Copyright by Vasilina Orlova 2021

Home , Balagansk, Belaya (Angara), Bratsk, Bratsk Reservoir, In a Better World, Irkutsk

Vasilina Orlova

2021 The Dissertation Committee for Vasilina Orlova certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Citizens of the Future: Infrastructures of Belonging in Post-Industrial Eastern Siberia

Committee:

Craig Campbell, Supervisor

Kamran Asdar Ali

Kathleen Stewart

Serguei Oushakine

Maria Sidorkina Citizens of the Future: Infrastructures of Belonging in Post-Industrial Eastern Siberia

Vasilina Orlova

Dissertation

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin May 2021 In memory of my grandfather Vasily Orlov. On February 4, 1961, while clearing the road at the Angara River on a lespromkhoz bulldozer, he crashed through ice to his death. Acknowledgments

I am thankful to my grandmother and my interlocutors, including those whom I do not portray nor mention, for their time and attention. While most of the names here are changed, I preserved the names of my grandparents—Valentina Orlova and Vasily Orlov. Many thanks to people who welcomed me in the villages of Anosovo, Karda, Bolshoi Lug, Muia, the towns of Ust Uda, Ust Baley, Ust Kut, Balagansk, and the cities of Bratsk, Irkutsk, and Severobaikalsk. For reading parts of this writing, often in very preliminary drafts, I am grateful to myprofes- sors Kamran Asdar Ali, Craig Campbell, Kathleen Stewart, Serguei Oushakine, Maria Sidorkina, John Hartigan, Elizabeth Keating, Jason Cons, James Slotta, Courtney Handman, Marina Peterson, Ward Keeler, as well as to my colleagues and friends—some of them are also professors now— Rick W.G. Smith, Alexandro Flores, Kate Maddox, Daniel Perera, Manuel G. Galaviz, Chelsi West Ohueri, Angelina Locker, Omer Ozcan, and Alexandra Simonova. Thanks also to Gleb Domnenko, Laura Lippman, and John Parman for reading parts of this. I thank scientists who made their expertise available to me in Siberia: Anna Sirina, Larisa Salakhova, Mikhail Rozhansky, and Svetlana Pshennikova. I thank the archivist Boris Salnikov, workers of Bratskgesstroi Museums, the Ethnographic Museum of Irkutsk, the Ethnographic Mu- seum of Ust Uda, and the Rasputin museums in Irkutsk and in Ust Uda. Many thanks to the collective of the newspaper Ust Udinskie Vesti (formerly, Angarskaya Pravda) for giving me access to the archive of the period of the Bratsk dam construction, 1954–1961. I owe my thanks to my friends and scientists based in Moscow: Irina Sirotkina, Mikhail Alexeyevsky, and Nestor Manichkin. With Daria Lilleson, we visited the Cinema archive. Igor Vereshchagin gave me access to his collection of newspapers and his photo archive. Thanks to Memorial workers for finding “A Tale of a Young Woman” for me.

v Many thanks to colleagues and to the audience for comments and questions that shaped this work as I presented it at the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies Conven- tion in 2017, 2018, and 2019, American Anthropological Association Meetings in 2017 and 2018, and the “Futures and Ruins” workshop at Duke University in 2016. I separately want to thank organizers and speakers at graduate student conferences where I presented, including “New Di- rections in Anthropology” at the University of Texas in Austin. Thanks to my discussants. I am grateful to Mikhail Rozhansky, Anya Belyanina, and Alexandr Verkhozin for the discussion of my project as I presented my book in Russian The Anthropology of Everydayness in Irkutsk at the Center of Independent Social Studies. I owe the preliminary presentation of this project to Maria Sikirina, my friend from the university years and now director of gallery Izmailovo in Moscow. I owe the appearance of this book to my publisher and writer Stanislav Ivanov. I owe the Moscow presentation of my book to him and to the book club Tsiolkovksy. I am preparing the book Siberian Talks in Russian thanks to publisher and poet Dana Kurskaya. Ulyana Tyufiakova transcribed hours of recordings, and Aadita Chaudhury and Sarah Kauf- man aided with editing. The community of women writers The Grotto founded by Talia Lavin cheered me through the process. The Wenner–Gren foundation and the University of Texas at Austin supported my research financially (College of Liberal Arts, Anthropology Department, and Center for Russian, EastEu- ropean and Eurasian Studies); Indiana University contributed a travel grant. I thank my family that resides in Russia (Moscow and various locations in Siberia and beyond), USA, and Ukraine (Kyiv and Dudarkiv) for their support. My son Vsevolod Domnenko (Seva) accompanied me in my travels, and I thank him for being a dear presence and a helpful research assistant.

vi Figure 1. My son Seva at the entrance to a “mermaid bedroom” in one of the friendly houses in Anosovo. In the wallpaper, Ariel is holding her companion fish in her palms. The toys onthe floor are arranged in an intricate composition: doll furniture, including sofas, shelves, kitchen seats, wardrobe. Nikolay made these detailed toys for his granddaughter.

vii Citizens of the Future: Infrastructures of Belonging in Post-Industrial Eastern Siberia

Vasilina Orlova, PhD The University of Texas at Austin, 2021 SUPERVISOR: Craig Campbell

The Soviet Union’s promises of the radiant Socialist future failed to materialize but left behindmaterial reminders—ruins, broadly conceived: not only architecture and infrastructure but also values, popular tropes, and ideas. My dissertation argues that these “ruins” of a future as imagined in the past continue producing warped meanings. They become a kind of affective infrastructure for the present. Through daily engagement with the material reminders of Socialist industrialism’s failed promise, people are entangled in a particular affective infrastructure of belonging. I study these entanglements by focusing on avillage in the Priangar’e region of Siberia. In the 1950s and 1960s, the developmental transformation of Soviet infrastructure manifested in the region with the construction of the Bratsk Dam and Hydroelectric Power Station. The dam and the station were a massive terraforming project. The dam-induced flood displaced thousands of people. New settlements arouse at the shores of the Angara River. They were centrally planned. One such settlement, the primary site of my research, is the village of Anosovo. Almost sixty years since relocation, eloquently described by the Russian writer Valentin Rasputin in the novel Farewell to Matyora, Anosovo, a sister-prototype of Matyora, is still there. With the official dis- bandment of the USSR in 1991, Anosovo saw the drastic reduction of government support on the way of marketization, privatization, and liberalization of prices with the turn to the neoliberal market economy. Anosovo, along with countless other small settlements across the former USSR territories, found itself in a position of a monotown with the privatized enterprise with the plummeting social sphere. How do people survive there and in so doing, how do they navigate the entanglements of ruins and new beginnings?

viii What keeps the remaining villages rooted in a place whose population has dwindled from more than 2,000 in the 1970s to a little over 500 today? How do they define their belonging and how do they effectively “belong”? This work argues that among the factors that define people’s connection to the place postponing their movement is the multiplicity of the ties of “affective infrastructure” understood in two senses: first, as the human (and animal) connections, and second, as the workings of the infrastructural agglomerations of objects upon the consciousness of the people. People become the sensitive joints in affective infrastructures. Being incorporated within these affective infrastructures and in effect manifesting as the elements of such, the villagers in Anosovo connect to the place with strong ties. The affective profile of the villagers turns out to be optimistic, directed toward the future, hopeful, nostalgic, longing for immortality and awaiting compensation or retribution. The mood is marked with what this works calls “cheerful nonchalance”: a disregard for the everyday risks and dangers of life in the industrial margins of Russian Siberia. This work argues that cheerful nonchalance—the upbeat spirit of caring less or not at all—is an affective response to precarious conditions.

This ethnographic work is grounded in participant observation, collection of narratives, andmyown family history: my grandmother lived in Anosovo until the death of her husband, and the story of her peregrinations, her theorization of the “Siberian character,” and the analysis of her written memoirs add a personal and intimate dimension to this study.

ix Ust Ilimsk

RUSSIA

aikal-Amur M B ainl ine Ust Kut

Bratsk Magistralnyi

Severobaikalsk

Karda Zhigalovo IRKUTSK Anosovo OBLAST Kumareika Muia Ust Uda Verkholensk Balagansk

T r a n s - S ib e r ia n R a i lw Svirsk a y

Ust Baley Angarsk BURYATIA Irkutsk

Ulan Ude

ZABAYKALSKY KRAI

MONGOLIA 0 100 200 km

Figure 2. A map of the research area around the village of Anosovo, Eastern Siberia. The map was commissioned by the author and created by Mats Wedin.

x Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... xiv

List of Figures ...... xv

Introduction ...... 1 Soviet Heteroutopia ...... 4 Bratsk Hydroelectric Station and Dam ...... 4 Women’s Fates ...... 8 The Bloom of Intellectual Life in Bratsk ...... 14 Structure ...... 18 Methods ...... 24

Part 1. The Roots Of Ruins ...... 28 Chapter 1. Interrogating the Dead ...... 28 1.1. Ephemerality Of Palpable Objects ...... 46 1.2. Materiality Of Memory ...... 56 1.3. Photographs Are Turning Their Back On Us ...... 66 1.4. Affective Infrastructures Of Belonging ...... 76 Chapter 2. Women’s Stories: Waiting for Divine Remuneration ...... 77 2.1. Svetlana Sergeyevna And The Demand Of Immortality ...... 77 2.2. Alevtina And The Search For Justice ...... 96 2.3. “Live, Mama, You Feed Us”: Care And Carelessness In Anosovo ...... 105 2.4. A Dreamscape In A Magic Ball And Ritualistic Refusals ...... 113

xi Part 2. Anosovo On Maps ...... 127 Chapter 3. Transience and Endurance of the Place ...... 127 3.1. Photographic Memory ...... 135 3.2. Forms Of Recollection ...... 139 3.3. Elena And Refusal Of Aid ...... 141 3.4. Vera And The Limits Of Cruelty ...... 146 3.5. Post-Soviet Planners ...... 156 Chapter 4. Anosovo’s Nonexistence ...... 161 4.1. “Every Beehive Is A State” ...... 161 4.2. “Settlement With Serfs”: Anosovo’S Pulsating Existence ...... 164 4.3. The Cross-Marked Border ...... 173 4.4. “It Is In Our Mentality”: Nonchalance, Pofigism, Carelessness, And Indif- ference (Ravnodushie) ...... 178 4.5. Nonchalance Of Traveling The Ice ...... 179 Chapter 5. Kardinian Dreamers ...... 184 5.1. Layered Heteroutopia Of The “Abandoned” Village ...... 186 5.2. “My Fate Slipped Away”: Solitary Dwelling In Taiga ...... 193 5.3. The Ideal House In The Ideal City ...... 202 5.4. “Local Tsiolkovsky” ...... 208

Conclusion ...... 214 Nonchalance ...... 221 Language ...... 229 “The Far-Away Land of Anosovo”: Instead of the Epilogue ...... 231

Appendices ...... 234 Map of the Drowned River ...... 234 Note on Transliteration ...... 246 Family Structure of One Household in Anosovo ...... 247

xii Glossary ...... 248

Bibliography ...... 250

Vita ...... 266

xiii List of Tables

1 The first page of Belodedov’s manuscript translated ...... 202

xiv List of Figures

1 My son Seva in Anosovo ...... vii 2 A map of the research area around the village of Anosovo, Eastern Siberia . . . . x 3 One of the bas-reliefs adorning the Bratsk dam ...... 6 4 The plane distills a chemical concoction to kill the gnat; dated 1956–57 ...... 9 5 Photo of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the History Museum of Bratskgesstroy 13 6 The page of the satirical sheet Komsomol Extinguisher ...... 16 7 One of the scenarios of the future from the journal Tekhnika – molodezhi! . . . . . 17 8 Into the Space! ...... 35 9 My father in the club of the village of Anosovo ...... 42 10 My neighborhood in Moscow, built in the 1980s ...... 47 11 Grandmother Valentina’s penultimate journey, traced ...... 52 12 A brooch with a plastic ruby ...... 53 13 Grandmother Valentina and I in 1998 in her apartment in the city of Angarsk . . . 55 14 A package of the milk “Little House in the Village” ...... 61 15 My grandmother in 1950 ...... 63 16 “We are waiting for the Dad at Yandy mooring” ...... 65 17 The cover of the issue of Ust Uda “literary and ethnographic collection” Istok (Source) 67 18 An illustration from ethnologist Lyudmila Saburova’s essay “Clothing of the Rus- sian population of Siberia” ...... 70 19 Women in traditional costumes captured from the back ...... 72 20 Birchbark tursuk (container) for mushrooms and berries ...... 73 21 An old woman in everyday clothes, view from the back ...... 74

xv 22 A woman in winter furry garment “dokha,” view from the back ...... 75 23 The book of navigational charts of Bratsk Reservoir ...... 78 24 The leaf of the navigational charts folio with the village ofKarda ...... 80 25 Svetlana Sergeyevna in her hat and a mauve dress at the stairs of the Anosovo house ...... 82 26 Svetlana Sergeyevna and Zoia Petrovna drink tea in a “summer kitchen” . . . . . 86 27 A leaf of my handwritten photo album, with my first draft of the story ofSvetlana Sergeyevna ...... 89 28 The kitchen and the mirror of Svetlana Sergeyevna ...... 91 29 The room where my grandmother Valentina Orlova died ...... 93 30 “Elena” is photographed here, in the photo below, with her granddaughter . . . . 97 31 “Alevtina” in 2016; pictured on a moor waiting for a river boat ...... 99 32 “Irina,” younger sister of “Alevtina” ...... 100 33 Irina, Galina, and Alevtina: a Baptist praying circle in the village ...... 102 34 Zinaida Vasilievna, mother of Alevtina and Irina ...... 107 35 Dasha on the school stairs covered in poplar fluff in Anosovo ...... 111 36 Dasha as a young woman in her kitchen in the village of Muia ...... 112 37 With Dasha in her room in Muia, watching MTV ...... 113 38 Tatiana with her children at the Red Square in Moscow ...... 114 39 Margarita in a magic ball ...... 116 40 Tatiana Valerievna looking at the photographs of herself and her children . . . . . 117 41 Carpet with deer, one of the populous themes and products during the Soviet time 119 42 Tatiana Valerievna with a bunch of flowers in her hand ...... 122 43 Ella, daughter of Valentina and Konstantin in their Anosovo house ...... 129 44 The map of the village of Yandy before the flood drawn by Anatoly Kopylov . . . 133 45 My father and Anatoly Kopylov discussing the map of Yandy that Kopylov created 134 46 The map of Shishimorovka (Zayandy), also named Podyandushka ...... 135 47 A photograph of his mother in Yandy before the flood from Rodion’s photo album 137

xvi 48 A photograph of himself as a boy in Yandy before the flood from Rodion’s photo album ...... 138 49 Elena and her granddaughter in Anosovo in 2013 as photographed by me . . . . . 142 50 Chamomile meadow in the town of Ust Uda ...... 150 51 “Prototypes” of the characters in Valentin Rasputin’s works ...... 153 52 The town of Ust Uda with a view at the Angara River in November 2018 . . . . . 155 53 The plan of the Institution of the Urbanism for Anosovo, courtesy of Anosovian archives ...... 169 54 Anosovo in the public cadaster maps of Rosreiestr ...... 172 55 Erecting the cross at the entrance to Anosovo on the June 24th, 2016 ...... 174 56 Conversations about ethos (mentalnost’) in Anosovo ...... 180 57 The village of Karda before the flood of1961 ...... 189 58 Karda in 1980, on a new place above the hill, the map drawn by Nikolay Ruposov 190 59 My interlocutor, “Karolina,” is walking the remnants of Karda ...... 191 60 Belodedov’s boat ...... 198 61 The first page of Belodedov’s manuscript ...... 203 62 The plan of attic includes the plan for thebees ...... 205 63 Page from Belodedov’s manuscript depicting the ideal house ...... 206 64 The scheme of the mushroom room ...... 207 65 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Kukoi Island where a pasture was ...... 236 66 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Island Naratai where grew the fruit trees ...... 237 67 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Islands Sosnovyi (Pine Tree), Bryozovi (Birch Tree), Sarafanin, Konnyi, Bolshoi Ust Udinskyi, etc...... 238 68 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood showing the settlement of Ust Uda ...... 239

xvii 69 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood ofan- other Birch Island ...... 240 70 The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with several more islands and villages ...... 241 71 The fragment of the map with islands Korovnik, Ogorodnikov, and Baikalov . . . 242 72 The fragment of the map with islands Goriachkin, Podvolochnyi, and others . . . 243 73 The fragment of the map with islands Sosnovyi, Kamennyi, and villages of Bakarma and Yegorovo ...... 244 74 The fragment of the map with islands Verkhnyi Kamennyi, Yelovyi, Nizhnii Yelovyi, Srednyi Kammennyi ...... 245 75 One household in Anosovo ...... 247

xviii Introduction

The rates of our economic development lead us closely to the resolution of theproblems that everyone to date considered the problems of the far-away future. Among those problems is the issue of the new cities. Unexpectedly for many, we literally faceplanted against the problem of the construction of the housing envelope [zhilishchnaya obolochka] for the Socialistically organized society of the future.

