach to education that was then prevalent
(Rosen 1971:35). Consider, for example, this passage from Makarenko’s hugely popular book, Road to Life:
I ventured to question the correctness of the generally accepted theory of those days [the 1920s and early 1930s], that punishment of any sort is degrading, that it is essential to give the fullest possible scope to the sacred creative impulses of the child, and that the great thing is to rely upon self-organization and self-discipline. I also ventured to advance the theory, to me incontrovertible, that, so long as the collective, and the organs of the collective, had not been created, so long as no traditions existed, and no elementary habits of labor and mores had been formed, the teacher was entitled—nay, was bound!—to use compulsion. I also maintained that it was impossible to base the whole of education on the child’s interests, that the cultivation of the sense of duty frequently runs counter to them, especially as these present themselves to the child itself. I called for the education of a strong, toughened individual, capable of performing work that may be both unpleasant and tedious, should the interests of the collective require it.
109 His methods of strict discipline were built around his theory of the kollektiv, which Oleg Kharkhordin notes, was a mechanism of mutual horizontal surveillance that Makarenko himself called a “technology of no mercy” (1999:75-122). Writes Joravsky, “[Makarenko’s] ultimate sanction was not physical punishment but threat of expulsion; to avoid that the children began to observe civilized rules first as a small sacrifice and then as a point of ride, reinforced by semi-military manners, including parades to martial music” (1989:350).
244 Summing up, I insisted upon the necessity of a strong, enthusiastic, if necessary a stern collective, and of placing all hopes on the collective alone. My opponents could only fling their pedological axioms in my face, starting over and over again from the words “the child” (qtd. inJoravsky 1989:351-351).
Makarenko’s model of strict discipline through the kollektiv would become an important component of the Narkompros’ (People’s Commissariat of Education) approach to education, as well as its successor, the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences
(Akademiia pedagogicheskikh nauk or APN), founded in 1943. These organizations oversaw a centralized, universal and egalitarian Soviet education for most of the second half of the twentieth century (Dunstan and Suddaby 1992:5; Gilgen and Gilgen
1996:14; Kelly 2007:95-6).110
I bring up Makarenko and the APN only to set the stage for comprehending the miniature revolution in the politics of Soviet education that would take place during perestroika. Throughout the post-War period, debates had continued in the APN between those who supported the centralization of undifferentiated education, and those who advocated differentiation and decentralization. Debates would frequently erupt around times of economic crisis such as production shortfall or insufficient worker training or motivation. Thus, throughout the post-War years the tension between these two poles existed, despite the overall hegemony of the Makarenko model, and his successor, Sukhomlinsky (cf. Kelly 2007). The economic crises of the
110 Alongside these conservative developments in Soviet pedagogy, the Communist Party also developed a network of youth organizations, starting from the Octobrists (age 7-10), and then the Pioneers (age 10-15), a kind of Communist Boy or Girl Scouts with a trademark red bandana. These extended all the way through the Komsomol, or Communist Youth League. Participants in these organizations would learn Communist Party history, participate in camps, and in cases of the most successful, be primed for the positions in the Party leadership. These organizations also worked closely with schools, especially on matters of collectivist ethics (Kreusler 1976; Rosen 1971:45).
245 1960s and 1970s, however, once again raised the issue of proper education.111 These conditions again opened up questions as to whether the undifferentiated centralized approach to education was addressing what Gorbachev suggested was the fundamental, and often overlooked, aspect of the production process—the “human factor.” As Gorbachev remarked in 1986 at the 27th CPSU Congress “Party work has to do with the human factor…. Hence the main task of this work today is to inspire, by all possible means a change in the minds and moods of personnel from top to bottom.
… Little can be changed in the economy, management and education without changing mentality and developing a desire and ability to think and work in new ways” (Rawles 1996).
Social historian Ben Eklof suggests that this late-socialist call to change minds and moods created the conditions of possibility for the reform-minded factions in the
APN to interject, once again, their own ideas for reform: “[T]he increasing official emphasis upon ‘the human factor’ privileged education in the rhetoric of perestroika, for if the success of reform depended, in the long term, upon fostering qualities of initiative, independence and responsibility, what could be more logical than to begin with the schools” (1993:9)?112
111 The Soviet Union, like much of the world, had been mired in an oil-shortage-fueled stagnation from the 1970s, and had begun taking loans from Western banks as a way to support production. As Katherine Verdery (1996:30-37) argues, rather than attempt significant structural reform, the U.S.S.R.’s ruling elite borrowed to attempt to solve its economic problems through using loans to purchase technologies. The hope was that it could service its debt through the sale of goods; however, these goods, whose salability was already questionable, met a flagging global economy. At the same time, the loans began to slow. These global-economic convulsions of the late 1970s thus lead to further economic crisis. It became clear to the Party leadership that the U.S.S.R. was gripped by inertia, shortage, corruption and inefficiency (Muckle 1990:70-71). 112 In fact, according to an article published in the Soviet journal Pedagogika i Psikhologiia (Pedagogy and Psychology), psychology had already entered a few schools by 1980 (cf. Kala and Raudik 1986:7). The developments in the mid- and late-1980s should therefore be thought of as extensions of earlier trends.
246 At this time, a group of educators had a famous meeting at the writer’s colony at Peredelkino in 1986 and came up with their rubric of the new “Pedagogy of
Cooperation,” which highlighted a philosophy of “more humane relations between teacher and pupil, a “dialogue of cultures,” “open schools, a “greater respect for the autonomy of childhood and for the role of play in learning, and for freedom of choice as well as self-government,” and a more “democratic classroom” (Eklof and Dneprov
1993:8-9). This was a departure from the teaching priorities based on the imposition of knowledge, skills and abilities through rote learning. Anton Makarenko was undoubtedly rolling in his grave. In the context of the reign of the conservative
Academy of Pedagogical Sciences (APN) over education and its historical resistance of psychological expertise, this amounted to a psycho-ethical revolution.
As the chorus calling for the shift to differentiated “democratized” education grew, those in power, keen to find ways out of the economic stagnation, began to take note, and eventually, Yegor Yakovlev, an influential member of the Politburo under
Gorbachev and the person in charge of education, assembled a Temporary Research
Committee on the Schools (Vremennyi nauchno-issledovatel’skii kollektiv ‘Shkola’ or
VNIK-shkola), whose platform became the “Pedagogy of Cooperation.” Their proposals were submitted in late 1987 and 1988, and led to the empowerment of
“teacher-innovators,” greater self-management of schools, the establishment of school boards, and the encouragement of diversity, as opposed to leveling (Dunstan and
Suddaby 1992; Eklof and Dneprov 1993:12). Reformers within the APN began to press, once again, for a differentiated approach, decentralization, experimentation, diversity and “humanization” (Eklof and Dneprov 1993:5). For instance, in a
247 document that appeared in the press in 1988, the VNIK-Shkola group suggested schools should “further the intellectual, moral, emotional and physical development of the personality, liberate its creative potential and shape a communist world-view based on general human values” (Muckle 1990:79).113
What is interesting about these reforms is the role that psychologists played.
The VNIK-Shkola group relied on clinical and other applied forms of psychology to give their answers to pedagogical questions, in particular, the developmental psychology of Lev Vygotsky that had been marginalized since 1936. This shift was also reflected in reappraisals of upbringing.114 In addition, many of the reformers were themselves psychologists. In an interview in Psikhologicheskaia Gazeta, Aleksander
Asmolov, a psychologist who would eventually become the main psychologist in State
Education in the USSR, recalls those years as introducing the “liberal doctrines” of education, or what he casts as the shift from “averaged to personality-oriented education” (Zaitseva 2005). Notes Asmolov, “[F]or the faceless totalitarian education system in which the child is adapted to the school program [rather than] the program to the motives and capacities of the child, the psychologist is an unwelcome figure.
Psychological services are pertinent and necessary above all in the system of differentiated education, which opens the line of possibility [veer vozmozhnostei] for the individual development of the personality in the world of culture” (Zaitseva 2005).
113 Eklof (1993:5) makes the interesting point that this debate within the APN essentially played out a long-standing class-based conflict within Soviet society between the middle classes, who were disinclined to leveling, and the margins of the educational community. 114 As a well-known educator and writer, Simon Soloveichik, wrote in 1985 in the newspaper Novyi Mir, parents needed to leave behind the then-typical Soviet pedagogical formulas for upbringing which included the “street traffic model” or teaching rules; the “vegetable garden” approach of treating the child’s soul like a plot in need of weeding; or the “carrot-and-the-stick.” Instead, Soloveychik drew on Vygotsky’s ideas, and advocated cultivating the child’s soul and love (1988).
248 In pursuing new kinds of differentiation, Asmolov built programs not only for talented children, but also for those with disabilities as well as those susceptible to delinquency. These programs were meant to solve several problems, including
“loosening […] the myth of the “sameness” of all children” which was “one of the political barriers on the path to differentiated education [variativnoe obrazovanie] and the reason for the banishment of pedology to the ‘intellectual gulag.’” Asmolov adds that it was these programs that first created a demand for the creation of
“psychological services of education, aimed at prophylactic, diagnostic, correctional and rehabilitational work with the personality [lichnost’].”
In other words, with the new emphasis on child-centered education came new discussions of difference, and thereby forms of expertise sensitive to that difference— in this case psychological expertise. It is interesting to note that the main critique against this approach in the USSR through the post-War period was its elitist nature.
And, indeed, as I suggest in chapter 3, a similar argument can be made about contemporary services where, “personality-oriented” education couched as a liberal innovation may also introduce new categories of social risk and management priorities.115 Leaving this discussion to the side for the moment, it was the introduction of these kinds of programs that Asmolov suggests opened the way for further educational reforms.
115 Consider the risk language in this quote from Asmolov: “Gifted children, [odarennye deti] children with disabilities [deti s anomaliiami razvitiia] and children with asocial behavior [deti s asotsial’nym povedeniem] are located on the extreme corners of a triangle, reflecting particular zones of risk [zony riska], which raise the attention of the system of education. The development of the mentioned programs, often associated with the “triangle of rebellion against totalitarian impersonal education,” in large part stimulated the crossing over of differentiated education to active development in different regions of the educational space of Russia (Zaitseva 2005).
249 Some of the ingredients for the PPMS system were already in place. As Elena
Kazakova, a professor of education and initiator of the PPMS system told me, Soviet
“defectology,” or psychological approaches to speech and other disabilities that had been founded in the 1950s, provided some of the “special education” expertise. There were also already similar psychological services in the Soviet-occupied Baltic countries. And there was also an institutional precursor in the professional orientation centers for adults that had been formed in the 1970s. All of this is to say that the
PPMS System that would emerge in the late-1990s was in many ways an outgrowth of late-Soviet discussions around education, subjectivity, and, vitally, economy. There was also something new: starting in the 1980s Western ideas about tutoring, consulting, and guidance counseling began arriving. Particularly influential were trends coming from Belgium, which had already established a PPMS system.
Numerous exchanges were arranged between Belgium and Eduard Dneprov, the new
Minister of Education. And in 1998, the first All-Russian Conference on psycho- pedagogical guidance (psikho-pedagogicheskoe soprovozhdenie), was held.
Finally, in July of 1998, a federal resolution establishing the existence of the
PPMS centers was signed into law (1998). This short, 8-page document, gave some general outlines for the running of the PPMS Center, which were tasked with assisting children with “problems in development, studies, social adaptation [who] are in need of psycho-educational and medico-social help” by offering “individually oriented teaching, and psychological, social, medical and legal help.” This resolution was followed up with two other normative documents, an administrative order on psychological services (1999), and a set of methodological recommendations (2003).
250 The significance of these developments as expressions of governmentality is that the formation of a new psycho-pedagogical guidance system in Russia’s schools marked a shift in desired ends from moral upbringing, discipline and rote learning to what might be considered the productive potential of emotional well-being expressed through a new, highly differentiated approach to the child. In a climate of shifting political rationality, the PPMS Centers came into being in order to contribute to the development of new kinds of learning environments, educational aims and, ultimately, subjectivities.
One of the most interesting dimensions of the story is the way that history has a way of repeating itself. In the face of the harsh social realities after 1998 and then the rise of Putin-style statism, some features of this educational rationality of emotional self-realization have again swung back in response to the problems of crisis and cognitive incapacity: rather than simply promoting emotional well-being in the classroom, many PPMS Centers have recentered their work around diagnostic measurement, and early detection in learning. As was noted in chapter 3, this has been built around not a potential-filled child, but one requiring management, adjustment, and control. Thus, a pragmatic rationality has succeeded the progressivism of the early post-Soviet period in much the same way that the 1930s succeeded the avant gardism of the 1920s. Also like the 1930s, the roots of this shift has been firmly ensconced in the soil of economy: in the words of one psychologist, while the “realization of the rights of the child to full-fledged and free development” remains central to the modernizing educational system,
251 unfortunately, currently more and more children are found in a position of acute social trouble. Bad ecology, the growth of social aggression, economic problems, the spread of narcotics, the increase of migration, instabilities of the family, parent and teacher incompetence—these and many other factors are becoming external boundaries of the process of development of the child (Sartan 2002).
This cold reality was made manifest repeatedly on my regular visits to one particular
PPMS Center throughout 2006, which over the course of the year could be observed spending more and more time on crisis cases, and less and less on what might be termed emotional enhancement.
Inside the PPMS Center
In the pages below, I trace these transformations through the lens of one particular
PPMS Center, located on Petersburg’s outskirts, in one of its poorest regions. What I found there was not only a bleak picture of St. Petersburg’s broad “margins,” but also a set of insurmountable difficulties for the staff. In addition to confronting a staggering range of crises and tragedies, the staff was also situated within a bureaucratic structure and resource constraints that generated tensions between administrative and therapeutic imperatives, and inadequately elaborated legal frameworks that generated a problem of mission-drift. That is, they constantly confronted problems whose solution lay outside their legal mandate. The result was that unpleasant work environs were created. Most important to this discussion, these in-built resistances transformed the broad goal of “modernization” into something very different.
*
252 Working at the margins
I had been invited by Tatiana Fedorovna, the Center’s director, for an interview on an odd day—New Year’s Eve. As I trudged across the steel bridge that afternoon, I paused to look at a massive, dilapidated building, hanging in the heavy winter mist. It reminded me of the Russia I first encountered in 1994, before advertisements, full-glass storefronts and consumer culture flooded the city. This hulking concrete mass was probably a khrushoby, or a quickly constructed building made under Khrushchev’s push for cooperative housing starting in the 1960s—another hybrid socialist scheme meant to address shortage. This building had about fifteen stories, each in turn with its own storied rooms, and seemed about to topple into the
Neva River. Its side was a slapdash patchwork of cinder and cement, with dimly lit rooms inside. Satellite dishes and dangling wire peppered its balconies, each with its face turned to the heavens. Smoke stacks in the distance coughed a thin gasp into the frozen sky. Unlike the adorned city center, the buildings and sidewalks were caked with dirty snow. In the fading light of 4 o’clock, the headlights of a trolley started to blaze, passing over a billboard with a lovely, sun-tanned couple riding a Vespa in white shorts.
Regions like this one are filled with the mixed signs of the post-Soviet economy. During my fieldwork, Russia had been enjoying a five-year surge in economic growth due to high oil prices (cf. McFaul and Stoner-Weiss 2008). New construction was seemingly everywhere, and cranes could be seen all over the city.
The spread of cozy cafes, restaurants, fancy cars and a semblance of middle-class life in the city centers made it difficult to see the flipside of the Putin era. Yet decaying
253 structures of the late-Soviet period such as that massive apartment building by the
Neva were equally common, as were problems of homelessness, dispossession and unemployment (Höjdestrand 2009; Humphrey 2002).
Digging into statistics on Russia helps to tell this complicated story, and also to contextualize what it means to study psychological assistance in a poor region in one of Russia’s wealthiest cities. On the one hand, the number of those living below minimum subsistence levels had, by 2006 near the height of the boom in oil prices, fallen by 8.5%, or 12.5 million from 2002. This suggested an overall improvement in life for everybody, as the administration often noted. The global financial crisis of
2009-2010 has since revealed the fragility as well as patchy distribution of this recovery. Even in 2006, roughly 20 million people, or 15% of the population, were considered “poor,” living on less than 5,083 rubles ($169) a month. In the wake of the recent financial crisis, which has impacted Russia more than other G-20 nations,
World Bank projections in 2009 predicted an increase to 24.6 million poor, totaling
17.4% of the population (Bogetic and al. 2009b:14). Perhaps more important to note is that poverty is “shallow” in Russia, with many clustered just around the subsistence line: if the subsistence line were raised 10% (just 508 rubles ($17) per month), an additional 4 million (2.5% of the population) would fall under it (Bogetic and al.
2009a:17).
Social mobility has also been highly uneven. The lion’s share of those lifted out of poverty during 2002 and 2006 were “transient poor”—people already clustered around the minimal subsistence line. Meanwhile, the “chronically poor” has risen as a percentage of the total poor from 40% to 60%. These are people working in
254 agriculture, and unskilled laborers who continued to face no prospects for mobility, even during Russia’s years of relative economic prosperity (Bogetic and al. 2009a:18).
Also worth considering is that another quarter of the population is considered
“vulnerable” to poverty (defined as less than 150% above the minimum subsistence).
And those in that category are projected to grow by 3.6 million after the crisis, the majority of whom will be from Russia’s nascent middle class (Bogetic and al.
2009b:13). Finally, there is also a spatial dimension to the mobility story: relative to rural areas, poverty reduction has been three times better in cities; relative to cities like
St. Petersburg and Moscow located in the western and central parts of the country, poverty rates can be an astonishing forty-five times higher (Bogetic and al. 2009a:17).
The poor populations being treated in St. Petersburg’s marginal PPMS Centers, while not a majority of the urban population, are in fact quite representative of Russia’s population as a whole, which is still beset by both high poverty rates and also very high vulnerability. Moreover, they are also, to use Jennifer Patico’s (2005:482) phrasing in another context, “structurally revealing of certain processes of institutional decline and marketization.”
The difficulty of working with these populations became clear to me on that very first visit. My meeting with Tatiana Fedorovna had started badly. She arrived late and seemed cool and distracted, and I was wondering whether I had somehow offended her. Meanwhile, people kept ducking their heads in and out of the room, causing interruption. I started to sense that something else was happening in the center from which our meeting was taking her. She eventually admitted that they were
255 having their holiday party, and that, if I wished, I could join, and then we could speak afterwards.
I soon found myself thrust into a large room with six tables that had been set for a light meal, complete with champagne, glasses, snacks, and about 15 or 20 people.
As I entered, a woman with long dark hair and glitter eye shadow was assigning people to different tables after guessing who they were. Another woman, the emcee for the evening (also with glitter eye shadow) took me by the arm and corralled me into the first woman. Not knowing what was happening, I stepped on the latter’s feet.
There was raucous laughter, mayhem, and she proclaimed, table five! at which point I was lead to a table with two other women. Soon remarks were being made about the passing of 2005 to 2006, and how the time of year is a chance to put some things behind you. We were all given a piece of paper and a pen, and told to write something there about the past year—a characteristic or event—that we would like to leave behind. We then had to crumple it into a ball and toss it into a plastic bag.
She asked, “What should we do with it!?”
One young girl said, “Burn it!”
We formed a circle; we would take care of matters with our feet. Soon the bag of crumpled notes was in the center of the room, being kicked around like a soccer ball. Some people, particularly the few men there, tried to juggle the bag and kick it forcefully. Sometimes the bag went airborne and landed on someone’s head. People’s faces became red with excitement, wet with sweat, and in some cases almost mad.
The mood had been extremely energetic, but over the next hour it dropped like a stone, particularly after the first sips of champagne. This group of practitioners
256 suddenly appeared overworked, tired, and melancholic. Some, I noticed, hardly said a word at all, and sat with their heads supported by an arm on the table. At several points the emcee asked to have the music turned up louder in order to hide the silence.
The heaviness and strain of the year seemed to have settled over the room like a dark cloud.
The case: crisis, poverty, illness
As I came to see in the following months of participant-observation, these specialists confront, on a daily basis, intimate things about the vast underbelly of urban poor stretching beneath Russia’s emerging middle-class. After my New Year’s
Eve adventure, Anna Andreevna, another specialist, had invited me to attend their weekly meetings, or consilium, where I was able to hear staff share their challenging cases and discuss the operations of the Center. These Wednesday morning were filled with a staggering number of cases involving domestic abuse, alcoholism, disappeared parents, gambling addiction and suicidal risk. Practitioners confront these broadly social problems in a single “symptom”—the child exhibiting anxiousness, anti-social behavior, truancy, fear, mysterious bruises, a penchant for playground fights, or just poor grades—and their client waitlists are only growing. According to center estimates, it takes about a month to get an appointment, and for the 60,000 children in the region, there is only enough staff to see about 1,000 over the course of the year.
Below is a selection of the sorts of cases discussed at the consilium, pulled directly from my scribbled fieldnotes:
257 1. The child cries when his father drinks. Where can the child be sent for help? 2. Story of a feud around a daughter between a mother, grandmother and aunt. The mother is described by the aunt as being irresponsible, inviting strange men to the apartment, and drinking. Initially the daughter was mostly cared for by her grandmother, but the grandmother died when the daughter was four. Then the aunt wanted to take over, and did for a while. There was a subsequent struggle around the administration of several different apartments. At a certain point the mother began to express more interest in caring for her daughter. Thus the daughter now appears in the center as the one “with the problem,” but it turns out that she is caught in the midst of a feud over her custody between her mother and her aunt. (The father appears to be absent.) The Center suggests that the two parties talk with one another, and offers itself up as a mediator. 3. A girl was brought into the center two years ago with speech problems, but underlying emotional problems were soon diagnosed. She has no friends at school and difficulty relating to others. (Papa is where?) It turns out that the mother disappeared without a trace and was gone for about two years. Eventually she returned. Why did she leave? Some story is told about the mother’s fixation on going “to Caledonia.” Now mother wants the daughter back. In principle the daughter also wants to go back, but the grandmother is fighting against this. 4. A boy with Tourettes (suspected). Manifested in ticks. Massage has not helped. His mother claims he has always been this way. He has trouble looking practitioners in the eye when speaking. The suspicion is that this is at base a neurological problem with emotional problems laid over it. 5. A boy is having nightmares. His mother calls. It turns out dad is playing video games that may have been causing the nightmares. Dad has turned off the sound, but the boy still likes to watch. He is drawn (pritiagivaet) to it. The nightmares haven’t stopped. There is a daughter. She is seven. She still sleeps in the bed in between the parents. The boy’s view of the parents is that mama is “beautiful” and dad is “evil.” The practitioner said that she conducted the “[Paired] Hand[s] Test,” a test meant to assess the projection of aggression. In this test, nine cards are shown to the child, and he must say what the hands are doing. The answers are recorded verbatim and scored according to some charts. Despite the apparent resistance to tests, it is generally fairly easy to track aggression—“the hand is punching someone.” He did not do very well on it. The leader of the consilium, says that it will be necessary to see the interactions of the family. She agrees to take the case from the younger practitioner. 6. A mother makes a crisis call. She is unable to control her son. He is 17.
258 7. A catastrophic event occurred in a family. A brother fell through the ice to his death. The other child now feels tremendous guilt. He doesn’t see any reason to go on living. 8. A mother’s child is placed in sanatorium. She is instructed to stay away from the child. There are charges of neglect. To what extent should the municipality get involved? She was initially against placing the child there because she feared her son being na uchot [on the state registry of committed patients]. 9. A mother routinely comes home late. She is unable to watch her children. She asks the neighbors to do so. She returns, and the child has been beaten. Ends up in the hospital. He’s twelve. She is raising the child alone. Father left for work in the north. Remarried. It’s the mom, son, and granny. Child smokes as does mother and grandmother. 10. A mother was arrested for striking two religious missionaries who had been let into her home by her daughter with a Hugo Boss umbrella. 11. Boy comes in with difficulties with pronunciation. Fever. Mild cerebral trauma. 12. Eight-year-old boy. Fears. Bad self-image. Screams at school and can’t be restrained. Parent seeks advice. Practitioner unable to help. Dispatched to another. 13. Conflict in kindergarten. Staff foresees a need for correction for child, mom disagrees. She claims to have some literature about this, but produces nothing. In the 40 or 50 faces he drew, 30 of them were sad. He is in art school. Mom and dad are both artists. Mom and dad are very demonstrative but also positive. Discussion of schizophrenia. 14. The boy has lit three fires in three different apartments. At times he’s been alone with his grandmother, at time with parents. Has self-control problems. 15. Can’t process lessons. Feels alarm all the time. Father and uncle recently died consecutively. 16. Mother-son. Mom complains that her life is terrible. She has no work, no husband (he’s drug-addicted), no grandmother. Very demonstrative. All is very sad. She has an invalid son. Evgeniia Antatolievna remarks that it reminds her of the story of a director and an actress who meet and fall in love and decide to move to the country to start a new life, have lots of children, etc. They do this, and then something goes wrong. They get expelled from the village and end up back in the city. Very sad history. This is brought up by Anna Andreevna just so that the people in the room know that “they exist.”
*
I often left the consilium feeling discouraged. The stories I heard gave me a sense of both the social “precarity” (Allison 2009) in Russia’s second largest city, as
259 well as the extraordinary difficulty of the specialists’ work. This list also gives a good sense of the population the specialists met in their consulting. Empowerment, innovation and emotional well-being sounded good on paper, but in the end had little relevance for the cases they faced. Working in one of St. Petersburg’s poorest regions, they confronted students who were not just struggling in school or getting bad grades because of motivation problems or a poor work ethic. Rather, they had to confront problems that were deeply social in nature, extending well beyond the child and the classroom, and involving issues ranging from custody battles, family deaths and disappearances, parents suffering from addiction and substance abuse, suspected domestic violence, as well as general stories of failed dreams. This is not to say that courses in career development or realizing potential would have been inappropriate, only that, in light of the case loads and lack of staff, there was little time left over for such courses. Finally, the list also highlights the particular ways that the practitioner’s gaze came to fall on the family—that is, through the child as symptom. Children arrived in the center with particular difficulties, sometimes accompanied by physical signs of abuse, and it was then the practitioners’ job to piece together the partially visible family picture.
The reality of the PPMS Center’s work—at least those centers working with economically disadvantaged populations—was essentially to address those left at the broad margins of a society undergoing transformation. And it was this reality that seemed to have led to a reconceptualization of the PPMS Center’s social task in the early 2000s. That is, in the hard-knock life of the disadvantaged school, the humanistically oriented psychological orientations that had underwritten the PPMS
260 Center’s formation in the 1980s, have been deemed impractical and replaced with a focus on building cognitive capacity while managing psychic distress. As Iasiukova, the author of a key methodological text used by the centers, writes,
However much psychologists talked about the importance for optimizing the education of pupils for emotional stability, positive self- value, self-confidence…the fundamental burden in the learning process falls not on the emotional-communicative, but on the intellectual sphere. And so namely as a basic direction for offering psychological help in the school it would be better to emphasize not the formation of the personality of the child, the systems of his communication and emotional contacts, but in the first instance the development of his thinking (Iasiukova 2005).
The principle here is that poor performance in school at an early age can have a magnified effect over time; thus, the specialist’s emphasis should be on early detection and purely cognitive interventions. This redirection of the reason-passion dichotomy has essentially shifted the pedagogy of self from the realm of affect to intellect, in a sense recapitulating earlier forms of Soviet pedagogy. On the ground, this has meant that groups of pupils undergo extensive diagnostics testing of their attention, cognitive reasoning, spatial and mathematical logic, whose tabulated results are then later discussed with teachers.
Beyond school diagnostics, the PPMS Center also offers a range of programs that respond to particular kinds of deficits—of attention or writing ability, memory or clear speech, effective communication among asocial teens or emotional stability. In chapter 3 I contrasted a document of the PPMS Center’s on success with one from
Tomorrow’s Builders to highlight the prophylactic nature of their work, so I will not do that here. But the point is that the PPMS Center’s has come to approach the child
261 not as a bundle of potential, but rather as a kind of machine in crisis whose function can be improved.
It may seem surprising that this would be the renewed approach given the social nature of the child’s problems;, however, this shift to cognitive measurement and prophylaxis, may make more sense in light of the broader discourses that have come to frame Russian school reform under Putin. Since 2000, the project of
“humanization” has been replaced with that of “modernization,” which can be found across not only education policy, but also technological development, infrastructure, and, indeed, citizenship. The Ministry of Education has undertaken its own forms of
“modernization” in order to play its role in returning Russia to a superpower in the global economic order.
The thrust for modernization seems to have produced a greater emphasis on measurable macro-views of the classroom along with the increased centralization and bureaucratization of psychological practices. This has had the important consequence of introducing a biopolitically productive element of measurement and audit to psycho-pedagogical work at the same time that crisis services with the poor have increasingly dominated the psychologist’s time. Batteries of diagnostics and its accompanying component of “psycho-correction,” have thus fit in with this broader interest in measurement and improvement.
Psycho-correction has not been the only approach to consulting work in the centers. On the contrary, many practitioners I interviewed remain committed to career counseling and other kinds of programs aimed at enhancement. For instance on paper at least, the PPMS Center in X region also offers courses like “The Magical World
262 Inside Us,” and “The Joy of Conversation”—though I never heard these discussed.
The point, therefore, is not that these practitioners have simply translated the federal shift to cognitive measurement; rather that a conjuncture of factors have aligned to make some forms of psychological consulting less practicable than others. These factors include: the general disconnect between modernization rhetoric and socio- economic realities; the pragmatics of psychological work in a society that is splitting at the seams; and the severe under-investment in psychological services. When paired with state attempts to manage PPMS system “failures” by standardizing psychological practice through quality-control audit and also the generally fuzzy mandate that the psychologists had been given as a result of a still-evolving legal structure, these factors shaped their work in profound ways.
Operations Under the Microscope
These rather high-level discursive shifts in the rationality governing the psychological assistance were registered in particular, technical ways at the PPMS Center. The shift to more calculable forms of psychological assistance through diagnostic testing was accompanied by the Ministry of Education’s effort to rationalize the PPMS procedures in order to make them both more efficient and accountable. Together with its local- level arm, the Committee on Education of St. Petersburg (Komitet po Obrazovaniiu
Sankt-Peterburga), the Ministry began developing a form of audit, known as attestation (attestatsiia) as a way to strengthen the connections between the
“normative” documents that had brought the PPMS system into existence and the subsequent official methodological documents.