—Nadezhda Krupskaya, Cities of the Future, 1929

This woRK is an ethnographic inquiry into the life in the village of Anosovo at the Angara River in the Irkutsk Oblast (District) in Russia. This space continues to bear the resonance of the “post- Soviet” thirty years after the collapse of the USSR. Across the vast territories of the Soviet Union, almost identical settlements came to life through the second half of the twentieth century. Re- markably similar, they contain innumerable personal stories and dramas unfolding and folding into a picture of everyday life. The village I have “studied” and lived at was an industrial almost- town once: its “town-forming enterprise” (gradoobrazuiushchee predpriiatie, Collier 2011, 4) was of the forestry industry. Today, the settlement falters with little economic input and increasing government neglect. And yet, many continue to live there, holding on to pleasures and challenges of post-industrial rural life, actively constructing their “belonging” to their place. How and why do people stay in centrally planned settlements and navigate the potent “ruins” of the Soviet past?1 This work argues that among what defines people’s connection to theplace

1I call the enduring materialities of the Soviet time ruins. “Shadows of communism,” as the political scientists Pop-Eleches and Tucker call it, are evaluation-laden (2017). “Historical legacies,” diagnosed as “poorly functioning democratic representation mechanisms, external policy constraints, and significant collective action problems” (Pop- Eleches and Tucker, 2017, 312), reveal the attitudes of civilizational superiority. “The ‘dowry’ of Soviet industrial modernity,” as anthropologist Jeremy Morris (2016, 11) suggests following Trubina (2013), will also not do. Trubina uses the word “legacy” (nasledie), not “dowry” (nasledstvo); she speaks of “bad legacy” and “surviving legacy,” which are, affectively, set the tone of melancholy that I want to avoid. I prefer the word “ruins” in the wake oftheanalysis of the colonial endurances (Stoler 2008, 2016). I am aware that “ruins” is not unproblematic either. I am aware that the ease with which it is possible to visualize

1 postponing their movement is the multiplicity of the ties of “affective infrastructure” understood in two senses: first, as the human (and animal) connections, and second, as the workings ofthe infrastructural agglomerations of objects upon the consciousness of the people. Being incorporated within these affective infrastructures and in effect manifesting as theel- ements of such, the villagers in Anosovo connected to the place with strong ties. They become the sensitive “transmitters” of affect, the joints in the affective infrastructures. For theunder- standing of these affective infrastructures, one has to take into consideration the background of Anosovo. Anosovo is not merely a post-industrial settlement; it emerged as a byproduct of the manifestation of a Communist dream, as one of its many reverberations. This work argues that what emerged as Anosovo and in place of Anosovo and other centrally planned settlements can be called a “heteroutopia” in recognition of the multiple, often contradictory, utopian visions cohabiting one place and moment.2 Soviet futures, even when they are only evident in the remnants of “planes that never took of” as Soviet literary scholar Victor Shklovsky called it in 1914 (Oushakine, 2016), remain powerful presences in the region. The village of Anosovo sprung to life on the wave of the Soviet industrialization. TheBratsk hydroelectric station and a massive dam flooded vast territories and displaced almost two hundred fifty settlements. Instead, centrally planned settlements like Anosovo materialized. Today, some of them, with population drastically dwindling, appear unviable to an eye of an indiffer- ruins is deceptive. In the abundance of visual and multimodal portrayal of ruins of the Soviet times, there is an array of popular Instagram accounts with the telling names, like “yut_ebenya” (literally, “cozy fuckplace,” meaning also “cozy backwaters”), “northern_friend,” “postsovenok” (a play of words “post-Soviet” and “baby owl”), “besprosvet” (“dead end,” but also playing on the combination of words like “kultprosvet”—“cultural enlightenment,” Soviet abbreviation) and hundreds of other accounts, who, knowingly or not, trail in the discourse of the post-Soviet “ruin porn” as they broadcast the tenement housing panoramas, abandoned Soviet constructions, and derelict houses. I am aware that by using the word “ruins,” I likewise am trapped in the affectively profitable discourse of exploitative commercialization of ruins. However, what for some may be “remnants of the twilight years of the Soviet empire… among the debris… too worthless to plunder” (Brown 2015, 45), for me are the reminders of an ancestral home. While claiming the Soviet ruins as my own does not absolve me from the responsibility of being reflective while so doing, I see the labeling of any mention of ruins a “ruin porn” to be a swiping gesture coming from an uncharitable place. The term “rubble” that Gordillo seems to offer as an alternative toruins(2014) is not suggestive to me; to me, there are no analytic or affective advantages in calling my “ruins” anything else. 2“Heteroutopia” departs from Foucault’s “heterotopia” (1967) and elaborations and modifications, such as Jason Con’s “heterodystopia” (2018).

2 ent observer. What would the futures of those settlements be, and, if they have few prospects, how—by what means and why—do people continue living there?3 The “hetero” utopia is referring to the utopian visions of the “cities of the future” ofwhich Krupskaya wrote and that occupied thoughts of Soviet theorists and citizens alike. The new utopias including those of contemporary living came to life later. I have titled this work “Citizens of the future” in reference to the people who were supposed to be inhabitants of the Socialist futures, the futures that imagined in the past and now lie in ruins. In 1929, in a small essay titled “Cities of the Future,” Nadezhda Krupskaya wrote about the “housing envelope [zhilishchnaia obolochka] of the Socialistically organized society” that the Communist party has to build. The proprietors and imagined beneficiaries of the project were therefore supposed to be “the citizens of the future,” and, as one of my interlocutors once suggested, the relocated Anosovians belonged to this category. Not the citizens of the future as they were imagined in the past by Soviet theorists are the current inhabitants of the Anosovo’s present. And yet, as the Socialist future failed to come to life fully or as intended, its ghost continues to haunt the space.4

3The questions of post-Socialist futures were especially palpable in the 1990s—2010s, on which, not coinciden- tally, many groundbreaking anthropological and other ethnographic works focus. This period, the first time after transition, and its mood, were evaluated and captured differently. The differences often depended on positionality. For the anthropologists who, being Russian, embody the sensibilities of the colonial majority, the dominating mood looked differently than for the representatives of minorities and colonized peoples. As Dace Dzenovska putsit, “[C]ontrary to the ‘break of consciousness’ described by Alexei Yurchak (2005) in his ethnography of the late-Soviet generation in Russia’s main cities or the ‘moral vacuum’ described by Serguei Oushakine (2009) in his ethnography of postsocialist life in Barnaul, Latvians knew just what to do after the Soviet Union fell” (2020, 14). For others still, including youth, the 1990s were the time of not as much disorientation as the time of hope and exciting opportunities ahead, and a rise of entrepreneurial spirit. But, even so, it was undeniable that the fervent privatization and marketization led to the shrinking of villages and monotowns and the profound expansion of what Dzenovska calls “emptiness,” exemplified by abandoned houses and “a melancholic public mood”(2020, 11). 4The trope of “haunting” haunted the Communist modernity, thanks to the Marx and Engels ascribing thehaunt- ing qualities to the idea of communism since its emergence (1848). Derrida reflected on the spectral Marxism in The Specters of Marx (2012). The encounters on the verge of semantic availability defined as the heart of thematterof haunting entered the sociological imagination (Gordon, 2008). For the Soviet territories, Alexander Etkind suggested the science of “hauntology” as describing the phenomenon of the lingering presence of the Soviet phantoms (2013). Throughout this work, I pin some episodes as haunting—even though I do not engage “haunting” indepthmy work, it has been informing my way of thinking about places like Anosovo.

3 Soviet Heteroutopia

The Soviet heteroutopia was a product of the disjointed effort of the Soviet architects, planners, builders, participants, resisters, and dissidents. The heteroutopia arose—or failed to do so—in the social transformations that actively sought and created the new language, new forms, media, and genres for the emerging contexts, and the new ways of speaking and conceiving of the future. Old “things died” (Shklovsky 1914 [Oushakine, 2016, 111]); the new things were not yet in place, but they were coming. Actors recognized the urgency of this newness not only in terms of aesthetic expression, designs, architecture, or interior, but also in ways the byt—the routines of everydayness necessary for the maintaining life—was to be reconstructed. Reconstruction of byt required a reorganization of all spheres of life. In the process of this reorganization, throughout the territories of Russia, including Siberia— and other Soviet Republics—thousands of settlements rose in the second half of the twentieth century. Settlements, towns, cities, and camps sprang almost overnight, in several days, creating an industrial geography of socialist transformation. The village of Anosovo was one of countless “new things” that emerged in place of old “things dying” to partake in the development of the new “order of things.” Thus, Anosovo was one of 248 settlements relocated from the zone offlood the Bratsk dam. The “enlargement” and consolidation plans were part of the plan: in the Bratsk district alone, the inhabitants of sixty-three settlements were packed into six towns (Chepel, 2014). Anosovo absorbed a number of villages such as Anosovo, Serovo, Fyodorovka, Butakovo, Bernikovo, Khutor, Yandy with the khutor Podyandushka otherwise known as Shishimorovka, and possibly others.5 Bratsk Hydroelectric Station and Dam The Bratsk hydroelectric station and dam that changed life in the region were constructed over the span of almost a decade beginning from 1954. The construction of the dam commenced by the flood of 1961. The new, larger, industrial but rural settlements were brought andcomposed

5There is no agreement on which settlements exactly comprised Anosovo among local historians andarchival sources. Even though the relocation took place relatively recently, different sources name different numbers and names of the villages.

4 together as agglomerations of the previous, smaller villages. In my taxonomies, these were effectively some of the “cities of the future” as Krupskaya envisioned: villages on the brink of turning into industrial settlements. The Bratsk dam and station themselves were superobjects towering above the region, theSo- viet Union, and the world. At the time of its construction, the Bratsk station was the world’s singular most powerful electricity provider. Constructed by Bratskgesstroy (formerly Nizhnean- gargesstroy Management), the Bratsk hydroelectric station was the most powerful station in the world at that moment and still plays a significant role supplying Russia with electricity. The Bratsk dam is massive. It is 125 meters high and almost 1.5 kilometers inlength.Thedam has a rail line and a highway on top. The dam is adorned by a diptych bas-reliefs made inthat overabundant Socialist romanticism style that used to be called “Socialist realism.” Here is how architect and art critic Aleksei Kovalyov described the bas-relief on the left-shore side of the dam in 1975:

Cossacks that came to the far-away Siberia construct a wooden stronghold; there is a small group of peasants who came here to cultivate arable land; there is an expressive figure of Radischchev and a Buryat who works the forge; untamed, strong-willed Decembrists follow to the Siberian exile. The composition is crowned by a flag raised by a Red Army soldier—it is a symbol of liberation and defense of victories of the October. Eight-meter-high figure of the soldier solidifies the composition into one whole.

A contemporary reading by the website Sibenergetic is that the bas-relief “portrays a history of appropriation of Eastern Siberia to the October revolution from the pioneer Cossacks, through the exiles Radishchev and Decembrists to the Red Army” (2019). The right-shore side of the dam is adorned by a bas-relief where, among other figures, there are images of a chemist with a retort and a cosmonaut while on the background, there are toiling away masses engaged in a productive work. The construction of the Bratsk dam was surrounded by countless other projects in theregion. The Irkutsk Aluminum factory opened in 1953. The first line of the Angarsk Cementno-gorniy factory was set in 1957. The Bratsk aluminum factory opened in 1966. The development of the industry was accompanied by the growth of the cities. Thecityof

5 Figure 3. One of the bas-reliefs adorning the Bratsk dam. Artist sculptor Sergey Shaposhnikov.

Bratsk that arose around the construction of the dam in place of the village by the same name, grew from ~51,000 people in 1959 to ~230,000 in 2017.6 The population peaked in 1990 when it comprised ~288,000 people. Other Siberian cities had a similar dynamic: Angarsk rose from ~134,000 to ~226,000 peaking at ~269,000 in 1991. Shelekhov grew from ~13,000 to ~48,000 peaking ~55,000 in 2001. Severobaikalsk founded as a Youth Communist league (Komsomol) working camp in 1974, had ~13,000 people in 1979, ~24,000 in 2017, and peaked in ~30,000 in 1991. Two things are clear from this picture: first, the industrial towns mushroomed in the USSR, second, the 1990s, the time of the official collapse of the USSR, was the time of the peak of their population with dwindling that has not been redressed even today. Such were the scope and results of the recent social transformation which is reflected in the standpoints of my interlocutors. The Bratsk dam was situated to figure in the world’s imaginaries as a concrete displayof the power of Soviet modernity. Watching the monotonous cinema chronicles of the time in the Russian State Archive of Cinema Documents in Moscow [Rossiiskii Gosudarstvennii Arkhiv Ki-

6Last data available at the moment (2020).

6 nofotodokumentov], I saw plenty of triumphant reports that placed the Bratsk dam among the landmarks to demonstrate to the high-ranking foreign delegations. Such places invariably included Lomonosov Moscow State University, the Bolshoy Theater, the VDNKh (The All-Soviet Exhibition of the People’s Husbandry, also known as Exhibition of Achievements of National Econ- omy) in Moscow, and the Bratsk station and dam. In those video chronicles, the dam was romantically portrayed in the needles of pine on the steep shores of the Angara River. The monotony and repetitiveness of those triumphant video reports of the successes of Soviet production had a meaning of incantation: a sequence of similar episodes, over and over, with new and new figurants, ensured the reliability and the realness of reality, so to speak. Those video chronicles were broadcast via central television. They provided the sense of demonstrable, proof-driven character of Soviet achievements. The Bratsk station and dam’s superior capacities were part of their functionality ideologically. The industrial sublime was elevated to new heights in the concreteness of the Bratsk dam.The dam brought electricity to the territories and the light of Communism to the people of Earth following the dictum of Lenin’s famous “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country” (1920). The Bratsk dam carried the name 50 Years of the Great October, and its construction was that of the “all-Soviet significance.” The city of Bratsk rapidly grew around old Bratsk. TheoldBratsk was a village, a settlement first established in 1631 as the Bratsk ostrog (outpost). For nearly three hundred years, beginning with the early 17th century, Russians and people of other nationalities and ethnicities arrived to the shores of the Angara River and settled in small numbers, building lives around resource extraction and fur trade economies, while indigenous peoples resisted and retreated deeper into the taiga, away from these developments, but also joined, as documented by European and Russian travelers, naturalists, scientists, ethnographers, and anthropologists in the eighteenth to twentieth centuries (Gmelin 1752, Müller and Pallas 1842, Vitkovsky 1912) and beyond. The Yandy ostrog appeared in 1660—a year before the one built in Irkutsk. Anosovo appeared a year later, founded by Cossak Fed’ka Onosov. Both settlements were subject to the flood in 1960;

7 the village of Yandy was the largest village absorbed by the new Anosovo. Gmelin mentioned Yandy—Jendinskoi Ostrog—in his travelogue Journey Through Siberia from the Years 1733–1742:

This Ostrog is a little younger than Balagansk and was built by the same constructors from Ilimsk. There were constructions here even before the construction of the Ostrog, and, because in this land there were a lot of Buryats, the Ostrog was built in order to solicit tributes from them, which was difficult, and the tributes weren’t giving enough profit, because Buryats left soon. The Ostrog was also built to get tributes from those fewTunguses who lived in their own property and for the most part were extinct. Because we changed our horses here at 3 PM, we had to stay in the Ostrog until the evening. (1752, 185–186).

Archeologist Nikolay Ivanovich Vitkovsky, who traveled the Angara River in 1882, described Yandi in his diary: “The settlement is not big; earlier there wasa volost’ here, in 1865 it was transported to Ust Uda; ‘the road was just too bad [shibko khudaia], society gathered and decided to move out”’ (Vitkovsky, 1912, 749). Women’s Fates There were other settlements with no less eventful history than Anosovo and Yandy that wereto be flooded by the Bratsk reservoir. While they were preparing for the flood, the new city ofBratsk grew. Working on the hydroelectric station and the dam, as well as factories that sustained the work producing cement, building blocks, and aluminum factory (contemporary name RUSAL; opened 1966), the new city exploded. Since 1959 to 1970, the population of the city grew more than 10% a year. From 1959 to 1967, the population of Bratsk more than doubled: in 1958, 51,455 people lived in Bratsk; in 1962, 82,000, and in 1967, 122,000. The majority of the new Bratsk dwellers were young people, Komsomol members, high-school-graduates. The current median age ofa Bratchanin or Bratchanka (male and female Bratsk dweller) is 36 years old. Bratsk remains a young city: children and youth under 17 comprise 20% of the population. In the striking “annulment of times,” the new Bratsk is considered having officially emerged in 1955,7 which is the date that the rejuvenated city celebrates its birthday. This resetting of timelines is a striking contrast to Anosovo that recently began the celebration of its birthday

7Official website of the administration of the town ofBratsk https://www.bratsk-city.ru/city/index.php

8 Figure 4. The life in the young city of Bratsk consisted of hard work. The plane distills achemical concoction to kill the gnat; dated 1956–57. Courtesy of Bratskgesstroi archive, scanned by Boris Salnikov. from a solid jubilee of 325 years despite that it lived through a reconfiguration and displacement of 1960. As I explain the local specificities throughout this work, I will return to interpret these competing timelines in the conclusion. The city of Bratsk was newly populated with workers who constructed the dam andworked at factories. In the beginning, many lived in insulated green tents, Siberian winter with temperature dropping to minus fifty degrees of Fahrenheit notwithstanding. They left memoirs and photographs. Their effort was valorized; to this day, the story of the Bratsk construction inthe official museums and archives remains uncomplicated. In the archive of the Memorial in Moscow, proclaimed by the Russian government a “foreign

9 agent” in 2015, I encountered a story that complicates the narrative of Bratsk constructions. The story was published in journal Veche. “Bratsk-54: A Story of a Young Woman” (Gavrilov, 1974) contains a memoir of a 19-year-old Muscovite, lover of theater and high-school graduate enlisting herself to work on the Bratsk construction. “I did not know myself how I got [to Bratsk]. Pure coincidence. I did not even think, I did not even know about any Bratsk. It was ridiculous. With one girl—her name was Nina—we ran from the rain, until it ceases, onto a covered porch. And lo, the youth were being recruited. We walked back and forth for a while, and it was a frightening thought—what if we enroll?” (1974, 140). She had a childhood dream to bathe in the Angara River that prompted her to enroll on a whim. To the taiga, she took with her a pair of felted boots [valenki] and seventy brochures of theater programs in a plywood case. To the destination, she traveled with thieves, she narrates. For the first winter, she was living in the settlement of Anzeba, a former transit camp forprison- ers. She lived in a tent for forty people, some of whom were married couples emitting “obscene sounds” [zvuki nakhalnie] at night. She reflects how herself and other young “idealists”ideinie [ ] despised “sluts” [bliadi]. The tents where they lived, albeit furnished with insulation, were still tents providing people with insufficient protection from severe Siberian cold. Fabric frequently caught fire from heated ovens, and sometimes people were not fast enough to get out and save themselves. She recalled an injured young man with the bone in his hand exposed standing in snow and crying like a child. He was taken to the hospital but did not survive. A smell of fried meat—burnt human flesh—she remarks, was such that “one could die.” The next place in her construction career was the settlement of Oka near the city ofBratsk. There, she was loading trucks with wood and urinated in her pants lifting the weights beyondher capacity. “By the end of the workday, I did not even have to go to the toilet,” she recalls (Gavrilov, 1974, 148). She remarks that the claims that people could choose work for themselves, like she read later in the book by the Soviet writer Anatoly Pristavkin The Land of Electric Transmission Lines [Strana LEPiia](1961), was far from true. Her coworkers, women, ridiculed her for not swearing. At some point, they threw her in

10 snow, two women sat on top, and demanded she cursed. As she kept resisting, they unbuttoned her cloth and started putting snow on her chest. At this point, she yielded. Since then,she became a profuse curser, she recalls, and also she had a profound change to her personality. “I grew angry. I started cursing everyone the way that men clutched their heads in horror. I was overwhelmed with such anger because everything in life happened not the way I wanted, not the way I dreamed. And I poured everyone left and right” (Gavrilov, 1974, 154–155). Her next ordeal was a zek (zakluchonniy, imprisoned), who came to her barrack and informed her that from now on she will be sleeping with him. He was sleeping in her bed and she was sitting on the chair in the same room, with no place to go. That continued for sometime,and then a new zek chose her and began threatening to kill her in the forest if she did not agree to be his “wife.” A third zek, who she recollects respectfully, saved her—a murderer who had a considerable respect from others, put an end to it, and she surmises it was only because she was still a virgin and not a woman. Thus she explained his unexpected patronage and interpreted his motives: it was unacceptable to treat a maiden this way. I am not recapitulating all the opinions and episodes of her life; hers was one of many; collectively, the workers who constructed Bratsk with its “wonders” and “miracles”—touted as such in today’s Russian press as well—built the “city of the future” that, in Nadezhda Krupskaya’s words, constituted “the factory where the old man (and woman, chelovek) will be reconstructed and the new man created” (1930). The “nomoi of the Soviet modernity,” to readjust anthropologist Danny Hoffman’s phrase(he speaks of the barrack as “the nomos of… modernity” 2007, 402), included the same enterprises listed by the anthropologist Stephen Collier in his fieldwork in the town of Belaya Kalitva in Rostov District in Russia (2011). Such “nomoi” included schools, hospitals, club, library, post, administration building, housing for the workers, ORSes (Otdel Rabochego Snabzhenia, “division of workers’ provision”), bakeries, hospital, and even the airport. Anosovo reproduced it all, including airport where the small planes Polikarpov Po-2 dubbed kukuruznik landed.8 Anosovo did not have theater—Bratsk had. But the Anosovo village club showed movies.

8The fall of the rural aviation in the post-Soviet years is among the changes Zuev and Habeck observe(2019).

11 Places instrumental for forging Soviet identities in Bratsk included the “house of culture,”9 palaces of pioneers—places of extracurricular activities for children, houses of byt (enterprises accumu- lating services for home maintenance like laundry and sewing torn buttons), children summer camps, museums, archives, bus stations, and so on. The figure of the Soviet citizen in therural space was produced by the sovkhoz, kolkhoz, or lespromkhoz and corresponding ways of organiz- ing economic and social living.10 The construction of the Bratsk dam was portrayed in Soviet literature as a great deed ofheroic effort, and this portrayal was highly in demand. In an interview, Yevgeny Yevtushenko recalls how he read his epic poem Bratskaya GES (Bratsk Hydroelectric Station) aloud to a big audience—it took four and a half hours, and people listened, including those standing outside of the venue.11 Curiously, like the anonymous memoir “A Life of a Young Woman,” Yevtushenko’s poem Bratsk Hydroelectric Station revolves around a fate of a young woman who was a construction worker—Nushka. Nushka became pregnant, and the lover did not acknowledge the child. She concealed her state as long as it was possible, and, having delivered a baby, was met by her colleagues in the hall of the hospital. They knew all along, and they were there, loving, caring, and ready to support her and her son born to live in a better world, sustained with the energy of the newborn Power Station. In the Bratsk museums and from the memories of my interlocutors

9In the book In the Soviet House of Culture: A Century of Perestroika, Bruce Grant outlines the history of the Nivki of Sakhalin Island from tsarism into the 1990s showing how despite the USSR announcement of “a decisive break from the imperial past,” the rush of peoples into the Soviet modernity continued (1995, 4). His work contains what I perceived to be a tinge of a metaphoric or allegorical reading of the “house of culture” as something more than an institution of Soviet governmentality, but usually, the house of culture was an ideological and cultural community center offering various engagements, activities, and performances for the town dwellers. In this work, Icallthe Anosovo’s community center “club” because what it is called there [klub], but it bears a lot of functions of the “house of culture” (was never called so during the Soviet time though). Today, it is also a club in the direct sense of the word as it is a place where the village discotheques happen. 10In Post-Soviet Social: Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics, Stephen Collier asserts that small settlements, provincial towns, were the arenas in which the main Socialist transformations took place (2011). I agree. However, industrial villages organized around the lespromkhoz (state-owned Socialist timber enterprises) have typically not been at the center of the study of how settlements were designed by Soviet planners as “cities of the future,” or places where Socialist futures were palpable. Rather, kolkhoz, sovkhoz in rural spaces (farming enterprises, analyzed by Humphrey, 1998, Verdery, 2003) were at the center of such study. But some of my interlocutors felt that lespromkhoz should be at the center of the investigation of the Soviet visions of the Socialist future. 11“Y.Y.: In 1963, when I read my long poem, Bratsk Station, in full before an audience of workers. It was a venue for about 800 people, but they put speakers out on the street, and people stood and listened there, too. It was a very chilly day in April. I read for four-and-a-half hours without a break. There were children in the audience as well. That was one of the happiest days of my life. What is any Nobel Prize worth compared tothat?”(Basinsky and Virabov, 2015).

12 Figure 5. Photo of the poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko in the History Museum of Bratskgesstroy.

who lived in Bratsk at the time, the different outcome of the situation was more common—dead bodies of newborn children were routinely found in the trash, according to the memories of my interlocutor. The satiric newspaper of the construction, Komsomol Extinguisher, whose goal was to exterminate the remaining vices and lacks of the process on the road to Communism did not mention discarded newborns, nor seem to have the other Soviet press of the time. One detail from Bratsk Hydroelectric Station poem is particularly interesting in terms of the construction of the Socialist space and identities. At some point, Nushka throws away the lock from her plywood suitcase because she was told “it would be impossible to build the Power Station with locks on suitcases.” To achieve a better future for everyone, the person has to relinquish personal possessions and with it, a corner of her personal space—to open herself up and keep her only suitcase open. Which she does, in many respects, as the suitcase apparently symbolizes her womb and the accessibility of her body.

13 This lock seems to be a symbol of Nushka’s honesty and openness. She effectively throws away what little there was between her and society. It can be read as a mark of what theBritish anthropologist Caroline Humphrey calls “excessive communality” (the inevitable question is, excessive from whose point of view?) or “intense communality” (2002, 47, 48) characteristic of the spatialities that emerged in the Soviet architectural and infrastructural organization of space. Yevtushenko’s Nushka foregoes her independence for the benefit of others, protects no property, surrenders to her lover, and then bears his child along with his contempt. In a non-literary world, a woman conceiving a child outside of marriage was to bear a heavy share of derision and condemnation. One cannot reasonably compare the fates of the “young woman” from Gavrilov’s recording and the character in the poem, but it is useful to remember that they share the space, time, and events, and both worked on the construction of the Bratsk, together with hundreds of thousands of others. By the 1980s, Bratskgesstroi had one hundred thousand workers and was referred to as “the state within the state” (Sergeyeva, 2011). The Bloom of Intellectual Life in Bratsk The city of Bratsk saw an influx of famous visitors—artists, politicians, writers, and otherdistin- guished guests, often accompanied by photographers. Fidel Castro visited Bratsk in 1963; hisvisit was meticulously photo documented practically minute by minute by a swarm of photographers; one of them was Edgar Brukhanenko. Nikita Khrushchev visited the city twice, in 1959 and 1961. In 1959, he was under the fresh impression of the recent visit of the USA. The reporter wrote, “He observed that the USA is a big capitalist country. Its riches were collected for 150 years and belong not to the working class but to the capitalists. The Soviet state exists for 42 years, and in this small term, it leaped forward… ’We had to reinstall the economy ruined by the war. It requires a lot of effort. But ten to fifteen years will pass, and we will outrun theUSA!”’12 Poets, singers, actors, and other members of creative intelligentsia flew in to find inspiration, present their art, and inspire workers. Among such were composer Alexandra Pakhmutova and

12This report, written entirely in the authentic language, is published here: https://imenabratska.ru/ s-prazdnikom-stroiteli-bratskoj-ge-s/ without a source, authored “supposedly, Alexander Gaidai”—a famous journalist of the time.

14 singer Iosif Kobzon. Creative collectives flourished in the city of Bratsk proud of its artistic talents and shows, such as the band Padun organized in 1967, children dance collective Ogon’ki created in 1968, later, the band Lel’ that began in the 1970s, in the 1980th, collective Zharki and Molodost’ Bratska (Bratsk’s Youth), and many, many more. The intellectual life bloomed. The newspaper Krasnoe Znamya (Red Flag) founded in 1934 (currently, Znamya: Newspaper of Bratsk and Bratsk District) was joined by Ogni Angary (Angara Lights) founded 1955, the Komsomol Committee issued its own “sheet” (boyevoi listok) Komsomol- skii Korchevatel’ (Komsomol Extinguisher). It was just part of the process seen across the region. Angarskaia Pravda (The Angara Truth), now Ust Udinskie Vesti, was founded in 1958. If Benedict Anderson is right suggesting that newspapers played a key role in defining the modern nation by facilitating the belonging of people to an imagined community, on the way of forging the modern subjectivities (1983), then the regional newspapers surrounding the Bratsk station and dam construction produced a type of subjectivity that became of the USSR. The subjectivity was of the Soviet person in possession of many admirable qualities even if naïve, but who was also apparently not always sincere and was a play-pretend idealist. In the newspaper pages, the development of the dam, hydroelectric station, city, and district were laced with victorious reports but also not devoid of conflict, struggle, and tension. The newspapers were brimming with breaking news of achievements and without fatigue lashed and weeded out “the vestiges of the past” [perezhitki proshlogo], as well as criticized cases of flaws in production [brak], sometimes framed as the intentional harm inflicted by irresponsible workers or, worse and more dangerous, intentional wrongdoers. Another constant target of Socialist critique was the parasitism [“tuneyadstvo,” literally, “vain eating”—consuming without producing that some renegade individuals were engaged in], and many other tensions and slippages that the project generated. The language shifted and changed over the years. What could be criticized and what was forbidden changed as well. This newspaper development was regional, but it was part of the central press development. The central press portrayed even more inspiring visions of the future that seemed both incredible and within reach. Thus, the journal Technika – Molodezhi! (Technology—to the Youth!), intended

15 Figure 6. The page of the satirical sheet Komsomol Extinguisher. Note the header: a bulldozer smashing a scattered throng of wrongdoers who evidently sought to sabotage the construction process but were gravely mistaken in their calculations. for the youth, since 1933, published the futuristic visions of the technologically advanced Socialist future. Like Soviet cities, the journal reached its peak in 1990: the issue 2 was printed in two million copies. In years before and after the Bratsk dam construction, these visions appeared particularly compelling. For example, the engineer, writer, and inventor Georgy Babat described the internet decades before it wrapped out the globe. He suggested that the data will be stored, transmitted,