263 The attestation process was initiated following a set of methodological recommendations made by Olga Zimina (2003), a leading specialist of the
Committee’s department of licensing, attestation and accreditation. In a document published in 2003, Zimina had argued that, based on the absence in PPMS centers of standards (of wage levels, practices, and professional skill), it was “necessary to evaluate the results of the activities from the point of view of their social effectiveness
[obshchestvennoi effektivnosti]” (2003:5). As the report noted, “There is inadequate systematicity [sistemnost’] at all levels for the building of services of a specialized help complex for children” (2003:11). Such “systematicity,” it was proposed, could be achieved through an audit process in which “the problems, goals, and tasks of services have to be recounted.” The interest here was not only on behalf of the child, but also in adding legitimacy to the PPMS system. Zimina concluded, “The real chance to advance the rights of institutions of psycho-medical social help in the education system is through attestation and state accreditation” (2003). This was because attestation would effectively ensure that PPMS Centers were in “compliance with norms,” and held accountable.
When I arrived at the PPMS Center in X region in 2005-2006, it quickly became clear that attestation, which took place once every 5 years, was an object of great fear and anxiety. It involved a lengthy inspection process that lasted anywhere between several weeks to months. As they were preparing for it, Tatiana Fedorovna, the director, showed me the thick binders they had to put together in preparation.
These were filled with reams of paper reports on case loads, documentation of the programs they offered broken into component units of time, staffing salaries and
264 allocations, and other such minute details on operational procedures. Apart from paperwork, the attestation process also seemed ill-matched to the system on which the
PPMS Center had to rely for its consulting, diagnostic and outreach work. While they had a few computers for accounting and word processing, when it came to the cases themselves any child who passed through the center would be attached to a tetradka, those flimsy “blue books” commonly used for written exams. It was from a stack of tetradki that practitioners read when they came to consilium; it was into tetradki that they wrote during consultations; and it was with the tetradka that any client’s case moved among specialists at the center. Remarkably, I never once heard of a time when a tetradka was lost; nonetheless, the fact was that the most important part of the center’s work—the case documentation—was stored in insubstantial notebooks kept in piles in the staff coffee room. The vulnerability of such a system alone caused the specialists to worry.
The tetradka system caused numerous difficulties at the Center. At times, it was revealed that a child was moving through the center without someone’s knowledge, which always led to finger-pointing over improper notations and book- keeping. Relatedly, a child could also be abandoned or passed to someone else with the same effort as it takes to toss a tetradka aside. For example, one day there was heated discussion about a case involving a seven year old boy of Iranian heritage. The boy was having problems with his memory and logical thinking. Based on their tetradki, the boy had been in the center before. Leafing through the little blue notebook, Anna Andreevna noted that he first appeared at the center several years ago because he was having problems with being an outcast. He wanted to dye his hair
265 blond, make his name more Russian-sounding, become Orthodox Christian, and had started crossing himself. Reading on, she related that there was also a situation around the fact that the father, “who isn’t just Iranian, he’s also a doctor,” left on a trip without kissing the child.
At this point, Evgeniia Antatolievna, an outside specialist who often oversaw the meetings, interrupted. “How does this have anything to do with the child’s memory and logic problems?” She asserted that what was emerging from the case file was that the child has been transferred internally with everyone disagreeing about the problem, and “nobody feeling any guilt about it.” As I sat there listening to this exchange, I was struck by the fact that nobody had even discussed the boy’s disturbing desire to efface his Iranian identity. Rather, the core issue had become a purely bureaucratic one of “buck-passing” (cf. Herzfeld 1992:4). Such tensions between procedures and therapeutic work would become a leitmotif at the center.
The details of these conflicts around the tetradki suggest that the lack of resources for which the tetradka stood also suggested a lack of congruence with the discourses of accountability that had been swarming around the PPMS system. In order to make something accountable, in other words, it might make more sense to provide the tools for doing so before undergoing assessment. And as I show below, the push to accountability of something that is, by design, very difficult to account, posed a central problem for practitioners.
Of course one should not, on the basis of an allergy to red tape alone, conclude that some form of oversight was a bad idea. As the case of the Iranian boy also illustrates, practitioners had tremendous power that could be exercised through
266 normalizing judgment. Moreover, diagnosis was a tremendously delicate and uncertain process, and the specialists had only small amounts of time to spend with each client, yet their assessments could carry significant weight. Perhaps the most extreme instances were those in which, because practitioners lacked the medical authority to address particularly severe cases, they were expected to forward these on to the city’s outpatient psycho-neurological clinics, or PNDs, the province of doctors in white coats. Such references could potentially taint a child’s record: being seen at a PND can also mean being put na uchet, or “on the registry,” a thing most Russians assumed meant you were crazy and which could, another practitioner told me, make it difficult to get a job later (see chapter 6). As a result, there was a significant disincentive for making referrals that also placed a heavy burden on case decision-making. This became an important calculation for some practitioners in making their assessments.
Another aspect worthy of oversight was the way that practitioners could seem to be unreflectively deploying particular assumptions about what is normal. I observed many instances—and not just at the PPMS Center—where extremely naturalized assumptions about boys and girls were deployed without so much as a blink. In one case, while assessing a child’s drawings in which several androgynous figures appeared, practitioners immediately took these to be potential signs of illness.
Warranted or not, however, the effect of the impending attestation, as I gathered from the numerous outbursts and grumblings during consilium, was primarily one of unproductive anxiety resulting from internal procedures that were ill-matched to audit procedures.
267 Evolving Structures and Mission Drift
This anxiety was compounded not only by the state’s under-investment in their services, but also by the nature of the as-yet-ill-defined legal structure in which they worked, and the resulting conflict between different staffers as a result of that lack of clarity. While Olga Zimina, the author arguing for the attestation, had hoped for a certain “systematicity,” the reality of the situation was quite far from it. Part of the problem lay in the fact that the mental health system as a whole was not particularly well-integrated. I spent several weeks learning how a particularly severe case would travel through the system, starting from a concern in school and scaling upward. In theory, this case could start with a referral from the school psychologist to the PPMS
Center, and then move to the outpatient clinic (PND), and perhaps even a psychiatric hospital. But when I asked whether this picture of the system was accurate, most said that while it was right “in principle” (v printsipe), the links between services were actually still premised on personal relationships. Thus, to a significant degree, because of the lack of definition offered by the state and municipal authorities, the system was in many ways being built from the ground up.116 At the same time, these very same centers remained fundamentally responsible to those authorities and could be called on at any time to document their activities.
The problem that emerged from the vague definitions of legal and institutional structure was one of mission drift. For instance, when practitioners encountered a child exhibiting difficulties in school and the suspicion was that something at home was causing it (e.g. father’s drinking), two questions immediately came up: first, what
116 The relationship between state formation and various kinds of private, informal and sometimes semi-legal actions is discussed by Vadim Volkov (2002) in relation to the security industry.
268 is the proper institution—the PPMS or the organs of guardianship? Second, did they have a legal right to follow their cases beyond the child-school context? And though the PPMS system was by then eight years old, these questions were still very difficult to answer. Other signs of mission drift occurred when practitioners found themselves stumbling over conflicts between the legal rights of the child and parents’ rights.
According to the PPMS system’s founding documents, its primary task was to ensure the rights of every child to a good education and to their wellbeing. Yet this mandate could sometimes run afoul of what parents thought was appropriate. In some cases, parents would even refuse to come for a consultation, leaving the practitioners in serious doubt as to how to proceed. In others, genuine danger to the child would leave practitioners wondering whether they had the right to overrun the parents’ rights.117
Consider, for example, the following exchange from a consilium meeting in mid-May. The case was being narrated by Evgeniia Anatolievna, one of the more experienced psychotherapists in the center, and it involved a mother-son relationship.
A boy, 14 years old, has started to cut school. He has an addiction to computer games. His father works as a river boat operator. Mother doesn’t work. The boy has no friends at school, though he did make some through the computer club. He now spends all his time in a computer game hall. He cut school for a week without mentioning it. Finally the school called. He then was suspended for three days. Someone from the school was dispatched to his house, and he was found to be living in squalid living conditions. The boy sleeps on the floor. The mother went to the computer club and gave them a picture of her son. She asked them not to allow him in. The boy has two motives—either that he wants to cut school, or to assert that he is an adult. But the mother’s response was to lock him in his room. This is concerning—from the point of view of if there is a fire, if he is able to go to the bathroom when he needs it. The recommendation from the
117 I remember one occasion, for example, while visiting the home of Anna Andreevna, that I saw a dog-eared copy of the Russian Family Codex: she was trying to figure out what could be done for a particular child.
269 sitting specialist was to get to work on the question of computer addiction.
After Evgeniia Anatolievna finished talking and closed the tetradka in front of her,
Anna Andreevna put in that there is also concern about the safety of the child. “Some of the details of this case remind me of one of my own,” she said. “And I view the situation under discussion with some concern. It’s difficult to know what to do and where to turn for help.” She was referring specifically both to the conditions in which he was living, and to the fact that his mother was, in her view, handling things irresponsibly by locking him in his room.
At this point Tatiana Fedorovna, the center director, became very upset. “Too much time has been wasted on this!” she exclaimed. “The work that Anna Andreevna is doing is not our responsibility. We should have written a letter to the local inspector long ago to absolve us of further responsibility.” Tatiana Fedorovna then turned the discussion to “results”—pressing Anna Andreevna to describe what had actually come of all her extra efforts. Anna Andreevna sank into her chair in silence, looking chastened and nonplussed.
A similar scene took place in discussions of the next case, which involved a five-year-old. The practitioner, a young psychologist named Diana Ivanovna, was unsure whether her group work had had any effect. The child, she reported, still has very sharp reactions. “She does everything out of spite and sees it as being correct.”
One of the few male specialists, Nikolai Efimovich, suggested that perhaps some observation by the regional PND (outpatient clinic) would be appropriate. Again,
Tatiana Fedorovna interrupted. “What do we have the right to do?” she asked
270 rhetorically. In continuing to try to resolve things falling outside their mandate, she said, “We have taken away the time of the child, and wasted the state’s money. We have committed a breach (narushenie) of protocols.”
These examples also illustrate how the problem of mission drift was connected to intra-staff conflicts, forming a kind of dialectic of transgression and contraction that was driven by the ad hoc nature of the PPMS legal structure and, I would argue, the thrust to audit. Thus, from the practitioner’s point of view, while charged with protecting the rights of the child, they quickly found that the problems involved were much larger than their legal mandate allowed. And when they tried to act in accordance with protecting the rights of the child, following leads beyond their mandate, they were reprimanded. The director’s response, on the other hand, makes it clear that the terms by which members of the staff discuss the purpose and aims of the work were different. From the director’s point of view, their work was primarily a matter of “results” and mandate.
In a rare lapse of candor, some weeks later Anna Andreevna, who had borne the brunt of the director’s scorn on several of the occasions mentioned above, called
Tatiana Fedorovna a “chinovnik” who just “counts statistics.” Using the demeaning term roughly equivalent to the lowly civil servants of Gogolian and Dostoevskian fame, she also suggested a qualitative difference in the kind of work she does. On that particular day we were discussing the fact that Anna Andreevna is expected to generate reports on the total number and types of problems they consult. I asked her what Tatiana Fedorovna does with them.
271 “I really don’t know,” she replied somewhat exasperated. “She asks me to turn these in, and then I have no idea what happens with them, or how they are compiled.”
The only instance of use that she cited was an interesting one: at a certain point
Tatiana Fedorovna had become concerned that the numbers of children in the groups were too small—thus potentially raising a question by the state as to whether practitioners were being employed ineffectively. Thanks to the statistics, Anna
Andreevna was able to show that this was not the case.
At the time of Anna Andreevna’s outburst, the results of the attestation were just coming back, and they were not glowing. Anna Andreevna confessed that they had “found mistakes”—though primarily matters of improper documentation, rather than things to do with the substance of their work. While hesitant to follow my suggestion that this bureaucratic procedure seems to miss the point of their work, she did admit the laws and ways of restructuring inside the Ministry of Education change so quickly that it’s difficult to stay on top of them. Tatiana Fedorovna, she said, has taken the results very personally and is embarrassed. And, indeed, I had seen Tatiana
Fedorovna report the results to the group in consilium, stating that she was shocked that such a thing would have been found in “our collective.” Of course, Tatiana
Fedorovna had her own view of the situation. As the person responsible for reporting to the city officials and who was ultimately responsible for the Center’s work, the issue of institutional mandate, obligation, and boundaries was essential. Observing these boundaries is what allowed the center to exist. It is also what keeps its employees out of trouble, and keeps people from loosing their jobs.
272 The “Productivity” of Efficiency
I have thus far suggested that, beneath the calls for modernization, efficiency and social effectiveness was a compounding set of factors that tended to produce the opposite—rudimentization, inefficiency and ineffectiveness. This resulted from the impossible situation of being held accountable, while at the same time operating without structural guidelines or administrative resources. It might be suggested that the ineffectiveness of bureaucracy is familiar enough to be a trope in Russian and even non-Russian literature. It is not surprising, the argument would go, that state institutions, particularly post-Soviet ones, are mired in red tape. The problem is human error, the argument continues: venality, corruption, and ineptitude interfere with what would otherwise be a smooth procedural matter. Based on my fieldwork, however, I want to suggest that these emergent practices at the PPMS Center should not be excluded from the procedures of “efficiency” on the grounds that they are a problem of human involvement; instead they should be considered as being fundamentally a product of “efficiency.” The techniques of calculation, audit, measurement, couched in the language of modernization, results, efficiency and effectiveness, are here productive not of rationalization but what might be called irrationalization.
The question to which I now turn is, what are the social effects of irrationalization inside the PPMS Center? Of the range of effects inside the center, I highlight three—time and resource wasting; backstabbing between administrators and therapists; and the production of a risky form of bureaucratic improvisation that always left participants vulnerable. All three of these were intimately tied to the audit, and, as a whole, consumed an increasing amount of the specialists’ time.
273 This sense of extra demands on one’s time was something that I witnessed in a consilium that followed the poor results of the attestation. As the year wore on, practitioners spent less and less time discussing cases, and more and more time on procedural matters. As was becoming clear from the state pronouncements, PPMS
Centers were being still further pushed in the direction of crisis management, and were being told to prioritize crisis calls, exclusively if necessary—a statement of the dire family situation in St. Petersburg. For example, at one particular consilium, the entire three hours was spent going over the new system they would be implementing for their crisis books. These would include telephone number; date of call; time; name; request; crisis in terms of words of: client, specialist, outside specialist; what was done. All of this was to be done by hand. In another consilium, meanwhile, significant time was spent on specialists “journals” in which they were now expected to account for all of their time.118
On a fieldwork follow-up in 2007, I met with Vera, a young psychologist who had decided, shortly after I left Russia in 2006, to quit her work at the Center. “It was a hard place to work,” she confided. “You were constantly being pulled in two directions at once—on the one hand you were expected to plan your work carefully.
On the other there are always new demands being made on your time by the new events that the center is expected to provide for the region.”
Apart from time wasting, another effect of the push for efficiency was that it created a bitter atmosphere, as we have already seen, between administrators and specialists. As Vera continued to tell me about leaving the Center, she described a
118 This amounts to a different kind of “bureaucratic writing” than the sort that Gupta documents in his study of state institutions.
274 place mired in conflict. “Anna Andreevna,” she said, “is two-faced. She’ll flash you a big smile while holding a knife behind her back. Nikolai Efimovich for some reason was telling me all the time not to write the full details of the cases in my tetradki. He seemed extremely nervous. And Tatiana Fedorovna is emotionally closed and extremely difficult to work for. Most of the other specialists who could leave have.”
I had also witnessed the conflict between administrators and specialists. One day Tatiana Fedorovna had decided to participate in one of the Balint Groups, a kind of group-support meeting that had been, until that point, exclusively for specialists
(not administrators) to discuss their cases. She wanted to talk about the fact that a girl interested in Goth culture had come to the center’s attention by way of a telephone call from a friend. The girl was contemplating suicide and her friend was afraid for her.
Some action on the center’s part had been taken, but in the end it took nearly two months for her to appear on the Center’s radar. Tatiana Fedorovna wanted to address this with two questions in the Balint Group: how could she have been helped more effectively (by the center); and what else could have been done to support her when she was in “striking distance” [v zone dosiagaemosti]?
What unfolded was a good example of the disconnect between administrators and specialists over the question of results and procedure. The questions the specialists asked were most frequently psychological in nature, and therefore the kinds of questions she was unable to answer since she hadn’t worked with the Goth girl as a psychologist. Still they came: was it possible that the girl should have been paired with a male psychologist since she may have been some kind of sexual energy behind her imbalance? What was her family life like? What were the relations with her friends?
275 These she answered curtly over and over again, saying that she hadn’t worked with the girl. Other questions sought to psychologize Tatiana Fedorovna’s decision-making process, which she also resisted. For instance, one psychologist pressed her to speak about the nature of her own emotional response to the girl: was it possible that she was mixing the role of psychologist, mother and director? (Tatiana Fedorovna had spoken with some terror of the chains that the girl was wearing and her deep concern for the girl that she be extracted from this social context and placed into another one.) Tatiana
Fedorovna resisted this interpretation brusquely. She said she didn’t think in any particular way about Goths; she was just worried for the girls’ safety. Another member of the staff followed up, capitalizing on the chance to press Tatiana Fedorovna to talk about her emotions (on previous occasions I had heard the staff tell her that she is insufficiently open, and needs to show her emotions more often).
In the end it wasn’t clear what good came from the Balint Group. Despite feeling guilty for not responding faster, indeed, at any suggestion that things be done differently, Tatiana Fedorovna had said that she had done all she could given the staffing problems at the time. And not knowing more about her view of the workings of the center, it was hard for the psychologists to offer any constructive comments about how things could have been done otherwise from an administrative point of view. This became a kind of performance of organizational failure, demonstrating an ongoing dysfunction at the level of staff/administrator relations which resulted in a girl potentially in danger slipping out of “striking range,” and constituting a missed opportunity. By the end Tatiana Fedorovna was visibly frustrated.
276 Apart from time wasting and intra-staff tensions, the audit culture of the center also produced some fascinating instances of bureaucratic improvisation. For example,
I had been invited to one meeting in which a certain Lena Aleksandrovna, the director of a sister organization to the PPMS Center called OVSN had contacted Tatiana
Fedorovna to discuss the fact that they are working with some of the same children clients, and to see about developing a collaboration, so the “left hand would know what the right is doing.” The reason for the overlap is that PPMS gets word of all its young clients through schools or caretakers, while OVSN is fed clients through the police. And at least as of that time, no federal or municipal system had been designed to address this overlap.
Lena Aleksandrovna asserted her main needs. She said that OVSN was limited in the amount of time they could spend with any client—just six months. She said that this made it difficult to do anything sustained at the level of emotional or intellectual support. In particular, she singled out giving support for kids with conflicts that rest inside the family. All they have the means to do is inquire into vospitanie, but not really do much about it (rassledovat’). This is the gap that PPMS might fill, she explained. A second task would be to provide continued “control” in the form of rehabilitation plans to do with professional orientation. They agreed to meet once monthly to begin to discuss the children they were sharing. The question in my mind of whether PPMS could actually support these children given their waitlist was answered by the fact that since they qualify as “crisis” situations, they are bumped to the front of the line (which, of course, in turn, moved even more of their
“enhancement work” to the backburner). They also resolved to create a situation
277 where PPMS would contribute to OVSN’s “bureaucratic profile” by recommending further lessons for kids—whether developmental- or professional-oriented. These things were based on the “needs” that Lena articulated—including needing “an official means of transfer,” and also some “recommendation and conclusion for their kids.”
Having in about thirty minutes settled on the ways in which they would collaborate, they proceeded to spend the next hour figuring out how to make it look on paper. How can they make their efforts both legible as well as unquestionable in the eyes of government officials? As Lena explained to me, since they are state-funded organizations it is important that they give the impression of “working and not just sitting around talking.” They eventually identified the proper piece of paper for noting their activities—a slim yellow slip with which both parties seemed to be quite familiar. This was a document with a serial number at the top, a kind of official form that was probably issued by the city government organs. Of chief importance in their negotiation in this process was the getting of “the stamp”—that of the OVSN, the
PPMS Center, and of the various government authorities. Thus, for OVSN the stamp of the PPMS Center was as important as the actual work. There was quite a bit of discussion about whether or not PPMS should then write therapy “recommendations” on these slips. Tatiana Federovna, PPMS’ director, quickly jumped in, saying that they don’t have the right to do that, and they went around for a while on what to write on the card. After saying at first that they could write nothing, they decided that they could simply sign the specialists’ name, and write “oral recommendations given.”
When the meeting was over, Lena sat back in her chair and sighed. “I’ve just about
278 had enough with our bureaucratic ways. Sometimes it makes us fail to see the forest for the trees.”
Conclusion: Rationality-Technique-Implementation
What kinds of selves are both desired and produced by Russia’s postsocialist state institutions? The answer depends where you look. As a matter of political rationality, the federal government under Putin and now Medvedev echoes many of the discourses in other countries that have undergone neoliberal reforms. That is, at the rhetorical level Russians would appear to be incited into the innovative, entrepreneurial, flexible citizens of global capitalism. Yet as a matter of technique, the pragmatics of dealing with huge swaths of population in need of crisis counseling have led to largely prophylactic and crisis-related work. In this sense, one could say that political rationality is a window dressing over what is essentially the management of problem children with no real prospects of becoming those future entrepreneurs. This is a “self” about which the state is primarily concerned with containment and correction. Rather than playing the offensive game of enhancement, it is playing defense. Finally, at the level of practices, what I have been calling implementation, both rationality and technique lend themselves to a further entrenchment of prophylactic work. Starved of resources, left to infighting and bureaucratic improvisation, practitioners are pulled even further from the programs of enhancement they have written into their work.
This suggests that it is important, in considering the nature of governmentality, to disarticulate rationality, technique and implementation.
279 As I have suggested here, unbundling in this way brings to light several features of the PPMS system that might have otherwise been either hidden, viewed as curious “contradictions” or contingencies, or else dismissed as irrelevant peculiarities.
By unbundling rationality from technique we were able to see how particular forms of audit or self-empowerment are not necessarily bound to particular political rationalities. For as we saw in the Russian case, the languages of self-empowerment that one might assume to be the trademarks of privatization actually emerged in the late-socialist period. While these were certainly part of a liberal ethos, they were also articulated with Gorbachev’s “socialism with a human face.” Furthermore, the techniques of prophylaxis and management have become a part of an otherwise neoliberal-statist rationality in contemporary Russia. But the chief pay-off, I would argue, is in looking beyond rationality and technique, and onto the “little army” of experts who are charged with welding these two features of modern governmentality together. While commonly considered to be mere conduits for bundled governing rationalities and techniques, what I have shown is not simply the messiness of daily practices, but specifically how particular kinds of messiness were generated through techniques of rule as they came into contact with administrative and financial realities.
This has, indeed, given Russia’s current rhetoric of modernization an additional distancing effect—but here it is not rule from a distance, but rule with indifference, leaving experts to figure out how best to navigate highly irrational “rationalized” waters.
Other anthropologists of Russia have drawn similar conclusions in other bureaucratic contexts. In Michele Rivkin-Fish’s (2005) study of the WHO’s attempt to
280 insert forms of empowerment into reproductive medicine, she finds a disjuncture between discursive incitement and material possibility that ends up blaming the victims. One could say something similar here about the PPMS specialists as well as their clients. Yet one difference is that the intervention by this point has not been made by an external agency, nor with a fairly coherent set of aims. Rather, “modernization” has emerged through discourses originating in multiple institutions and speeches.
Thus, this material sheds more light on how governing processes are unfolding internally in Russia.
The example of the Ministry of Education’s audit system of attestation also suggests something potentially much broader about audit procedures. While rendering things technical is often viewed through Weber’s iron cage, here the audit was productive of forms of organizational “irrationality.” Writing on the curious productivity of the prison, Foucault provocatively noted that prisons are not so much good at reducing crime; rather they excel at producing it. If the haphazard nature of governance of the PPMS Centers—my test case for the state’s governance of post-
Soviet subjects—is itself productive, we might ask what exactly is being produced here? It would be too much to suggest that the PPMS produces poverty or even particular kinds of injured or foreclosed subjectivities. But based on these materials, it can certainly be argued that centers such as these, which have been given blurry mandates and legal frameworks, insufficient financial resources, and systems of audit can at best only be responsive to poverty in ways that will tend to re-inscribe children in crisis into particular grids of legibility—falling na uchot or simply leaving school.
And it is worth pointing out that this PPMS center is not necessarily representative of
281 all PPMS Centers. In some brief comparative work in a wealthier part of the city, I found radically different kinds of possibilities in another PPMS Center. The school to which it was attached, having won a huge grant from the federal government for its student performance, had in turn channeled its psychologists into the kinds of work implied by state pronouncements. This suggests that class differentiation may not entirely be a matter of a state/non-state divide, but rather one closely tied to forms of financial possibility that can flow across that divide.
In the end, it remains difficult to spot the engines of change pushing the redeployment of psychology in public institutions away from concern with the ethical futures of the child, and toward the maintenance of a social economy by controlling potential dangers (cf. Donzelot 1979; Procacci 1991). This chapter suggests that it is best to think of these as heterogeneous psychological practices between and even inside different institutions, which nevertheless unfold in differently constrained social service fields. What they produce in the way of “selves” is primarily a result of the alchemy of rationality-technique-implmentation as they come together in particular sites. Surely one of the great ironies of this is that the prize put on “differentiated” child-centered education in the 1980s appears to have had an unintended result under post-Soviet capitalism, differentiating the ways psychologists can practice, and the kinds of opportunities for self-knowledge opened up to different children.
Reflecting on this chapter and the previous two chapters, all of these discussions go against the grain of research suggesting that neoliberalism and psychological work go hand-in-glove to produce entrepreneurial and prudential subjects across an undifferentiated social field. Rather, considered in light of the
282 parallel market for services, the articulation of neoliberal political rationalities with statism has produced at least two kinds of class-based biopolitics that appear to remain in motion as the politics of the person intersect with different economic interests in the human factor. This amounts to a critical difference both in how expertise and governance intersect around and through persons, and in the rather “personal” nature of freedom under postsocialism.
In the next two chapters, I turn in a new direction, to the political potential psychologists claimed for their practices. Through an analysis of what practitioners had to say about their work as “social reform” in chapter 6, and of a popular talk radio program called For Adults about Adults in chapter 7, I explore the dynamics of self- making as it has come into contact with Russia’s post-Soviet political situation.
283
PART III – POLITICS
284 CHAPTER 6
“Learning to Be Free”: Toward a Post-Soviet Practical Ethics
While researching the scope of contemporary psychotherapeutic services in St.
Petersburg, I came across the following quotation by a therapist:
For decades the primary concern of Soviet theorists in psychotherapy had been “ideological purity,” i.e. conforming to materialistic ideas and limiting the influence of “hostile” theories and practices. Psychotherapy was used essentially as a tool for “re-forming” patients and correcting “wrong” behavior. The requirements for professional work, therefore, were formal techniques. The concept of internal human experience and humane therapeutic relationships were notably missing. It was out of the need for learning in this field—promoting and teaching humanistic psychology—that [our] Institute was founded by a group of friends and colleagues.
With years of experience we began to understand that, in Russia, our work served not only a psychological but also a social task. Paraphrasing Choguam Trungpa, who noted years ago that “Buddhism will come to the West as psychology,” it is possible to say that humanistic/existential psychology is coming to Russia as a power for social change.
The psychotherapist went on to quote one of his students on the role and importance of their institute in Russia:
You Americans think we are free now, you think we are building a new market society, that independence is now here. It is impossible to say that it starts like that. It is a process. In the beginning, what is important in order to become free? People have to experience this freedom inside themselves. Everyone has to become free at first. But history has examples where people have had to learn to be free. One of the very famous examples is when Moses was leading his people for forty years in the desert. In order to gain new values you need time. Of course I
285 don’t want us to spend forty years traveling in the desert and just look to the new generations in the future. I want to be learning now.
These statements, ranging over history, subjective transformation, different conceptions of freedom, and conversion, encapsulate an argument for psychotherapy’s social and political relevance in Russia today. Moment 1: the contemporary is juxtaposed with Soviet constraint, said to have been too focused on ideological goals rather than on “internal human experience” and “humane” relationships, a move that also naturalizes the latter position. Moment 2: it is post-Soviet psychology’s special knowledge of the self that makes it relevant for “learning to be free.” Moment 3: contemporary psychotherapy is assigned “a power of social change,” a process that is given moral weight through religious metaphor.
During fieldwork, many informants framed their first encounters with psychology and their reasons for becoming psychologists in similar terms. Much like a religious conversion, the intensity of these experiences compelled many to “spread the word,” missionizing for the betterment of society.119 Many psychologists and psychotherapists linked their work on themselves and their clients to a larger social
119 This view of psychotherapy’s political work has as a predecessor various developments in North American and European psychotherapy and psychoanalysis in the 1960s. In the psychoanalytic stream, which includes Freudo-Marxists from the Frankfurt School such as Herbert Marcuse (1964) and Erich Fromm (1958), and existentialists such as R.D. Laing (1983), psychoanalysis was used to critique a “sick” modern industrial society whose various social arrangements resulted in the alienation of the human being. A more prominent stream that Russian therapists draw on derives from the human potential movement linked to Abraham Maslow (1968) and Carl Rogers (1961). If writers such as Marcuse, Fromm and Laing used psychoanalytic theory to shed light on modern human alienation, human potential psychologists drew on psychological practice to strive for greater degrees of accommodation, including the humanization of public institutions. One historian, Eva Moskowitz (2001) links this latter tradition to the Civil Rights and Feminist movements, and the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. A practical therapeutic outcome of this shift was expressed to me by a retired clinical social worker in the U.S. She explained that practitioners tend to remain “within the consultation,” in the “here and now,” to cite Carl Rogers’ famous summation of client-centered therapy. “The outside world” is engaged in such therapies—whether through family or workplace relations— however, critiques of politics or society are less central than a more general belief in the “potential for growth” of all human beings (cf. Rogers, et al. 1989:26-29).