16 Figure 7. One of the scenarios of the future from the journal Tekhnika – molodezhi! (Technology— to the Youth!) (1958, #2). The visual presents a scene of the use of “informational service.” Draw- ing by E. Borisova. Note the Soviet-style interior and a view with tenement houses in the window from the “library.” and made accessible through an innovative type of network: “Already in the beginning of the third millennium, any person regardless of whether he lived in a big city or in a barely-populated settlement, was able to plug in his receiving apparatus to the unified wave-water [volno-vodnaia] informational network of the Earth and use all the information collected by the humanity.” (Babat, 1958, 46). The detail of precision of this prediction is striking: “A receiving apparatus is connected to the neighborhood base where the data requested most frequently is stored. The recipient calls

17 a corresponding division or section of the neighborhood catalogue, finds the data he is interested in, and reads it on his screen or listens through the loudspeaker.” (Babat, 1958, 38). The artist, at the bid of the author, drew “matrixes of memory” as the carriers of the information. The radically anti-utopian meaning of these bold visions and ideas is evident in the subsequent realization of many of them, albeit in forms that may differ from the initially imagined. These and other visions of the future were compelling for my interlocutors, then young.These visions were practically coeval with the works by Valentin Rasputin and Yevgeny Yevtushekno. Valentin Rasputin, in Farewell to Matyora and other early works, lamented the disappearance of the old villages. Yevgeny Yevtushenko produced his hymn to the heroic effort of workers constructing the Bratsk Station in the poem Bratsk Hydroelectric Station. (It nevertheless was read as aspersion by one hydroconstructor I talked to. “Yevtushenko did not reflect [the process] correctly,” “neverno otrazil”). Other writers encompassed the conflict between the “old” and “new” worlds putting itone against another in a rather unsentimental even if still-romantic fashion. Thus, two Moscow poets, Nikolai Dobronravov and Sergey Grebennikov, who arrived at the construction site slightly belatedly, they admit, in their work To Siberia, for the songs! describe the tension in terms of the generational conflict (1964). According to a critic, they sat one against another “The outgo- ing world is semi-abandoned villages, blackened houses, old people who never flew the plane or traveled on the train. The contemporary world is the mighty power stations, factories, andcon- struction sites. It is precisely the world for which the young villagers leave without even waiting for the transition funds” (Volosova, 2016, 267). The allure of progress, technological advancements, and the promises that began but have not yet been fulfilled (construction sites, versus, say, already built houses) is what appealed to the Komsomol youths, according to the poets. That was not merely a “cultured” feeling expressed by the Soviet intelligentsia in writings.In the oral history of “accelerated constructions” [“udarnye stroiki”], Mikhail Rozhansky highlights the feel of “social energy,” euphoria, enthusiasm, romanticism that people experienced as “a big personal life’s luck,” according to his interlocutors (2011, 623).

18 Structure

Having briefly outlined the historic background of the region and spoken of some aspects ofthe socio-cultural specificity of Anosovo and vicinities in the way I understand them andthewayI think they fit into the context of this work, I will now outline the structure of thiswork. The first part of this work, “The Roots of Ruins,” begins an investigation of affective tiestoa place on a, I am aware, way too self-centered example of my relationship with my grandmother, or, rather, my relationship with the specter of my grandmother appearing in my own memory. Beginning as an autoethnographic exploration dealing with family trauma—the premature death of my grandfather who lived and died in Anosovo—it then goes on, in a series of portraits and sketches, to build towards the beginning of the investigation of the subjectivities in Siberian villagers as they changed after the official collapse of the USSR in 1991. I am “floating afewconcepts there to provide ways of holding the scattered lifeworld”: episodes that “reshape something from within a space I am both occupying and making.”13 The first chapter is devoted to the memory of my grandmother in an attempt to do what I call “memory ethnography”: an ethnography of one’s own memories but when it comes to others. The second chapter is titled “Women’s Stories: Waiting for Divine Remuneration.” Itintro- duces some of the characters of this work and portrays a number of women’s stories to arrive to the theme of refusal. The ritualistic refusal of care or appraisal, due to modesty, has been prominent in my female interlocutors. One of the key characters introduced here, Svetlana Sergeyevna, is an Anosovian older woman of authority, who remained faithful to her husband long after his death. She continued an intense relationship with the dead, as other people do throughout Rus- sia, and as I myself did with my grandmother. I am looking at the Svetalana Sergeyevna’s wish for the return of her husband in the context of the Russian long-standing philosophical thought of resurrecting the dead represented by Nikolay Fyodorov. Fyodorov imagined immortality as achievable through technology, and Tsiolkovsky envisioned the Soviet people not only spreading communism across the planet but also extending it extraterrestrially. Eventually, the immortal

13I owe these formulas to the reviewer #2 of the Journal of Contemporary Ethnography received on the Oct 5, 2020.

19 Communists of the future were supposed to be able to colonize other planets. To me, these dreams are still palpable in Anosovo as it emerged in 1961, which was also the year when the first Soviet astronaut, Yuri Gagarin, was launched into space. These things are tied together through a sense of a lost futurity. One of the ethnographic cruxes of this populous chapter is a story of Alevtina who cares for her paralyzed mother. The mother’s scarce state-sponsored pension allows the family to stay afloat. The second part, entitled “Anosovo on Maps,” continues unraveling the stories ofAnosovo investigating the connection of people to the place. The third chapter is titled “Transience and Endurance of the Place.” It considers the ties in the affective infrastructures where people discuss with their families and sometimes even strangers their prospects of leaving Anosovo and their refusal to do so, sometimes despite having property—even houses—elsewhere. The chapter also considers the connections that people keep or refuse to keep with Anosovo once they leave. This part explores people’s connections to the place, through the set of ethnographic examples, and shows that, while the rumors of Anosovo’s planned obsolescence are wrong de jure, they nevertheless find confirmation de facto as the local administrations on regional level donothave any plans of improvement of life in Anosovo. In fact, in a characteristic gesture of neoliberal governing, an official is sending an accusation to Anosovians: supposedly, a certain neglect and even inability to care for themselves is in the “mentality” of the people. The fourth chapter, “Anosovo’s Nonexistence,” uncovers a paradox of omission of Anosovo on the regional cadaster maps that made it possible for a private firm to acquire the land “with serfs” there, according to an aid of the CEO. The “pulsating existence” of Anosovo refers tothe settlement’s nonexistence on some cadaster maps and its reappearance in other. Supposedly, it happened because of a bureaucratic mistake, but it rendered Anosovians unable to privatize their property. The transition to the “neoliberal order” from the “Socialist past” is therefore farfrom complete there. There are still places like that in the former Soviet Union where privatization did

20 not happen, and where people find themselves in a disempowered state;14 but they are far from helpless. This chapter also investigates the constructions of “mentality” as something supposedly encompassing, in different eyes and with different affective charge, whether positive or negative, forms of nonchalance such as pofigism, carelessness, and indifference (ravnodushie) in the Anoso- vian’s affective and cultural and political response to precarity. While it seems to agree withthe officials who accuse villagers of nonchalance or even carelessness, formally, the villagers’ theorization of “nonchalance” reimagines it as an upbeat and undefeated attitude. In subverting the trope of nonchalance, villagers are meeting the accusations half-way and provide an important objection: if their demands are met with indifference, carelessness becomes the most rational response. Nonchalance is a powerful response of the disempowered: it constitutes a refusal to care excessively for the evading achievements opting instead for the pleasures and peacefulness of soul and mind that might be inaccessible to the “successful” figurants of the neoliberal order. I suggest that nonchalance is a long-standing “post-Soviet” affect which so far has not been named. This affect is a lining of a bunch of cultural affinities and soul ties, a general“mood” of the place—a set of dispositions, attitudes, and orientations that I call “cheerful nonchalance.” I argue that “cheerful nonchalance” prominently influences everyday life in Russia. “Cheerful nonchalance” is an addition to the already described affects of “despair” (Oushakine, 2009), “nostalgia” (Boym, 2001; Nadkarni and Shevchenko, 2014; Boele, Noordenbos, and Robbe, 2019), or “melancholy” (Etkind, 2013). The affect of “cheerful nonchalance” has been largely overlooked but is prominently present in Siberia. “Cheerful nonchalance” is what happens when not only the state gives up on a place, but people also adopt a kind of blasé attitude to risks of daily life. The “cheerfulness” of thesaid nonchalance refers to the upbeat spirit of it. In this work, I distinguish nonchalance from both “patriotism of despair” (Oushakine, 2009) and “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). There is hardly any trace of despair in Anosovo as a collective affect, and the trope “cruel optimism” fails to

14The processes of privatization and decollectivization have been uneven and, as Verdery characterized the latter, “exhibit[ed] tremendous diversity, not just from country to country but from region to region and even village to village” (2003, 13). Anosovo is one of the villages where, as of 2021, privatization is still the matter of the future.

21 capture the situation when the person is unattached to the favorable outcome. (I read Lauren Berlant’s concept of “cruel optimism” (2011) as hope against one’s better judgment). Nonchalance may have Soviet roots. In the process of improvisation and creative work through the lack and deficit, nonchalance was exemplified by such figures of the underground as the group Mit’ki (described by Yurchak, 2005, 126–157 and conceptualized as “living vnye”—that is, outside of the accepted ideologies, on the margins). In Soviet times, people were breaking the rules of propriety, refused to participate, or did not care for the ideology the way they were supposed to care. Nonchalance has been internalized, and in the Post-Soviet times, I argue, it reemerged as a reaction to the disconnect between the consistent action and sustainable returns. Such a disconnect is characteristic of precarity. There is a continuity between the Soviet and post-Soviet periods. But there are also recourses to the established cultural patterns, in which the gender plays a role; thus, women are driving cars or being no less “nonchalant” than their male counterparts, but nonchalance could manifest differently in women.15 The first part of the drama of Anosovo, up to the flood and relocation, is familiar totheworld through works of prominent Russian writer Valentin Rasputin (1937–2015), a representative of what came to be known as “village prose,” or a cohort of “derevenshchiki” (“villagerers,” as it were).16 The novel Farewell to Matyora describes a place about to be flooded and the relocation. The toponym “Matyora” indeed exists there. It is not the village but a creek that broughtitswa-

15The construct of the “Soviet man” (chelovek; Caroline Humphrey in her work clarifies that “chelovek” includes the “woman”, 2005), has been an ideal along which the ordinary Soviet people may or may not have consciously aligned themselves. Such an ideal gave way to the proliferation of identities labeled “hybrid”—supposedly including elements of the Soviet and post-Soviet subjectivities—with the corresponding changes in the notions of what comprises the man and the woman. The Soviet rendition of gender equality had lingering effects but is challenged by the new gendered norms and norms of sexuality. The gendered relations in the Soviet period in Siberia were infrastructure-mediated and construction-centered even as they were steeped in everydayness (byt) of the forging of Communist futurity. Today, they are variously challenged but the gender roles in the rural areas are closely connected to the gendered labor division and remain relatively rigid and what can be called “traditional.” 16In her foreword to the English edition of Rasputin’s novel and in her other works, Kathleen Parthé is grappling with Russian nationalism, Russian chauvinism, and at times blatant anti-Semitism (1991, 1992, 2019). These features were as prominent in earlier Rasputin’s works as they were in his later compositions. But these features were noticeable in Farewell to Matyora as well. One of those characters who were wrecking crosses at the cemetery before the flood are described as “cleaner but not good-looking either” and having “thieving eyes”(Rasputin, 1991a, 17–18). The official who was in charge of the relocation “looked like a clerk with a straw hat and gypsy face” andhad“dark curly hair” that made him “look even more like a gypsy—it seemed that any minute he would jump up with a gypsy squeal and babble in his tongue right and left, fighting them all of”(Rasputin, 1991a, 20, 23). In short, those were aliens bearing marks of the racially different Other who prepared Matyora for the flood.

22 ters into the Angara River on the other shore from Atakanka; currently, there is a bay, above the drowned creek, of the same name (Orlova, 2019b). The story is the drama of relocation ofthe village of Atalanka, where Valentin Rasputin spent part of his childhood and where his grandparents lived.17 Atalanka is forty kilometers (twenty-five miles) from Anosovo by land and about twenty kilometers (twelve miles) by the river. Atalanka had the same fate as Anosovo had: it was relocated as a dam was “built downriver on the Angara for a hydroelectric power station”; the dread and the anticipation that “the water would rise in the rivers and streams, flooding much land, including, first and foremost, Matyora” had been fulfilled (Rasputin, 1991a, 4). What the relocation has brought, and what is happening in the new, resettled, “Matyora,” now, I am showing in this work.18 This work is, perhaps first and foremost, an exercise in longing. Sometimes weknowwhat we miss, and sometimes we do not. I have discovered, in myself, the severity of missing a hu-

17I have collected memories of Rasputin throughout my fieldwork—inadvertently, as they resurfaced in conversation. I have not had an opportunity to bring these stories here. I am flagging them here as necessitating the workin the future. Rasputin is a revered figure in his native land. 18The proximity is inevitable. One of the main characters of Rasputin’s novel is Darya Pinigina. Someofmy interlocutors have this second name (I changed it for the sake of protecting their identity). Reading Rasputin’s novel from the perspective of analyzing mobility, ruins, and affects in their interplay, I am struck by the cascading and scattering relocation that, in a sense, is still ongoing. For instance, here is how Valentin Rasputin describesthe plane landing in the village before the flood: “During the last few years a plane landed twice a week intheold pasture and the locals had learned to take to the air to get to the city or the district capital” (1991a, 4). This is the experience of my interlocutors—one of them being my father—that they had on the new, relocated, place as well. Only with privatization and decollectivization was the plane route deemed unprofitable and discontinued. This is but one change of the kind. No wonder then that the people living there would view the socio-economic changes of the recent decades and the accompanying rhetoric of “market transformation” quite skeptically. One of the most profound stories in Farewell to Matyora to me is the tale of Darya whose mother, not a Matyora native, was afraid of water and haunted by fear to drown in the Angara River all her life. “’We teased her, the Angara was like home to us, we grew up on it, but Mother would say: “Oh, it’ll bring sorrow, it will, you don’t have a fear like this for nothing.” But no, no one in our family ever drowned… Only now Mother’s fear has surfaced, now I see she was right… just think, now… ’ Darya stopped in confusion, lowering her voice until it was barely audible, completely lost now: ‘So that’s how it is: the water will catch up with Mother after all. I[t] never occurred to me. So that’s it.” (1991a, 35—the episode is butchered by the lost “t” in the edition). Darya realizes that the mother will drown after death, in her grave, with the cemetery on the island set for the flood induced by theBratskdam. Being haunted by the work of Valentin Rasputin, the powerful writer who created a story about the place and displacement in 1976, three years before I was born, is both humbling and, given his ideologies, disturbing. The old women Rasputin portrayed with such power are dead. Some of my interlocutors are of an old age now. They were children at the moment of relocation. They were not, for the most part, so poignantly disappointed by the prospect of relocation as Rasputin’s characters; their disappointments would come later and be of other nature. “[E]verything [ahead] seemed strange and unsteady, steep and not for everyone, just like those stairs that some can use easily, and some not at all. It was easier for the young people… ” (1991a, 46). What did not get to have light in his novel is that for some, mainly children, the relocation brought not only an apocalyptic excitement but a genuine thrill of looking forward to what was to come.