286 and political “calling.” They viewed their work in historical terms in that they were helping others to overcome a sense of social oppression engrained since school; eliminating the culture of shame and modesty said to reduce self-esteem; locating new possibilities where before none had existed; and arriving at a new appreciation of sexual identity or relations. Ultimately, many spoke of their intent to teach particular notions of internal “freedom,” as well as new kinds of social energy, strategies for overcoming fear, and for finding inner stability. In some cases this impulse could lead to intense forms of therapeutic work. Perhaps my favorite example is a one-day session in “extreme training” (ekstremal’nyi trening) run by a transpersonal psychologist. For 2,000 rubles (roughly $120 at the time) clients could be driven a few hours outside the city and buried alive for up to six hours before being disinterred. The exercise was intended to trigger a “psychological rebirthing experience.”
Such stories of psychological becoming can be read as attempts to come to terms with Russia’s post-Soviet turmoil and social change through self-work and, as it were, rebirth. In this chapter, through an analysis of these narratives of first encounter with psychotherapy, I explore the interchange between the personal and the political that has been articulated through the post-Soviet expansion of psychotherapeutic knowledge and practices.120 My main interest is in what these narratives reveal about the practices of freedom as they have taken shape through the “ethics of concern for self,” to borrow Michel Foucault’s felicitous phrase (1997a). How is self-work made politically relevant in Russia? Why is the self seen as an important place to begin?
120 Between 2005 and 2007, I conducted interviews with 58 different practitioners, roughly a third of which were men. This chapter draws on roughly a quarter of these. These were among the most fruitful and interesting interviews.
287 What is meant “freedom”? In what ways are political, social and cultural conditions in
Russia projected onto the fabric of “a self”? In exploring these questions, I move through the three “moments” outlined above, discussing “learning to be free” in relation to: 1. the discourse of Soviet constraint; 2. three women’s stories of self- realization; and 3. the key concepts underpinning psychology’s utility as a “power of social change.”
I draw several conclusions about the relationship between the life-trajectories of my psychologist informants and “the political.” The first is that their work cannot be viewed as an apolitical pursuit. While some of their engagements with clients appear conservative in nature, they are also intent on articulating notions of freedom that are not simply “negative,” but rather based on forms of social recognition, new objects of intervention as well as techniques. Second, the way in which “the self” has been politicized has largely been through idioms of social resonance. Expressed through concepts like energy (energiia) and harmony (garmoniia), psychologists have developed what appear to be post-Soviet ways of thinking about “the self” as a source for social work and a highly internalized politics. Of particular concern for them is both a form of gender equality, as well as a resistance to the forms of self- commodification that they and their clients face in the market economy. Third, their efforts appear constrained nonetheless by apparently internalized ideas about gender roles, and also with the ongoing problem in Russia of the re-articulation of moral versus economic value (cf. Patico 2008). This suggests that “learning to be free” as a psycho-ethical and political project is taking shape in the midst of a complex field conditioned by cultural and social factors as well as relations of power. As a
288 community, then, psychologists are bridging a number of dimensions of everyday life that have been unsettled by post-Soviet transformations. These dimensions include value, sociality and selfhood. In tracing the various ways they have tried to answer the question, “how shall I live?” we can begin to understand more both about psychologists as a particular community working and living in St. Petersburg, as well as about the politics of “the self” after socialism.
Moment 1: Freedom and the Discourse of Soviet Constraint
My informants’ stories of psychological becoming gathered moral, social and political force through the way they referenced the Soviet past. Many who had worked during the late-Soviet period were highly circumspect about their past work, and their reflections could be compared to the Cold War-era critiques of Soviet psychiatry (cf.
Bloch and Reddaway 1984).121 At their most extreme, these stories included accounts of KGB spying, bugged telephone advice lines, deception, lying, disdain for patients, and daily abuse and discrimination. In this section I analyze these stories as part of a discourse of Soviet constraint. Following Lisa Rofel’s work on cohort analysis, I approach them not as “transparent descriptions,” but as a “means through which postsocialist subjects are constituted” (1999:14). That is, these narratives enabled practitioners to constitute themselves as post-Soviet actors, and contemporary psychotherapy and psychology as part of the re-moralization of not just Russian medicine, but society as a whole. Looking to replace a culture of lies with truth,
121 Psychiatric abuse was not restricted to the USSR. See, for instance, Jonathan Metzl’s (2010) account of how, during the Civil Rights Movement, psychiatric clinics are used to imprison black civil rights activists.
289 collectivity with the individual, and correction with self-responsibility, practitioners used the Soviet period as a pivot on which to simultaneously, if indirectly, say something about their current work. In contrast to the interplay between the genre of rejection and embrace of the Soviet past discussed in chapter 1, the critique of the
Soviet past was, in these instances of self-construction, unrelentingly negative, suggesting, perhaps, a largely settled domain of post-Soviet social meaning.
Let us begin with Vladimir Mikhailovich, a co-founder of a well-respected psychotherapy institute. In his fifties, and a former naval officer and engineer,
Vladimir decided to study psychology at Leningrad State University (LSU) in the late
1970s. Among the leading graduates of his cohort, he was nevertheless unable to get a job because of his “fifth point” (piatyi punkt),122 which said he was Jewish. In the end, he was only able to find a job in narcology (narkologiia), a relatively new, and low- status branch of psychiatry that worked with alcoholics, and where, according to my research, many qualified “Jewish”-designated practitioners ended up.123 This encounter with professional discrimination would be the first of several for Vladimir, and experiences like these shaped his negative view not only of “Soviet power,” but also its medical system as a whole.
Vladimir’s fundamental complaint with the Soviet medical system was that it positioned the patient and the doctor in highly subordinate relation to the state, and in an adversarial relation with one another. As an example, he described the widespread
122 Piatyi punkt is a designation in one’s passport ostensibly denoting religious belief, but in actuality was based not on practice but kinship. 123 Eugene Raikhel’s (2010) study of narcology is consistent with what I heard from practitioners: Narcology had a low status among medical fields, primarily because of the target population (alcoholics were viewed unsympathetically in the Soviet Union) and secondarily because of the routine set of treatment tools (hypnosis, drug treatments and placebo therapies.
290 used of placebo therapy in treating alcoholism, which made use of an implant, or
“podshivka,” by which a substance called disulfiram injected subcutaneously. The patient was then told that if this substance comes into contact with alcohol in the bloodstream, it can cause a severe physiological reaction and potentially lead to death.124
“Such methods,” he noted, “are very manipulative, and are founded on the fact that the person is afraid. An awesome myth of death through drinking was created.
Pills, injections—these were the symbols generally reflecting that myth. But the basis
[was] deception.”
Vladimir’s colleague, Vitya Markov, another Jewish practitioner who ended up at the same narcology clinic (and whom we met in chapter 1), agreed. Placing a lie at the center of the therapeutic relationship, he added, in turn triggered further mendacity.
This [lie] spins off all kinds of rumors because the sixth person to be administered the podshivka drinks and nothing happens. When you go in for your treatment, you tell this to the doctor, and he responds with a lie to your rumor: “Well,” he says, “that may be true; but this other person did die.” The key thing is that the entire relationship is based on a lie. There is no trust, and you play this strange game. The funny thing is that the essence of alcoholism is that it is based on lying to yourself, and here the method of treatment is to deceive. So you have mixed up the method with the thing that fuels the problem in the first place. … Of course this doesn’t solve the problem. In a lot of cases, the lives of alcoholics were much happier when they were drinking.
Vladimir suggested that a related problem with Soviet narcology was that it did not see patients; it only saw a “struggle with alcoholism” (bor’ba s alkogolizmom).
Sensing this, patients “took the natural position in opposition [to the doctor]. The state,
124 For more on podshivka, see Etkind and Chepurnaia (2006) and Raikhel (2010).
291 the medical system—narcology—combats alcoholics; and alcoholics combat them.”
Meanwhile, he added, “alcoholism has no relation to medicine; it is a social and psychological phenomenon.”
Another clinical psychologist, Andrei Abramovich, who had worked at the
Bekhterev Institute in the 1980s, described the elaborate performances that arose around the podshivka and its logic of deception, fear and combat. He noted that doctors would sometimes create collective rituals before administering the podshivka, while the alcoholics would come up with ways to “neutralize” the podshivka, such as eating ten lemons. Placing a lie at the center of the therapeutic relationship, he said,
“was the essence of the Soviet system.”
If these stories seem extreme, Vladimir also described more mundane situations that contributed to the reproduction of this doctor-patient antipathy and its structuring within an alienating medical system. For instance, when he started working in narcology doing group therapy, he was instructed to follow the protocols— essentially a ten-lesson set of lectures. “This [method] didn’t propose [that alcoholics] rebuild relations,” he complained, “or make a psychotherapeutic contract in which they would come to understand that they are responsible for themselves [na nikh lezhit otvetsvtennost’]. We were in white coats. For them we were people closely tied to the system [priblizhat’ k etoi sistemoi] in the struggle against alcoholism. In the best case, we were the people who knew something that they didn’t know, and who would tell them what to do.”
While working at the narcology clinic, Vladimir, Vitya and others began a reading group in which they assembled the bits of Western psychotherapy—Gestalt
292 founder Friedrich Perls, the humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers, and Freud—they had gathered through samizdat. Through these readings they began to share what troubled them about the clinical protocols. Soviet medicine viewed the patient as someone to be “psycho-corrected.” Vladimir explains, “This meant influencing minds” in keeping with “Soviet morals, ethics and principles, and a general devotion to the Communist Party.” “The totalitarian system,” he said, “presupposed that the most important category was the people [narod]. But ‘the people’ is no one [narod eto nikto]. And nobody was interested in the separate person, his aspirations [chaianie], his suffering, joy, inspiration, and soul suffering [bol’ dushevnyi]. But therapy is exactly oriented to this. Therapy is generally that situation in which for me what is most important is that very person [dlia menia vot samym glavnym iavliaetsia vot etot chelovek].”
Eventually Vladimir and Vitya began to make some changes by reorienting their approach to the patient and the illness:
We took up the idea that you help those people by reflecting what is happening to them; by helping them to understand that it’s a problem with how they live; how they build relations with themselves, with the world and other people; how, in fact, to a large extent it is reflection of those difficulties that they encounter in life and that they can’t overcome using their own resources.
They eventually formed one of the first outpatient clinics in the city, where patients could come and go as they pleased. In this clinic they formed a “therapeutic community” (terapefticheskoe obshchestvo) that included patients, their doctors, and also the staff. They saw movies together and held gatherings in the evenings to discuss
293 artists. “We basically looked at our patients as people who were going through some difficulties, and whom we would help.”
Another feature of the discourse of constraint is the way soft power was exercised in clinical settings. Vitya was scolded for mentioning Freud in a group session (a KGB agent had posed as an alcoholic.) And Vladimir, calling the clinic a
“theater of the absurd” (teatr absurda), gave an example of meddling from his superiors that helped to reinforce the clinic’s hierarchy: while in the midst of a hypnosis session and with a “do not disturb” sign on the door, a head doctor on a tour of the clinic burst in nonetheless. Rather than rising to show her the requisite respect, he asked her, politely, to leave so as not to disrupt the session. He was later reprimanded for his own (and his hypnotized patients’) failure to show respect.
According to informants, Soviet medical power could also be erratic and contradictory. Vladimir told an amazing story about how he came to be hired, and fired, as director of the city’s first psychological advice hotline. One day, out of the blue, he was called by a head doctor and asked to report to her office immediately. On his way, he noticed a line of people outside her door. The head doctor handed him the daily Evening Leningrad, which reported that the first psycho-social service and hotline in the country was opening.
“What do you think of this idea?” “I think it’s a fantastic idea,” I replied. “Good,” she said, “start immediately.” At first I protested. “Lena Nikolaevna, I have a [therapy] group scheduled at 3 o’clock; they’ll be waiting for me.” “Don’t worry about the group,” she told me. “We’ll cancel it. Begin.” To this very day I remember what happened. I was sitting in the office, behind this huge Stalinist desk. People started coming in, and I remember one person who needed help, and I wasn’t really prepared; I was thinking about my scheduled [therapy] group.
294 Meanwhile, while consulting with this person, someone called on the hotline, and I was supposed to answer. It was horrible.
Vladimir decided, as with his work in narcology, to “put things in order,” dividing the walk-in service from the telephone service. But within a few months he ran into a problem. While recruiting staff, he chose a woman from his university days who turned out to be Jewish by passport. He was pulled aside and told that, while the director liked this person, “we already have a lot of Jewish people working in the hospitals.” According to his recollection, she was eventually hired, but the even was very disturbing for Vladimir. He recounts needing someone to share the story with, so he called an old teacher:
I had a good relationship with her; she was a normal person [normal’nyi chelovek]. And I told her what had happened. That’s it. I didn’t have some kind of active revolution in mind. The next day, our deputy director came up to me—someone with whom I had a good relationship—and said, “Vladimir Mikhailovich, I don’t know how to say this, but you’re no longer working on the telephone service. The head doctor has made the decision. I can’t say what he said, but it was connected with your telephone call. It was bugged.” Imagine! A therapist is supposed to guarantee the confidentiality of his clients, but cannot because he’s being bugged. This was a crisis counseling line (telefon doveriia)125 that was being bugged. It wasn’t only me who was being bugged, but also my clients.
He remains confused as to the meaning of this event: was the Party simply using the telephone line as a way to gather information on people? Was it a means to control psychiatry? Was it about Jewishness? “It’s hard to say,” he confesses, “but what is totally accurate is that there were no resources, and no accounting for the interests of the client. It was precisely the opposite. The client wasn’t important.”
This discourse of constraint was not confined to practitioners who were critical
125 The literal translation of telefon doveriia is “trust line”; Vladimir Mikhailovich here emphasizes the word “trust” [doveriia].
295 of Soviet psychiatry. Egor Eisenberg, the psychiatrist whom we briefly met in chapter
2, generally viewed his discipline’s past in positive terms, emphasizing the professionalism of his colleagues, their commitment to curing patients, and the difficult material conditions with which they had to contend. Yet even he suggested that Soviet medicine had a problematic way of looking at the patient. Comparing today’s practices to the Soviet period, he said, “[Today’s patients] don’t fear that they’ll be presented as a laughing-stock, be given a moral lecture [tebia ne budut vospityvat’], or be insulted. There was an unwritten rule in Soviet medicine: [The task was] not only to care for, save or cure, but also to teach.” He then gave the following harsh example of “teaching”:
A woman, our teacher, is doing abortions. We, the students, are standing there, and these women were lying right there, being prepared for the abortion. She says, “I will give her anesthesia; she has children, she’s a good woman. But this woman”—the word “prostitute” wasn’t mentioned—“I am going to do without anesthesia so that she will learn. She’s always getting pregnant.” And, you know, I, at that time a completely green student, still felt that something wasn’t right here. You can’t dishonor a person publicly [nel’zia pozorit’ cheloveka publichno]. Maybe one could have discussed this with the woman later, to say, “Listen, why don’t you use [caution]…” But why crucify her in front of everyone?
*
Having explored some of the features of the discourse of Soviet constraint, the question can now be revisited: what kinds of work do these stories about the Soviet past do to situate the practitioners’ current subject-positions? How do such stories stage the contemporary? To answer this we need to attend to the intrinsically comparative dimension of their statements. Threaded through them is an implicit external standard against which the past practices are judged, and in accordance with
296 which contemporary work is practiced. Reading their statements as a kind of negative image of the present, it seems that post-Soviet practice’s vital point of intervention has been precisely the re-development of the doctor-patient relationship in the face of the dissolved Soviet medical system. This re-development has entailed the
“humanization” (gumanizatsiia) of their discipline, a term that came up often in fieldwork, which was related both to Soviet-era therapeutic practice and the medical system, and the recalibration of subjectivity in the wider society. Through implicit comparison with the past, these practitioners were simultaneously constructing themselves as ethical agents in the face of Soviet constraint, either through accounts of overt conflict or marginalization, or instances of doubt. In the post-Soviet period, the story of burgeoning agency was then merged with the kinds of society the practitioners envisioned as ethically preferable. The discourse of constraint, thus, works with two temporal registers simultaneously, drawing on the stories of what practitioners had to overcome to add moral and ethical legitimacy to their current practices.
Moment 2: Freedom amidst Break-up
If the discourse of past constraint was one strategy practitioners used to locate themselves and their profession in the present, yet another was through narratives of psychological becoming. In contrast to location through negation, these narratives gave a more positive content to psychology and its role in personal transformation. In this section, I discuss three such narratives, all of which span the late-1980s and early
1990s, a time when the country and its orders—social, gender, or otherwise—were collapsing. Taken separately, these stories are unremarkable, even mundane; however,
297 together they hint at some key sociological and political dimensions of post-Soviet psychology and psychotherapy—the fact that practitioners are largely female, and that many mention freedom, so salient in the late- and early postsocialist contexts, when describing their first encounters with psychology.126 Apart from this fact, the stories also point to an existential intensity that brings out a conflict between particular post-
Soviet pursuits of “self-realization” and both gender and economic constraints.127 In one sense, their subject-positions as women often seemed to interfere with their desires for “liberation.” In another sense, the desire for particular kinds of personal authenticity was often thwarted by their economic precariousness. As stories of process more than destination, these narratives reveal both some of the psychological dimensions of “freedom” as it came to be desired in the late-1980s and 1990s, as well as some of the social and economic barriers to its attainment.
Liberation: “It wasn’t part of the Soviet system. … It was for me.”
126 If the Soviet-trained psychotherapists and psychologists tended to be predominantly male, post-Soviet-trained practitioners were mostly female. Neither was a function of skewed sampling. Nearly every organization in which I did research reflected these biases. The upsurge in post-Soviet psychologists is gendered much the way social work and counseling is in the U.S; however, there are some dimensions of this phenomenon that are specific to Russia: Due to its post-Soviet nature, and specifically the fact that psychology really only blossomed as a specialty under late-socialism, a significant proportion of informants, whether male or female, had re-professionalized as psychologists after working as engineers, mathematicians, or educators, what Shevchenko terms the “technical intelligentsia” (2009:25). 127 The topic of gender and postsocialism has been well-studied. The is general agreement that after the post-Stalinist period, early Soviet feminism had been replaced with a more pragmatic approach to gender-related policy, re-inscribing traditional gender roles and the institution of the family as a way to boost flagging population levels after World War II. Michele Rivkin-Fish notes the “sex-role socialization courses” in Soviet high schools meant to “ensure that young women prioritized marriage and children and that all young adults embraced traditional stereotypes about women and men’s distinct psychologies and social roles” (2005:13). Thus, by the time of the Soviet collapse, many women had long rejected the replacement of motherhood with the crèche system, as well as the ideal of the New Soviet Woman as a kind of de-feminized laborer. Verdery suggests that in the post-Soviet period this attitude has been extended into anti-feminism and pro-natalist politicking (see chapter 3) (1996:79-82). See also Dunn (2004), Pine (2002), Gal and Kligman (2000a) and Philips (2008).
298 Elena hated her schooling. “The Soviet period was very oppressive,” the fortysomething explained while seated in front of St. Issac’s Cathedral. “Everyone was supposed to sit straight in their desks, wear their Pioneer ties, and recite Party history, but I didn’t want to do that. All along I felt like I was a black sheep. After being different from everyone for a while, you begin to think that you are the one with the problem.”
Not surprisingly, after graduating from the pedagogical institute, Elena had no desire to serve that institution as a teacher. Instead, in 1988 she went to work in an after-school program, where she started to make “personal connections with the children and the parents.” This was the spark of human contact to which she attributes her nascent interest in psychology. The problem was that the discipline of psychology wasn’t interesting because it “was mostly focused on age-psychology and defectology and was tied to the idea that it was for the sick.” She added that while there was some research on the personality (lichnost’) and intellect, these were “very theoretical in orientation.”
After the collapse of the Soviet Union things began to change in the psychological fields, and Elena went to her first psychology training (trening) in 1993.
This was self-development and everything was new. It was a new type of knowledge. Psychology had meant heavy lecture, but this had exercises, and you talked about your own experiences. It was a new way of thinking. A new point of view. We called each other by first name. It was a new social form. We used the informal ‘you’ [na ty]. I went mad about it. I took all the psychology I could find. Sometimes without purpose. It was shocking how new it was. But I was ready. I felt very happy. I could be myself. It wasn’t part of the Soviet system. It was for me. I soon understood that I wanted to do this kind of work. I found that I had an ability to see a lot. I could read a group. I could understand a lot about other people.
299
Then, as Russia was embarking on Gaidar’s neoliberal reforms, Elena had her first child. In the face of drastically shifting economic and social conditions, her dreams of becoming a psychologist were sidelined, and she spent the next several years tending to her child because “a woman with small children needs to stay home,” while helping her husband with several business ideas. Amidst post-Soviet shortage, they tried several middle-man enterprises. Eventually they found a factory that produced plastic bags that needed supplies. Her husband asked what they needed, got it to them in exchange for the bags, which they then sold. This operation, which began with an
“office” consisting of a rented table with a phone and a WC used for storage, eventually led to a successful packaging business.
In 1998, around the time of the Russian financial crisis, Elena started to look for work. She found an advertisement for an International Academy of Etiquette.128
This, she says, turned out to be “the best education of [her] life.”
The topic was very interesting and useful. It was just etiquette. In the Soviet Union nobody thought about etiquette. When I was a girl I remember being introduced to the concept at a restaurant where I learned about salad forks. I liked it very much—how pretty everything was. … This was a rare opportunity to get some practical education.
She completed her training and became certified as an “image-maker.” Just as the economy was starting to improve in Russia, her husband left her, creating a new set of challenges involving, to this day, a struggle to receive alimony that is always in
128 This etiquette phenomenon seems related to what Elizabeth Dunn (2004) finds in early 1990s Poland. There, prospective managers sought to transform their dress, manners and disposition in order to reflect what they perceived to be the more “flexible” and desirable image of the manager.
300 doubt because much of his business income has always been off the books.129 This has increased the pressure on Elena to convert her dreams into a paycheck, but she has had a hard time finding work as an image-maker. “It seems,” Elena says, “that people are not ready for etiquette. It seems like now everything is all about psychological training
[as a professional skill]. I have tried to pitch my image-making in politics and management but not had much success. Firms are not looking to hire middle-aged women.”
Since then she has tried to frame etiquette within the concept of dress—and she now just works on people’s exteriors. She gave the example of a friend, who used to wear very grey clothes and felt unsure of herself. Rather than take on her inner problems, she advised her to get a new pair of bright glasses. “She was shy at first, but when she put them on she realized how beautiful she was. Starting from the glasses, next she changed her clothes to match them, and then eventually she herself began to feel more beautiful and confident.” By the time I met Elena again in 2007, she had stopped image making, and was working as a nanny.
A path to self: “I worked very closely, through tears, on myself.”
Pixie-like with short hair, Vera Aleksandrovna is 33 and had been working at a municipal center as a psychotherapist for children with problems for about a year when I first met her. Over coffee one day, she told me how she became a psychologist.
Like Elena, Vera started with her upbringing. She attributes the first glimmers of psychological interest to the fact that she grew up in a remote, ethnically
129 As Wanner (2005) notes, many businesses in post-Soviet countries keep two accounts: one “white” for government officials, and the real “black” ones.
301 homogeneous region of Russia, near Lake Baikal, where she said she “always felt other.” She also cites an interest in psychological literature—the novels of Stephen
Zweig, Dostoevsky, Kuprin, Dumas, Hesse and Coelho. These have also been companions of her psychological journey—a journey that she describes as bringing her back to herself.
“When my father died of stomach cancer [during perestroika] I was just 17, and I had to grow up. On a whim, I decided to enter a competition for state-supported spots at the university studying psychology.” Her initial impulse was to understand
“why people are sick.” She believed medicine had the answer but then became interested in psychology. She describes an initial sense of “freedom and possibility” on entering school—a sense that soon faded as she confronted the theoretical emphasis of the psychology faculty, its dearth of practical work and harshness of the teaching.
This left her feeling “somewhat empty,” and she was turned off by psychoanalytic theory as an explanation for disorders. “The idea that parents are guilty—this struck me as a form of determinism.”
While in school, the Berlin Wall fell and eventually the Soviet Union collapsed. She graduated in 1994, and continued her training by participating in seminars. Eventually, she met a man and got pregnant. “My life changed at that point.
I had no way out. The family system [in Russia] was broken. I spent time living in terrible places—including a dormitory [obshchezhitie]—with my child. I had a sense of total dependence, and the harmony in my life flew away.” Moving through the rapid changes of the mid-1990s, with a child to support on her own, Vera read voraciously in search of new psychic resources. She discovered Herman Hesse’s Glass
302 Bead Game, Stephen Covey’s self-help book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective
People, and some influential works by S. B. Bratus in psychopathology, and Orlov.
“My sense of psychological values began to change. I became more humanistically oriented. I applied to a program in Vladivostok, where they were holding seminars in humanistic psychology, was accepted and decided to go. My father had relatives there, and I felt that there was not only part of my father’s blood there, but also a part of his soul [dusha].”
Like Elena, Vera continued her training on the heels of the recession of 1998.
These courses would set her on a career path. It met once a month over the course of several intensive days of Gestalt-oriented work:
Everyone had to formulate a goal [zapros], and mine was that I wanted to learn to love, and not manipulate. It was of course not a very concrete formulation, but nonetheless an important one. I worked very closely, through tears, on myself. We put together goals of the week. We worked on the structure of our lives. We studied forms of love— love with conditions, love without judgment.
In 2003, she left the trainings without finishing the courses.
I had suddenly understood that I was not only a person, but a woman. I wanted to identify more closely with myself as a woman, learn to support myself. My relations with men had been intentionally distant. I secretly longed to be with a strong, confident man with boundaries who knew what he wanted, but I was also afraid of such a man. I wanted to find myself first. I also knew that I would be leaving Vladivostok eventually, and that it would be unfair to lead anybody on. If I’d stayed there, I’d have gotten married. And I looked around and saw what others seemed to emphasize: material things, having a car and a nice apartment. For me what was most important was living near the institute and having daycare for my son.
She moved to St. Petersburg, where she had “always dreamed of living.” “I read
[Paolo] Coelho’s The Alchemist. He writes about the idea of having a life path that one
303 must follow and following your dream. It is important to be the subject of your own life. I came to these realizations thanks to psychology.”
Her path since then has been somewhat different from what she had imagined.
Dreaming of living in the great northern city, the fabled place of nineteenth-century
Russian literature built to look like a European metropolis, she confesses she ended up living in “Leningrad,” a Soviet-era part of the city. Her work has also been unsteady.
She worked initially as a psychological consultant for several HR firms but found that she wasn’t cut out for it. She eventually took a job at the regional center where I had met her, while continuing to work on the side to build her own consultancy working with parents and children. Meanwhile, her son now spends most of the year living with his grandmother in distant Lake Baikal, and Vera has separated her pursuit of career from her role as mother.
When I followed up with her in 2007, she had quit her work at the PPMS
Center. She explained that she was constantly being pulled in two directions, and that it was an unpleasant environment in which to work. Lacking a steady, though modest municipal income, Vera is now pursuing the dream of building an “international cultural center with rooms where several people can stay and live, a winter garden on the roof, different kinds of events with other countries like bead making.” She continues to do psychological consulting in the evenings and weekends, and appears to be doing reasonably well—she emailed me some photos of herself traveling in
Turkey—though no stories of the cultural center have been forthcoming.
*
304 Fate: “I decided [not to try], but [then] a magical image appeared.”
Olessia was closer in age to Vera than Elena, and she knew when she was in high-school that she wanted to enroll in the psychology faculty at the university. The problem was that so did many others in the 1980s. After several failed attempts at admission, she eventually applied to the biology department and “studied mushrooms for three years” before realizing this wasn’t for her.
One fine day I was sitting in a lecture about gestology—tissues, blood, etc.—it was a very important moment. … [The lecturer] was world- renowned. I understood it was a great lecture, but I was bored. During the break I left and decided that I wouldn’t study biology any longer.
She dropped out of school and went back to work, determined to get into the psychology faculty. Her friends and family told her that it was not realistic, and, once again, she was not admitted. Her scores on the qualifying exams were too low in physics, and she complained that her family knew no one that could pull some strings for her, working “po blatu.” So she hired a tutor, and took the exams again. Again, her scores were too low. “I decided that I’d not try to get in again, but that year a magical image [vol’shebnyi obraz] appeared. It was the first year that you could apply to different specializations [within psychology].” Undoubtedly a response to a burgeoning interest in psychology in the early 1990s, the university had finally broadened the range of possible ways into the field. Olessia applied to legal psychology, which turned out to be the least competitive, and she was finally on her way.
Like Elena and Vera, Olessia also suggests that most of the exciting developments were happening outside the university; after getting in, her story shifts
305 away from her university education to a series of trainings she took around the city during the 1990s, passing through the hands of various guru-like figures, each of whom was trying to turn her into his next acolyte. She describes one fairly well-known psychologist: he “immediately saw [something] in me. He said that I had a ‘great voice’ that was needed for work as a psychologist or and psychotherapist. He suggested that we start working together, to do individual lessons.” She turned him down, herself unsure of what she wanted. Only later, when she “had a sadness [and] was really depressed [tiazheloe sostoianie]” did she go back to participate in his seminars, psychological trainings (treningi) in communicative competence, conversation skills, sales trainings, and public speaking that were very popular throughout the 1990s. But she confesses that, “trainings didn’t grab me to the quick
[menia eto zatronula za zhivoe etogo ne bylo].”
She eventually found another psychology center called Dusha (soul), then linked with a Texas-based organization Global Relationships Center that was active in the 1990s setting up psychotherapy franchises in Russia. Dusha’s work “affected [her] more.” The problem was that the courses cost 180 rubles, over four times her school stipend. Taking up a series of odd jobs, she worked nights to pay for these courses.
Eventually, they offered her the chance to study in exchange for leading trainings herself, but she declined. She complained, “They had a system where lots of men were working as interns, but not women. […] The women were nobody. It’s like they thought they weren’t ready.”
When she returned her studies at the university, she describes returning to an entirely different kind of education. Whereas at Dusha, where “everything [was] more
306 fearless, active, bright,” at the university the professors were always telling them something else.
They would say that you are not allowed to let your own personality get involved [nel’zia rabotat’ lichnost’iu]. You are almost nobody. Be abstract, and leave aside your own personality. They would say that was really unprofessional. It’s exclusively the client, it’s really unprofessional. If you cry, for example, if you experience something with the client, it’s really unprofessional. If you have a lot of empathy it’s really unprofessional. And to me this was always not right. But at Dusha they always said to work using the soul [rabotat’ dushoi], the personality. That which you feel, it’s important for the client. It was a huge experience. A kind of foundation—I nevertheless got something in my soul [ia vse takie poluchila tam v dushe].
Nearing the end of her university work, Olessia got pregnant and, after graduating, remained unmarried. Her story resembles Vera’s and Elena’s in that she, too, struggled to convert her training as a psychologist into a paycheck while balancing her identity as a mother. She began by holding courses for pregnant women, but the income was quite modest:
There was no money, and the father [of my child] didn’t help at all. I had a room in a communal apartment [kommunalka], near the train station. There were homeless people, drug addicts, alcoholics, and we had that kind of apartment, where, for example, if you left a spoon sitting in the kitchen, such ordinary things, within minutes it would be sold. It was impossible to live there with a child, so I rented an apartment. I needed money, so I worked.
She persisted nonetheless, leading trainings while her mother strolled the baby outside, bringing him to breastfeed at breaks. It was a hard time, but in those difficult years an idea would emerge for a psychotherapy course that would become very successful. The idea took shape in the kitchen, a highly symbolic milieu in Russia
307 where at least one other informant said that her career as a psychologist was born.130
Says Olessia,
I had a girlfriend and I would go to her place with my child and spend the night. We’d be in the kitchen, I’d have already put my son to sleep, and we’d sit there until 3 or 4 talking. She wasn’t a psychologist, but she is very wise [mudraia], not smart, but namely wise. A person who had a really hard childhood, who had alcoholic parents, spent her whole childhood sleeping in a basement in a box, would steal bread, and so on. […] But she never thought she had a bad childhood. To the point, she was at a psychology training course and when she told them how she had lived, the Americans had eyes like this [she opens eyes wide in astonishment]. They said how did you survive? They told her that she had had a bad childhood.
So we would sit together in the kitchen talking about what to do. I said I didn’t know what to do, I couldn’t say that being pregnant was the only thing I was interested in, I didn’t want to return to Dusha, and she said, you need to teach people the thing that you do better than anyone else. I joked, saying that the thing I do best is sex. And she said, well that’s what we’ll teach. And that’s when my course on female sexuality was born. I taught it for many years. I just stopped. I say, I got tired of women’s orgasms [laughs]. But the course wasn’t just directly related to orgasm, but about women’s nature [zhenskaia priroda], women’s essence [sushnost’], and her internal world [vnutrennyi mir], and feeling more whole. Wholeness [tselost’nost’], selfhood [samost’], about everything. Not just about sexual things.
Unlike Vera and particularly Elena’s story, Olessia has been able to build a good career in the marketplace as a psychologist. Her courses on women’s sexuality became popular, and her efforts with her husband, whom she met later, to found a psychology organization have also resulted in a recognized and solicited center in the city. As she suggested, she did eventually branch out from courses on women’s
130 One informant described Russia as a “culture of kitchen conversations” (kul’tura kukhonnykh razgovorov). In harsh times, it was the place where people could meet with relative assurance that their conversations would not be overheard and misconstrued. In post-Stalin years, the kitchen became a place for intimate conversion (obshchenie) with one’s closest friends (svoi). Seated zastolie, or “at table,” amidst vodka or tea and a spread of food, close friends would philosophize, trade jokes and personal struggles late into the night, leaving only for a cigarette or the bathroom. See Pesmen (2000), Yurchak (2006), Ries (1997; 2009), and Boym (1994).
308 sexuality and into new areas, particularly something called “systemic constellation,” which I discuss below, and which also seemed to have a link to the events in her life.
*
What do these three narratives of “psychological becoming” suggest about a possible big picture of post-Soviet self-work? All three stories are built around a dynamic of liberation. In Elena’s story, it is liberation from social strictness and an arrival at new forms of public intimacy. Vera’s story depicts a more gradual form of freedom, a journey that followed a path to her self. And Olessia’s story suggests a more professional liberation—one where, at first, she was able to include her feelings and herpersonality in her consulting work, and later, to offer courses to clients based on “what she did best.”
The stories are also staged around a tragedy which must, in turn, be overcome.
Elena’s liberation was set in opposition to the straight-jacketed past of the Soviet period, as well as her divorce and sense of abandonment. Vera’s centered on a wide range of difficulties, including a sense of exclusion in her ethnically homogeneous community, the early loss her father, being a single parent with little support, and having trouble making relationships with men. And Olessia’s eventual triumph passed through difficulties, including the school failures, the search for a truer form of psychology, living in a kommunalka. Interestingly, Olessia also augments her hardship story with the story of her “wise” friend, which, in a kind of metonymic substitution,
Olessia borrows as a source of moral legitimacy.
Triumph through suffering is a common trope in Russian culture and literature, perhaps best captured by Dostoevsky’s portrait of the saintly prostitutes.
309 Anthropologist Nancy Ries’ (1997) study of post-perestroika discourse finds an ongoing equation between poverty and moral purity, suffering and redemption. More recently, Olga Shevchenko finds an insistence among Muscovite on “permanent crisis,” even in the face of material improvement (2009). In related ways, the stories of hardship offered by Elena, Vera and Olessia also partake in this discourse. However, in the context of psychological becoming, they take on a psychologized “born again” aspect, where the depths to which they sank are what give their self- realization its force, and where that realization links a loosely defined notion of freedom to projects of internal transformation enabled by psychological tools.
At the same time, the stories of psychological becoming are also stories of the personal experience of political-economic collapse. This appeared in the way that particular traditionalist ideas of gender, as well as economic precariousness, constrained the experience of liberation and self-realization. After “going mad for” psychological trainings in the 1990s, Elena encountered several gendered and economic obstacles that made it difficult to pursue her own career: the pressures of motherhood; the relative lack of women’s claims over her husband’s earnings; the view of middle-aged women (and indeed men in Russia) as undesirable labor. Vera, too, found herself torn between her interest in her career and self-realization and the swirling discourses of motherhood, and heteronormative femininity. Finally, Olessia’s path to self-realization was also impeded by the presence of some male figure who wanted to make her an acolyte, while she found herself to be stronger than an “ideal woman” should be. This compelled her to reject all of these figures.
These stories thus show how the projects of internal liberation and realization
310 encountered numerous constraints. These included discourses surrounding proper femininity (see chapter 3 for a discussion of motherhood), questions of the nature of
“realization” for different gendered subjects, questions of emotional openness and obligation to others. Finally, through these stories, we can begin to see how the practice of psychological freedom was also articulated with the precarious nature of making ends meet in the 1990s. Ironically, the arrival of the “democratic freedoms” both enabled as well as impeded their desire for inner-freedom as they struggled to navigate the formal economy.
Moment 3: Logics of Self- and Social Transformation
How did psychologists articulate the search for personal liberation and self-realization with “social change”? Inspired by Michele Rosaldo’s (1980) investigations of the
“dynamics” of Ilongot affect, I pay close attention to the most recurrent terms and concepts that practitioners used in interviews in order to illustrate how various psychological projects to “get settled”—in one’s self and surroundings—also intersected with the political rhetoric at the time. Sometimes this articulation was through metaphor, akin to the link Emily Martin finds between the science of immunology and discussions of national health and flexible production (cf. Harvey
1989; 1994; Ong 1999), at other times, as in instances of gender discussion, the interplay between personal and political was explicit.
Based on a textual analysis of my interviews with roughly sixty practitioners, for which I used qualitative data software, several recurrent terms were important in connecting personal and social projects. The first, “fear,” or strakh, was discussed as a
311 widespread cultural phenomenon, and was usually framed as a response to the disruption of socio-political order. Related, many practitioners also spoke of a lack of stability, or stabil’nost’, which articulated a desired internal state (i.e. a stable self) with the term Putin-Medvedev have used to differentiate the virtues of their rule over
Russia from the chaotic 1990s under Yeltsin (i.e. the stable economy). Gender, specifically the perceived collapse of a gender order, figured prominently in both.
These discussions of undesired states were complemented by a search for orientation and psycho-ethical resources, and here, the wisdom of soul (dusha) was invoked as a means of resisting the hyper-instrumentality of a market-driven life. Yet although dusha can also describe certain forms of intimate sociality, in these discussions it was rarely ascribed its social meanings. Instead, the pursuit of self-care as a social matter was explored through two other terms—that of “energy” (energiia) and “harmony” (garmoniia). These terms articulated a particular social circuit through which a person’s stabilized self could be linked to other selves, creating a harmonious social resonance. I will make the somewhat provocative claim that we can read these in terms of a discourse of transfer or change from one “state” to another that resonates with the shift from a socialist to a capitalist state.
Fear and time, order and authority
During my research at the Psycho-Pedagogical Medico-Social (PPMS)131
Center in one of the poorest parts of the city, practitioners frequently spoke of children whom they viewed as suffering from “fear” (strakh). There was the boy with an
131 For a discussion of several PPMS Centers in St. Petersburg, see chapter 5.
312 unidentified panic or fear; the child with inexplicable fears of death and loss; the girl who easily manipulates her parents and has become fearful that she will somehow be responsible if they die; the pre-schooler who fears Baba Yaga (a Russian fairy tale witch); the boy with “internal feelings of fear” that have “different sources”; the child who clings desperately to her mother and fears being abandoned; the boy whose father and uncle recently died who feels fear and alarm (trevoga) all the time and cannot do his schoolwork; the boy who missed school all of January, who draws himself as two people light and dark—one is scared and at home, the other wants to ride his bicycle— and has a spontaneous fear of death and cemeteries; the tenth-grader who fears water and open space; the boy who is afraid to be at home alone and draws UFOs that suggest an underlying fear. Adults, too, were fearful. According to practitioners,
Russians “fear change”; “they fear loss”; “their fears interfere with their own ability to live”; “they are afraid to smile”; “they fear opening up.”
Fear, it seemed, was all around. It was explained in relation to a range of different life events and problems, at times creeping into the way the psychologists viewed their clients. As Vera Aleksandrovna remarked in a Balint group exercise,
“Whenever I encounter this case, I am filled with strong emotions—fear, pity, wrath.”
Her colleague, Ksenia, suggested that she reflect on the experiences in her own life that are causing her fear. And in another staff meeting, I observed how, after a practitioner concluded that “the boy is unable to explain the sources of his fear,” another turned to his neighbor and remarked, “Who can?” Who can, indeed? But this was precisely what practitioners were tasked with doing—finding fear’s source—and this pursuit often led them into the terrain of social transformation and its effects.
313 Strakh was almost always mentioned in some relation to issues of time, order, and authority—three things that have been upended since the collapse of the Soviet Union.
On the topic of time, many scholars have noted the particular temporality of
Soviet modernity which fused a sense of a future already present and a past, 1917, that was constantly celebrated in the origin stories of the Soviet Union (cf. Buck-Morss
2000). This was said to produce a “modal schizophrenia,” where the “is” and the
“ought to be” were constantly being forced, ideologically speaking, into an uneasy equivalence (Clark 1981).132 Yet regardless of its particularity, this temporality also anchored a sense of certainty and social order which was disrupted with the Soviet collapse. Alexei Yurchak’s book title summons this sentiment nicely: everything was forever until it was no more.
Traces of the collapse of this temporality appeared in some of the discussions of strakh. An interesting discussion linking strakh and time came up in my discussions with Anastasia Fillipovich, a doctor-psychotherapist and children’s specialist. The regular appearance of strakh had prompted me to ask about what she made of it. She explained that there are two words in Russian that are commonly confused: strakh, or fear, and trevoga, which might be translated as anxiety, or alarm:
We need to speak more about anxiety than fear. Anxious fear is directed to the future, a concern that situations are undefined, so that something can happen, and can make one’s own position unstable. I would say that that’s more like anxiety than fear. [This anxiety] can be explained by the fact that society is going through an ongoing state of change and people still can’t assert or confirm that their situations are stable. They have no savings to help them in a moment of need, or property to sell to support them. They don’t know what kind of
132 The degree to which this actually obtained in daily life is debatable, but certainly there are many accounts of an actual sense of permanence and inevitability of the Soviet Union (cf. Lahusen 1997; Yurchak 2006).
314 political society exists, and they worry about their children. And so it’s really anxiety caused by uncertainty. But in the Russian language, fear and anxiety are often not differentiated. Fear is a response to something happening, for instance, a barking dog. With anxiety nobody is barking.
The fact that Anastasia Fillipovich’s distinction between the affect of fear (a kind of flight response in the face of an impending threat) and the emotion of fear (an anxiety without a necessary object) did not obtain in many interviews is interesting. For to conflate affect and emotion, fear and anxiety, seems to give a more material existence to future uncertainty, and also to anchor worry about the future in the body.
Commenting on the current atmosphere of Russia under Putin, Nikolai Bazov, a psychologist with his own consulting and training business, remarked,
Twenty years ago [when I started my work], I thought I would do something in Russia for the future of my children, to do what I could to build a better society. Now I understand that there is nothing here. Russia’s future is in a smog. I am afraid when my sons go out. I would like to raise them elsewhere, but there are not really any good possibilities. […] I don’t see a real way out. Meanwhile, I think that things will just get worse here in Russia. My wife is willing to move, but her feelings are more mixed. She argues that our world is a mirror of our mind. But I think about the twelve people I know, whom were beaten on the street, in the middle of the day, good people. [The idea that] by changing our thinking nothing will go wrong—we can see that this isn’t totally true. I can’t even think about a family around me that has not had some recent encounter with violence.
These statements fell on the heels of a comment that seems more descriptive of fear as a visceral response. Speaking about the increase in random violence, he said,
“Many of the people around me have experienced terrible violence and beatings without cause. A neighbor from the middle of Russia suffered a fractured skull and eye problems after a terrible beating that landed him in the hospital for 3 weeks. This was unmotivated. It’s just a release of aggressive tendencies in society. In the
315 countryside people do not necessarily understand the source of this violence consciously, but they see it in the actions of politicians now in Russia, which operates on the basis of widespread fear and violence.”
The discourse of fear and its sources and objects was not only future-oriented, it was also backward-looking. Commenting on the crumbling social order, Vitya
Markov remarked, “What the post-Soviet person fears is the loss of shablon,” referring to the predictable patterns that characterized daily life in the Soviet Union.
Evgeniia Nikiforovna, a psychotherapist working with a university-linked clinic, remarked that in her work she has seen a “growth in society of fear, alarm, dismay and aggressiveness.” And Nikolai Bazov, once more, told me after I had participated in a psychological exercise meant to test one’s decision-making skills that “many are afraid to destroy their work. This fear inhibits them and they take a long time to find the missing piece.”
By far the most prominent examples of the link between fear and a loss of order were connected with highly normative statements about gender. Vitya Markov told me that many men are “simply scared” to be open because of the high expectations in Russia around masculinity. Recall also, Vera’s statements that she
“longed for but also feared a strong, confident man who knew what he wanted.”
Olessia’s discussion of her course of women’s sexuality was also riddled with gender and fear: “the tender, weak type of woman is afraid of a cockroach”; “boys raised by bossy mothers fear that their wives will also boss them”; “men fear women who are confident in themselves”; “questions of ‘what’s inside me?’ for men this is a
316 dangerous thing”; “I had a really strong fear of men. Now I know it was because I didn’t want to be suppressed.”
This suggests that psychological interventions “against strakh” may also be psycho-technical ways to think through contemporary problems in Russia, including the aftershocks of political collapse and its subjective effects; the perceived threat to various kinds of social order (in particular a gender order); and also a concern with time that is double-edged, folding into itself both a fear of loss of past order, as well as a fear of an uncertain future.
Paradoxes of stability
As an escape from fear, many spoke of a search for stability, or stabil’nost’, a fact that reinforces the idea that these discussions also broached broader questions of social order and disorder. Recently Teresa Caldeira (2000) has studied the prevalence of talk of fear in contexts of urban social transformation. When “violence disrupts meaning,” narration and signification of discourses of fear, she argues, can counter disruption through the reestablishment of order. As she notes, referring to the work of
Rene Girard and Mary Douglas, “danger is controlled and social order maintained by clear categorizing.” She adds that talk of crime also has productive effects, for instance inciting further violence by criminalizing certain social groups. Citing
Michael Taussig and Alan Feldman, she notes, “Narration mediates violence and helps it to proliferate” (2000:34-37).
The duality of fear narratives, that is their conservative as well as productive dimensions, can be usefully applied to the discussions above. Discussions of fear
317 indeed seemed to have a conservative character, reinforcing certain gender orders through the search for psychological calm. At the same time, however, “fear,” and its companion stability (explored in this section) could also be productive, inciting new objects of psychological intervention in the name of an alternative kind of stable social order. In fact, stabil’nost’ has also figured prominently in political discourse in Russia under Putin. It is semiotically opposed to the tumultuous 1990s, which most remember as being lawless and chaotic, and when people witnessed not only the end of the
Soviet Union, but also the “wild capitalism,” “mass theft,” “grabitization”
(prikhvatizatsiia) decay of social institutions, and Russia’s general loss of standing in the world. This led not only to political instability, but also to many experiences of personal instability in due to wage freezes, dispossession, the transformation of cultural value, the loss of markers of status, identities, social institutions and the rules of the game (cf. Collier 2005; Patico 2005; Shevchenko 2009; Wanner 2005). In the wake of such changes, Putin seized on the distaste for “liberalization” and
“democratization” in order to promote his new social contract based on a notion of
“stability” (stabil’nost’) that has, on the one hand, indeed stabilized the currency and raised living standards (albeit one buoyed by high gas and oil prices), but on the other helped to justify the political status quo.
Olga Shevchenko (2009:8) finds this desire for stability in discussions of daily life as well. She characterizes the postsocialist condition as one defined by the discourse and practices of “total crisis.” Likened to “living on a volcano,” life required
“unceasing labor of remaining attuned to what could be the ominous rumblings of coming calamity.” “[C]hange for them was almost never a good thing.” For those who
318 did fare well in the postsocialist period, this was not the mark of achievement.
“Rather, they praised themselves for being successful in the preservation of their families’ peace and well-being, a preservation which, could, of course, bring unforeseen and pleasant advances, but which was valuable primarily for its own sake.
Improvement was a by-product; stability was what counted most” (my emphasis). She identifies two proving grounds for finding stability—domesticity and the assertion of one’s autonomy and competence.
Interviews with psychologists suggests that this discourse of stabil’nost’ has its counterpart in matters of the self—but not only as a way to still one’s own insides, but also to contribute to a more stable Russia. Some said that stability is good for their profession because the work of the self cannot take place in unstable societies. Citing
Abraham Maslow’s (1987) hierarchy of human needs, with “self-realization” as the highest level, Tomorrow’s Builders’ Aleksandr suggested that only after meeting one’s basic human needs (food and shelter; security; love) can one attend to questions of self-realization. Others read the increasing interest in psychology as an outcome of stability and prosperity. For example, Tamara of Tomorrow’s Builders told me that “a good sign of stability” is the fact that more and more people are valuing not just higher education, but also psychology. And Aleksandr, again, speaking of the conditions for self-realization (samorealizatsiia), commented on the number of encouraging signs in
Russia of late, including the fact that “the state can make a budget for more than one year,” and that “politics are more stable—we know that there will be a presidential election.” As Nikolai Bazov put it, “Stability means you can run your business, and that your clients can afford to come to you.”
319 As concerns the affairs of the self, stability also seemed to safeguard against the fearful emotions that the collapse of social order had triggered. As Daria, a school psychologist, suggested, psychologists might play a stabilizing role in this context:
“The great social change we have experienced is reflected in the growing demand for psychologists and religious figures.” Addressing matters at a markedly more fine- grained level, Irina Pavlovna, a psychoanalyst who had invested a great deal of her own money in a small family practice, insisted that proper relations between parents and children must be based on a number of “stabilities”: The parent must be dominant, and “dangers can result from an imbalance or instability in gender relations and identities.”
Stability as an interior state was also a capacity that could be developed. The
PPMS Center I studied offered several programs aimed at the “development of capable stability.” I also observed a female client in a training who, when asked to describe her goal for the session, responded, “I want to become more sure of myself; more stable on the inside, more steadfast (tverdyi).” Vladimir Mikhailovich, the psychotherapist cited above who spoke about podshivka and narcology, told me that,
“Psychology is a way toward self-fulfillment (samosovershenstvo) and self- development (samorazvitie) that allows a person to feel more confident, more even- tempered, more stable, more independent.” He added, “Everyone wants to be better
[vsem khochetsia byt’ luchshe], more stable, confident. […] People really want to be stronger.”
If such descriptions of stable interiority, which trade easily in the rhetoric of
“independence,” “strength” and “confidence,” can be taken as symptomatic of a
320 broader socio-political discourse in Russia, then it can also be said that several important paradoxes were involved. One was that, the Soviet period was itself quite stable, contemporary longings for stability notwithstanding. Vitya Markov went so far as to call it “inertial, stable and oppressive.” By the same token, instability—the sign of political liberation—could itself be oppressive and undesirable. Olya, a psychologist working in one of St. Petersburg’s outpatient clinics, told me that she preferred not to invest time in developing her professional qualifications. “In the face of an uncertain future, why invest in self-development?” Tomorrow’s Builder’s
Aleksandr told me that the increased choices that Russians now have in their lives, on the face a positive transformation, is also a problem: “Choice also makes things unpredictable.” Thus we get a paradox of stability: with more stability (contingent on central control) comes more opportunity and more choice. But with more choice comes more unpredictability. This interchange seemed productive both of further fear and instability, and also more psychology.
This paradox was also discussed in more direct relation to Putin. Take the comments of Igor, a young psychologist at Tomorrow’s Builders. Linking stability to a social-reformist project, he told me that given the choice between a more democratic
Russia and Putin’s model of “central control,” he would still choose the later “because people need stability in their lives in order to begin to live.” He continued, “When I look around the city, I like what I see. There are renovations, the improvement of daily life, a rising quality of life, and cafes.” He said that stability is the quickest way to arriving at a Russia where he will feel safe raising a child. He then gave one very
321 profound example: his brother recently died in a car accident, and it took the emergency services an hour to arrive. By the time they did, his brother had died.
I want to live in a place where basic life services like that are faster, more responsive. I was recently in Helsinki. One night I decided I would go for a walk at night on the empty highway. I would never do this in Russia, but in Finland there was the silence, the occasional passing car. Nobody was paying attention to me. It was a safety that was calming, unusual. It’s a safety that you have in the US, too, and I envy it. After spending just one week in Finland, I no longer throw cigarettes on the ground. But I look around me, and that’s all I see. In general, Russians show a lack of personal responsibility. This needs to change, and stability is a way that this might happen. When free of fear Russians will be able to rely on the government.
In Igor’s view, stability—expressed later in our conversation as a strategic tolerance of
Putin’s “vertical power”—would be required for the “change” (read: instability) of an eventual more fully fledged democratic Russia. The stability of the economy and politics were thus connected with people’s internal stability, in turn linked to the birth of a civic ethics of personal responsibility—the required capacity for living in a more truly unstable (but also choice-filled and “free”) society. Through this circuit, the political-economic and the subjective become linked through the medium of psychological knowledge. And yet, it is also clear that stability can have a deeply conservative character, leading a person interested in social transformation paradoxically to accept the status quo in the name of its overthrow, and producing what Shevchenko calls, in another context, “an incentive for creating defensive institutions” (2009:14). To this point, in a recent New York Times commentary occasioning the 25th the anniversary of perestroika, Mikhail Gorbachev remarked,
“What’s holding Russia back is fear. Among both the people and the authorities, there
322 is concern that a new round of modernization might lead to instability and even chaos.
In politics, fear is a bad guide; we must overcome it” (2010).
Soul as compass
In the face of fear, of being knocked off balance, what gives the self direction?
On what could people rely for their sense of wrong or right, truth or falsehood, in the space of transformation? My interviews confirmed something that other anthropologists, linguists and ethnopsychologists have also said about Russia—that dusha, or soul, is an important source of orientation in the world. Folding into itself notions of both an internal emotional world as well as intimate sociality, dusha was that thing on which one could rely for continuity and direction when facing self- transformation. Dusha has been much-discussed in studies of Russia. As a starting point, a systematic approach has been taken by the Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka
(1992), who draws on literary sources in search of a “semantic metalanguage” to define dusha—that is, a language that does not rely on the culturally laden English terms of soul, mind, and body.133 Citing the many Russian Slavophile writings of the nineteenth century that rail against the soullessness (bezdushie) of the West (1992:61-
62), she suggests that in the West, where rationality has gradually replaced emotional
133 Accepting this argument is not essential to using her definitions of dusha as a point of departure. For other writings on dusha, see Dale Pesmen’s work Russia and Soul. That such definitional rubrics defined through linguistics are by their nature general is something I doubt that Wierzbicka would deny. There are always, for instance, different ways of using language, including with a sense of irony. Yurchak (2006), for instance, has used Austen’s distinction between constative and performative meanings of language to point that any utterance contains both, and further that these two meanings can be at odds with one another. His example: a late-Soviet person’s vote in a Komsomol meeting should not only be read constatively (they are voting, therefore they are unthinking adherents to Communism), but also performatively (they vote in order to make use of the Komsomol resources for their own purposes). Nonetheless, such schematic frameworks do help us to indicate what we might think of as the Russian ideology of dusha.
323 worlds, the concept of soul has become less and less privileged as compared to
“mind”;134 whereas in Russia, dusha has retained a central cultural significance, particularly in a psychological sense.135
Wierzbicka summarizes dusha thus: in distinction to the Cartesian binary mind-body, it is dusha that is counterposed to telo (body). Dusha, thus, remains a source of insight for the person; however, unlike “mind,” dusha “focuses mainly on values and emotions” (1992:47). Dusha is an internal spiritual theater, where feelings are prominent and where events can take place. It is deep and can’t be observed, as in the phrase, “another’s soul is unknowable [chuzhaia dusha potiomki].” Nonetheless, it can be a source of intuition, as in “knowing something in one’s soul”—a knowledge that is not purely factual, but related to values. Dusha is also a locus of human will, as in “soul strength [dushevnaia sila].” When one is depressed, it is the soul that is in trouble: a term for mental illness is dushevnobol’nyi, or, literally, soul-sick. “Thus,” she concludes, “the Russian dusha is used very widely and can refer to virtually all aspects of a person’s personality: feelings, thoughts, will, knowledge, inner speech, ability to think” (Wierzbicka 1992:52).
134 This assertion, like any in strongly systematized ethnopsychology, can be questioned. For instance, while Weber’s iron cage of rationality has indeed pervaded many areas of cultural life in the West, the rise of religious fundamentalism in the US, for instance, has also injected less reason-bound notions of soul and heart into everyday discourse. We should thus assume similar kinds of exceptions in the Russian case. 135 Wierzbicka for some reason does not emphasize the cosmic (or in her language “transcendental) dimension of dusha; perhaps this is because she was writing closer to the Soviet period. She suggests that Soviet materialism denied this meaning of soul, citing a Soviet kindergarten rhyme: “but science teaches us that the soul doesn’t exist [no nauka dokazal shto dushi ne sushchestvuet].” Nonetheless, dusha in its psychological meaning would be used by party officials to refer to the moral aspects of a personality—as in the case of a “spirit” that cannot be broken, and should not be softened (1992:37).
324 Dusha also contains a social dimension. Part of this rests on dusha’s knowable nature. “The emotions and the thoughts that one has in one’s dusha [v dushe] and the feelings that one has ‘on’ one’s dusha [na dushe] are hidden to outsiders, but there is no implication that they may be hidden to the ‘insider.’” In Russian many phrases suggest a desire to share one’s inner-states with another, to “exteriorize them”: ilit’ dushu (to pour out one’s soul); otvesti dushu (to relieve one’s soul); otkryt’ dushu (to open one’s soul); dusha narapashku (a wide-open soul); razgovarivat’ po dusham (to talk from soul to soul). “What these expressions suggest is that although other people cannot know what goes on in a person’s dusha without being told, there is an expectation that normally people would want, and need, to tell someone what goes on there (57; my emphases).” In fact, hiding dusha from friends is seen as bad, and the opposite of zadushevnost’ (literally “behind-the-soulness), which is what one does when really letting friends in on something intimate (1992:57-58).136
With this perhaps overly schematic view of dusha, I now turn to the discussions of dusha that I encountered in the field. I found similar emphases, encompassing both dusha as inner-guide, as something opposed to the body, and the spark of sociality. And what was particularly interesting was the way that people deployed dusha in the face of the personal decisions they faced in Russia’s market economy. In one of Olessia’s sessions, for instance, a client wanted to work through a problem related to career decisions. She was a translator of legal documents into
136 This discourse of dusha has been linked elsewhere to other concepts denoting intimacy discussed in this dissertation, including deep conversation, or communion (obshchenie), kitchen talk (kukhonnyi razgovor), and one’s close friends (svoi). See Yurchak (2006), Pesmen (2000) and Ries (1997).
325 English, and was making good money, but confessed, “I feel that the work is not good for dusha. Or, perhaps, it is not dusha’s work.” In the same session, another participant confronting a job as a banker or a psychologist, wanted to know, “Which is the better thing to do? What is better for me? Not only for money, but also for me as a person, for dusha?”
That clients were asking these questions in trainings suggests that psychologists have successfully claimed expertise of dusha. In many cases, this was an inherited relationship resulting from the assertion of one of their own gurus.
Nikolai, relating his story of conversion to me said, “When I heard Tolkachov’s system, I got a new relation to my body [telo] and dusha. I suddenly understood that my parents were not bad parents. It rearranged my whole life and my understanding of the world.” Similarly, another practitioner told me that when she enrolled to study medical psychology at LGU in the 1970s, she knew that there would be no work.
When I asked why she enrolled, she replied, “It had to do with dusha. I was free- spirited [vol’nyi].” She added, “Psychology resonates especially well with Russian dusha because it is connected to the desire to understand one’s inner world, which is an open and complex space.” Even Svetlana, a medical psychologist who wears a white coat and works in a psychiatric clinic, made such a link: “I was at first interested in medicine, but if we take the difference between biology and psychology, then, the world of the person and the world of dusha seemed more meaningful and more interesting. I was always one who thought about what was happening in my own life, what’s in dusha. And so I reasoned that the dusha of others is also interesting.”
326 Through dusha, many practitioners had not only found practice psychology, but also located their legitimacy as advisors on personal transformation. In this vein, and in contrast to what Wierzbicka writes about the inscrutability of dusha for
“outsiders,” many like Olessia claimed to be able to feel the soul-suffering of another.