23 man being—my dead grandmother—a loss which, in a strange way, is an emblem, for me, of the severity of missing some alternative to the present that was somehow promised to me but failed to materialize. I analyze the dreams of others here, and I have had my own. I have held on to my dream of returning to a Siberian village as a schoolteacher after my graduation from Lomonosov Moscow State University. In my dream, I would arrive at a construction site, at a village or settlement that would develop into something bigger in the near future. Of course, even as I was having it, I dismissed this dream as ridiculous. The first wave of enthusiasm having died down long ago, and I was not about follow a path of cheerful desperation and inspired risk-taking—but some of my interlocutors did just that. The experience of missing or of living through a loss is an intense sensation. Everyone knows the ebullience, the bodily pleasure, that one feels at hearing the voice of someone you miss. A surge of joy runs through your nerves, humming like attuned strings. You might be aware that you had been missing the voice and the warm, palpable, pulsating, radiant presence of someone— but still, on hearing that voice, or seeing that face, you might be surprised to rediscover in an instant what it truly means, to miss. This sense of missing is an embodied feeling. Part of the intention of this work istocreate a feel of place, to recollect something about place and time that is more like smell, a sense of it, as opposed to analyzing the processes. I recollect episodes like I recall towels and bedsheets my grandmother used to fasten to a twisted cord spread from one wild pear tree to another in the backyard of her house, across the meadow. I liked diving into those sheets in some sort of search for myself—fresh sheets, dry already in the summer wind, billowing like the standards of unknown kingdoms, or the sails of caravels with imaginary red crosses; fabric rich, Venetian, Renaissance folds (for all I knew), heavily scented with the Soviet detergent Laska (Caress)—a strong odor I am not likely to forget.

Methods

I have made four trips to the main place of my fieldwork, Anosovo, over the course of 2016–2019, engaging in participant observation, doing interviews posing open-ended questions, and conduct-

24 ing spatial elicitation—walking with my ethnographers soliciting their memories on landmarks that we passed. I aimed to solicit personal narratives of movement and “staying” and attitudes to the Soviet past versus contemporaneity. This work is primarily based on the data received as a result of “participant observation,” that catch all way used by anglophone anthropologists to refer to everything from traveling with smugglers to tea drinking in cafes. “Deep hanging out” it was called, by Geertz (1998). For me it was mostly sitting in quiet homes, walking in muddy streets, slowly turning the leavesofthe photo albums head-to-head with their owners, and trying to understand the mechanics of how Anosovo came to be and how it found itself where it did, and what this “where” is on a grander scale of history. My ethnography is very particular. I am sticking to the everyday occurrences described here in a largely ethnographic mode, in a way not unfamiliar to those who have a record of being interested in anthropology of Russia or in everydayness.19 I am using what could be called “thin theory.”20 It is a deliberate theoretical commitment. At the current stage of this work, my ethnog-

19The most prominent books that could be said to focus on phatic communications are works byPesmenand Ries. Pesmen’s work is on how the “Russian soul” (2000) circulates in daily conversations. Her work is intensely saturated with linguistic examples and populated by memorable characters. However Pesmen’s method (asking people directly about the Russian soul, informing them that this is the topic of her study, so that everyone knows it and seeks to astonish a foreigner with new and new information) creates a difficulty in approaching the subject. Ido not believe that the “Russian soul” is “a thing”; to me, it is rather an exoticizing device of the Western gaze returned by the Russians in a series of playful reappropriations. Pesmen encountered a trap presenting a special danger for anthropologists: natives who are only too eager to theorize some peculiar feature of their culture happily playing experts and “selling it” to the researcher as something of value and significance it may or may not possess “in reality.” Ries’ method, on the other hand, is to attend to “spontaneous conversational discourses” as they are, she argues, “a primary mechanism by which ideologies and cultural stances are shaped and maintained” (1997, 3). Ries has reaffirmed this method in her later work; “Open-ended ethnographic conversations have revealed complex patterns of mutual engagement within communities and integration with the postsocialist labor, service, and commodity markets.” (2009, 181). I use the method that I think are similar to Pesmen and Ries’: paying attention to the everyday conversations and narrativized ethnographic engagement. 20Geertz’s principles of “thick description” (1973) as the description that presents the essence of what is happening rather than names the features of objects or sequence of events dominated the socio-cultural writing as a desirable model. In the 2000s, however, there emerged a chorus of voices variously grounding “thin description” as a necessary approach and pointing out the inevitable lacks of “thick description” which necessitates the omniscient anthropological knowledge that demanded seeing the system of meaning where such meaning could be imposed by the effort of providing a “thick description” (Jackson Jr 2013, Love 2013, Brekhus, Galliher, and Gubrium 2005, Porter 2012). I am using the term “thin theory” to denote a similar to “thin description” idea but in relation to theory, specifically. Thin theory is supposed to denote the willful suspension the theoretic judgment. I am trying to forgo the idea that I know what is happening in order to wait what emerges out of ethnography itself rather than use theoretical frameworks to which I am dedicated or attached as governing principles helping to align ethnography. That does not meanthat the theory will not emerge, but it does mean that I hope to refuse to assign theoretical frameworks to ethnography

25 raphy does not align along a big—much less revolutionary—theoretical claim. I struggled to embrace modesty in theoretical claims because I wish to make space for ethnography to speak for itself. I want to see what it has to say without prematurely assigning it a role to bolster a claim to which it could serve as evidence. I outlined my theoretical aspirations above, but I am not under the spell of delusion that I have currently fulfilled them. Writing nonfiction with my memory full of holes is a challenge. As if that were notenough, there is a difficulty, when one is writing about a particular village, in that one can hardly obscure the identities of the people. Anna Tsing changed the toponym of the village where she worked in Indonesia.21 I considered changing the toponym, but it is important for me to put Anosovo on my maps, and I cannot do so if I do not name the village. I am using some of the portraits, too, which makes people identifiable with certainty. Still, the names are changed, although I havenot anonymized the creators of maps for the obvious reason that their names should be preserved. Still, changing names does not matter anyway. Everyone already knows what I am writing about and everyone already knows with whom I have spent time… Indeed, anonymizing might only create more gossip and more conspiracy. I have not yet solved this difficulty. I also suspect that it will make this work into a difficult to define genre: not nonfiction really but not fiction either:a kind of literature based on the real people’s stories, being as true to them as possible, but probably diverging from them quite a bit in the direction of what is called in Russian “khudozhestvennaia pravda” (“artistic truth”)—which requires one to alter details and shift the stress in order to tella story. Part of this tension is, I hope, resolved by my publication of a corpus of essays, “verbatims,” and short stories in Russian: thus I am keeping the community abreast of my writing, my writing open to feedback, and myself receptive to what members of the community have to say. Other writings of mine, published in Russian, have preceded or accompanied this project, which is part of my methodology. My writings are about “everyday living” in the Irkutsk Oblast in advance. Whereas the dangers of this approach are that the text falls into a random agglomeration of fragments, I am hoping that patterns will emerge out of this agglomeration as I name them. 21Changing toponyms is a more or less common ethnographic practice. Tsing changed the toponym for different considerations: “This is an area which, so far, has eluded clarity and visibility required for model development schemes,” Tsing wrote. “I see no reason to intervene here. I have thus changed the names of all the places in the Meratus Mountains” (Tsing, 1993, xiii). And then, of course, changing toponyms is a standard practice in fiction and autofiction.

26 (District) of Siberia, and beyond (Orlova 2018, 2019a, 2019b, 2020). They include a book titled The Anthropology of Everydayness [Antropologia povsednevnosti] which I composed at the request of a publisher friend, Stanislav Ivanov. This book contains stories, essays, and prose miniatures growing out of the Siberian material I collected. Most of those stories have not made their way into my work in English (yet). I did bring copies of this book to Anosovo, and the heroes of some of the stories had a chance to read them. The feedback that I received was encouraging: one person responded, as I was told, “Pust’ prodolzhaet” (“Let her continue”). Any other feedback I receive I will incorporate.

27 Part 1

The Roots Of Ruins

Chapter 1. Interrogating the Dead

Derrida was writing post cards to his lover in her presence. He meant to create an exhaustive recording of his inner world, to produce what he cumbersomely called a “complete electro-cardio- encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram” (1987, 68). The science of writing that he suggested, more famously, called “grammatology,”is, therefore, perhaps the electro-cardio-encephalo-LOGO- icono-cinemato-bio-grammatology at the same time. If so, ethnography is auto-electro-cardio- encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-grammatography. I understand creation of such a “gram” to be an ultimate “gram” of being, a complete record that is at the same time equivalent to the writer and is greater than she is (even though—and as well as—infinitely smaller). Even one moment recorded ultimately is beyond immense: the shortest moment, a brief lapse of time will take an infinity to be read properly and fully interpreted: “afterwards they would need centuries of university to decipher it.” When Derrida says this, he does not mean himself: every human being’s inner world can be studied indefinitely, and there would be no end to the onslaught of associations. The ethnographic enterprise is doomed to failure in this sense: we can never record our subject fully. It is not difficult to imagine a huge institution decoding a gram of every human, like theBrain Institution studying Lenin’s brain in Moscow. While the body of Lenin lies in the Mausoleum at the Red Square, Lenin’s brain is who knows where, sliced one thin layer after another and glued

28 to glass plates in the attempt to solve the mystery of consciousness and decode the natureof human genius. It is certain that an ethnographic account can always be “set forth… in less personally revealing ways,” as Ward Keeler put it, “yet… writing in a more personal voice adds a certain vividness, even urgency, to an account” (2020, 95). The difficulty of autoethnography is “how to include sustained attention to ethnographers’ own personal experience” (Keeler, 2020, 95).22 In other words, the dreadful “so what?” question that has slain so many ethnographic projects appears to loom over semi-autoethnographic enterprises with a particular menace. Perhaps at some point we need to stop asking the serial “so what?” question because there is never an end to it. One can so-what anything. Sure, while every person has personal experiences others might deem worthy of sharing, it

22The essay by Keeler, titled “The Incitement of Fieldwork” is a part of bigger work in progress, amemoirthat “mirrors the mind of a… meditator and so consists… of endless streams of association, lacking a… narrative structure, let alone a Hollywood ending!” (Keeler 2020, personal email 4/28/2020). The narrative challenge and a wish for a clear-cut Hollywood ending that we have been inculcated to demand from our own writings possibly more sternly than from the writings of others end in the rigidity of scholarly structures depriving us possibly from the most interesting writings that are being done in the field, as notes, sketches, and reflections. There are, of course, lucky exceptions, such as Reflections on the Fieldwork in Morocco by Paul Rabinow (1977), The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology that Breaks Your Heart by Ruth Behar (1996), Ordinary Affects by Kathleen Stewart (2007), The Hundreds by Kathleen Stewart and Lauren Berlant (2019), The Smoking Book by Lesley Stern (1999), Bluets by Maggie Nelson (2009), This Atom Bomb in Me by Lindsey Freeman (2019), and, of course, bell hooks’ Wounds of Passion: A Writing Life (1997) and All About Love (2001), among other works exploring what appeared to be more or less a free-flow of associations, impressions, meditations, or interrogations of various subjects united by a common theme (smoking, the color blue, sequence of encounters, love, etc.). If I can be permitted a footnote within a footnote, in the Preface to Wounds of Passion, bell hooks devotes pages to explain her rendition of such a method: “Women of color active in feminist movement popularized memoirs that appropriated their style from pastiche and collage.” (bell hooks 1997, xix; see the xix–xxii). For some, such writings lack structure. I, on the other hand, consider them to be crème of the crop of that intersection where social sciences meet belles-lettres (beautiful letters): something why it all matters to begin with, and I know I am not alone in this conviction. Granted, this is not only the problem of “soft social sciences”: thus, according to literary agents, memoirs as the literary genre appear to be sold in fewer copies than conventional narratives. However, with the diversification of writings and a relative technical ease of publishing in digital forms,I would venture to suggest that more and not less of the things that previously died in manuscripts need to be taken out even if it is for those few who are in position to take advantage of them. Maybe we need more writings of all kinds, not more writings following particular forms. Another important writing in connection to the question of anthropological genre is Michael Taussig’s Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia (2003): a deceptively simple use of a suggestive form. I think Barthes called the suggestiveness of this form “the diarrhea of the diary”: the ease with which daily impressions put in writing acquire the infinitude that seems to hint at the profound cohesiveness beyond just the text but gettinginto something in regard to the world and human in it, if only the author had more time and space for a systematic work. My project is not a diary, even though it contains the inclusion of the reworked fieldnotes (but a tiny fraction of the notes I took in the field), and the subject is less pressing thanthe limpieza—ethnic cleansing captured by Taussig in a series of would-be momentary textual photographs—but the specter of the genre is here, as well as the specter of another Taussig’s book, I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely MyOwn (2011).

29 is also clear that we do not possess enough time and energy to attend to each of those experiences. The answer, however, it seems to me, lies in the exact same condition that makesthe more traditional, non-auto-, simply ethnography, relevant: in the metaphorical nature of scientific, particularly anthropological, knowledge. Theorizing the “cultural form” in one of themost widely read anthropological essays of all times, “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” Clifford Geertz says: “In the case at hand, to treat the cockfight as a text is to bring outafeature of it (in my opinion, the central feature of it) that treating it as a rite or a pastime, the two most obvious alternatives, would tend to obscure: its use of emotion for cognitive ends” (1972, 83). In other words, the Balinese cockfight does not interest us as an end in itself. There is a transition from a concrete, located, particular socio-cultural event to the universe beyond it: the imagining of time, the periodicity of excitement and disappointment, the class gradations and identities shaped around the cockfight, the “cultural form” of the cockfight, of performance, and ofanevent that is decipherable to an observer like any text would be, provided the observer has the ability to read. The Balinese cockfight itself becomes a mere metaphor for something else—and foralotof things, at that. It is no longer a square somewhere concrete but an arena of an unfolding world. Such is the metaphorical nature of anthropological knowledge and the source of the demand of answering to a bigger question. A bigger question of my Siberian project is manifold. The project began as a fascination with the productive power of the Soviet ruins that populate post-Soviet space. Perhaps it is possible to discover the way to measure to what extent and how those ruins (broadly read, not only as architectural or infrastructural ruins but also narratives, values, ideas, and gestures) influence the everydayness. However just to be sure that I ground myself in something less abstract and difficult to discern than such influences, I semi-resigned myself to simpler ethnographic questions arising from my conversations in the field: namely, what connections do people build, howdo they find belonging, what identities and affects arise, and what keeps them going in dwindling communities suffering from economic and social abandonment? The main village of my fieldwork in Siberia “experiences outmigration,” in the terminology of one of my reviewers. It shrank from

30 more than 2,000 people in the 1970s to a little over 500. The answer to my “simpler” ethnographic question, as is often the case, is much less straightforward. I find that it is connected with “ruins.” Looking at the remnants of the Soviet factories and buildings (“actual ruins”) strewing Siberia, I saw a lot of ruins into which people discontinued their affective investment. Abandoned, they became monuments of time having come to a standstill. Cultural and ideological shifts had deprived them of previous meanings. Such monuments are sometimes literal, made out of concrete and granite. Gaston Gordillo, analyzing the “pulsating ruins” in the Gran Chaco lowlands, Ar- gentina, is rendering the thought of the early 20th century philosopher Robert Musil who suggested that the monuments, despite being erected to attract attention, are largely ignored. “But this indifference is not complete,” Gordillo adds, “for the monuments’ presence can also attract expressions of collective energy, as the toppling of communist monuments in eastern Europe clearly shows” (2014, 149). “Discontinued” things have a “latent potency” (to use Gordillo’s expression), which we might think of as otherwise-impotency, for such reminders fail to trigger the sense of patriotic unity or belonging that they were meant to inspire. Such outdated monuments facilitate instead a melancholic feeling of inexplicable loss. We have learned such things very clearly in Actor Network Theory: humans are not the only agents in the world. While infrastructures might not write conventional histories, this does not mean they are not active critics.23 I roamed ruins with people. I do not have much ethnographic material about ruins.24 People