Recounting a story of experience doing individual consulting, she said,
[The client] is sitting there, and he has no emotion on his face. He sits, talks about these things that are unpleasant, even heavy. But he reflects no emotions. He speaks with a calm voice, no intonation. But inside of me everything is being squeezed and I can feel his tears. I don’t feel sorry for him. I have caught his condition [Ia lovliu ego sostoianie]. So I say to him, ‘You want to cry right now.’ And he says, ‘Yes.’ Because it’s like I feel his tears. I have this ability.”
What makes this work, she says, is that the situation “calls to the soul [vyzyvaetsia k dushe],” and that, with dusha, she can “feel his condition” and “catch its field [lovliu polia].” Such statements also indicated the fact that, unlike in the Protestand and
Catholic contexts, where people tend to possess their souls, and where soul can be identified with them individually, dusha is more like a force that may or may not be connected to the person.
Depending on the context, dusha could be historicized in different ways.
Recall the words of Vladimir Mikhailovich, the psychotherapist trained in the Soviet period, whose critique of Soviet psychotherapy was that it was only concerned with
“the people” (narod) and not “the separate person” and his “soul suffering” “bol’ dushevnyi.” Yet while he saw a surge in dusha after the Soviet collapse, Olessia saw the opposite: speaking about the workplace, she told me that it is not uncommon for one’s boss to “pick up on” (poimet) the fact that one is troubled (in her terms, showing a soulful feeling (dushevnyi perezhivanie)), and try to help. She added, “But now
327 relations with the boss and workers are already more formalized. Everything is more harsh, whereas earlier [dusha] was more accounted for.”
Regardless of historicization, most psychologists considered themselves experts of dusha. Olessia’s imperative to “work with the soul” (rabotat’ s dushoi) meant drawing on this moral compass as a counseling resource, and as a way to discovering what is “true” (pravda) for that person, without any particular need to arrive at what is universally true (istina)137: “[E]veryone has their [claim to deep] truth
[istina] and that’s fine. I steer away from that. I try to say, what are you feeling? What is happening now? How is it reflected in your body [kak v svoim tele otrazhaetsia]?
Where is this hurt located in your body?” To illustrate the relevance of dusha’s relative truth (pravda) and importance in therapy, she gave the example of the
American human potential psychologist, Carl Rogers’, approach to group therapy.
He didn’t dictate a vector of psychological movement [vector dvizheniia] to the group. The group would begin to interact, and certain problems would appear through interactions, certain emotions would appear [rozhdaetsia], and he would work with these emotions with these soul conditions [s sosoianiami dushevnemi]. That is, that power chooses [etot vlast’ vybiraet].
In comparison to Olessia, Nikolai was even more explicit in asserting dusha’s role in orienting oneself: he told me about a new psychological theory with which he was experimenting called “transurfing.” Drawing on the metaphor of the pirated compilation DVD, a mainstay of Russia kiosks at the time, he said the idea is that one’s life is a DVD filled with different movies. One can choose any number of movies for one’s life. The question, he said, is how to choose, and most people are not
137 Yurchak explains the difference here as being between deep, cosmic truths (istina), and political or “clear” ones (pravda) (2006:126-127).
328 sufficiently attentive to dusha. “We can’t understand our path because we look from the mind—only our dusha can see the way to happiness—we can’t hear dusha. Dusha doesn’t choose the goal. It can only give advice. We can choose whatever we want; but only dusha can see the disk. The problem is that we are all sleeping. We need to become more aware.”
These materials suggest that as an internal theater of emotion and a source of wisdom, dusha was being integrated into contemporary problems, and used as a guide through personal and ethical dilemmas. The continual invocation of dusha in relation to questions of career and money seemed also to highlight the instability of question of value—whether economic or ethical. The anthropologist Michael Lambek, paraphrasing Simmel, notes that “money transforms quality into quantity,” or, in
Kantian terms, dignity into price (2008:136). Dusha, then, was marshaled not so much in opposition to Western “soulless” reason or mind, as Wierzbicka’s reading would have it, but rather as an alternative to the conversion, through the market, of ethical value into economic value.
“Energy”: internal state/gendered phenomenon/unit of measure
Was there anything particularly new or postsocialist about this use of dusha discourse, other than its integration into psychological forms of knowledge? Indeed, as
Serguei Oushakine has suggested, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, one dimension of the disorientation people experienced was “post-Soviet aphasia,” or
“regression to symbolic forms of the previous historical period that has been caused by…the society’s distintegrated ability to find proper verbal signifiers for the
329 signifieds of the new socio-political regime” (2000:994). In other words, people failed to find the terms for expressing both what had happened to them, as well as what kinds of futures they envisioned for themselves, resulting in a kind of cultural speechlessness.
Based on my findings, psychology seems to have found success in the marketplace as a symbolic resource for making sense of things and learning how to act. In these final sections, I elaborate on two concepts that appeared prominently, not only in interviews, but in the psychological discourse circulating in Russia through ads and TV more broadly: energy (energiia) and harmony (garmoniia). These concepts supplement the long-standing discourse of dusha. While fear and stability were problems referenced by psychologists that people ultimately confronted in solitude, references to the concepts of energiia and garmoniia were more productive, individually, socially and morally. “Energy” (energiia), as in a kind of psychic property of both individuals and groups, seemed to stitch things—self and person, groups, societies—together.138 Another closely related term, “harmony” (garmoniia) was an important goal of psychological work, where a person would strive not only for
“internal harmony,” but also harmony with others. The distinctly social nature of these
138 “Energy” is a foundational concept in Freudian psychoanalysis. In Freud’s theories, psychic energy is the source of our drives, and takes two forms—libidal energy, and the death instinct. The primary goal of therapy is the redirection of misdirected energies away from neurotic responses. In fieldwork, it was not clear that it was specifically this kind of energy that was being discussed. As to whether there is a Russian vernacular form of energiia, Sergei Oushakine’s study suggests that the term has a nationalist dimension in the form of a post-Soviet “ethnovitalist” movement in which patriotic sentiment has warned against the dissipation of “energies” in the face of the “Russian tragedy” of diminishing birthrates, abortion, and swelling immigration (2009:115-129). Yet neither of these specific kinds of energy was ever cited. Thus, it seems more empirically appropriate to view energiia as a floating signifier. As the accounts here suggest, the invocation of energiia could be various and sometimes contradictory; however, in most cases energiia was part of a rhetorical strategy used to anchor the claim being made in a kind of psycho-biologized nature.
330 concepts signals an attempt by practitioners to articulate a postsocialist personal ethics that welds together the personal and the social. What I highlight in this section is the way that the presence of gender norms in many instances created a conflict for practitioners, straining their gender-neutral conceptions of “self-realization.”
*
In the most basic form, energiia was a life current that could be sensed by specialists. It was thus a psychological phenomenon. As Volodya, a transpersonal psychologist, told us in a three-day training on “The Psychotherapist as Shaman,” before beginning we should “get in touch with our energiia and become more rooted.”
Not just people, but also particular expressions could also possess or lack energiia: after asking me to describe what it was that I wanted to address in her course, Olessia confessed that she wasn’t “feeling any energiia from [my] problem.” Related, energiia could also be constituted by particular experiences, and then dissipate. Describing to me the post-training euphoria that some of his clients experience, Nikolai said that many “enjoy the training, have energiia, but then after two or three weeks the effects wear off.” Vitya Markov suggested that energiia was not only an invigorating essence.
Talking about the numbing effects of too many trainings, he said, “The power of inertia [it’s] a natural energiia in psychology, a drive to the status quo. It reinforces the old structures.”
This mysterious energiia also had a social life. Groups could have it or loose it, and its presence could prepare the ground for psychological work by creating a means of unreserved and excited exchange. Volodya spoke of an energiia that flows between people with which he works in his consulting work. Olessia spoke at length about her
331 growing frustration with her course on women’s sexuality because, lacking any men in the room, things seemed somehow flat. “We would gradually go along, and there is no anger, no energiia. Instead, it’s a certain state (sostoianie), it’s like [she inhales and holds her breath].” She explained that “when there are women and men together they drive each other along [oni sami drug druga goniat],” and that the presence of both sexes “helps the group energy [grupovaia energiia],” creating a “spark” (iskra) that
“adds something unconscious…an instinct; it’s human nature.” Further, without this
“spark” “it’s harder to see [uvidet] the true natural essence [istinaia sushnost’ prirody] of these women.”
If fear was something that inhibited people, made them less confident and unhappy and prompted them to seek stability, then learning how to channel energiia was often discussed as a way forward. Nikolai spoke a lot about “the rule of moving energiia in human relations,” and often suggested that if one can learn to master this rule, various forms of good fortune—financial, social, sexual—would follow. He mentioned something called an “agregor” of “special psychic energiia”: “When many
[people] want something [at the same time], they provide a special energiia to a pendulum (agregor)” that can make things happen. He added, “many people in our life want to take our energiia through making rules. One must destroy one’s connection to those people.” Energiia was thus also a sensitive and valuable commodity, subject to imbalance disturbance and corruption. In another conversation, Nikolai told me that
“the hotspots [centers of conflict] in the world are strong mixes of what he called
“urethral” and “muscular” personality types—roughly equivalent to the hot-headed
332 and the mindlessly physical. He attributed their rise, and our “current course to world cataclysm” to “a diversion of energiia from its realization.”
These discussions of energiia are reminiscent of Durkheim’s (1995) concept of effervescence. For energiia identified a perceived social force that, like the idea of collective effervescence, could lead to experiences bordering on the psychic-mystical, and transform members of the group. One key difference, however, is that energiia was also a matter of a relation to oneself. In other words, not only through sociality, but also through certain forms of self-reflection could a particular ecstatic state of being take hold. Nonetheless, like the magical energy of the social, energiia could also propel practitioners and clients into almost mystical forms of psychological practice.
To give one example, when I returned to St. Petersburg in 2007, I found that a new fad was sweeping the psychology community—something called “systemic constellation” (sistemnaia rastanovka). Conceived by a German psychotherapist named Bert Hellinger, systemic constellation was based on the idea that people carried certain psychic scars that could be passed down genealogically, which had the power to trouble them across generations. The example I recall was that an aborted child must be properly acknowledged by the younger sibling, otherwise, various psychological problems can be manifested. The proper way of managing the problem involves a form of group psychodrama. In this process, the participant first describes the “symptom” (simptom) to the practitioner, and then selects “substitutes”
(zamestiteli) for the relevant actors as well as oneself. Then, from the side, she watches as the practitioner moves the substitutes around, like pieces on a chess board, asking them questions and asking them to respond with words and movement
333 according to whatever energiia they feel at that moment. The idea is that energiia possesses a certain historical truth that will reveal, and potentially expel, whatever problem underlies the symptom.
I touch on this popular form of psychodrama because it was, at least in 2007, a prominent way in which energiia was being discussed and used. It relied heavily on belief—belief in energiia, indeed, belief in the idea that one’s problems might be related to past events that had nothing to do with oneself. Nikolai suggested that he was, as yet, a neophyte. “I believe it, but feel no energiia.” And a certain Natalia, in answer to my skepticism, suggested that that energiia was real. “Don’t you experience something when, for instance, you miss your child? A pull? We can speak of energiia in this way.” With reference to Durkheim, energiia’s effectiveness does not require a belief in a cosmic force. Rather, the effervescence and also disciplinary power of the social group, as I discovered in my own turns as a “substitute” could be enough to compel people to move in certain ways.
I have given so much detail about energiia—its flexibility as a concept, the way it links the interior and exterior, the personal and the social—because it was a master term by which practitioners made links between personal issues and questions of social and economic value, intimate sociality, and even politics. Energiia had an ontological status in relation to psychic health, as well as sex and money. On receiving my payment for her psychology training course, held in her living room with just a handful of close friends, Vera beamed, “When you pay a lot of money for something it means you really value it. Your money—it’s like energiia; you’re giving me your energiia.” Nikolai, meanwhile, suggested that “money is a variant of energiia, and sex
334 is another.” Even in the rather new-age systemic constellation seminar I attended, most “symptoms” were unrelated to family problems. Rather, participants were keen to learn which career to choose; whether to follow what is good for dusha or one’s wallet; whether to uproot oneself from one’s community in search of a job.
The range of issues, focused as they were on questions about work, and the tension between making money and being a soulful person, suggests that energiia, the supposed resource for social effervescence, was thus a psychological idiom or vehicle for interrogating and navigating issues linked to being a social person in a market society. What, then, would the ends be? Having escaped strakh, found inner stabil’nost’ through having harnessed one’s own, and perhaps others’ energiia, how should these psychological methods constitute a social mode of being-in-the-world?
Harmony as means
Together with energiia, garmoniia articulated a particular social circuit through which a person’s inner-wellbeing could come to be linked to another’s. Based on the titles of psychological trainings in Petersburg at the time, the word itself seemed to capture something important for practitioners attempting to advertise their services. Their were courses on “harmonious relations,” an institute called Harmony, and even the Ministry of Education had termed the work of psychologists working with problem children in schools as soprovozhdenie, a term that means not only advice-counseling, but also a form of “accompaniment” that characterizes two instruments playing a duet harmoniously.
335 The concept suggested a desired social form, but it was rooted, firstly, in the self. Specifically, garmoniia described an internal state, so that, for instance
“harmonious relations” (garmonichnye otnosheniia) would primarily refer to one’s relation with oneself. For some, a state of harmony traversed somatic and psychological aspects of the person. For others it was an exclusively psychological phenomenon. The keenest theorizer of garmoniia whom I encountered in my fieldwork was Nikolai Bazov, a psychotherapist in his thirties running his own business, which I’ll term Verity. Bazov had for the last decade been teaching his
“vectors system,” a psychological theory of human personality types based on a dynamics of one’s “genetic potential”—that is, what one is given—and the degree to which that genetic potential is realized, which is based on self-acceptance. When these two “vectors”—genetic potential and realization—are in a state of garmoniia, then one is most likely to be both happy and successful. And as he repeatedly told me, genetic potential was not what was important for a person’s happiness, wellbeing or success; rather it was garmoniia.139 “The ideal,” Nikolai told me, “is when all eight vectors are in harmony. Realization, manifestation, harmony—this is my work.” Interestingly, this way of thinking about self-work did not necessarily lead to excessive comparison according to particular cultural norms. Because the desired state of harmony could be
139 As for the different potentials under examination, these extended a Freudian mapping of the human body based on oral, anal and genital to a scheme of 8 color-coded “holes”—conceived as the points of exchange with the outside world. In addition to Freud’s three, these included the eyes, ears, skin/pores, muscles and nose. A set of personality characteristics were connected with each of these, and Nikolai would start each course by having participants take an 80-question quiz to determine which of these were most dominant. Someone who tested as having a strong “anal character” would be meticulous, neat, and so forth; people with a dominant “visual character” would be strongly interested in aesthetics and environment; persons with a “nasal character” would be interested in food.
336 achieved primarily through self-acceptance, Nikolai was not promoting unpalatable versions of self-fashioning.
This harmonious interiority could then be replicated at multiple social levels as well, with either a positive or negative relation. Discussing the importance of acceptance (priniatie) for harmony, Nikolai said that if a person “can understand and accept the vectors in another person, then harmony in the family results. If you can do this at work, then there will be harmony in the collective. And then on the planetary level if you can understand and accept other countries then harmony will be planetary.
I consider this system to be very holistic [ekologicheskie].”
As one might suppose, however, the existence of racism, ethnocentrism, or male chauvinism always had the potential to adversely influence one’s garmoniia.
Commenting on this, Olessia remarked, “There are very few harmonious women in
Russia who are just fine with who they are [khorosho shto im kakie est’].” She went on to describe the enormous expectations placed on women to look a certain way.
Discriminated against in the workplace, and discouraged from finding their own jobs, they become completely dependent on their husbands for a sense of self-worth.
Nikolai also discerned a problem of garmoniia specifically for women: “The big question for women in Russia is that they have no harmony in their private lives, in sex, in relationships with others. Many have sexual problems.”
At the same time, however, garmoniia was also sometimes used to reinforce those very socially imposed norms, something that Nikolai was particularly prone to doing: discussing Irina Khakamada, a well-known female political figure in Russia at the time, he told me, “You can tell by looking at her that she lacks garmoniia in her
337 private life. It is seen in the stress on her face, the harsh features. She is nervous. She is strong. But she is not happy. Many either don’t have husbands, or have bad relationships with them.” On other occasions he told me that he thought that it was a global problem that men had become feminized and women masculinized in that this disturbed the family, which was to be the source of global harmony.
This gets at a critique of psychotherapy more generally. That is, in helping clients to accept who they are without interrogating the cultural patterns, forms of knowledge and relationships that may have led them there can have the deleterious effect of reproducing relations of inequality in insidious ways. Vitya Markov said this in so many words when attempting to describe the lack of garmoniia in the Soviet period, asserting that “duties, desires and obligations should be in a kind of harmonious relation—not structured around the imposition of stubborn rules and their violation.” As a political logic, this breaks down once desire has also been subsumed by the normative. In any case, Markov, too, said that “what is always necessary is to harmonize the relations between us that essentially define us as human beings.” That these could be disturbed was suggested by Vera, when she found herself alone with a young baby and no support, and “the garmoniia in my life flew away.”
For the purposes of this chapter, it is important to highlight how these commonsensical ideas of inter- and intra-personal harmony were also redirected to address some of the challenges specific to the post-Soviet period, in particular coping with the way questions of gender, money and value were altering sociality and the harmony therein. Tamara Grigorievna, the director of Tomorrow’s Builders, in describing their efforts to give Russian children “psychological education,” said, “[In
338 our work] we take less of an interventionist approach, and try to develop the values of development, harmony, success, and self-certitude. We are teaching new values and a new language in Russia.” Thus, garmoniia could itself be considered a value.
Yet when entered into the calculus of new socio-economic relations in Russia numerous kinds of ethical ambivalence arise around garmoniia. For all the talk of global harmony or dusha, most practitioners also had to cater to a language of success and promotion. Nikolai, for example, would sometimes slip into an aggrandizing form of self-promotion. In one conversation, I asked him whether a harmonious person could be recognized: he replied, “He is completely sure of himself [on dovolen soboi], he is good for himself, comfortable, harmonious, he doesn’t fall into depression from some kind of failure, he knows what he wants. Second, he has the ability to build harmonious relations with his surroundings—with the family, work, business, and so on.” And in another conversation he told me that, like “money being a variant of energiia” (see above), there could also be something called “money garmoniia,” whereby the same energy that flowed within and between people also flowed through relations structured by money and sexual desire. The harmonious disposition of these relations could lead to all kinds of success, he promised.
It was also evident, however, that Nikolai would at times regret the things he’d said, take them back, try to remake them. Thus, after in one moment telling me about his prowess as a teacher of garmoniia in business and money, in the next he would lay out a general critique of those who would define their garmoniia in relation to success:
“Every achievement opens a vista onto a new level of achievement. This is not the path to garmoniia. What makes a person finally harmonious is the realization that ‘I’m
339 human.’ It’s at this point that he may find some sense of garmoniia inside himself and with others.”
Conclusion: [En]gendering Freedom and Social Change
The materials described in this chapter highlight the close relationship between the issues that most concerned psychologists and Russian political economy. The nature of their work, it seems, has been to inject new symbolic life into the languages, techniques and conceptions of “the self” as a post-Soviet object. In light of the difficulties many said they experienced in the Soviet period, this project was given a moral urgency that is difficult to ignore. At the same time, these materials also highlight the deep ambiguities of “learning to be free,” where “freedom” is articulated with, and in some ways reproduces, staid gender norms, commodity forms, the desire for success, and, in many cases, extreme social precariousness.
This chapter began with a statement about psychotherapy in Russia—its historical precursor, its role as a practice of freedom, and its power of social change. I have tried to show how this statement formed the basic background against which informants claimed psychology’s national as well as personal relevance. Some of the most powerful claims for psychology’s contemporary practical ethical relevance come from those discussions of the Soviet past. In asserting the dehumanizing nature of
Soviet mental health and the strained relation between doctor and patient that the system was said to have created, practitioners claimed that their present work was on the front lines of a re-humanizing project.
340 “Leaning to be free” was one perceived benefit of this psychological
“missionizing.” In exploring how certain kinds of “freedom” were situated within three female practitioners’ stories of “psychological becoming,” we saw that freedom was less a thing than a fleeting experience that ebbed and flowed and pushed the women to pursue careers as psychologists. It was tied up in languages of personal overcoming and revelation. Yet the pursuit of internal freedom was also heavily mediated by gender norms of femininity, sexuality and motherhood, and could also be read as examples of the social vulnerability that political and market reforms engendered. The story of psychological becoming and freedom was thus also a staging ground for ethical dilemmas strung between particular liberal notions of freedom, competing impulses related to domestic obligation and femininity, as well as the marketplace’s gendering of skill.
As a lens onto the affective landscapes of the post-Soviet period, psychological concerns also seemed to crystallize around particular terms like strakh and stabil’nost’—terms that had a broader socio-political significance. I used this to suggest that it would be wrong to view post-Soviet psychological work as an apolitical pursuit. On the contrary, the redeployment of dusha as a means of moral orientation in the face of the increased rationalization and commodification of daily life suggested a direct engagement with the question of how to live under new articulations of moral and material value. As was also suggested, however, the “progressive” nature of these politico-ethical engagements was questioned. The pursuit of stabil’nost’ and dusha could also reinforce the status quo through a politics of risk-aversion.
341 If discussions of fear, stability, and dusha contained a conservative kernel, energiia and garmoniia seemed to till new ground between the personal and the political. Drawing on a rhetoric of social flow and resonance, psychologists articulated new languages of self and self-transformation. Interestingly, the gender norms that underwrote the more conservative idioms reappeared in various ways in relation to energiia and garmoniia. Particularly with garmoniia, there were instances in which traditional assignations of gender roles, as well as the reduction of social life to economic value were brought into conflict with psychological notions of self- garmoniia. Yet at other times, while money was almost always in conflict with dusha, it could nevertheless be a form of energy one gives to another. And there were also instances where the language of sex and success were threaded through garmoniia.
In concluding this chapter, I want to suggest a few points for further exploration. Running through all of these discussions is a tension between what
Michael Lambek has identified as virtue and (economic) value. Lambek, following in the footsteps of Marx, Weber and Simmel argues for the incommensurability of value and virtue—especially in these neoliberal times. Based on my fieldwork, this assertion also appears to be of central importance to psychologists and psychotherapists working in post-Soviet Russia, whose work has placed “the self” at the center of this cultural negotiation. Their work is therefore a crucial site in which to investigate how virtue and value are navigated in a place that, for many, remained a repository of utopian dreams in an alternate, non-capitalist world, but has now embraced acquisitiveness with the vigor of its former foe. Virtue and value, at least in the psychological work I studied, remain far from collapsed. Rather, in response to the
342 “crisis of subjectivation” that followed the Soviet collapse and the arrival of the market economy, new practices of the self have been developed in which people with expertise in behavior and emotions are making new sense of the post-Soviet period.
Through psychological knowledge they are rethinking the relationship between self and world, self and change, self and money, and, finally, the pursuit of the good life.
In some cases, new articulations can be seen coming into view, while in others, such as with gender identities, stultifying arrangements are simply being re-inscribed. That these ethical dilemmas are messy and unresolved is what makes them “post-Soviet.”
In the final chapter of this dissertation, I turn to a final concrete, and yet also virtual, space of practice—a call-in radio show which offers psychological advice to listeners. Through an analysis of the host-caller interactions, I add specificity to practitioners’ claims that psychotherapy and psychology have something to offer to discussions of Russia’s social and political problems, and learning to be free.
343 CHAPTER 7
Moscow’s Echo: Technologies of the self, publics and politics on the Russian talk show
The woman cooking cabbage. The man who wishes he could be done with drink. They are the game’s remoter soul. Connected by the pulsing voice on the radio, joined to the word-of-mouth that passes the score along the street and to the fans who call the special phone number and the crowd at the ballpark that becomes the picture on television, people the size of minute rice, and the game as rumor and conjecture and inner history.
-Don DeLillo, Underworld (1997)
I don’t want to call the broadcast, but I want to talk about my phobia. It’s a fear of death, fear of the unknown, what comes next. I think that many have this. -Sergei, text message sent to the Echo of Moscow, 2 July 2005
The rise of the talk show, or tok-shou (lest there be any doubt of its origins), has been impressive in Russia. Beginning with perestroika in the mid-1980s, and accelerating with the arrival of the market economy, talk shows have come to occupy a central place on Russian TV and radio. Part of their attraction resides in what
Michael Warner terms the “appeal of mass subjectivity,” where, by entering the uncanny feedback of a mass public—that place where radio callers hear themselves hearing themselves as the host asks them to turn down the dial in the other room— audience members can experience the fantastic contradiction of being embodied and
344 self-abstracted simultaneously (2002:168).140 But talk shows are also popular in
Russia because they offer audiences a chance to speak and be heard at a time when there continues to be much to say about politics, economy and everyday struggles.
This chapter is about the emergence of a new style of post-Soviet talk show—one that offers its callers and listeners psychological advice—and the political work it does. It investigates the ways in which, by disseminating novel techniques of the self and organizing listeners into live publics, such talk shows have helped reshape “the self” as an object of government in postsocialist society.141
140 Warner argues that mass publics attract subjects because of a “utopian desire” for self-abstraction that is always, also, potentially self-fulfilling. This utopianism is genealogically rooted in the bourgeois public sphere, where a “privileged public disembodiment” (i.e. white and male) was the condition of public participation. In the era of virtual reality, mass publics no longer negate bodies through self-abstraction, but rather allow one to “trade [one’s body] in for a better model.” (2002:176). Talk radio is thus a related, albeit elementary, form of virtual reality in which the dialectic between self-abstraction and self-fulfillment is experienced through a mass (psychologized) self. 141 Foucault’s (1988; 1990; 2005) phrase “techniques of the self” refers to a set of practices, or arts of existence, through which self-cultivation is practiced that both constrain and enable subjects. When deployed through a talk show, these are given greater potential force. Warner’s non-normative concept of “a public” is useful here. He defines it as a contingent, self-perpetuating relation among strangers that relies on circulating texts—or in this case, radio programs—which are “reflexive.” Like techniques of the self, such publics also mediate subjectivity by shaping ways of relating to oneself and others through participation—in this case psychotherapeutically mediated forms of public intimacy. Moreover, they are of social import because they “make stranger relationality normative.” This is what gives publics their “expansive force [as] cultural forms” (Warner 2002:76). Barry et al. (1996a) extend Foucault’s notion of techniques of the self to his concept of governmentality (1991). Combining an examination of techniques of the self with a focus on the practices, regulatory mechanisms and disciplinary mechanisms of government, these scholars have opened a space of inquiry into how the voluntary processes of becoming a subject are mediated by relations of power, expert knowledge and the management of populations.
345 A glimpse at the television programs airing at the time of my fieldwork in
2005-2006 reveals that psychotherapeutic expertise, nearly non-existent under communism, has risen to a place of esteemed prominence in studio.142 Consider
Channel One’s daytime line-up: on the program “Lolita. Without Complexes” (Lolita.
Bez Kompleksov), where the pop singer Lolita Miliavskaia aims to “discard the masks that hidden feelings lurk behind” and help guests “change their lives,” “professional psychologists and psychotherapists are always present to give…concrete advice and help them to find the path out of their most hopeless situations.” In the slot just prior, on “Understand. Forgive” (Poniat’. Prostit’.), the guest enters in the spot-lit office of two psychotherapists, and not only is given a consultation, but an expanded investigation of her life, including televised visits home, at work, and in “those places where conflict happens.” “It’s not just an office visit, but many meetings, many conversations, a concrete problem and its real resolution. The reconstructive story of
142 As I discussed in chapter 2, there are important political and ideological reasons for the near absence of a Soviet psychotherapy tradition. For the first decade and a half after the revolution, applied psychology—pedology (child studies), educational and industrial psychology—was thought to be a science well-poised to contribute to the building of a New Soviet Man (Bauer 1959:107; Rose 1996b:15). But for a combination of reasons—psychology’s “bourgeois” heritage; its vulnerability to the charge of subjectivist idealism; its unpalatable research results—psychology came under increasing ideological pressure in the 1930s. Applied work was especially severely curtailed. Only in the 1970s did clinical psychology enter a limited number of psychiatric institutions (Lauterbach 1984). By the 1980s, however, new therapeutic approaches were appearing in form of books, and with the delegations of the American Association of Humanistic Psychology (Hassard 1990); and by the late 1980s the first psychotherapy institutes appeared in Russia. In light of this history and the limited exposure most Russians have had to therapy, the popularity of psychological advice on talk shows is striking.
346 the cure of a patient takes place on one program.”143 One of the most successful hosts of this genre is the psychotherapist Andrei Kurpatov, a household name among practitioners and laypeople, whose Channel One show, immodestly titled “We will solve everything with Doctor Kurpatov” (Vse Reshim s Doktorom Kurpatovym), was the first to open the therapeutic session to viewers. Seated opposite his guest, “the pale youth with the burning gaze” (Stepanova 2006) provides couples therapy and treats irrational phobias.
Such programs, distinctly post-Soviet in their emphasis on mass-mediated personal disclosure, comprise 13% of the weekday broadcast minutes between 9 am and 9 pm on Russia’s five main channels (Channel One, 5, NTV, Domashnii, Rossiia).
More strikingly, during those hours the chances are one-in-four that the state-run
Channel One is airing an advice talk show.144 As an Izvestia writer put it, “Channel
One has taken the healing of the population seriously” (Petrovskaia 2006).
The emphasis on psychotherapy on talk shows is another important part of the complex story I have been tracing in this dissertation of how the refashioning subjectivities out of the remnants of Soviet experience is unfolding at the intersection of market forces, state governance, and new forms of expertise. Despite a lay association in Russia of “psy” with illness and skepticism about psychotherapy’s key idioms—introspection and confession to a paid stranger—many are experimenting
143 All quotations are taken from the shows’ promotional materials on the web (Kanal 2008a; Kanal 2008b). Both aired on Russia’s state-run Channel One. “Lolita. Without Complexes” was discontinued. “Understand. Forgive.” is ongoing. Translations here, and throughout, are my own unless otherwise noted. 144 Values calculated as of 13 April 2007. This includes psychological/lifestyle programs, plus several health advice shows that include the “soul” as a target. (For more on “soul,” see fn. 7.)