23With the link to Latour, anthropologist Caroline Humphrey offered to see the doings of Soviet architecture and infrastructures as “prismatic.” Even though such infrastructures and architectures did not always convey in full force the ideological meanings that they were supposed to (by the Soviet architects, designers, planners, and users), they still created socialities and subjectivities. These socialities were not quite the ones that were intended, but theywere also not random: architecture and infrastructure gathered the meanings to scatter them like a refracted light but not a random way (2005). Similarly, non-randomly, one would argue, the ruins of such architecture and infrastructure continue working on the consciousness of people today. 24Ruins, a common conviction runs, tell stories. Statements to this effect can be found in Tsing (2015), Stoler (2008), Ginsberg (2004), Edensor (2005). Contrary to this conviction, I came to think that ruins do not tell stories. They refuse. I suppose that ruins influence our state unnoticeably, but their influence is layered, like layeredisthe toxicity of toxic debris; these layers agglomerate (Goldstein and Hall 2015, Magdalena Stawkowski 2016). I am aware of the supposed abundance of the ethnographies of Russian ruins that have allegedly become a commonplace and have long been critiqued as “ruin porn” by The Calvert Journal (Rann, 2014). The interesting twist about it is that, in the abundance of visual material that will take a separate overview to survey, there are few (if any) ethnographic scholarly works on the “Russian ruins” to date. Some examples no doubt can be named. For instance, there is a chapter devoted to industrial landscapes and ruins of the town of Ivanovo, “Russian Manchester” of sociologist’s Alice Mah’s book Industrial Ruination, Community, and Place: Landscapes and Legacies of Urban Decay (2012, 102). But the author is not fluent in Russian, and therefore the depth of her ethnographic delve is limited. Theworkof Andreas Shönle is not an ethnographic but cultural analysis. A handful of spectacular photo essays, some of which

31 do not really articulate a lot about ruins. I am convinced that the methodological limitations— difficulty in soliciting others’ perspectives on ruins—is what accounts for scholarly conclusions that people who belong to the “rural poor” really do not think nor feel anything about ruins in particular, as Gordillo seems to suggest.25 This difficulty is also probably the source of a bemoaning a lack of sensitivity towards ruins coming from the representatives of the Russian “high culture” (the bemoaning widely spread in the high Russian culture, Andreas Schönle suggests (2011, 5)).26 It is not that people do not have the sensibilities to recognize ruins as ruins, whatever that may mean, it is that “ethnographic methods” (or looking from the “outside” of the other’s body) are barely adequate in accessing the perspectives of others when it comes to big ethnographic questions. What do people feel about ruins, how do they experience nostalgia or hope? How do they decide to cut cords with a place and move away, or build long-term plans? Why do they act on some impulses and not others? All these ethnographic questions, which are less concrete and descriptive than “How do they raise children, cook food, or worship their gods?”, questions like “Why these gods and not others? What do people recollect when they cook these dishes? What memories do these tastes evoke?” are more about the inner world than the outer. These questions are simultaneously answerable— since we do, at least to a degree, share certain human experiences—but remain guesses and re- constructions, since the only experiences we are able to have a direct access to are our own. Autoethnography is a viable solution for this methodological problem. If, in other words, I described my own perception of Soviet ruins, nostalgia, and “what con-

are published at The Calvert Journal itself, even if done by anthropologists, like Rebecca Bathory, do not seem to include any data gathered through participant observation (like opinions and impressions of others). This adds to the picture in which the fascination with (post)Soviet ruins is undeniable but does not seem to have produced an abundance of ethnographic accounts. Rann suggests that the reason why the West is fascinated with the post-Soviet ruins is because they present a possible version of the future for an imperial formation. I would like to highlight that the critique of the fascination with Russian ruins is nevertheless directed almost entirely at mass culture. For all the talk about how overabundant the “ruin porn” is, there seems to have been a suspicious scarcity of the actual anthropological analyses of the Soviet ruins, specifically, conducted with ethnographic methods. 25“I encountered many examples of this material becoming of ruins [that is, the transformation or recycling of ruins—V.O.], which makes apparent how the rural poor see ruins simply as rubble.” (Gordillo, 2014, 38). 26In Architecture of Oblivion, Andreas Schönle observes that “Russian high literature and culture contrast the Eu- ropean appreciation of ruins with their neglect in Russia” (Schönle, 2011, 5). What this unlikely parallel implies, from quite different standpoints, is that the perception of ruins is a question of aesthetics for certain specific (educated, Western, refined) sensibilities. Consequently, the “appreciation of ruins” is a trait which others (uneducated, non-Western, unrefined) do not generally possess.

32 nection I have to this place,” I would make some of it clearer, if not completely clear. My re- course to autoethnography, or the things that influence my perceptions, my positionality, my non-foreignness to the Soviet ruins and Soviet nostalgia are all explained with the social “fact” (if that’s at all a thing) that I was born in the Soviet Union in 1979. The USSR collapsed in 1991, officially. As an anthropologist working in Russia, I have inevitably enlisted my experiences. In my view, the Soviet Union continues collapsing and will perhaps collapse for decades and even in centuries to come, while the debris of this collapse bursts in all directions and flies into the face of the Angel of History. The “memory ethnography” (that I propose) should illuminate the detached ethnographic questions because it turns the question from “them” on to “us.” It is not just “people” who moved in and out of Anosovo, who belong to the place or do not—so did my grandmother, and so do I. The scatter that began with the Bratsk-dam-induced flood and the uprooting of the familiesin Priangar’e (a sociocultural—but not administrative—region around the Angara River) in 1961, in a sense, merely continues. The affective infrastructure of memory ties and the imperceptible or scarcely deemed important personal connection comes forward when the conversation is about the place undergoing the economic and social abandonment. In 1956, my father was born in the village of Yandy that went underwater during the construction of the Bratsk dam. Yandy was relocated and became a part of Anosovo; the toponym “Yandy” for the settlement was lost.27 My father relocated to Anosovo together with his family— on a boat—when he was a child. In 1961, my grandfather Vasily Orlov crashed on his bulldozer through the ice of the Angara River and drowned. It happened in February, the month when the ice was supposed to be the thickest. His body was extracted from the winter river. I did not know what it could mean or how it could look, until one day, on the Russian Perestroika TV, I saw a footage of school children extracted out of icy water. Their bodies were frozen in different poses, like ice sculptures. I am still amazed that the footage of this event was broadcast on national television. At that time, disturbing videos were barely redacted. I cannot imagine what it must

27Now “Verkhniie Yandy” and “Nizhnie Yandy” are the bays where the creeks used to be before the dam-inflicted flood.

33 feel like to live through seeing a loved one frozen like that. My grandmother saw this. Perhaps my father did, too. I do not think I will ever bring myself to ask him this question. Once my father and I were stuck in the winter Moscow traffic jam. At the elapse of the third hour of this automobile imprisonment, my father suddenly confessed (“no other word would do,” as W.G. Sebald noted in similar circumstances) that for years he keeps returning to that morning at the Angara river when his parents and him were departing from the village of Yandy with its healing dust and roofs that passed the sunlight but stopped the rain. It was an early morning. The pink river with high clouds mirrored in the water. The river presented, as it didalmostany time, day and night, a spectacular, doubled, constantly changing landscape. He did not anticipate the nostalgia for the healing dust and breathing rooms of Yandy that I heard about in Anosovo so many years later. On the morning of his departure from Yandy—that is to say, the morning of his arrival to a “new world”, my father must have seen what I also saw at the mooring of Anosovo: clouds pro- ceeded with their parade. They looked like ever-changing mountains with pagodas and towers reconfigurating incessantly. In their monumentality, the storys and layers of clouds generated the impression of me moving while I was standing at the mooring, as they unfolded in front of us showing the next and then the next angle of a terrific multidimensional architectural agglomeration. The machine of the sky produced itself. The leaden Angara River was like an unstable earth; the mooring trembled under each light step. The new place was to be a place with a whole new archeology of nostalgia, understandings of the past, present, and future, a different systems of beliefs and connections, as-of-then- unknown—my father is still departing—eschatological expectations, fears, hopes, and forebod- ings. I have this memory as if it were my own, the way I have some memories on behalf of my now-eleven-year-old son being an adult. I imagine, my son will be recalling in different places— wherever they are—Texas prairies, fences, cactuses, palms, and a rustic charm of small towns, an absolute reign of high yellow grass and gigantic pickups. In both cases, I am in the fanciful possession of memories of very young people: my father was six in that boat that evenly streamed to the new life, indeed very new, new and happy, happy and unbelievable.

34 The notches of the taiga to which my young father’s eye was accustomed, unfolded inthe next rows of hills covered with trees in a slightly different but all too familiar way. My father’s family was moving not far away, only five to seven kilometers below the stream. Ridiculously close, one could say, given the scale of the changes that it brought. They were leaving Yandy and everything that it represented forever with no possibility of return. But children did not live through the drama that Valentin Rasputin’s interlocutors and characters lived through. In the spring of the year 1961, Yuri Gagarin breathed over with the eternal fame, smiled with his modest smile as he seemed to have touched the incandescent bulbs of stars in their sockets. The promises of the Socialist modernity appeared to be within reach. Whether he saw his dead father as an ice sculpture was only one of the questions that I could never find the right place, time, or tone to ask my father. Even when I do ask my questions,the response does not always satisfy me. Why did my father come to the “bankrupt place” in Siberia?

Figure 8. Into the Space! 1961

35 I asked him this question, but in response, I received something vague. Likely, he was simply feeling out of place in Moscow by this time in his career. After his submariner and a Naval officer career, he had a military journalist career. After that, he was working in a series of organizations closely intertwined with the state institutions, such as something called the Collective Security Treaty Organization, one of the post-Soviet structures aiming at preserving a sort of union in place between Russia, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Belarus, a number of former Soviet Republics to preserve some bases on each other’s territories. The organization was led by one of the officials, a stately, tall man with piercing blueeyes, well versed in intrigues and connections of the “corridors of power” under Putin. My father’s coworkers were 70-year-old men with diplomatic careers under their belts. One of them told a story that when he served in Italy, he left a weapon and gold somewhere in a hidden place, for his successor to use. Apparently, he was something of a spy. The peak of my father’s career was that he delivered an address to a big international gathering in Vienna. This is I who thinks that was the peak; I am not sure if this is how he’d see it. Anosovo happened after my father left the Organization. I do not know to which degreeIam “allowed” to elaborate on it in my work—there is a certain sense of sadness to this story. I feel like it was a sort of self-exile. He banished himself to those places seeing that his expertise and experience were underappreciated in Moscow. But he also had illusions that his intervention will help to rebuild Anosovo—spoiler alert, that did not happen, at least not to a degree he hoped, but his health suffered from Anosovian conditions. Mom implored me to deliver him back toMoscow as he started having heart problems there. My father inevitably became one of my interlocutors. In asking him questions, I have threaded the territory charted by anthropologists Alisse Waterston and Barbara Rylko-Bauer who theorized “intimate ethnography” (Waterston and Rylko-Bauer 2006, Waterston 2019). “Intimate ethnography,” Waterston (2019) highlights, is not autoethnography—autoethnography is many things with their own rigor, but clearly is not what is happening when the conversation cen-

36 ters “the Intimate Other.” In Waterston’s case, “the intimate other” is her father—his memories, experiences, documents.28 Ethnographic work is closely connected with death the way the buildings are closely connected with ruins. We know that our subjects, like ourselves, will not be alive tomorrow, and the text has a capacity to outlive us. Auto-writing is an auto-autopsy. Documenting traces of living, we are creating an “autothanatography” (Derrida, 1987, 273). In The Post Cards, Derrida is probably a model writer recording “everything that has ever happened to you” that anthropologist Kathleen Stewart told me I did not have to write about in one of the seminars. “You do not have to record everything that has ever happened to you.” (The thought struck me as sudden, I admit.) In the world where anthropologists attempt to interview the plants (as John Hartigan did, 2017) and conduct multispecies ethnographies, assembling images of the dead or asking the specter questions are forms of the primordial query “who are we?” I could have expanded the work by collecting the memories of others about my grandmother. Despite that almost fifty years have passed since she departed the village of Anosovo, Eastern Siberia, people still recall her there. Her departure was one of many after lives of the villages on the shore of the Angara River were uprooted, even before the flood of the Bratsk dam. The exodus that started withthe news of the incoming disaster, before the flood of 1961, prompted by the shadow of the flood. The exodus never stopped, and the recent regional relocations could be viewed as parts ofthe same process. The story of my grandmother’s peregrination adds an intimate dimension tothe world-wide process of movements, displacement, dam constructions, their disruptive work on the environment, and, ultimately, a global change that the planet endures—all on a microlevel of personal stories, which is one of the things ethnography is arguably good for. What the above amounts to is that at the foundation of my now-many-year exploration lies a

28I think that it could be more complicated, particularly in cases when the “intimate Other” to be interrogated is dead. Autoethnography is still at the center in the autoethnographies of grief, if we can call them that: such autoethnographies are written grappling after death of the significant other, be it a lover or a mother. How“auto” these autoethnographies are, if they are still about “the other”? “Memory (auto)ethnography” that I propose is pointing at the middle ground and is somewhere in-between of autoethnography (because it is still about me and my perceptions) and “intimate ethnography” (because the “other” of my interrogation is not here with me, and I have no way of asking her all these questions I finally have for my grandmother, alas, belatedly. Why would, then, will it be an “ethnography.” “Memory ethnography” is an ethnography of my own memories but when it comes to the other.

37 family trauma. Only now do I come to formulate it in these heavy terms. Trauma, in this sense, has become “productive.”29 Trauma that occurred to one’s kin is re-inscribed, in this case, upon the surface of everydayness. As Christen A. Smith argued, intergenerational trauma, particularly repeated trauma, is emblazoned in the bodies of those who may not have lived through the event itself (2016). It is strange to me to think that this foundational trauma, having occurred so many years ago and that I did not witness, dictates me sitting here writing. Preparing my grandfather’s body for the burial, women cut his clothes off.30 Somehow the destroyed clothes ended up in the attic. My grandmother, Valentina Orlova nee Zueva, attributed to the surviving clothes that she saw her husband in her sleep holding their child. In her dream, he was standing at the threshold, looking at her heavily, grasping the son. She was arguing with her husband not to take the child from her. “Why do you need him? You are dead.” The clothes, she later said, had to be thrown away or burned, but back at the time, she lamented, she was not familiar with this tricky subject. On the day of Valentina’s dream, her child was bathing in the Angara River and had nearly drowned. She was informed of this much later. This, of course, is a convergence of events, which often happens in personal narratives, as everyone knows who ever collected such narratives or simply listened to people or themselves. We tend to weave things into garlands, often post fac-

29I am thinking of Sophie Tamas who asks, “How do we speak usefully about unspeakable things?” recalling her story of abuse that she explored in her research and made the theme of the subsequent book where she addressed “the methodological and ethical challenges of producing knowledge within and from sites of trauma” (2011, 432). One of the ways to deal with trauma she suggests is to “stop making sense,” by which she means forgoing the idea that a life story of an abuse survivor is going to be “linear, directional, cumulative and coherent.” (2011, 432). I am also a survivor of an abusive relationship, and I worked with it by creating an unruly written narrative (Orlova, 2006) that allowed me to eventually work through this experience to a great sense of re-inhabiting self and regaining power, balance, control, and trust to the world. I can attest that becoming a master of one’s own narrative maybe the way of regaining the sure footing of a reigning self, reestablished on a new level. This will not be a self that has never been broken, but this nevertheless will be a self that commands respect. The type of trauma I am dealing with in this writing, however, or the type of trauma that has become “productive” for this writing of mine is less personal, less intimate, mediated by generations. It is a family trauma, which, as family traumas often are, or so I think, is part of a broader history: national, international, human, planetary. 30I am reminded here about the story one of my interlocutors, Alevtina, who I introduce later, told about her father—he froze almost to death while walking from a nearby village. He was like an ice sculpture too when he was discovered—almost ringing, she said—but his wife, Alevtina’s mother, had nothing short of an epiphany. It appeared to her that if she used tar, a pot of which she luckily had under the floors, to rub into his body, she could bring him back to life. Women with her refused to believe it because when they just poured milk into the man’s frozen teeth, it nearly froze itself, but she insisted. The parts of bodies where the tar did not land ended up suffering from frostbite, but she indeed restored him among the living. “A miracle,” concluded Alevtina but instantly remarked, “He did not live for a long time after that though.”