347 with popular psychotherapeutic forms.145 Since the 1990s, aside from talk-show therapists, a bustling new self-help market has spun out gurus, psychics, group therapists, coaches, family consultants, children’s specialists and leadership trainers, all of whom serve a clientele eager to undertake the next set of experiments in self- fashioning. The reasons for the new psychotherapy market are complex. They include all the ordinary, but nonetheless important, motives: curiosity, healing, self- realization, happiness, improved relations, boredom, fashion; however, one important factor has undoubtedly been the connection made between psychological training
(trening) and what people take to be important for succeeding in a market society. As such, therapeutic idioms like self-esteem, self-realization, self-knowledge, self- management, independence, personal potential and responsibility have articulated with consumer desire, capitalist self-fashioning and careerism.
The state has also given psychologists new legitimacy. As I discussed in chapter 5, while for most of the Soviet period, psychologists graduated and found few jobs, in the 1990s, along with the growth in commercial therapies, the Ministry of
Education has overseen the creation of psychology positions in schools and an expanding network of municipal psychological centers. These new work opportunities have translated into new university departments and training programs. And since
2001, the work of the psychologist has been linked to Russia’s geopolitical and
145 Regarding the skepticism of psychotherapeutic idioms, Pesmen notes how in Russia far more common than a discourse of “self” (sebia; samost’] and its actualization, investigation, analysis or fulfillment, is a discourse of “soul” (dusha], which refers to personhood, self, or identity. This concept fuses the liberal distinction between the self and the person (the individual vitiated by society) (2000:15-18). Because of its social and almost mystical nature, Dusha resists navel-gazing, paying a stranger to discuss oneself, as well as the incursion of science into one’s interiority.
348 economic future: invoking the almost banal global discourse of flexible citizenship
(1999), the Ministry of Education’s decree in 2001 to “modernize” education has brought special attention to the development of new kinds of productive citizens through psychological work.146
This chapter analyzes the intersection of psychological expertise and talk shows in order to pry apart further some of these complex issues related to the technologies of healthy selfhood seventeen years after the collapse of communism, and to investigate them in relation to the political. Drawing from the literature that has linked the “psy” disciplines and its technologies of the self to neoliberal governmentality (Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979; Rose 1996a; Rose 1996b), I explore the resonance between psychotherapeutic techniques, self-governance and governing selves in Russia.147 A close analysis of a radio talk show, For Adults about
Adults (Vzroslym o Vzroslykh) hosted by psychologist Mikhail Labkovsky, suggests that psychotherapy, talk shows and politics have collided to produce a robust neoliberal governmentality. This involves not just the deployment of techniques of the self, like self-esteem, but also a proposed reinscription of relations of intimacy that touches on social relations, forms of civic action, citizenship and politics. As I argue,
146 See chapters 3 and 5 for a more detailed discussion of these state developments. 147 Rose (1996a) has drawn connections between the marketization (or de- governmentalization) of state functions and the outsourcing of the government of citizens to the citizen him or herself by constituting the self as a domain of government. Here, power is exercised not on subjects, but through them, aligning their energies and desires for “liberation” with the pursuit of a more efficient polity. “Neoliberal techniques of self,” then, typically entail an increased attention to feelings, employing the skills of psychological and social experts in the development of more fulfilled (and therefore effective) persons.
349 this governmentality is also reinforced performatively, in virtual form, by the synergistic combination of psychotherapy and media, which sutures together subject and public, constantly (re)fusing the boundaries between interior and exterior, subject and public in a way consistent with neoliberalism’s dispersed governmental energy.
I also, however, query the “robustness” of this governmentality by attending to the many listeners who were resistant to Labkovsky’s prescriptions. Through their critical engagements they proposed other solutions to personal problems, and counter- interpretations of selfhood, intimacy and politics. In addition, what should we make of the fact that Labkovsky is speaking as a political (not economic) liberal?148 His technologies of self are not aimed as much at the rational-choice actor as at a particular kind of liberal citizen. This points to the multiple practical ethics tugging on subjectivity in post-Soviet Russia, and, I argue, offers clues to how projects that may appear in one sense to be “neoliberalizing” also articulate with other political rationalities to produce unpredictable discursive formations.
Picking up on the discussions in chapter 3, 4 and 5 in which I explored the numerous forms and expressions of politically liberal thinking in the psy fields, I will argue in this chapter that this unpredictability has implications for rethinking the nature of liberalism more broadly in Russia, which often appears contradictory and multivalent. A close attention to the status, nature, contours and responses to the
148 Wendy Brown (2003) makes a useful distinction between political liberalism (liberal democracy; freedom; rights) and classical economic liberalism (free trade, state non-intervention in economy). These are part of neoliberalism’s genealogy; however, neoliberalism’s “liberalism” hews much more closely to the economic rationality of laissez-faire. Moreover, neoliberalism extends market rationalities (cost-benefit, efficiency, “morally neutral” evaluations based on dollars) to politics, society, and the very fabric of the citizen’s being.
350 techniques on For Adults about Adults suggests that we need to think of liberal assemblages, which combine and recombine a range of liberal technologies and rationalities (utilitarian, welfarist and advanced/neoliberal).149 Such an optic helps to explain why “liberalism” as a political stance can remain a dirty word, while neoliberal rhetoric surfaces in many federal pronouncements pertaining to economic policy and the development of enterprising persons. It also sheds light on the potential political effects of particular liberal assemblages: as I show in this chapter, Mikhail
Labkovsky’s psychotherapeutically inspired, egalitarian, liberal-progressive vision of a future Russia appears nevertheless to serve Putin’s call to sacrifice all for the economy. This is because, in a context in which neoliberal economy has been divorced from liberal politics, one is left with a “neoliberalism without liberals,” a situation that may characterizes neoliberalism more generally, and testifies to the flexible promiscuity, discursive power and political afterlife of neoliberal techniques.150
The talk show, historically, or, “democratization” in miniature
The genealogy of the Russian talk show can be traced to Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, initiated in 1985, which entailed a “reevaluation of values (pereotsenka tsennostei)” that was to take place primarily through mass media (Mickiewicz
149 For more on the assemblage as an analytic of global process, see Ong and Collier (2005). 150 As Wendy Brown notes, “Liberal democracy cannot be submitted to neo- liberal governmentality and survive. There is nothing in liberal democracy’s basic institutions or values—from free elections, representative democracy, and individual liberties equally distributed, to modest power-sharing or even more substantive political participation—that inherently meets the test of serving economic competitiveness or inherently withstands a cost-benefit analysis” (2003).
351 1999:11). At this time, “lively, hard-hitting programs” appeared that broke from more conservative broadcasting to discuss edgy topics like “rock culture, drug abuse, prostitution, youth disaffection, violence, and corruption with unprecedented candor and energy” (Stites 1992:189-190). In addition to offering audiences fresh faces and formats, these programs also opened novel arenas in public discourse, new ways of relating to media and publics, and new political imaginaries. For example, the popular show, Vzgliad (Viewpoint), featured four young journalists around a table whose discussions of sensitive political issues were interspersed with rock music
(Mickiewicz 1988:164-178; Mickiewicz 1999:65-82). So-called extrasensory individuals (ekstrasensy) also appeared, using television as a vehicle for mass healing.
On Good Evening Moscow, psychologist Anatoly Kashpirovsky gazed into the camera while speaking hypnotically, offering his audience “anesthesia at a distance” through the “power of suggestion” (Remnick 1989b; youtube.com 2009b). On 120 Minutes
Allan Chumak talked little, and instead used hand movements to disseminate healing powers through the television. To capture this special energy, viewers would place jars of water and ointment next to the TV for later use (Remnick 1989a; youtube.com
2009a). One of the first interactive Soviet talk shows, 12th Floor, also appeared in
1986. 12th Floor was a popular youth affairs program that filmed young people in their own surroundings using remote cameras. Outside the studio and in real time (which made censorship impossible), teens openly criticized the Komsomol, the quality of schools and textbooks, censorship, and other sensitive topics (Mickiewicz 1999:66-
69). At the same time, Soviet journalist Vladimir Pozner and Phil Donahue had begun
352 a series of telebridges (or space-bridges), which broadcasted the satellite-enabled interactions of Soviet and American audiences (Uehling 1987).
What differentiated Soviet talk shows from American talk shows was a much diminished focus on the personal detail. While in the US, talk shows had opened onto new, tabloid-style confessionals on Donahue and Oprah, in the Soviet Union producers were drawn to the format because its participatory and spontaneous qualities could be used to push political issues, not explore personal affairs. This difference was made particularly clear when Phil Donahue’s programs with Soviet audiences and on
Soviet soil aired in the USSR in 1987 (Broadcasts 1987a; Broadcasts 1987b).
Providing the lead-in was Donahue’s Soviet counterpart, Pozner: “The questions which Donahue asks. The questions, let’s put it this way, are unusual for us; they touch on intimate aspects of family life and as a rule, we don’t take this sort of question onto TV screens. In America it’s the opposite, they don’t just take them, but at times they relish them” (Broadcasts 1987a).
After 1991 something happened. The personal detail became a media currency at the same time that Russian TV underwent what Mickiewicz calls the “American effect” (1999:21): American shows like Santa Barbara, cartoons and movies began airing, spreading a new grammar of televisual styles, including increased violence and more explicit sexual content, and commercialism. Describing those late-Soviet talk shows, Vladimir Pozner had remarked that “the talk-show is one of the most democratic forms, permitting ordinary people to take direct part in TV shows. Not even interactive TV can replace it” (Mogilievskaia 2006). In the post-Soviet media environment, the commercialization of television has pushed talk shows in new
353 directions. While homegrown political talk shows continued, their relevance to questions of governance has become diluted, turning political argument into mere spectacle. Meanwhile, the tabloid-style formats that have proliferated—largely, argues
Mogilevskaia, because of their profitability and conquest of media viewers (2006)— have also expanded the talk show’s democratic associations from an ideal of public participation, to one that entails personal transparency, confession and group therapy.
Neoliberalism and Psychotherapy in Russia
Psychotherapy is not part of a “neoliberal project”; rather, the psychotherapeutic techniques and norms found on talk shows and elsewhere have articulated with a neoliberal political rationality. Responsibilization; prudentialism; entrepreneurial conduct; the constitution of the self as a particular domain of government—these neoliberal techniques are given a kind of psychic content in and through the elaboration of “feelings” as a governing surface; the incitement to liberation; and, to a degree, the encircling of all of these within market rationality. Under other political, economic and social circumstances, one could imagine both the techniques of psychotherapy, and, indeed, the rationalities of neoliberalism, falling under a different name. Nonetheless, the political order in Russia today remains tied to the legacy of neoliberal reforms initiated in the 1990s. Viewing 1991 as an opportunity to drive the final stake through the heart of communism, Western countries and international aid agencies made billions in loans and grants in order to help along “economic restructuring.” In accordance with the Washington Consensus, it was thought that market growth would lead to democratic institutions and the growth of civil society (a
354 view that proved to be wrong). Under Yeltsin, reformers implemented “shock therapy,” swiftly privatizing state assets at bargain basement prices, and implementing a variety of austerity measures, including reduced budget deficits, the elimination of subsidies, price liberalization and tighter credit supply, to free the market from state control (Wedel 1998:45-82). This turns out to have been, as many have joked, all shock and no therapy (Ledeneva 2006), sending Russia lurching through a series of sharp turns. While some got rich quick, many were left extremely vulnerable to massive inflation and diminishing savings, shrinking entitlements, currency devaluation, recession and joblessness that resulted.
As anthropologists of postsocialism have shown, these reforms also entailed particular subject-making projects—which, of course, were not necessarily successful.
Some of these include the deployment of a consumer/service provider model along with the partial privatization of healthcare (Rivkin-Fish 2005); the rationalization of shop-floor management through the inculcation of a regime of standards and performance measures (Dunn 2004:118); and the spread of neoliberal norms in business magazines, including self-centered lifestyles, new kinds of embodied performances, and a blurred boundary between personal and professional life
(Yurchak 2003).
Since Putin came to power, however, the rationality under-girding Russian politics has become more difficult to describe as “neoliberal.” In response to the chaotic 1990s, many now hold a dim view of “liberalism,” no matter the type. The conflation of political and economic liberal streams has served Putin well. He has been able to reverse some reforms of the 1990s by re-nationalizing key industries, and
355 generally strengthening state power vis-a-vis the market, while in the area of social reforms, continue to apply a market rationality—and all without much of a liberal- democratic opposition. Putin’s Russia has come to resemble China, where select neoliberal reforms are combined with authoritarianism (Harvey 2005). As Lilia
Shevtsova notes, the Russian liberals in Putin’s administration have become mere
“adornments” of an emergent “bureaucratic capitalism,” working at the margins of economic policy, serving as convenient lightning rods in the face of unpopular social reforms while at the same time providing a useful ideological cover for attracting foreign-direct investment (2007:113-131). It is in this blend of politics, along with its mixture of individualist, patriotic, liberal, neoliberal and socialist discourses of the self, that psychotherapy is being practiced.
For Adults about Adults
For Adults about Adults airs on the politically liberal, private, nationally broadcast radio station, the Echo of Moscow (Ekho Moskvy).151 Since 2004, the program has been a clearinghouse for personal problems, a place to hear the sad details of the
151 The Echo of Moscow’s corporate structure embodies a political tension important to this chapter. It is owned by Kommersant, one of the most liberal newspapers in Russia, but its largest stakeholder is the state-majority-owned oil and gas giant, Gazprom. Nevertheless, Echo of Moscow was one of the first liberal radio stations in Soviet Russia, and remains a thorn in the side of the political establishment. It first went on the air in August, 1990, and featured straightforward political commentary, and even call-in shows (Remnick 2008). Roughly a third of its programs are call-in programs. Twelve are advice programs, and Labkovsky’s is the only one concerned with psychological issues. (Other major state-run national stations, Radio of Russia and Radio Maiak, have similar figures.) Psychotherapists have a stronger presence on television; nevertheless, this chapter focuses on radio because of the analytic possibilities opened by a higher volume of caller-host interactions, and the immediacy and spontaneity of the therapeutic interactions.
356 alcoholic’s life, to be amused by the pugnacious pensioner, to find something that might be usefully applied to one’s own life, and perhaps even to call and enter the media stream. In the hands of Mikhail Labkovsky, the sympathetic host with the somnambulant voice, the chaos of life seems calmed, secured by advice that is as consistent as the program’s regularly scheduled slot, Saturday night, 10 pm to midnight.152 Labkovsky was educated at Moscow State University and also collaborated with the Canadian Family Mediation Practice. His political views on issues ranging from sexuality, gender and child-rearing, are liberal-progressive.
Drawing on the psychotherapeutic sensibility of American humanistic psychology, he offers his callers a hopeful perspective on their problems: dependence, lack of confidence, dispossession, overwork, domestic abuse—no matter what the problem, change begins within yourself.
Labkovsky’s program is organized thematically, and its topics generally concern either family life (children and divorce, marriage problems, property and gender relations, alcoholism, mental illness) or personal issues (self-transformation, mental health, feeling unfulfilled, psychological dependence, fear). The four months of shows analyzed aired in the first half of 2005 and included over 500 calls or text messages from both men and women of diverse ages (three women for every two men).153 The average stated age of female callers was 48, and for men, 37, but there
152 The program has since moved to 10 pm to 11 pm, and Labkovsky has started another show, called “The Night Program,” about sex, Sunday night from midnight to 2 am. 153 Shows aired between January and July 2005, and analysis was based on transcripts posted on the Echo of Moscow website (http://www.echo.msk.ru/programs/psychology/archive/3.html). In addition to content
357 were also many calls from pensioners and students. As for socioeconomic status, it is generally assumed that psychotherapy is an elite activity, yet the data suggests that the program drew listeners of diverse backgrounds: of those providing adequate information to hazard a guess, a slim majority of listeners described themselves somewhere between working- and middle-class, owning property and living well enough to have some disposable income, but not without financial woes (43%).
Slightly fewer were poor, describing dire living conditions (40%). And 17% were relatively wealthy, mentioning multiple properties, managerial positions, businesses and travel.
A slate of recent reforms was at the front of callers’ minds. On January 1,
2005, pensioners, veterans and others with a privileged social status in the USSR saw their social benefits—e.g. free rides on public transit—monetized. More details on the legal process of privatizing an apartment were issued, stirring anxieties about housing that stretch back through the shortages, shoddy construction and expropriation and communalization of the Soviet period. In March, a new law was ratified allowing people to create housing associations and select alternatives to state-provided maintenance services. A revised family codex amended how assets are divided in divorce, child visitation, and child custody procedures. Together, these introduced new uncertainties into the management of life, rolling back decades of state social support
analysis, I created a database indexing call content, and, when possible caller sex and age. I recorded socioeconomic status according to a basic scheme that was crudely subjective and based on uneven information—e.g. property/business ownership, capital, family/personal situation, profession. Finally, I grouped and counted call types in order to assess patterns in how listeners responded to each week’s theme. Unaccounted for in any substantive way in this analysis, but worthy of mention, is that calls were screened, yielding a particular sample of people with particular issues.
358 and services, introducing new opportunities for citizen initiative, and transforming kinship formations.
Labkovsky’s dual expertise in psychology and law facilitated a discussion of problems at the seam of the political and the personal. Following suit, many treated the program as a place to ask questions, to express worry, to vent or just to be heard. “I want to say that no one belongs to the world now [mir seichas nikomu ne prinadlezhit]. Neither the young, nor the old,” said Tatiana (5/7/05, 9). “In the last 15 years millions have left Russia. No one is needed other than floozies, oil workers and street sweepers,” another complained (4/16/05, 3). And Valentina said, “For me it started in 1992 when all stability crumbled, when organizations started to fall apart, when there was nothing to eat, my husband took to the bottle from grief [muzh zapil s goria], and there were two children who needed to be fed, and there really was no time to think about defining who should do what. …We fell out of socialism and no one could get used to capitalism” (7/9/05, 30).
Labkovsky assisted his listeners in “getting used to” things—depression, divorce but also capitalism and new laws—by recommending techniques of the self.
These techniques had an expansive quality, triggering the rearrangement of relations of intimacy, and assembling into particular social formations which were addressed not only to personal, but also political, problems. Finally, they prescribed methods for conflict resolution and norms of politeness that produced a particular vision of Russian civil society. Section 1 (immediately below) elaborates the nature of these techniques, focusing on self-esteem and self-possession, and how private property relations appear to have been “folded in,” in the Deleuzean sense, to create subjectivities with a
359 particular sense of possessive interiority.154 I track, in particular, the slippage between
Labkovsky’s political liberalism and the forms that neoliberalism has been described as taking on the surface of the self. Section 2 examines how, by bringing a range of intimate relations into psychological grids of perception, the techniques of the self also ordered particular kinds of social order and politics. This normative social formation resembled a neoliberal “civil society,” for which the radio program, as a mass public, became a virtual version. Finally, Section 3 attends to the “social problems” frustrating the construction of the neoliberal subject and public. Despite Labkovsky’s orientation to a psychotherapeutically mediated individualism, many callers contested his vision of politics, publics and selfhood, offering a glimpse of the situated nature of neoliberalism in Russia.
The Echo of the Self: Talk Show Technologies
On March 5, 2005, Labkovsky greeted listeners this way:
My friends, if we are asked today what we are unsatisfied with in our lives, then there will be many calls, and much dissatisfaction. Many organizations studying public opinion talk about what percentage of the population is dissatisfied with pension reforms, with the housing law, with the president, with the government. I want to ask a different question. What would you change in yourself if you could? [Shto by vy izmenili v sebe, esli by u vas byla takaia vozmozhnost’?] … Usually we search in our own way [svoistvenno] in our surroundings. It’s not constructive and generally ineffective in the sense that nothing changes in our lives, nothing is added to it besides gradual irritation [postoianno
154 Deleuze uses the metaphor of the fold to describe the process of subjectivation. The dynamic is one where “the relations of an outside folded back upon themselves to create a doubling, to allow a relation to oneself to emerge, and to constitute an inside which is hollowed out and develops its own unique dimension” (1988:100). Instead of having an essence, our interiors reflect relations of force, or rule; particular understandings of the body/flesh; and regimes of truth.
360 rasstroistvo] about the fact that we don’t like our surroundings. And if we ask the question in this way, “What would we change in ourselves?” then it gets interesting.
In the face of political disenfranchisement, a felt inability to “get used to capitalism” and a host of other problems, Labkovsky was inviting his callers to consider another kind of solution: self-transformation.
The volume of responses was the highest of any program analyzed—some 80 calls and text-messages in two hours:
I want to change my internal world and how I think. I want to feel less worried when alone. I want to be less affected by rudeness. I want to be less lazy. I want to be less defensive and stop covering up my inadequacies with snobbishness. I want to learn to shut my big mouth. I want to be less angry. How can I be less hypochondriac? How can I develop love of self? How can I learn to say ‘no’ without worrying about disappointing others? I want to love others even more. I want to escape this emptiness. I want to reach my artistic potential. I want to be able to self-regulate. I want to know how to live. I want to loose weight. I want to be taller. I’d like to become the governor. I’d like to change my name to Aleksandr—Aleksandrs are more effective in life.
Like cosmic dust orbiting a black hole, call after call brought out the features of an invisible gravitational center, “the self.” In inviting his listeners to consider self- transformation, Labkovsky wasn’t just making a common psychotherapeutic suggestion; he was also initiating them into thinking of everyday problems in a
361 particular, self-centered, way. And as the list above makes clear, “the self” could be many things: an internal world to be changed; a thing to be coaxed in order to reach something; a locus of worry, insult, defensiveness or anger; a domain requiring control in the face of external challenge; a site of potential action where one can train in something; a store of desires to be other than what one is; a container for normative values. What is important is that through the simple question, how would you change yourself, “the self” became an “it.”
Labkovsky’s concern was not with specifically defining the self, but rather positing it as something to which one relates, whatever “it” is. His concern was a technology, which involved the proper attitude, or relation, to one’s self, which he often defined as a relation of esteem or samootsenka.155 As a practice, samootsenka relied on a differentiation between interior and exterior domains, and careful mediation between them. Thus, samootsenka was a matter of proper orientation: a self-esteeming person should look to himself when faced with a problem. The lack of samootsenka, Labkovsky explained to Alexei (1/15/05, 15), is “when a person is not oriented to himself, but the opinion of others.” Second, samootsenka emanates outward into the world; it can have effects, for example increasing (or decreasing) the respect one receives from others. As Labkovsky tells Nikolai (1/1/05, 11), “When you love yourself, then you look at the surrounding world the way you look at yourself, and, correspondingly, if you don’t love yourself, then that also flows from you. You produce the impression of a person with problems [cheloveka problemmnogo,
155 Samootsenka could also be translated as self-appraisal, suggesting a neutral evaluative relation to the self. I translate samootsenka as self-esteem because of its explicit use as a psychological concept.
362 neudachnogo, zakompleksovannogo], who is unsuccessful, has complexes, and due to that, correspondingly, there will be many problems.”
Putting these techniques into practice, Labkovsky’s samootsenka could then overcome a range of problems, including a lack of confidence, domestic disputes and addiction. For example, in a call from 67-year-old Larissa Konstantinovna (1/15/05, 2) samootsenka was a way to be liberated from the oppressive judgment of others. A man has recently asked for her hand, Larissa explains, and she questions Labkovsky’s advice that people should live together before marriage. “Understand, I am a teacher at a college and I am a social person, to a degree. Immediately it will be known. We’ll start to live together, and then it won’t work out, and everyone will know…I am afraid of what Maria Nikolaevna will say.”
Labkovsky retorts unsympathetically that if she is “more interested in Maria
Nikolaevna,” then she needs to forget about the boyfriend and “live in order to gather impressions about yourself and your surroundings.” “And don’t allude to the difficult
Soviet period, when this kind of thing was impossible. Now you can allow yourself if you wish. So allow it. And try to live together.” “One more curious detail,” he adds,
“there is this understanding, samootsenka, are you familiar with it? … So, samootsenka is how you value yourself. You are reasoning as a person who has no samootsenka. That is, your respect is based on the evaluation of others. Feel the difference [pochuvstvuite raznitsu]. It’s better if you yourself investigate whether it’s good or bad. In evaluating your life you are not resorting to your own values, but to what you think others think.”
“But that’s how we were raised. [My tak vospitany.]”
363 “Well, Larissa Konstantinovna, well, give it up, you’re not at an interrogation.
What does ‘raised’ mean? You are your own boss [vy sami sebe khoziaika]. ‘We were raised this way’ or ‘we are a product of a certain time…’ You are completely, I would say, a little cunning. You can do it if you want.”
In a Foucauldian moment, it is the host who most fervently asserts Larissa
Konstantinovna’s autonomy, who appeals to her inner-reserves, who rejects the idea that she is a product of a certain time, who encourages her to take time to learn about herself, and finally, who tells her, in a complex phrase, “Vy sami sebe khoziaika,” that she herself is the governor/master of herself. This demonstrates how samootsenka works as a political technology. As Cruikshank has noted in her study of the self- esteem movement in the US, “[B]y isolating a self to act upon, to appreciate and to esteem, we avail ourselves of a terrain of action, we exercise power upon ourselves”
(1996:234). The exercise of power upon oneself, even a libratory power, is a form of subjectivation situated in relations of power.
It is worth lingering a little longer over the term khoziaika (master; proprietress; owner) (and the implicit internal domain, khoziastvo, over which one ought to be a master) because it hints at the specificity of those relations of power and the terrain of action that samootsenka involves. Caroline Humphrey has linked the cultural concept khoziaika to a discourse of political power in Russia according which
“socio-political order is brought about by the exercise of centralized and personified power, not by law, the observance of principles, or the existence of civil society.” In other words, people “seek order not in themselves but for themselves, that is, from powers (vlasti) conceived as above” (2002:28-29). Humphrey’s contention casts
364 samootsenka, which in this context would mean, “you’re not a slave to anyone,” in an interesting light. Specifically, it suggests that it involves an internalization of external authority, which is then exercised over oneself.
This form of samootsenka also appears to invert its socialist counterpart.156
Oleg Kharkhordin notes that in Soviet self-training literatures, samootsenka meant not
“self-esteem,” but “self-evaluation,” and was the first step toward becoming a better communist. One should take stock in oneself as compared to the ideal of the New
Soviet Man in order to recognize one’s deficiencies, and prepare the way for self- compulsion (samo-prinuzhdenie), enacted through particular ways of training the will
(vol’). In this process, so-called pointless self-rummaging (samokopanie) was to be avoided. Rather, through training the will, one comes to a state of self-control and self- possession (samoobladanie). All of this, Kharkhordin argues, was aimed at “a transformation of the self that would make self-sacrifice possible” (1999:241-255), or what Oushakine calls the “self under erasure—the void subject” (2004:395). In contrast, Labkovsky’s model of samootsenka urged listeners to ignore social judgment in forming a view of themselves and the world, thus revising the sources of authority from the kollektiv to the ideology of the autonomous subject. It also shifted the object of self-work from will to feelings, and the technique from one of explicitly normative comparison to self-knowledge (which is, of course, normative in its own, implicit,
156 Attempts to draw too clear a distinction between “Soviet selves” and “post- Soviet selves” risks caricature, the conflation of pedagogy and practice, not to mention the ethical quandary of attributing total penetration of Party power. Recent historical scholarship that uses Foucault to study “Soviet subjectivity” under Stalin has been criticized for this. See chapter 1, as well as Etkind (2005), and the discussions in Ab Imperio, especially Boym (2002).
365 way). Finally, he offered listeners an alternate telos of self-realization, replacing self- control and self-sacrifice with a kind of eternal self-return.
In light of discussions of property, Labkovsky’s assertions that his listeners heed only their own inner-voices took on a possessive relation to the self, suggesting a resonance between Labkovsky’s samootsenka and postsocialist discourses of property.157 Recall C.B. Macpherson’s concept of “possessive individualism,” which argues that the property form instantiates the idea that what a person owns, in the first instance, is himself. This ontological sense of self, according to Macpherson, derives from the a priori of private property as a natural right, which is “read back into the nature of the individual.” As this particular relation to self takes root in liberalism, he argues, ownership comes to ground freedom itself and the realization of one’s potential. Citizens come to feel that not just possession but also self-possession is the pre-condition both for their freedom (being free means being “proprietor of “one’s person and capacities”) and even their humanity (what makes us essentially human is
“freedom from dependence on the wills of others,” a freedom that “is a function of possession”) (1962:3).
157 Property is hardly “postsocialist.” As Verdery notes, property was fundamental to socialist institutions and functioned as a form of social capital that grounded systems of informal exchange and reciprocity, and organized power and social relations (2003:46-48). Soviets had personal use rights to their apartments (known as private property (chastnaia sobstvennost’]) and also to possessions such as clothing, cars, books, et cetera. (personal property (lichnaia sobstvennost’]). In an economy of scarcity, those possessions took on hugely personal meanings. Soviets, thus, possessed, yet, in the last instance, only the state “owned” things. The difference this makes as a matter of folded interiority and self-self relations correlates with Labkovsky’s inversion of socialist samootsenka.
366 For Adults about Adults was filled with examples where property concerns were enfolded, constituting this particular notion of, and relation to, self. Obsessively technical legal questions about property law (often exasperating the host) and the lack of property, expressed the link between property and selfhood.158 That is, the threat of dispossession, itself a harrowing and painful experience many in Russia have suffered throughout the last century, appeared to link sympathetically the status of one’s material khoziaistvo to the status of one’s self-as-khoziaistvo. As Humphrey notes, dispossession strikes at personhood because it strips a person not just of their possessions, but also social status (2002:21), a dual fear that Labkovsky’s callers frequently cited, especially in calls where kin had competing claims to property. In many cases, anxieties around gender appeared in instances where only one spouse owned the apartment. These calls prompted Labkovsky to formulate his samootsenka model in terms of a more explicit form of possessive individualism, but they also seemed to flow from that model of subjectivity.
In a call from Vladimir (5/28/05, 35), for example, we learn that the opportunity to privatize the family’s municipal apartment has created a conflict. He and his mother are registered there. Presented with the option to legally reconstitute the apartment as “property” (and therefore to really “own” it), his mother has decided she’d like to privatize it in her own name (which depends on Vladimir waiving his
158 Labkovsky fielded an immense number of questions about the new property regime. For instance, on a May 28 program concerned with family relations (where law was one of six possible areas of inquiry) 29 of the 42 calls concerned property. This was common across all the programs. “With no less sadness,” commented Labkovsky on April 30, “I can establish that 90% of the questions…concern kicking someone out, taking away something from someone, giving away something, and in general, all of this turns around apartments.”