38 tum, to make them make sense. But there is also a mystical sense to such coincidences, real or imagined. My grandfather “sat” until Stalin’s death (from 1948 to 1953). He was effectively, as I now realize, one of those criminals, as opposed to the political prisoners, that comprised two distinct “camps” within the gulags.31 He was charged with the attempted murder of a chief ofa lespromkhoz (timber harvesting socialist enterprise) during a heated argument about cattle graz- ing wheat. He refused a state advocate and defended his case himself. He was sentenced to seven years. He did not agree with the sentence and considered himself innocent. There was a fight however, and there blinked a knife. Blood was shed. His brothers said that my grandfather took upon himself the guilt for his uncle Afanasiy, who convinced him to go to prison, even though it was Afanasiy who used the knife. “You are young, and I am old. You will be freed eventually, and I will die there,” were his words, they said. I do not think I will know the truth of my grandfather’s imprisonment, as I have heard plenty of contradictory versions. I asked though why anyone would take the blame for an assault upon himself. I was told that Afanasiy raised my young grandfather, his two brothers, and a sister, in addition to his own “five or six children.” (My great grandfather did not return from WWII.) My grandfather Vasily Orlov was freed after serving a part of his sentence. He did notreturn to his native village of Kumareika but moved to Yandy. I do not know in which camp my grandfather served his term. But it is known that he participated in the construction of the Angarsk Petrochemistry Manufacture [Angarskiy Neftekhimichesky Kombinat]. He proudly showed it to my young father, “Here, your dad has built this.” After her dead husband appeared to her in a dream, my grandmother Valentina left thevillage of Anosovo. My father, a child then, left with her and did not return to the village of Anosovo until 2006. I was with him when he returned. That was when I first visited the village. I heard about Anosovo from him, and, when we visited in 2006, he said, “This is all that I will be able to ever give you, conceptually.” He meant, Anosovo was the last gift. At the time, I had not anticipated thatI

31In writing “gulag” in small letters, I am following Alexander Etkind (2013). In pluralizing it (“gulags” rather than “gulag”), I am hoping to lay the ground for imagining of gulag as not the thing of the past but a structure enduring through spaces and times.

39 would spend months in Anosovo and return many times over the course of more than a decade. What does that mean in the context of selection of a fieldsite for an anthropological project? As one of the “fathers of anthropology,” Bronislaw Malinowski wrote, “Perhaps as we read the account of these remote customs there may emerge a feeling of solidarity with the endeavours and ambitions of these natives. Perhaps man’s mentality will be revealed to us, and brought near, along some lines which we never have followed before. Perhaps through realizing human nature in a shape very distant and foreign to us, we shall have some light shed on our own. In this, and in this case only, we shall be justified in feelings that it has been worth our while to understand these natives” (1922, 25; emphasis added). In other words, other people are only of interest and profit to us as long as they tell us something about ourselves. The universal and incorrigible “man’s mentality” is at the stake ofan- thropological investigation.32 We want to experience human solidarity. We want to experience primordial kinship with all the “living and non-living beings” (Mbembe, 2019, 5). And, to draw from Malinowski’s inspiration, what better access to “these natives” could there be than thena- tives themselves—the natives, in particular, cultured, stripped of their savagery, alienness, and impenetrability, even if of some of their magnetism as well, and speaking in a language that is familiar and intelligible to us? But the degree of “bringing the anthropological work home” is different for everybody. How much our home is ours and the community that we are tied towith our soul and blood accepts us as their own are separate investigations in each particular case. Anosovo was still a foreign territory for me perhaps to a greater degree than the USA was ever a foreign territory for me. As an unknown land, Anosovo beguiled me before I went there. One story from Anosovo that my father told me speaks to finding “the locus of writing,” of which Barthes wrote. The idea of “locus of writing,” the way I see it, is about finding one’s ownvoice. Not inhabiting “the locus of writing,” is, for example, as far as I imagine, why people struggle with finding that mysterious “first line.” When my father was a boy, he watched a movie with a soundtrack of songs by Vladimir

32Since then, there was, naturally, a lot of objections to this extractive “anthropological mentality,” if I may. As Foucault, apprising Kantian universalism and a figure of a philosopher as a universal man, a measure of all things, once wrote sardonically, “Establishing oneself between the adversaries, in the center and above them, imposing one general law on all and founding a reconciliatory order: this is precisely what this is not about” (2003, 53).

40 Vysotsky, a musician loved across the Soviet Union. The boy returned home from the village club where he watched the movie and had that feeling of a chronicler: “if not for me, no one will ever know.”33 These songs were already written, arranged, played, copied from copies, tothe magnetic cassettes where the sound dissipates into noise, listened to and rehearsed all overthe Soviet Union. These songs had reached the remotest corners of the empire. And yet, tryingto recollect the lyrics, my young dad climbed on a chair and stood close to a lamp, waiting until the line would reemerge in his memory. He would then jump back to the table and add the line to the page of his notebook. He repeated this maneuver over and over again until he had all the songs written down. Such was the sense of urgency and necessity to practice and inhabit writing,the sense familiar to all the -graphers. In 2016, my father briefly, although not that briefly, for three years, returned to the village of Anosovo. He self-nominated for the position of mayor as an unaffiliated candidate and was elected. By that time, my project was full speed under way, and it was about a year after I was admitted to the University of Texas at Austin, anthropology department. In an emailfrom Moscow, my father asked me if I minded. I emailed him back from Austin that I did not mind. I had mixed feelings. I was disappointed, worried, and yet relieved. Disappointed, because the trip to the field where your dad resides was kinda uncool. Worried, because his presence was bound to produce complications, such as the reasonable unwillingness of people to share their dissatisfaction with the administration, government, or the state with the daughter of the mayor. It changed my “positionality” before I could even think of it. It changed the amount of blame I was willing to place on everything related to the “state”: my father was the state! I was set to gain access to some spaces and be excluded from others. I saw the Anosovo budget that made it difficult to acquire a piece of cloth with which to wash floors, so I knew that itwasimpossible for the village to buy a new diesel engine or a truck carrying water. Hearing that my father was going to be in Anosovo, I was also relieved because it made my trip that much easier. In Veiled Sentiments, Lila Abu-Lughod describes how she feared that the

33Poet Kirill Kovaldgy once told me in a conversation that as a child he documented reports of the Germans troops advancing through Russia. He led a record with a similar feeling of a chronicler: if I am not going to record this information now, no one will remember the events and the matching dates.

41 Figure 9. Only now do I come to realize how important the presence of my father was. A writer and a photographer, he creates a parallel stream of writings on social media, and I keep telling him I will collect them all under one cover. This is the photograph of my father in the clubof the village of Anosovo during a meeting before the election. Here, I see the common project of “visual anthropology” spectacularly accomplished, which consists in giving people cameras and asking them to photograph and bring to the researcher photos for analysis. Often, it is done with the goal to analyze these images and see something, through them, in the place, “culture,” “customs,” “people” themselves, or whatever the researcher fancies—something otherwise inaccessible, for we can see only through our own eyes, and never through the eyes of others. While I have seen some interesting implementations of such a project, here is an example of a very successful one, even if short-lived. The photographer is unknown to me. They were given thesame camera (iPad) for the duration of the meeting and evidently asked to snap several photographs, which they did. I selected one of those photographs. The light is on in the background, the table is covered with a pink tablecloth; there is a blue wall, murals, and a vase with flowers. community of Bedouins she set to study was bound to think less of her because her father insisted on accompanying her to the field (2016). Her father, as I learned later from Stoler’s Duress, was also a famous anthropologist (from my vantage point, his fame was positively eclipsed by his daughter’s). Ironically, the community perceived her father’s presence as a sign of respectability,

42 an indication that she was a good woman worthy of trust, rather than some immoral girl running amok, ostracized by her family.34 None of that was the case for me, yet the field was only one of many complications. I mustered the courage to admit the change to my advisor only after my first summer fieldwork of 2016.He was kind and laughed about it. When a peer asked if I had relatives in the field, I lied—said no. Be as it may, my father has been my point of entrance and connection to Anosovo either way. My father, throughout the years I have known him, liked to recall Anosovo. I could tell that his decision to ballot in Anosovo was not only dictated by his worry for me. He was excited about the prospect, a new page in his life, and I did not tell him anything beyond that email about the matter.

My father was among the returnees to Anosovo. I am one of such returnees. So, what keeps us returning, rather than them? What makes us belong, and what, does not? What is it about “affective attachments” that keeps us tied to a place? How do I answer the question, why this, andnotsome other location but make it fit in an “elevator speech” timeline?

When, in 2016, ten years after my first brief visitation, I arrived to Anosovo with the ideaof doing anthropological research, I saw the village facing change. The riverboat that previously went from Irkutsk to Bratsk stopping at Anosovo, no longer followed the previous route. The riverboat previously went all the way Irkutsk–Bratsk and back. But now, the riverboat to Bratsk started from the town of Balagansk. To reach Balagansk from Irkutsk, one would have to use a minibus. Well, that would be a wonderful journey—the tremor of the selectively paved road, a decorative fringe quivering above the line of the windshield, Russian pop music nonstop blaring from the speakers—merciless romances—and your body, sweating in the summer heat, squeezed

34“I suspect that few, if any, fathers of anthropologists accompany them to the field to make their initial contacts” writes Abu-Lughod before proceeding with providing a justification for his presence (2016, 11). This, to me, is more of a statement of how male-dominated anthropology was at the time when these lines were written—1986. Women are often—not always—accompanied in the field by fathers, husbands, or children. Which, of course, aredifferent configurations of connections shaping the field experiences accordingly. The presence of relatives is merely still-not- too-apparent, rarely woven into the texts, but commonplace circumstance of fieldwork for many anthropologists, and for female anthropologists, such presence is often male.

43 between the bodies of other passengers. Sometimes an occasional disoriented fly circles a salon over and over, drawing spasmodic rhombi in the air and driving the observer mad.35 Listening to the monotonous screeching sound, I imagined that I was riding a kibitka, a leg- endary vehicle—a covered sleigh—even if it was merely a minibus, in retrospect, the rusty ghost of a machine rushing along the Aleksandrovsky Trakt (post road), consuming the distance between the town of Ust Uda and the city of Irkutsk. I am not falling apart or asleep in this moment, but the next one, always not this one, but the next one. “They will not return it,” Lidia (45) said. “What?” Lydia was a former Anosovian whoImet in Irkutsk. We sat in a café to eat ice cream and talk. “Mark my word, they will not bring the riverboat back. It’s gone. And it’s for good.” She pensively drove a wooden stick in a plastic cup back and forth, collecting a colorful spoonful of strawberry–vanilla. (I will return to our ice cream conference later). The official reason for revoking the riverboat was that the level of water in the AngaraRiver drastically fell. That happened in 2016 to a lot of speculations as to why. Environmental reasons linked to climate change. Social reasons, or, rather, reasonings, at least as far as I heard, pointed to the diminishing of the population in all the villages on the right shore of the Angara River which needed less travel or could do with different ways of reaching their homes from cities and vice versa. Needless to say, the villagers did not think so. One way or the other, the halting of

35I attempted to video record a “soundscape” of the minibus travel: landscapes blurring into a monotony, amurmur of the conversations—someone talks about possibly forgetting their phone—the music, the rustle of the wheels, achild mumbling themselves to sleep (https://vimeo.com/226918018 and https://vimeo.com/226915444 (2017)). The minibuses are mini worlds in themselves. You are probably not aware, but in the city of Volgograd, therearouse a whole school of studying minibuses that uses the most advanced tools of the social sciences to date. “This article is devoted to social history of marshrutnyie taxis (minibuses) of the city of Volgograd in the spiritof Michel Foucault. Beyond the superficial unity of the word marshrutka (minibus), hides a heterogeneous ensemble of moral orders, technical artefacts, forms of property and juridical statuses. The history of such an ensemble is marked by disruption of the three socio-technical configurations. This work shows how the moral and technical heterogeneousness of these configurations and the disruptions between them generate the feeling of injustice and conflictness characteristic of the minibus taxis today.” (Kuznetsov and Shaitanova, 2014). I loved the “feeling of injustice” as it points out at the presence of affect. Another work asks: “Together or apart? Moral worlds and regimes of the usage of mobile devices in the minibuses of the city of Volgograd. The article is devoted to the question how mobile devices function in the context of construction of the social order in public metro.” (Sivkov, 2017). Indeed, minibuses deserve all the worlding in the world. Sivkov analyzed the mini-spectacles of phone calls in the fleeting heterotopias of which the witnesses—other passengers—are made to participate, and how theychange what others called “the affective atmospheres” in the bus. Phone calls are not always a possibility in minibuses going from Irkutsk to Balagansk, due to the scarcity of mobile connection. The interrupted call could also be a ruptured world (“Hello, hello! Can you hear me?” No, I cannot hear you).

44 the riverboat made Anosovo even more energy- and time-consuming to reach, expanding and exacerbating its “remoteness.”36 After I returned to Anosovo in subsequent years—2017, 2018, and 2019—my sense of “remoteness” became more ambivalent. I appreciated, if not possessed, the mindset of those Anosovians who praised their village for peacefulness seeing its seclusion not only as a curse but also as a blessing. Many Anosovians I spoke to admitted that they tended to experience an embodied and troubling sense of discomfort “in the city” (which, more often than not, meant, Irkutsk). “How do you even sleep there?” Nikolay (63) queried. “Pipes regurgitate, a tram slides and almost breaks your bones with its ringing. You can hear the neighbor who went to shit the floor above, and others who are making love below.” Curiously, I now shared his sense of bodily inconvenience on my trips to Irkutsk where I stayed overnight in my friends’ places or rented one-bedroom apartments from cheerful landladies who provided fresh linen. One of those landladies remains particularly memorable to me. I recorded her number and for a long time I had it on my phone. I traveled Anosovo–Irkutsk often enough to learn, over a stretch of time, that she decorated each of the properties for rent that she managed with a city- themed interior. One of her flats was all about Paris, another, Rome, and the third, London.The photo-wallpaper of Venice—San Marco square—had me wondering why I chose Siberia and not Italy for whatever anthropological exploration there was to conjure out of thin air. Could I not have asked a relevant question about Italy? Do we know all about it? I have been to Rome and Venice. I lived in London. I have never been to Paris. Seeing these dreamworlds reproduced, on pillowcases, curtains, wallpaper, and mugs in the Irkutsk interiors, I positively exercised a special type of imaginary lustful mobility. This finding occurred to me while I was staring at tile withthe miniature Eifel towers in one of those bathrooms. I was “staying put”—or rather I was not—amid the city’s vexations.

36“Remoteness” emerges from the intersection of the distance and proximity which do not necessarily correspond. “Remoteness” is a product not of distance but of the insurmountability of space. Kuklina and Holland argued that the roads that aim to diminish remoteness in Eastern Siberia perpetuate the inaccessibility of the place because of the state of the materiality of the said roads (2018).