367 right) in order to bequeath it to both him and his sister, who currently has no rights to it. “My mom,” he says, “wants to convince me that she will distribute everything fairly.”
“Well, Vladimir, here it’s up to you,” replies Labkovsky, taking an almost parental tone. “I can’t give you advice about how to act; you need to decide yourself.
Because we are not talking about the fact that after the death of your father an inheritance was created, but about the fact that two registered people remain in the apartment, one of whom wants to privatize it for themselves so that the other registered person will be refused their right to property in this apartment. How should you act, it’s for you to decide. I can’t give you advice. If you refuse [to privatize], you are automatically stripped of your right to this apartment. That is, you will be registered there, but nothing more. You will not be an owner.”159
“And if my mother transfers everything…”
“Yes,” says Labkovsky, “she can will it to your sister, and nothing will be left for you, for example.”
Appreciating the stakes, Vladimir knows that in relinquishing his right to privatize he would be in a sense “owned” by his mother, affecting not only his property, but his identity. “And what does it mean then if my sister demands that I leave. I leave, and then I end up homeless (bomzh)?”
159 In Russia, apartment registry is the guarantor of one’s ability to live and work somewhere. In desirable places like Moscow they can be hard (or expensive) to come by. Registration is distinct from ownership, however; only the latter provides for the right to sell or determine who lives in a flat. In loosing his right of ownership, Vladimir is also risking having his registration (and right to live there) revoked.
368 “The decision is yours to make,” Labkovsky says a third time, emphasizing that Vladimir, too, is his own boss.
Fifty-four-year-old Tatiana (5/7/05, 9), on the other hand, describes her successful ownership in terms that shade not only into her sense of self-possession, but also her ability to structure others into relations of dependence. “I settled my own housing question, so that I have, excuse me, a well-deserved [dostoinaia] apartment just under 80 meters. I can be in charge of it from here [dal’she rasporiazhat’sia] so that I will have some inheritance for [my children] and hold them like flies on a string.”
There were many examples where privatization and psychotherapeutic techniques were enfolded to constitute a sense of self: the man wondering when he is truly free of his ex-wife given that the property he attained after divorce was had with some portion of their money; the husband who feels a “victim” for having been bilked out of ownership by his own wife; the divorced father who asks, “how shall we divide the child?” The constitution of the esteemed, possessed self appeared throughout the program, including in programs about addiction, dependence, divorce, domestic disputes and communication. Samootsenka thus grounded an ethics by which one should “decide for oneself.” In and through this practical ethics, and its constitution of the self as a territorial domain and a locus of control, it also constituted what we might think of as a privatized self. As will become clear in the next section, it is this privatized self that becomes, through Labkovsky’s liberalism, the site of political action.
369 Political intimacy and publics
The critique is often made that techniques like self-esteem have no politics.
Yet as is clear from Labkovsky’s program, self-esteem was a profoundly political matter. Recall the program on “changing yourself.” Referencing the bad habit of doing nothing but complaining about politics, Labkovsky proposed that his listeners consider redirecting political dissatisfaction to self-transformation. As he suggested, since the only thing that complaining about surroundings will accomplish is our “gradual irritation,” we should look to those places where we do have power.160 The way that
Labkovsky’s techniques of the self facilitated a fluid exchange between the personal and the political is reminiscent of what Cruikshank calls “liberation therapy,” by which “personal fulfillment becomes a social obligation” and “revolutions within” become closely tied to political transformation (1996:232).161 The question, then, is what politics does Labkovsky’s form of liberation therapy enable and constrain? How do the politics of self extend into political registers?
In this section I explore the way in which, in social contexts, samootsenka also problematized relations of intimacy with family, among friends, with strangers, in organizing politically. And here I draw on Berlant’s (2000) sense of intimacy as an
160 Rose notes that contemporary technologies of subjectivity promise “not liberation from social constraints but render psychological constraints on autonomy conscious, and hence amenable to rational transformation. Achieving freedom becomes a matter not of slogans nor or political revolution, but of slow, painstaking, and detailed work on our own subjective and personal realities, guided by an expert knowledge of the psyche” (1990:213). 161 Cruikshank reports the logic of revamped state programs: “[G]overnment and experts cannot fix these problems [of crime, poverty and inequality] for us. It is only when each of us recognizes our individual personal and social responsibility to be part of the solution that we also realize higher self-esteem’” (1996:232).
370 experience of closeness, attachment or desire between people that is also always- already mediated by legal institutions, public discourse, medical technologies and therapies, and expressed through concepts like responsibility, (im)propriety, and
(ab)normality. Read in this way, reinscriptions of the relations of intimacy are tied also to particular governing projects. On For Adults about Adults, the way that samootsenka could be used to transform the norms governing intimate relations touched also on notions of citizenship. The problematization of different forms of intimacy opened onto alternative conceptions of sociality, politeness, community, political action, rights and membership.
For example, when on New Year’s Day Labkovsky devoted a program to
“problems with obshchenie (socializing),” he was not invoking any old word for sociality, but a culturally thick, almost sacred concept of communion among close friends. As Pesmen notes, obshchenie is part of the Russian discourse of dusha (soul) that inscribes the who (svoi, or one’s intimate circle), where (the kitchen table), and how (obshchenie) of intimacy. Pesmen quotes an informant: “Life, success, money, even success with women, as shocking as it sounds, none of these are the main thing.
The main thing in this system of values is ‘the feeling of elbows.’ The feeling that people will…come to your aid…. In a close circle of friends that feeling appears, that impression of oneness, unity of dusha (2000:165; cf.Yurchak 2006:102-108). Despite this soulful meaning, on Labkovsky’s show, host and caller referred to its more mundane sense of “socializing,” in effect renegotiating the nature of intimate social interactions.
371 Consider Ivan (1/1/05, 12), a caller who is eager to give others advice. After telling listeners that obshchenie can not only happen in one’s inner circle, but also “in line at a store,” he suggests that to be “successful” in obshchenie, (male) listeners need, firstly, to attend to self-presentation and hygiene because “women pay attention to shoes.” He then gets into the psychological nitty-gritty: referencing the “doubts that interfere with saying something, and missing a chance,” Ivan recommends using “the three second rule”: “Count to three, wait and speak. When you start to speak, it gets easier; the main thing is to take the first step. If a person is interested in conversation, the person smiles, says something, makes a so-called return connection.” He adds that psychological techniques can also assist in controlling the social context: premised on owning the interaction, you should define the terms of obshchenie by creating a
“structure of communication” and a “system of relationships” within which to converse. “To immediately become a master of obshchenie,” Ivan concludes, “is impossible. You need to study how to converse [obshchat’sia], learn to move past yourself [perekhodit’ cherez soboi, to quell your fears [podavliat’ svoi strakhi], your limiting beliefs, inner dialogue.”
Through this interplay of social anxiety and an almost business-like approach to the self, intimate obshchenie was transformed into a competitive, self-centered, and gendered form of social interaction. This not only eroticized a platonic mode of sociality, but also expanded the sites appropriate for intimate interactions while simultaneously isolating the self from its social constitution.
Other reinscriptions of intimacy with more explicitly political implications were seen on a program on May 14, which Labkovsky had devoted entirely to new
372 housing laws: after years of inept state control of housing, Russians could form their own Apartment Owner’s Associations (TSZh) in order to manage their housing fees for, say, the hiring of private services for building maintenance. “Citizens often complain about the excessive influence of the state on their private life,” began
Labkovsky. “The new [housing law] is a rare opportunity for citizens to show their independence, their civic position, and that they are a kind of civil society. The state has given, literally, a chance to our citizens to show their civic activeness.” Labkovsky continues, “But the prognosis is rather pessimistic, and I don’t know that our citizens will demonstrate that activity in order to live better. Most of all, I feel that everything will end with the robbery by state companies, and nothing new will come into our lives.” Referencing this “litmus test for our activity” Labkovsky issued a challenge to his listeners: “Will you build your homes, or will, as always, the state do it?”
Over the course of two hours, Labkovsky laid out the foundations of civic activism, beginning with techniques of the self: civic activism is initially a question of mentality. “Our psychology” and “historical make-up” interfere because Russians have a certain “relation to affairs” (otnoshenie k delu). Civic activism rests on an alternative, psychologically mediated, practical ethics that should then cascade over social relations, shifting attitudes about intimacy. Speaking directly to the matter of the home, Labkovsky complained, “We only consider our own homes as being behind the closed door. We don’t consider, for example, our building entrance…the elevator, much less our courtyard. No one organizes to do the so-called euro-remont (Euro- standard remodel) in their own building entrance, meanwhile people continue, well, to
373 piss and shit [there]. In general the impression one gets from the entrance is always worse than from the apartment. This, probably, reflects our relationship to the home.”
Labkovsky’s appeal to civic activism, joint decision-making, shared responsibility and a regard for the commons, was an attempt to expand people’s ideas about “the home” to include unfamiliar neighbors. His appeal was also posed against the logic of blat, or the personal connections on which one relies to get things done in
Russia. Blat is about social networks held together by an informal moral economy of favors and personal trust; Labkovsky was advancing forms of civic action that were formal, impersonal and rationalized (Rivkin-Fish 2005:155).
If intimate relations were in this case expanded into what might be called the political intimacy of liberal civil society, they were contracted when it came to physical proximity. For example, in a program on mental health, 54-year-old Galina
(4/9/05, 2) says that when it comes to being in public, respectful distance is most appropriate. “We have a neurotic society,” says Galina begins, citing the “elbow culture” (loktevaia kul’tura) of crowded Russian cities (recall Pesmen’s informant’s love of the elbow above). “Liberate [osvobodite] and create around yourself a living space [sozdaite vokrug sebia zhiznennoe prostranstvo],” she says.
In the dance between them, this intimate prescription eventually moves from public space, to the person, to the home. Labkovsky begins by framing her complaint in cultural terms: he cites a psychological study about the norms governing “the average space between people.” While with close friends the average space is the same cross-culturally, there is variation when it comes to strangers. Whereas in
Scandinavia it ranges from 150 centimeters to 20 meters, in Russia it’s around just 20
374 centimeters. Invoking the sociality of dusha, Labkovsky says, “We have a soulful people [narod dushevnyii] and so tactile contact is demanded everywhere, even if there are no crowds.”
This cultural explanation gives Galina no solace. The lack of respect for personal space is a sign of poor upbringing, “psychic illness,” and even an “inadequate reflection of reality [neadekvatnoe kakoe-to otrazhenie deistvitel’nosti].” Adopting a psychologized Biblicism she notes that you ought to “relate to another as to yourself
[vy k drugomu otnosites’ tak zhe, kak k samomu sebe].”
Going along, Labkovsky puts in, “Perhaps a lack of respect for the other is a sign that we don’t respect ourselves,” a sentiment he also expressed on the program on housing associations.
“Yes, exactly. We don’t respect ourselves, and so we don’t respect our surroundings. And so we have such an elbow culture. Who brushed whom. Speech is
[also] like that, you know, a reaction, whose words brushed whom.”
Moving into the home, Labkovsky then asks, “Do you relate to your family as
‘healthy people’?”
“I of course do,” she says, “although…this neurosis…hasn’t passed by our family. Fatigue from work, from life…. It seems to me that even in the family sometimes we need to keep back from each other a bit more….”
“Well, in any case, personal space [lichnoe prostranstvo] ought to be had by each member of the family, I absolutely agree,” concludes Labkovsky.
Erving Goffman suggests that in liberal societies personhood is at issue in contestations around personal space. That is, personal space marks “the role the
375 individual is allowed in determining what happens to his claim [for it].” This and other preserves comprising the “territories of the self” are actually sites for the performance of rituals for demonstrating self-determination, which he says is crucial to what it means to be a “full-fledged person” (1971:29-32, 60-61). Thinking with Goffman,
Galina’s desire for elbow room would then express the importance of self- determination to her own sense of personhood. But we can also go further: personal space for Galina not only designates a site for liberal autonomy. It also links together into a vision of Scandinavian “civility” certain kinds of public behavior, notions of self-respect and selfhood, family relations, and ultimately relations with strangers, all of which is measured against a pathologized social (dis)order.
On discussions about public transit, this desire for “civility” (and the realignment of intimate relations it entailed), collided with competing senses of manners—a collision, I suggest, that highlights a crucial political subtext—the question of citizenship.162 On May 7, two days before Victory Day, a holiday of national unity honoring the defeat of the fascists in World War II and the sacrifices of older generations, Labkovsky invited listeners to ponder the “tradition of relations
162 Scholars of postsocialism have adopted different understandings of citizenship. Petryna thinks of citizenship as consisting of two kinds of rights—claims rights and liberty rights. The former concern the rights to a job, to material well-being or to education that the state is obligated to provide to its citizens. The latter govern more abstract rights, including, in Western democracies, to liberty, fair trials, and privacy (2002:202). In contrast, Humphrey views citizenship as a matter of state- imposed obligations and categorizations, where being a citizen means carrying the necessary documentation (internal passport, work record, etc.), and observing the rules of border crossings (2002:75-76). The discussion of citizenship on For Adults about Adults concerned all three of these—rights, obligations and categorizations—and debates about public conduct revolved around the displacement of one citizenship regime by another.
376 between generations.” Surprisingly, despite this disarming introduction, discussions quickly deteriorated into a shouting match over manners on public transit. Elderly callers accused young riders of rudeness, or khamstvo, for ignoring the custom of giving up a seat for the infirm.163 “This rudeness [of the young], we need to struggle with it,” said an elderly Tatiana (5/7/05, 9). “It’s written right there [in all the buses]
‘for invalids, the aged.’ But no, he sits [there], and really sits, hanging his scarf on half of the next spot.” Young riders countered that each paying rider is equally entitled to a seat; moreover, the elderly are rude and pushy. A listener who signed “a 22-year-old”
(5/7/05, 18) retorted, “Permit me to disagree with Tatiana. If we look at the metro, there are these elderly people that can tear you to pieces. Or at the bus stop a crowd of grannies can just trample you. I’ve seen it many times myself.”
Whereas the older callers were more preoccupied with the rude ignoring of social obligation than with personal space per se, the young tended to view rudeness in terms of a breach of the personal space that Galina (above) described. These views of rudeness and public intimacy express different conceptions of citizenship. That is, the pensioners’ adherence to social custom was met with the young’s advocacy of a consumer model of “equal rights” to public space and a stripping away of social obligations: one rider, one fare. The discussions had no doubt been stoked by the recent monetization of pensioner benefits. These neoliberal reforms sought to give pensioners small cash payments in lieu of benefits, including free metro rides, which
163 Khamstvo is a flexible term, having either a pejorative meaning of a lack of culture and manners that is linked to Stalin’s answer to the intelligentsia— kul’turnost’—but also a positive meaning of soulful authenticity that resists Western forms of false politeness. In either meaning, the term is often associated with the sovok, or quintessential boorish Soviet person.
377 to the surprise of the Putin Administration, triggered a “grey revolution,” and pensioners marched in protest of the comparatively miniscule value of the cash payment. The debate on For Adults about Adults highlighted how the old benefits had also anchored a sense of social debt manifested by the ritual of respect of giving up a seat on a crowded bus. The rolling back of these benefits, as an elderly Aleksandr
(5/7/05, 3) complained, seemed also to have rolled back the manners that had taken shape around the benefits system. Citing the “completely boorish behavior of the young on public transportation,” he asserted, “Attitudes to the elderly are administered from the top, and that’s why we have this atmosphere in society.”
Alaina Lemon has suggests that the Moscow metro is a “place trope” where
“ontologies of a society in transition” are contested (2000:18). In times of instability, public transit can become an index of evolving social relations, attitudes about those relations, and the dynamics of unraveling and reform. We might think not only of the exchanges about public transit on For Adults about Adults as a place trope” but the radio show more broadly. That is, the calculating, sovereign self entailed in Ivan’s version of obshchenie; Labkovsky’s appeal to the expanded political intimacy of the housing association; Galina’s call for civility and personal space; and young transit riders’ rejection of social customs—these indicate how Labkovsky’s conception of selfhood was embedded in much larger social relations, and assembled together into a social formation consistent with a neoliberal political rationality. In particular, they advanced a view of the autonomous, partitioned, choosing, and socially un-obligated subject. Meanwhile, Labkovsky’s advocacy for civil activism through increased political intimacy invoked forms of governance which aimed to substitute social
378 programs with assemblages of “uncoordinated” actions of autonomous actors that scale up to functional, efficient, self-administrative wholes.
As Barry, et al. assert, neoliberal techniques aim to “produce a degree of
‘autonomization’ of entities of government from the state” resulting in an
“autonomization of society.” Replacing state bureaucratic structures, this autonomization of society turns entities, organizations and individuals into self- governing machines by creating “chains of enrolment, ‘responsibilization’ and
‘empowerment’ to sectors and agencies distant from the centre, yet tied to it through a complex of alignments and translations” (1996b:12). In this sense, the Apartment
Owners’ Association was one such chain of enrollment, whereas personal space, along with a host of other discussions of techniques of the self were sites for constituting the autonomous subject in relation to other autonomous subjects.
What we see on For Adults about Adults, therefore, is a complex deployment of neoliberal techniques. This results not from intent, but the happenstance convergence between Labkovsky’s efforts to deconstruct socialist discourses, his liberal politics, and the neoliberal rationality that continues to circulate in Russia.
Even the talk show itself reproduced neoliberal technologies by turning Labkovsky’s discursively constituted public of political action into a performative one: in calling the radio and just talking, listeners took the first step toward the practical ethics of self-esteem, and at the same time recreated this public in virtual form.164 That is, they performed the Kantian ideal of the freely publicly speaking subject. They enabled the
164 See Silverstein (2008) on the link between media, performance and disposition.
379 individualizing and totalizing force of pastoral power to work around and through them.165 In the act of hearing, with its sensual, immersive quality, people became part of a neoliberal public.166 And, finally, in completing the link between the care of self and the political they became autonomized circuits.
Social problems
What, then, to make of a simmering reluctance to accept the linking of politics, publics and the esteem, possession, presentation and spatial requirements of the self?
Motivating psychotherapeutic discourse against itself, one caller (3/5/05, 26) said,
“Changing yourself is the straightest path to neurosis. Is your program a provocation?”
“Doesn’t depression result from the successful change of your character, exterior and relations?” asked another (3/5/05, 52). Masha (3/5/05, 17) suggested that political improvement is not at all a matter self-change: “Mikhail, people are divided into creators, contemplators and philistines. The lousy philistines are nothing. They need to change.” These calls highlight some of the the limited appeal of the self-esteem model.
One of the most profound communication gaps between host and caller came when the self-esteem model enountered social life itself. In the face of discomfort, the esteem of self was driven further down the road of self-possession to self-control. This
165 Foucault uses the phrase pastoral power, analogous to the intense attention the shepherd gives to each and every member of his flock, to describe modern forms of state power. This power is both individualizing (in that it focuses analytical attention on the human) and totalizing (in that its calculative practices govern populations) (2000a; 2007). 166 As Hirschkind notes in his study of cassette-tape sermons in Egypt, the intimate quality of hearing was perceived as dangerous by Enlightenment philosophers because it involved immersion, passive reception and engulfment as opposed to the ocular values of distance, judgment and reason (2006:13-16).
380 imperative to control oneself resisted Labkovsky’s other rearticulations of intimate relations. Says Lara (3/5/05, 49) “I have tormented myself all of my conscious life; I change, and [still] I dislike everything about myself. I am convinced that given what’s left of my life, changing myself isn’t possible [nel’zia], fundamentally.” “Sometimes,” she adds haltingly, “it seems that, well, I am already completely different… But a moment arises and everything returns to its place [na krugi svoia]. No, you can’t change yourself. No way. You had some advice, ‘If there is some kind of problem, you need to change your relationship [to it].’ Well, that’s like telling a nervous person not to be nervous.”
“No, you didn’t understand,” says Labkovsky. “It’s not my advice, it’s a
Freudian saying, very famous and wise. On the contrary, it’s not a suggestion to the nervous person not to be nervous, but a suggestion that he himself accept the nervousness. It’s not the same. You didn’t understand the sense of this phrase.”
“Yes, maybe I didn’t quite put it right, I just,” Lara trails off. “Inasmuch as I am an emotional person, I get overwhelmed by my own words [ia sebia zakhlestivaiu svoimi slovami]. I only want to say, um, I told myself 100 times, I will be calm, and if in my militaristic front-line life, now a respite comes, I think, ‘Oh, I became calm.’
Baloney. A moment hits that disturbs me and again everything flies off… Then I am sorry … why am I screaming… well…”
Drawing on the dual meaning of the word nel’zia, which can be used by a parent wagging a finger at a child, or to signify that which is ontologically impossible,
Larissa suggests that self-transformation is hopeless. Moreover, her efforts at self-
381 control are constantly undermined by the hard life she says she has at home, even by language itself, which “overwhelms” her.
Another response to the self-esteem model was the sense that others would lack self-control. On the program promoting the Apartment Owner’s Association
(TSZh), despite Labkovsky’s suggestion that self-transformation and civic activism might be paired through the rearticulation of attitudes about intimacy and the home,
Kira (5/14/05, 16) complained that others can’t be trusted to control themselves:
“Eventually all these members of the TSZh will try to gnaw each others’ throats at the general meeting in order to put their own person by the cashier and snatch a piece of the general funds. Everything that you speak of is complete nonsense.”
“Kira just reflects, I think, the opinion of the masses [mnenie mass], not our listeners, but those apartment owners,” says Labkosvky resignedly. “Here, with such a psychology, with such relations to affairs, our endless history awaits us regarding the…eternal dissatisfaction with life.”
Others expressed a similar difficulty mapping the self-esteem model onto the realities of their daily experiences in that their attempts to be oriented primarily inward were constantly undermined by the rudeness, or khamstvo, of others. “What do I want to change in myself?” says sixty-nine-year-old Alla Pavlovna (3/5/05, 37). “I’m not reserved. I often yell at people. True, it’s for [legitimate] things, but nevertheless that’s not allowed. And so it really bothers me. I would even like to apologize publicly.”
Adding that “life has not been easy,” she says, “I can’t calmly regulate myself in response to khamstvo. My voice rises.” She gives the example of how fellow residents continually drop their litter absentmindedly in the building courtyard. “I am really
382 bothered [by this],” she says. “Are there really those who live by handling themselves like that?” Then, however, Alla Pavlovna checks herself: “I don’t know… I… I’m saying, now that I’ve gotten through to you, whomever hears me, who knows me, I am sorry for my unreservedness [nesderzhannost’].”
Khamstvo and its response, a defensive self-control, even turned self-esteem into a contradictory proposition. In Elena’s call it is as if only half of the formula is actualized: “I would change in myself my vulnerability to negligible external actions.
And I would increase my reaction in response to khamstvo” (3/5/05, 8). That is, while striving to be less oriented to outside disturbance and being more reserved, she nevertheless wants to be more aggressive in response to khamstvo.
Others cited the daily scenes of cruelty, neglect and sorrow which troubled their efforts to esteem and possess themselves. “I would like to learn to say ‘no,’” wrote in one listener (3/5/05, 34). “It turns out to be very hard because people are often sad when they are denied.” As if in response, Masha (3/5/05, 81) asks rhetorically, “How can I handle the negative when I see beggars on the metro? You can give or not give money, but these people emotionally violate all the passengers [no eti liudi nasiluiut emotsional’no vsekh passazhirov].”
Such calls point to the way that social relations—whether in the form of distrust (e.g. the corruption or irresponsibility of others), “battles” at home, or pity— constantly challenged Labkovsky’s model of the autonomous subject and the imperative to locate inner-reserves and attain order in oneself. Tugging at the threads holding self-esteem together, the grinding everyday threatened to unravel it and its particular structure of self–social relations. But more than that, these calls also
383 highlight how the practical ethics of self-esteem existed alongside others (e.g. selfless giving; socialist residues of self-control), just as Labkovsky’s normative view of the public, civil society and citizenship existed alongside others (the publics of svoi, or one’s inner-circle, for instance; or the non-public of what’s outside one’s front door).167
Perhaps the greatest challenge to Labkovsky’s recipe for political change through the revolution within was posed by Dasha (3/5/05, 62), who asks how self- work would help her to relieve the distress she feels from feeling pity for homeless animals and witnessing cruelty. “How can I not notice [abuse]?”
“Dasha, a hard question, very hard.” For in following the “logic of conscience,” Labkovsky reasons, one would have to take in every homeless animal, despite having limited means. Clearly this is unsustainable. “But if we dig deeper,” he says philosophically, “then life in general according to its definitions isn’t just. It’s set up in this way, and you simply need to accept this as a fact. You need to try to resolve this question of justice inside yourself, while bearing in mind that each person has their limited possibilities. [I vopros spravedlivosti nuzhno reshat’ pytat’sia vnutri sebia, pri etom imet’ vidu, shto u kazhdogo cheloveka est’ svoi, kakie-to ogranichennye vozmozhnosti.] And you need not try to take on more than you can handle because you just won’t be able to bear it.”
167 Yurchak defines the public of svoi as “a kind of deterritorialized public” which was “self-organized not through an oppositional counterdiscourse of one’s ‘interests and needs’” vis-à-vis the state, but rather publics that were related to authoritative discourse of the state, but redirected that discourse into directions that served their own needs without necessarily negating the authoritative meanings. He calls this the “performative shift” (2006:116-118).
384 In the absence of justice, Labkovsky can only resort to the default position of the inward turn—ethical and political questions and practices need to be decided
“inside yourself,” where there are also limitations. This shows not only how the messiness of social relations limited the politico-ethical viability of self-esteem, but also how many in Labkovsky’s audience had trouble imagining themselves as the kinds of autonomous subjects he was advocating. Met with competing understandings of subjectivity, family, compassion, emotion, obligation, response and a whole range of other objects and practices, the reach of the virtual neoliberal public turned out to be less extensive than one might suppose.
Conclusion
To recognize that subjectivity is itself a matter of the technologizing of humans is not to regard this process as amounting to some kind of crushing of the human spirit under the pressure of a corset of habits, restrictions and injunctions. Human capacities are…inevitably and inescapably technologized. An analytics of technology has, therefore, to devote itself to the sober and painstaking task of describing the consequences, the possibilities invented as much as the limits imposed, of particular ways of subjectifying humans. (Barry, et al. 1996b:13)
Talk shows do not dehumanize; they re-humanize. This chapter shows how For
Adults about Adults is involved in the production of techniques of the self that linked up with neoliberal governing practices and publics. But as the critical engagements show, these techniques were hardly all-consuming. Rather, they appeared as one of several options for the management of life. This reflects the fact that neoliberal reforms do not involve a wholesale substitution of values, but specific mechanisms
385 that are articulated, as Collier notes, with “old biopolitical forms, and the actual substantive fabric of human communities” (2005:388).
This view also helps to place Labkovsky’s subjectivating and public-making endeavors in the broader context of federal politics. On the one hand Labkovsky’s models of self-esteem were consonant with the kinds of subjects inculcated by the legislation of Apartment Owner’s Associations and the monetization of benefits, both of which are exemplary neoliberal reforms. But his appeals to political transformation through self-government and his liberal-democratic vision of a future Russian civil society sit uneasily with a policies under Putin that are hostile to grassroots politics, opposition parties, outspoken journalists, and so forth. The neoliberal nature of
Labkovsky’s particular psychological techniques of the self, therefore, are not examples of top-down implementation. Rather, they reflect instances where the liberal assemblage he advances—largely a liberal-democratic vision of the sovereign, self- esteeming, self-possessing, empowered, civically minded, polite subject—coincide symbiotically with a sightly different federal assemblage of liberal technologies. At this point of productive coincidence—in both homonymous senses—a range of normative visions—civility, civil society, neoliberal subjectivity—were articulated with one another, bringing diverse governing projects into alignment. These governing projects ranged from self-governance to the housing interest group, and from the regulation of public behavior through politeness to the transformation of citizenship.
But we should also inquire into the kinds of political options these psychological techniques of the self opened up. Given that efforts to learn how to manage one’s life, to be more self-sufficient, to get along with others, to be happier,
386 helped to constitute a particular liberal assemblage, what kinds of politics were actually enabled? This chapter suggests that Labkovsky’s pedagogy, while certainly a political technology, nevertheless may support precisely the forms of depoliticization that neoliberalism has been said to create, a testament to neoliberalism’s flexible ability to combine with other political rationalities. Political technologies like self- esteem become paradoxically anti-political technologies because discontent is obscured by the endeavor of affective engagement, and the zone for political work remains at the level of the self. As is seen in a call from Andrei (3/5/05, 36), if you are unhappy because you have to work two jobs to pay for the family apartment, you come home grumpy and then find yourself irritated by “small things,” the problem is not the way your life is structured by certain demands, but that “it’s [your] own choice.” Or, as Rivkin-Fish (2005) argues, when liberal solutions like self- empowerment fail to address complex dilemmas tied to structural inequalities, blame is often placed on victims who, not exercising their power, have enacted a moral failure.
In such a politically diffused atmosphere, it is no wonder, then, that the most common concern of callers was the search for an ethics of control of self, of person, of others, of things. This interest in self-control is linked to the autonomization of subjects referenced above—where the self is turned into a domain of government and where self-governing individuals are encouraged to constitute networks of self- governing machines such as housing associations. But it also dovetails with another key term in Russia discussed in chapter 6—stability—which continues to be used as a justification of Putin’s “democracy with adjectives” (Ryzhkov 2008) according to the
387 logic that sustained political and social calm and the related guarantee of personal economic possibility and success are seen as far outweighing the sacrifices of instability that would be necessary for more representative forms of government. The search for self-control seems to constitute the self as another governed realm subsumed by the logic of stability where the citizen is to be the privileged object of sacrifice—a sacrifice that is made at the altar of economy.
As was evident in the final exchange between Dasha and Labkovsky above, this “politics of the self” was therefore not always so easily translated into political terms for a host of reasons extending from personal ethics to historically constituted citizen-state relations to a general lack of the “chains of enrollment” through which those subjects should operate politically. In the absence of such organizations meant to give political voice to the neoliberal techniques of self, what is left is a neoliberalism without liberals.
This points to a dilemma in neoliberalism that has been written of elsewhere.
The dilemma is that neoliberalism’s reliance on market technologies, privatization and the farming out of state activities to non-governmental sectors, if even those exist, may act as an anti-politics machine (Ferguson 1994), effectively distancing citizens from the political machinery that might otherwise be mobilized for their benefit. In observing the rolling on of the psychological pedagogy of the neoliberal subject, whose wheels are greased by the public intimacy of the talk show, do we see a similar disappearance of political possibility and in the vacuum opened up, the insertion of a feeling subject, left to negotiate a denuded landscape of pure affect, a landscape whose shape may very well be determined by political economic realities, but whose
388 resolution is left only at the level of working at the “effects” of political economy? I take this question up in the afterword of this dissertation. In tracking further the politics of “learning to be free” I identify an ethical surplus that appears to hold some political promise for the projects of self-making.
389 AFTERWORD
Ambivalent Subjects: Psychologists between Value and Virtue
We are back in Aleksandr’s zhiguli, heading to the Russian-Finnish border for
Tomorrow’s Builders’ camp. When we finally reach the border zone, everything comes to a halt. The line of cars into neighboring Finland is endless. Aleksandr again exits for a smoke, while I stay inside with my wife, Nicole, and our son. An hour passes. The only things moving are the fancy Land Rovers with tinted windows that fly past every few minutes, driving against traffic in the opposite lane. Another thirty minutes, another 100 meters. Aleksandr has kept the car idling to keep us warm, and the cloying smell of petrol has crept inside. Aarno has woken up from his nap and is starting to get cranky. Another thirty minutes and he has completely lost it. The checkpoint is 2 miles up the road. Aarno stands on the backseat and starts screaming while looking tearfully at the cars behind us.
Suddenly there is a knock on the glass. The driver behind us, a woman, tells us that since we have an infant we can drive to the front of the line. Aleksandr shrugs his shoulders, starts his car, and we start zipping past the line. When we get to the Russian border patrol, we are quickly waved through, and the guards make a point of rushing us back into the car. Within ten minutes we are smoothly sailing.
390 Unfortunately, the Finnish checkpoints are also snarled with traffic. While the
Russian side had only one lane, Finland has several lanes for EU citizens (all empty) and a few for Russians (packed). We immediately start wondering whether, as people with an infant, we might have special privileges. I exit the car in search of a guard, but can find no one. On a whim, we decide to pass through the EU gate since I and my son are also EU citizens. The guard eyes us, and then makes a vague gesture. We interpret it as a green light and start driving. After a minute of uncertain passage, a gate swings closed, blocking our path. A large car with sirens is flying toward us. We are routed back, and asked to pass through the appropriate channel.
These differences on either side of the border are usually discussed in terms of administrative failure, corruption, lawlessness or unfairness. But over the years in
Russia you come to appreciate the potential benefits of administrative flexibility.
When the rules can be bent, negotiated, and interpreted, accommodations can be made. True enough, too often accommodations are made just because you drive a fancy Land Rover. But at the same time, the fact that accommodations can be made on the basis of social need is undoubtedly a signal of social health. On the other hand, when rules are formalized, they are depersonalized. The efficient and honest society leaves less possibility for exceptions. Instead, it has lanes, protocols, fairness.
As a way to offer some concluding thoughts to this dissertation, I want to use this little border story to open up a meditation on Russia’s so-called “moral economy,” and what humanizing interactions such as these and many others in post-Soviet spaces might do to shift the way we think about how psychological projects and governance articulate with subjectivity, freedom and the pursuit of a better life.
391 Russia’s moral economy, as many scholars have noted, includes gift-exchange, barter, extra-legal arrangements, and even has a special vocabulary—blat (pull); vziatka (bribe); krysha (roof); getting something cherez znakomykh (through acquaintances) (cf. Caldwell 2004; Humphrey 2002; Patico 2005; Patico 2008;
Rivkin-Fish 2005; Volkov 2002; Wanner 2005). If we can think of these as social practices, and I think that we can, then what is striking is the way they contain an inherent counter-current to the rationalization of society—one that is part of a long- standing tradition in Russia. As the border story suggests, this counter-current is hardly unproblematic (as the Land Rovers indicate); yet what I wish to focus on here are the socially useful “moralizing” dimensions in this story, and to consider whether, and how, learning to be free psychologically may itself be situated in the midst of these moral economies. The way to do this, as I will suggest, is through a closer attention to notions of freedom, social connection and ethics in Russia. Under certain
Western eyes, Russia has always been inscrutable, irrational and therefore problematic
(Malia 1999). In closing this dissertation, I entertain the idea that Russia’s informal economies, its flexibility, and the moral values that inhere therein may offer something worth holding onto as we consider our collective capitalist futures, as well as anthropology’s own relationship to the “liberal diaspora” (Povinelli 2002).
Summary of Arguments
The previous chapters have probed the intersection between psychological expertise, history and governing projects. Nikolas Rose and others have argued convincingly that the spread of psychological knowledge in the West over the last century has become
392 not just integrated into, but also productive of, political subjectivities. This is because of the ways in which “the self” has been incited and turned into a surface for governing (Brown 2003; Burchell 1996; Cruikshank 1999; Donzelot 1979; Gordon
1991; Ong 2006; Rose 1990; Rose 1996a). This dissertation focused on the recent expansion of psychotherapy and popular psychology in Russia timed with the expansion of markets and democracy to query the arguments of Rose and others.
I have shown that psychological expertise has indeed become part of a post-
Soviet governmentality in Russia, and has been incorporated into techniques of government both by the state and the market for services. This form of governmentality is not uniform across the populace; rather it is differentiated and differentiating, depending on context: in the market for services, psychologists have been enrolled in the formation of Russia’s new elite, threading their efforts in personal growth and training into neoliberal subjectivating projects of self-esteem, self- governance, confidence, flexibility. In contrast, psychologists working for state institutions, charged with the same kinds of tasks but faced with resource constraints and difficult populations, end up reproducing the category of the problem child and assisting with the differentiated management of the citizenry. Together these trends suggest that emergent class distinctions in Russia have taken on a psychological dimension, giving rise to what we might call “psychological citizenship.”
In situating these contemporary psychological practices historically, I suggested that one possible reason for the current arrangement of services (and the relatively more “prophylactic-oriented” work of state services) may also have to do with the way the applied psychology and psychotherapy took shape in the late-Soviet
393 period: while humanistic psychotherapy had developed in Soviet-Russia prior to the
1991 collapse, it was nonetheless marginal by comparison to medical psychiatry, and excluded from clinics.
The fact that these historically shaped projects are differentiated and differentiating, and unfold at a distance from state priorities and market logics, suggests that the socioeconomic implications of psychological work is neither part of the logic of capital nor expert intent, but is, rather, a happenstance result of the way expertise, governance and markets have converged under particular historical conditions. I described this result in terms of an “assembled biopolitics.” And my materials present, if not an intervention in, then an extension of some features of, the governmentality literature. In particular, I highlighted how the techniques of the self are too often viewed in isolation from their social and institutional contexts, as singular activities that unfold across uniform social spaces.
Throughout the dissertation, I also brought my critical reading of psychological practices into dialogue with practitioners’ own views of the work. If the former can be summarized as an exploration of the range of effects (social, political, cultural) of a psychological “will to improve,” to borrow Tanya Murray Li’s (2007) phrase, then the latter left space for investigating that “will” itself. What of psychologists’ desires to practice and their goals? What did they hope to achieve? My analysis of many conversations with psychologists, psychotherapists and psychiatrists suggested a recurrent appeal to “learning to be free” that gathered a kind of moral legitimacy in relation to a perceived oppressive past.
394 In this afterword, and in the spirit of an opening to further work, I return to this question of “freedom”—this time in relation to the discussion around moral economies with which this chapter began.
Freedom’s Just Another Word
Throughout the dissertation I have been working with a poststructuralist understanding of freedom that breaks from liberal-individualist notions of autonomy and a lack of constraints (cf. Macpherson 1962; Sandel 1984). In the poststructuralist formulation, becoming a “subject of freedom” is paradoxical: “The capacity for action is enabled and created by specific relations of subordination” (Mahmood 2005:29). That which makes one “free” is itself a relation of power. This axiom proved to be a key to capturing some of the political, social and ethical ambiguity of the projects psychologists and psychotherapists have undertaken in Russia in the last two decades: that is, they incite forms of internal freedom that are, at the same time, inscribed into particular agendas and programs, marketing strategies, imaginaries, and that can play into the reinforcement of socioeconomic difference through the construction of
“psychological disposition.” In the introduction, I also suggested that the concept of
“practical ethics” is a useful analytic counterpart to this notion of freedom and subjectivity, as well as a conceptually consistent answer to the demand for “agency.”
The pursuit of virtue, freedom, or well-being, even under constraints, can still be considered an ethical practice.
It is now worth exploring what Russian psychotherapists, busy with both freedom and subjectivity, might contribute to this concept of freedom. Based on my
395 readings of the literature on postsocialism as well as my own ethnographic materials, there is an indication of multiple types of freedom at work in psychological projects.
Parsing these helps us to make more sense of both the apparent ambiguity of post-
Soviet psychological governance, as well as to identify some ways in which they may be more than the sum of their (governmental) parts.
Thinking first of the materials in this dissertation: in every locale practitioners thought about their work not in solipsistic terms, as one might expect via a strong discourse of self-esteem, but rather in relation to social concern and social personhood. Mikhail Labkovsky, the radio talk-show psychologist, consistently promoted a view of self-transformation that was to be a ground for political and social transformation. Nikolai, the psychologist who taught the vectors system and was interested in spreading garmoniia (harmony) around the world, was thinking in terms that emanated outward. Similarly, Olessia, who spoke of the wisdom of dusha and the energiia that she is able to key into, continually resisted the instrumentalization of the self. And Tamara Grigorievna at Tomorrow’s Builders targeted the children of the elite by appropriating a capitalist language of success and leadership in order to teach lessons in friendship, reducing aggression, and empathy. Even the practitioners
“managing” the vulnerable populations of St. Petersburg continually showed up to work, for little pay, in order to help those whom “nobody needs” (nikomu ne nuzhny), as the psychologist Olya put it.
Can these practices be read as “ethical practices of freedom”? If so, how?
What kind of freedom? How might redefining the notion of freedom underpinning these “ethical practices” help us to make more sense of how they view their work?
396 And what might this conceptualization do to help us further draw out the relationship between being governed and being free in Russia? In seeking to answer these questions, I find useful James Laidlaw’s (2002) writings on freedom and ethics. Keen to subvert social (or economic) control theses of human conduct, Laidlaw has drawn on the same Aristotelian-Foucauldian line that other practitioners interested in
“practical ethics” have in order to shift from anthropological discussions of agency to one of ethics and freedom. He suggests that the focus on agency has narrowed the view of human action to one of effectiveness (and therefore presumably a partner to power). Agents are always seen to be succeeding at something, inscribing their wishes in the structures of power. In contrast, Laidlaw argues that a Foucauldian inquiry into the ethical pursuit of freedom offers a more comprehensive view of human conduct based not on outcome, but on the active practices of self, based on “models,” or available repertoires (as Rogers puts it). Writes Laidlaw, “The freedom of the ethical subject, for Foucault, consists in the possibility of choosing the kind of self one wishes to be” (2002:323-324)—a choosing that, of course, takes place within constraints.168
This approach thus opens a space for thinking of post-Soviet freedom alongside capitalist expansion and expanding inequality. But the important ethnographic question is, what is meant in this context by “freedom”? I would suggest that the views expressed by the various psychologists and psychotherapists that I listed above about the social dimensions of self-realization are versions of freedom of a
168 Laidlaw writes, “Wherever and in so far as people’s conduct is shaped by attempts to make of themselves a certain kind of person, because it is as such a person that, on reflection, they think they ought to live, to that extent their conduct is ethical and free. And to the extent that they do so with reference to ideals, values, models, practices, relationships, and institutions that are amenable to ethnographic study, to that extent their conduct becomes the subject matter for an anthropology of ethics” (2002:327).
397 particularly Russian sort. As many anthropological studies of Russia have shown, freedom (svoboda) has a much more social dimension than in liberal societies.
Caroline Humphrey (2007) points out that svoboda, which is derived from svoi, or
“ours,” has historically connoted a form of “freedom with.” Thus, it is less “I am free,” than “we” are free together. She notes that this is often vis-à-vis an “alien other,” but not in every case. Another important part of the discourse of freedom in Russia,
Humphrey suggests, is the notion of the community, or mir, which can ideally have a limitless reach. One need not only be free with one’s people (and in opposition to some other); one can also become free in a sense of cosmic oneness, in keeping with an “image of the universalized community” (2007:4).169
It should be clear from this summary of her argument that this “freedom” carries a social and unifying dimension. And Humphrey is not alone in her reading of
Russian ideas about freedom. In his research on late-socialist forms of sociality,
Alexei Yurchak has described forms of close togetherness (obshchenie) in which one’s identity was totally dependent on that of others. These groupings were known as svoi, which has the same root word of svoboda. Through svoi people established
“deterritorialized milieus” in which they could practice a form of daily life—freely, as it were—among intimates. Crucially, however, these milieus were not “free from,” but were very much free within Soviet society. They were vnye, or simultaneously inside and outside Soviet culture. Similarly, the many anthropological studies of Russian
“informal practices” (sometimes termed “corruption”) have noted the way people rely on others to make ends meet. As described by Humphrey (2002), Ledeneva (2006),
169 As Humphrey notes, this link between the free “we” and cosmic unity became an integral part of the communist project, which sought to promote its own forms of internationalism and freedom.
398 Verdery (1996), and Volkov (2002), the notion of blat, or “pull” was an essential survival strategy and therefore anchored social identities within economies of favors.
Therefore in Russia there is a certain social-moral orientation that diverges from both the atomized self-interested individual, and the money form—two keystones of ideal- typic liberal societies.
According to Humphrey, however, in the post-Soviet period svoboda has been resignified and linked to the import of capitalist ways of being. “Svoboda-freedom has a new content, widely seen to come from the West: namely contested elections, privatization, consumer choice, religious revivals, NGOs, environmental movements, gender consciousness.” Moreover, she adds, this “new svoboda is available to anyone with the wealth or resources to exercise it” (2007:8). This has led to a situation in which poorer Russians are unable to afford those freedoms. “People are worried that this new ‘freedom’ is not really freedom at all, but the downside of endless openness, namely ‘limitlessness’ (bespredel)…” (2007:8).
The ambiguity I find in the psychologists’ work—namely their simultaneous participation in both the entrenchment of elite power through psychological disposition, and the pursuit of “social change”—contains these two svobodas.
The Moral Economy
How might an exploration of moral economy transform our understanding of the double valence of psychologists’ projects of social reform? Apart from the fact that, for better and for worse, there always seems to be a way to get what one needs in
Russia, regardless of the law, the informal practices of the moral economy appear
399 relatively resistant to both the capitalization of daily life as well as depersonalization: both Humphrey (2002) and Wanner (2005) attest that in the early years of wild capitalism, people continued to hold onto certain moral orientations which separated the bribe (vziatka) from blat because of the foreignness of the money form to social relations. A decade later, it appears that this orientation remains an important part of daily life. The exchange of money among friends remains terribly awkward. For many people, traditions of charity and social care remain very strong over and above the accumulation of things. While some informal practices—for instance firms that sell bureaucratic services—have been capitalized, the legacy of the moral economy lives on. Douglas Rogers suggests that the “incontrovertible economic logic with no consideration of any human values, practices, or consequences” that has arrived in
Russia will continue to be “remoralized” (2009:245). And Sergei Oushakine suggests that, in trying to make sense of the changes of the last two decades, people have
“repatriated” capitalism in ways that incorporate other kinds of sociality and values
(2009:15-78).
Recent work by James Ferguson gives us some reason to consider these moral economies in a larger, global, context. For in Africa it has been shown how a scientific capitalism bent on efficiency and driven by cost-benefit analyses can be both demoralizing (Ferguson 2007:69-88) (in the sense of removing moral considerations from the calculation) as well as anti-political (Ferguson 1994) (in the sense that common citizens are distanced from the levers of power by a grey bureaucratic language). Might this, then, suggest that the persisting moral economy in Russia is a
400 possible source not only of corrupt officials and Land Rovers cutting the line, but also of a politics of solidarity?
I raise the issue of svoboda and Russia’s moral economy in order to suggest that they might help us to see in the work of Russia’s psychologists an ongoing struggle between different assumptions about freedom that is playing out through their pursuit of virtue through self-care. That is, one of the “virtues” that Russian psychologist seek to cultivate for themselves, as well as their clients, may be precisely this plural kind of freedom, one based, firstly, in a “we” that is held together by particular kinds of moral exchange. If their efforts are without question tied to class reproduction, then this is a way to understand them simultaneously as re-moralizing.
A Final Case: Nikolai’s Dilemma
These are tentative thoughts and will require further research and elaboration. In my fieldwork to date there have only been glimmers of this kind of re-moralizing politics, and they should not be overstated. But as a thought experiment, consider one ethnographic account, drawn from a series of meetings with Nikolai Bazov, that master of human psychological “vectors” and “garmoniia.” His story illuminates how the tension between selfhood and personhood—that is between being a singular versus a social being—continues to unfold through competing conceptions of freedom and sociality. I saw this in the way that, despite his stirring language of alleviating suffering and striving for freedom, Bazov continually performed awkwardly vis-à-vis the market and/or the state. In discussions with me about his efforts to build a psychology business, he floated between two seemingly contradictory subject-
401 positions—that of the savvy businessman and of the kindly social worker. This was driven in large part by his uncertainty about how to feel about his market-based approach to psychological care. The commodification of services seemed to drag him away from his stated ideals of service, and his struggle to found a business based around advice, training and consulting often led him to take corporate jobs that made him feel uncomfortable, to cater to clients only interested in psychology as a tool of manipulation, and even, in some cases, to lapse into the performances of therapist as shaman (Levi-Strauss 1967) and confidence man as a way to drum up business.
The first time we met, Nikolai had suggested that we do so on the street, and then go to his office together. I soon understood why. After meeting, we ascended a narrow flight of stairs, passed a guard, and began winding through a labyrinth of hallways. The building spanned two separate structures that had been merged together.
There were floors named 4a, b, and c that did not sit on the same plane. Clusters of signs meant to remedy the situation only added to the confusion. It was an apt spatial metaphor for the marketplace that had taken shape in the 1990s in Russia: improvised renovations, unexpected stairways, walls at odd angles, a secutiry guard distracted by soap operas, and dozens of dreams crystallized as business start-ups in small rented rooms. Finding your way was not a matter of good directions, but experience.
We eventually came to a doorway marked with Verity’s logo. The door opened onto a medium-sized, single-room office with two large windows looking onto the mottled wall of the neighboring building. There were two desks—his and his assistant’s—two desktop computers, a large map of the city dotted with push pins, and
402 two soft chairs, which he uses for consultations, separated by a table garnished with crackers and tea.
Throughout our many conversations in those two chairs, Nikolai was always intent on presenting himself to me in the best possible light. And when we began our conversations, he was quite confident in his “vectors system” as he referred to it. He believed it to be a universally applicable system that could help people understand themselves and others, bringing them success, and perhaps the world, peace. His desire to make it big was apparent enough: he knew I was American, and he constantly asked me what modifications would be necessary to sell his system in the
US. Would it be possible, he would ask, for him to join the faculty of a university?
How much money do psychologists make? Would people pay to come to his workshops? And so forth. As a result of these kinds of interactions, I got the sense that
Nikolai was more concerned with business, success and cultivating the confident disposition of the guru, than with psychological practice.
This view turned out to be inaccurate. I later learned that Nikolai was also leading pro-bono sessions for St. Petersburg’s teachers. It was a personal goal of his, he explained to me, to help teachers better understand their students’ needs, recognize their personality traits, and, ultimately, it seemed, respect them. What made this personal for him was based on a story he told me twice—the first time as a depersonalized one about “a boy,” and the second time as a personal narrative—in which a teacher tells a young boy “you are nothing.” The map in the wall with the push pins, it turned out, designated the number of schools in the city in which he had taught his course. And there were several dozen.
403
Figure . “Our graduates. Teachers who have passed the course ‘the Harmonious Child’ work here.”
Over our many meetings, two sides of Nikolai began to emerge, and as the year wore on and I got to know him better, he began to demonstrate less and less business swagger. He admitted to me that his wife, who is also a psychologist, made more money than he did last summer. He said he felt ashamed by this, even though he knew that such a view was based on sexist assumptions. At the end of the year, when his business wasn’t going very well, he admitted, “Five years ago I taught my system to business people through Verity. But now I don’t want to continue because Russian business has gone the wrong way. There is a great gap between rich and poor, and an every-man-for-himself idea where all that the businessman cares about is moving his
404 children and wife to the US, and then following them some years later. They don’t think about others.” Bazov explained that he changed his professional priorities, and had become more interested in giving harmony to others. He also complained that until now psychology in Russia has been seen as an instrument for manipulating others, not to connect with oneself and others. He gave the example of his wife’s experience with clients: “She wanted to teach the women about their bodies, their senses, their sexuality, feeling more comfortable with themselves, but all they wanted to know was how to manipulate their husbands.”
When I asked him what kind of future he envisioned for his work and business, he said that he has had three dreams.
The first, I am seaside with a laptop somewhere in Australia, and I provide [my psychological] system to others around the world through the internet. I would write special materials, rather than doing the trainings, which take a lot of work. In the second, which I no longer consider, I wanted to build a great organization, but once I learned of the low quality of professionals in the city, I gave up on this. Third, I dream of becoming an expert in relations and using those talents in a political sphere.
He used the example of the recent conflict between Russia and Ukraine over gas prices, and suggested that at its root “there are also psychological issues that are being played out.” “My perspective as a psychologist could help each side to see more of the big picture. These psychological levels and reasons are not available to the participants because they are without the special psychological knowledge that I have. I can see more. I can see special things for the future, be a good expert.”
In statements like these a craving for big fame and business success was always present, but also in partial conflict with a sense of social concern that extended
405 beyond Russia’s borders. One day, for instance, I asked Bazov to describe his activities on the previous day. He told me that he and his wife had journeyed to a factory, where they had been asked to assess the psychological capabilities of several mid-level managers. They tested five personnel, and wrote reports about them for the director. At least a few of them were negative, and probably led to firing.
My wife doesn’t like this work because she thinks that we have to write painful things. But it’s our work. The director hires us because he understands that we can see many things that he can’t. It is the director’s job to improve the plant’s performance by 300% by the end of the year, so he’s beginning with the capabilities of his managers. Our reviews are usually connected with firings.
Somewhat embarrassed, he hastened to add that many of those they have to assess were already on the edge. Then, as he showed me several of the assessments and their criteria, he boasted that Verity had won the account in a competition among four other firms. But then he quickly changed the subject back to his desire to shift the emphasis of the company by moving away from business work. He pointed out that his business seminars and HR-consulting work is now promoted through another website, and under a different firm name. Verity, shared with his wife, now specializes in more
“ecological” work, mostly training individuals and also teachers (for free) who can then teach children. He confessed that it has been his wife who has afforded him a much broader point of view of things.
The tension between Nikolai’s two visions of himself as a successful psychologist—one delivered in virtuous tones, the other instrumental—typified our conversations. What Nikolai shows particularly well is how the competing social identities that each approach to his work seemed to require had created a tricky field,
406 perhaps somewhat like the building housing his office. That is, at times he assumed the role of the socially minded practitioner, while at others, the savvy business man.
At times he spoke of his profound desire for social engagement—even at a planetary scale—while at others he spoke of his dream to be sitting alone somewhere on a beach, communicating his work through a computer. At times he played the progressive male aware of his society’s hegemonic masculinism, while at others he appeared as a traditionalist, even a chauvinist. These contradictory positions produced numerous kinds of ambivalence about his work, homeland, and its shared future.
The way Nikolai struggled to inhabit contradictory positions vis-à-vis the work of subject-formation was one that I encountered often. Regardless of institutional position, many practitioners wrestled over their professional identity, and their relationship to either the market or the state. What is crucial, however, is that practitioners were usually aware of these contradictions. In a way reminiscent of the early Soviet period that Sergei Oushakine discusses, in which people after the revolution experienced “a lost sense of direction,” “the lack of an established order,” and “a feeling of plotless life” (2004:393-394), practitioners also appeared to be searching for a new compass in conditions in which the order of things had shifted.
The question often seemed to become one of finding the proper balance, and necessitated a kind of “practical ethics.” Following Foucault (1997a; 1997b) and
Alasdair McIntyre’s (1984) turns to Aristotle, this posits ethics as a set of daily routine practices—things which one does to oneself as a way of caring for, or transforming the self—in the pursuit of some virtuous ends. As Saba Mahmood (2005) has pointed out in her study of the Islamic women’s piety movement in Egypt, practical ethics are
407 situated—that is, they are not expressions of sovereign agency but personal projects that unfold within constraints. Seen in these terms, I would argue that Nikolai’s work posed for him a dilemma that was ethical in nature and worked through in practice.
It was a dilemma that remained unresolved. After spending most of 2005-2006 trying to convince me that his system was capable of solving personal, social and even geopolitical problems, when I met him again in 2007, I found a person questioning everything. “With my vectors system,” he confessed, “if you have a problem in your life it’s your fault.” He paused and smiled, “But with [the new system I’m studying] it’s not your fault.” For at least partly economic reasons, Nikolai had begun to reconsider the nature of freedom, virtue, responsibility, social worlds and making ends meet—things that, apparently, he had had a hard time harmonizing.
Last Words
Like Nikolai’s own dilemmas, the analytic tension between psychology as a governing tool and a resource for the cultivation of freedom, virtue and responsibility in post-
Soviet Russia will remain unresolved. And perhaps that is as it should be: in closing, I would like to return to my earlier discussion of Michael Lambek’s work (2008) on the incommensurability of virtue and (economic) value. Lambek suggests that, in these neoliberal times, making ethical and economic value commensurable has been a cornerstone of many of the governing projects social scientists have critiqued. The concrete examples include the use of cost-benefit analyses, or the creation of markets for the provision of social goods like education, health care and welfare. It is the rendering of moral or ethical virtue in terms of economic value that, he implies, leads
408 to the demoralization of social life, and we might add, following James Ferguson, its depoliticization. Tracing a lineage of resistance to such forms of rationalization through Simmel, Marx and Weber, Lambek highlights instead the venerable tradition of arguing against the commensurability of value and virtue, a kind of last stand against the grinding gears of capitalism. As Lambek puts it, “We must preserve another set of values or ideas about value with which to critically appraise the production and expansion of capitalist value” (2008:135). Not everything, he seems to be saying, should be for sale.
Drawing on the Aristotelian tradition of practical ethics, Lambek suggests that one way to promote this incommensurability in our analyses of daily life is to consider human actions not in terms of ends, but in terms of means. This perspective, he argues through Louis Menand and C.B. MacPherson, distinguishes virtue from both economic value and absolute notions of virtue and “the good.” Lambek suggests that it is anthropologically worthwhile to investigate how ends and means are articulated in practice. What kinds of choices do people make, and on the basis of what kinds of judgment? If these are not kept distinct, he says, referring to Bourdieu, “ethical practice appears to get subsumed within an agonistics of honor or taste, and an ethical disposition—to do the right thing, to be a good person or to lead a good life—is replaced by narrower instrumental and competitive calculations—to get what one wants and to do so ahead of, or at the expense of others” (2008:137).
What Lambek describes as an analytic framework was, as we have seen throughout this dissertation, constantly expressed by my informants and their clients.
As with Nikolai’s dilemma, many psychologists struggled to articulate their interest in
409 the provision of social care with either market or state-based constraints and agendas.
And many clients struggled to determine which kinds of work were “for the soul.”
They did this in a way typical of the post-Soviet period, when many have struggled over the relationship of moral to material value. In the case of my informants, I came to see that they were actively pursuing what they felt were “soulful” projects anchored in a universe of social meaning and relationships, despite the fact that, very often, they had to express those projects in terms of other types of (market) value.
As a way of concluding this dissertation, I would like to propose a view of the
“psychologization” of Russia that not only follows but also supports informants’ struggle with virtue and value. Just as they appear to resist the commodification of their ethical projects, so might we, analytically, resist subsuming those projects, at least entirely, into another story of capitalist individualism spread through a psychological medium. As I have demonstrated, there is no question that the spread of capitalism in post-Soviet Russia is of great significance to the proliferation of new technologies of rule that shape class differentiation, incite the drive for market success, and foster new kinds of parenting. Yet this isn’t everything. Discussions with psychologists and psychotherapists also reveal a struggle around precisely the hegemony of economics as the only measure of post-Soviet value.
Aside from the potential ethnographic payoff of illuminating more dimensions of this community’s lives and visions, there may also a political pay-off that pertains not only to Russia, but the broader imperative to articulate what we, as cultural critics, are “for.” In search of a new kind of progressive Left politics, Wendy Brown (2003) has argued for disaggregating economic from political liberalism. She writes that
410 “when democratic principles of governance, civil codes, and even religious morality are submitted to economic calculation, when no value or good stands outside of this calculus, sources of opposition to, and mere modulation of, capitalist rationality disappear” (2003:7). In other words, economic neoliberalism erodes oppositional political, moral, or subjective claims that happen to be located outside capitalist rationality, including liberal democracy. Brown is far from unself-conscious about her rallying cry around liberal democracy: “The Left,” she writes, “is losing something it never loved, or at best was highly ambivalent about.” But it is also losing “a site [and indeed object] of criticism and political agitation” (2003:13).
Brown’s proposition is closely related to Lambek’s, and worth considering at the close of this analysis of the psychological projects of self-making in Russia. For both authors, resisting the commensurability of value and virtue, of the economic and the political, may be a way to retain the space for opposition, for rethinking, much the way the Second World did, for better and for worse, for much of the 20th century. By resisting a similar kind of conflation of the many ways Russian psychologists and psychotherapists imagine their place in Russia—as agents of care, coaches, healers, trainers, civilizers, advisors, liberators—it becomes possible to envision the moral economy as a possible resource for articulating forms of social equality and solidarity in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse. In this way, the pursuit of psychological freedom can be viewed more complexly—as evidence of particular technologies of rule, but also of a complex of projects, hopes and dreams that characterize contemporary life, not only in post-Soviet Russia, but many other places as well.
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