45 1.1. Ephemerality Of Palpable Objects When my grandmother Valentina died at our dacha in Podmoskovie, it became particularly evident to me how senseless things surrounding us are, whether we value them or not. She lived through her penultimate—but far from the first—displacement several years prior to her death. The last displacement happened as we buried her body at a faceless Moscow cemetery thatlooked like a packed neighborhood of the dead continuing the existence in the mode to which they were accustomed: living in multi-story houses, in close proximity to each other but perfectly anonymous. She was the first—and so far the only—in our family to lie at a city cemetery, asopposedto the cemetery in Anosovo or Dudarkov, the rural cemetery where the dead know their neighbors. When visited the cemetery for the first time, I remember the rows of graves stretching nearly to the horizon impressed me. “I had not thought death has undone so many.” It has been years since we buried her there, alone, while her relatives and friends of the youth are lying in different places scattered across Siberia. By burying her in a faceless Podmoskovie cemetery, I thought, we performed something of a pardonable and unimportant, but betrayal. Her body was to decompose among the corpses of the people she never met. For us, who lived our lives in big buildings in big cities, the idea of lying around strangers on the cemetery that has no visible borders is somewhat of a natural proceeding. From the tenement living to the tenement un-living in a cemetery stretching almost as far as the eye could see, there is a smooth transition. How unnatural it would have appeared to her. Perhaps she never thought of it. This is one of the hypotheses, because if she had thought about it, she could have asked about transporting her body to some other place. Perhaps she had thoughts about it but did not want any additional troubles for us. For ages everyone in our family on both sides, at least as far as we know, was putting one’s bones in a well-known cemetery visited from the days of early childhood. Exceptions were tragic, such as a great grandfather not coming back from the War. And now, my grandmother. I was finishing my dissertation, in the last bout of inspiration rewriting it nearly from scratch and inviting my dead grandmother fully back into my life—the way I never invited her when she was alive. In her handwritten memoir, my grandmother showed us the grace I have not shown neither to her nor to anybody in my family. Even though my grandmother had a lot to complain

46 Figure 10. My neighborhood in Moscow, built in the 1980s: tenement multy-story houses that are replicated in close patterns several times as you walk from the metro station Timiryazevkaya towards the Altufievo highway. about, and endured a lot from us, and me in particular, she did not betray us in her memoir saying stoically instead that in our family she never felt offended or insulted. She was, she was offended, more than once—no, we did not want it to be this way, did not do so out of malice, but rather from lack of patience, space, understanding, and I am sorry. Belated excuses, a decade too late. When we had a family gathering after funeral, back in Moscow, and two of her sisters were

47 there—one came from Ukraine, another from the Russian Far East—we, as tradition runs, recollected her, and there was a lot of words said. But, as James Baldwin describes the funeral of his father, a lot of words said above the corpse fell amiss. Baldwin writes, the minister “presented to us in his sermon a man whom none of us had ever seen—a man thoughtful, patient, and for- bearing, a Christian inspiration to all who knew him, and a model for his children. And no doubt the children, in their disturbed and guilty state, were almost ready to believe this; he had been remote enough to be anything and, anyway, the shock of the incontrovertible, that it was really our father lying up there in that casket, prepared the mind for anything.” Our funeral was not in a church. There were not many people. I kept thinking, in my annoying ways, that if I organized the funeral, I would do everything differently. But I had a baby attached to my nipple. The point is, of course funerals are a lie, in the sense that people reconstruct the person the way they perhaps never were. It is demanded by the genre, a solemn, triumphant, and horrifying memorialization of the deceased. A replacement should be done. The dead is to be snatched out of our memory to be replaced with someone they were not. A forgery is to transpire. Their real struggle and beauty, the nobility of their character, never mind their abuse and toxicity, and their virtue and fame are being stolen from them at this moment of reconstruction of them as someone they were not or someone we did not know. That happened to my grandmother. And I objected. I said, right there, at the gathering, holding my glass of something probably unalcoholic—my baby held by someone else but preparing to get reattached any moment—that she was a stern, strict, uncompromising woman who wanted everything always to be her way. It sounds immature now, and I must have kept silence. Yet I ventured into my speech and continued through it as through a mine field, carefully choosing words that would not, I hoped, embitter the bereft. But there was no chance in hell that was going to fly. The oldest sister of mygrandmother— now the oldest, after out loss—was rightly offended. She shook her head, and she interjected saying that her older sister was a strong and caring woman who always went above and beyond for those she loved and who were entrusted to her care—the truth that nonetheless was a lie. “This is how you experienced her,” I said. She was old enough to let it pass as perhaps shesensed that I had stepped onto something I felt I could not be moved from. She was kind enough not to

48 let me irrevocably ruin the event. But she probably did not think of me the same way thereafter, and who could blame her? It is easy to be kind to the dead. When that guy, linguist Ph.D., a graduate of Moscow State University, began unearthing the dead girls from cemetery and making dolls out of them, there was much outcry. One news item surprised me particularly, although all of it was one big endless surprise, for the lack of a better term. The father of one of the girls commented with sympathy that Moskvin took a better care of his child after death than he, father, did when the childwas alive. He dressed his findings in clothing, did their nails, put wax masks and make up ontotheir faces, watched cartoons, and even celebrated birthdays in the circle of appropriated corpses. All of that in a small apartment where he lived with his parents. They knew he had dead bodies, but their reverence to the science was so great that they, poor ignoramuses, assumed he needed those remnants for the sake of his scientific experiments. My point is however that it is easy to bekind to the dead. When people are alive and annoy you with their presence, it is not easy to be kind to them. In death, however, they are pliable. Available to whatever mask we please to put on them. The sadness, though, is in that it is impossible not to put some sort of mask onthem.Theyare too uncomfortable in their nonexistence and decay. We need some sort of human approximation of the inhumane voids we are about to slip into ourselves. We give them masks of void words, “strong,” like my grandmother’s sister gave, or “stern,” like I gave myself. But something eludes words, faces elude masks. “This is not what I meant at all, this is not itatall,” as Mr. Prufrock cried out in a fake profundity of quasi-intellectual conversations he kept having with his girlfriend. Whether he knew it or not, Anatoly Moskvin was a pupil of philosophers Nikolay Feodorov and Nikolai Vavilov. So the exhumated girls that he collected. You know these typical post- Soviet apartments, cages they are. They are tiny as matchboxes. Some said he had twenty-six mummified bodies in that tiny place. Basically, these apartments are too tiny for a coupleofcats. I watched the video footage: corpses looked at visitors from the dark of a narrow corridor, with their sad painted eyes. The unhappy old parents waved their hands: “We knew, we knew hehas those bodies.” A polyglot speaking with a gradation of fluency in thirteen languages, historian, an expert on necropoleis and cemeteries, a self-trained anatomist and taxidermist, and a collector of

49 corpses, Moskvin was of course diagnosed with schizophrenia. No indecency, nor impropriety he committed against the dead, he insisted. Except for of course disturbing their peace andmaking mannequins out of them. But he had a goal: to reinstall them, either through science or, if need be, dark magic, among the living. That father of one of the long-legged girls said: “He combed her hair, attired her,readher bedtime books.” That Moskvin denied any sexual gratification he may or may not have received from the mummies, solicited him, I assume, some sort of sympathy from the distraught parents. He had the nerve to tell them in court that they abandoned the girls to the voids and cold of the grave, but he, Moskvin, brought them back to the warmth of human habitation and warmed them up. A female police sergeant interviewed for the TV could barely contain herself and stumbled through her nausea. She said, “Yes, he did human-high dolls out of human remains.” He learned the art of mummification well; specialists in taxidermy observed his art with badly concealed envy. They probably did not have good opportunities to try their skill on humans too often. He would have gotten a prison term had it not been replaced with the psychiatric ward. He had either pervert fantasies of a sick mind or daring, thrusting itself way ahead of his time, scientific ideas. Some thought the latter. But of course, that would be too charitable tothinkso. I still remember a leg hanging from the shelf of the cloistered apartment in the footage. The investigator, a huge, bald man in a leather coat, has been rumored to vomit violently out of the doors of Moskvin’s house. Old parents isolated themselves after their son was taken from them in that sepulcher of the apartment. The media all around the world discussed it. On one ofthe godforsaken Austin radio stations where no news ever popped up, two dimwits discussed “the Russian scientists” and joked “are they all like that?” No, idiots, I mumbled to myself taking on as the green light shone. Not all of them are like that; just the fenziest and the most indomitable. That certainly is necessary to have no limits on one’s imagination to either believe that youcan resurrect the girls or to dig people out of the graves. Which is something I am doing now. Digging the remnants of the forgotten or the unknown and bringing them, for no good reason, toliveand quiver. When we “replanted” my grandmother to Moscow, she was in her seventies. We took her out

50 of her established life in the city of Angarsk where she lived for 24 years, beginning in 1989, and transported her in 2013 into a megapolis where she had no one but us, her immediate family. In Angarsk, she lived alone. She had everything she needed, or so she said. Her sisters and friends lived nearby. Granted, the Siberian “nearby” is a stretchable notion. The Siberian “nearby” is not among the closest “nearbies” around. Her closest-living sister was 75 kilometers (~46 miles) away. As many women of her generation, my grandmother did not drive a car. Neither did her sisters. She had no one to look after her as her health took a turn for the worse. Still, selling her tiny apartment in Angarsk was a mistake. The realization that she had no place to return exacerbated her loneliness and made her feel more uprooted, I could tell. She clung to objects dear to her that had no value in the eyes of family members who were tactless enough to question her desire to keep her possessions. But objects store memories. Things acquire values beyond dismissable as “sentimental.” They serve as reminders of the bygone—as bolsters of identity, in fact. No things—no memory. And also, no self. “Deprivation of such abstractions as citizenship and freedom is accompanied by forfeiture of concrete things—possessions, homes, jobs—which in turn strips people of other abstractions. Divested from books, they lose part of their knowledge. Confiscating letters and photographs speeds the dissolution of personal memories.” KateBrown wrote this (2015, 24) analyzing the traces, objects, “evidence” left by the Americans stripping their fellow Japanese Americans of citizenship before sending them to camps. I am not comparing the significance or scope of the private events of my grandmother’s biography to the calamity that befell others. The point of intersection here is objects. A change of place stripping people from the familiarity of everyday things threatens the sense of self and demands to reconfigure the self anew. Photographs and documents in particular have qualities grounding people in their own past. Even more, stripping people of possessions is a method of robbing them of their identity. Even though object, unlike documents and photographs, are “not signs” (Batchen, 2001), they are indicative of one’s past in one’s own imagination and memory. But back then, I could not rid myself of the doubt that we needed to preserve all those things. I enumerated to myself that my grandmother chose to take with her from the city of Angarsk to Moscow in 2013:

51 Figure 11. Grandmother Valentina’s penultimate journey, traced. The town of Angarsk is the point of departure. Moscow is the point of arrival.

— a threefold mirror with a crack across its surface;

— a lumpy sofa and embroidered cushions;

— three dozen books that she—I again observed—at no point reread or opened, for that matter;37

— photo albums;

— a box with brooches I remembered from my childhood. One of the brooches has a big plastic ruby and was at one time an object of my long-gone desire burning so badly that even now I sense a trace of it;

37I wish someone told me back then that the possession of books in particular has a quality of representing something that their un-reader does not have access to any other way. Once in an interview, Umberto Eco explained why he had far many more books than it was humanly possible to ever read them. One does not have to read all the books one has to benefit from having them around. They compose the veritable display of a universe to inhabit. Thishad not occurred to me, as I wondered why my grandmother will not discard the books she had, I assumed, no need for.

52 — a box with buttons. At least one of the buttons, a big gray glistening tessellated button, again, familiar and an object of my past cravings;

— the beetroot-color carpet, the object that remembered my father as a child (sic; I am en- trusting an object with an agency here);

— and a huge red-furred castrated cat Murzik, my grandmother’s faithful companion, a sweet machine of mischief and the infallible source of the cacophonous meowing that sparked her virulent irritation.

One animal and so many indispensable objects. All of them contributed to her sense of self. These objects continued to deteriorate, somehow, visibly, as though order escaped them, orthey no longer remembered what arrays they were called to comprise. I speculated that it is as if

Figure 12. A brooch with a plastic ruby. Fake in a sense that this is not my grandmother’s brooch. It is an image I already have in my manuscript Debris of Utopia that illustrates a short essay of it, specifically. The image obtained by marauding Avito.ru—the Russian online flea market.The limited number of commodities available in the Soviet era made for a mass affect. That is, it is far more likely that people will have encountered that broach at some point in their lives.

53 at some point, people let objects arrange themselves and form assemblages over which humans have no power, as though people were no longer interested or invested, or they did not have the energy to keep track of things. There was a certain order to how my grandmother arranged her surviving possessions, but it was erratic, chaotic, too meticulous at times, and overruled by things. Outdated newspapers were faithfully collected; they piled under the table, to be read at one point or to be used for cleaning windows. Tubes of moisturizer and lotion meshed with brown-glass bottles of medicine were congregating on a shelf near her bed or armchair. Everything appeared to be useful: a paperclip, a button, an empty box of chocolate candies, a fragment ofwoolen thread. Everything was kept for an occasion, but nothing was ever used—the occasion never presented itself. Was it because she lived through a difficult life, where everything could become a sudden asset, and there was a shortage of the plainest trifles? Was it simply in her character? Was it telling us something about her generation, people of that age, or Russians in general—or Siberians, for that matter? That period of her life was also marked with repurposing, recycling, and rethinking ofthe ordinary functionalities of things. A cup became a plant pot, a pan turned into a basket, a plastic bottle transformed into a vase. There were ridiculous repairs: eyeglasses fixed with anelastic band, a broken porcelain figurine put together with a glue that was the color of rust, acracked photo frame reconstructed with duct tape. When grandmother Valentina died, I took a closer look at her personal debris, her worthless and most precious ruins. They were scarce at that point. The mirror was broken during transportation and discarded. Her books were squeezed between books of our home library, embroidered cushions, scattered here and there. After she died, what was left of her werephoto albums, a number of documents tracing, in a dry bureaucratic language, what she went through in a more chilling way than a novel could present, and a notebook of handwritten recipes. The notebook was the tiny kind, pages covered with big, uncertain letters that look both like and unlike big, uncertain letters of a child, and newspaper clippings folded and saved between pages, like withering flowers. The content of her collection of notes was heartbreaking tome.How get your joints moving once again, how to prevent an asthma attack, how to improve your health

54 Figure 13. Grandmother Valentina and I in 1998 in her apartment in the city of Angarsk, against the background of the beetle-root wall carpet, an inescapable detail of the interior of the Soviet flats. The picture is snapped on a “soapbox”—small point-and-shoot camera. I do not knowwhat I bleached my hair for and cannot account for that. Maybe not all the “why?” questions have answers. by drinking a decoction of birch buds twice a day, how beneficial badger fat is for your liver and kidneys. Grandmother Valentina grew up when it was universally recommended in the USSR to give children and adults a spoon of badger or fish fat for the improvement of their health and wellbeing. She kept a bottle of badger fat in the refrigerator. She never managed to convince other family members, with the exception of Murzik, to take a spoonful of badger fat, but it was always there. I inherited all that: her brooch with a plastic ruby, a set of manicure instruments—the Cold-

55 War steel manicure instruments for the Cold-War manicure—and a box of powder. Those or- phaned objects lost not only their owner. By losing her, they lost their meaning. They acquired instead a sense of meaninglessness, absurdity, and abruptness. They tangibly represented her having been here with us yesterday. They recreated her portrait in some new, unfathomable way. They could not have belonged to just anyone’s grandma. They were all about her,andthat was all there was. Not sooner than many years later, while I was moving out of my university apartment complex in Texas, I thought it was good that we sold my grandmother’s apartment when she moved from the city of Angarsk to Moscow. Had we kept her place, she would have gone there. It was good, after all, that we did sell her home, that she indeed did not have a placetogo. 1.2. Materiality Of Memory By “chilling events in her life that a novel could not adequately present but that were reflected in her documents,” I meant the route her life took. When my grandfather Vasily died as he did, drowning in the winter Angara River, my grandmother Valentina moved, in 1964, to the village of Beryozovka to her sister, 140 kilometers (~90 miles) up stream of the river from Anosovo. In two years, Valentina Orlova was invited by her dead husband’s brother to move to the town of Shelekhov, an urban center. The town of Sheleknov also had “just arisen.” It started asa bunch of tents for workers of the Irkustk Aluminum Factory (IrkAZ) in 1953. First, the settlement was named after the factory, then the town acquired the name of the “Russian Columbus” Grig- oriy Shelekhov—an explorer, traveler, seafarer, merchant, and fur trader. “Businessman,” as the Russian version of Wikipedia has it. Colonizer, in other word. The town grew. The family—my grandmother and her son—amounted to two more new town dwellers. They lived poorly. They had to sell, book by book, the library that my grandfather collected. She managed to become an accountant. At her new job at the aluminum factory, her boss sexually harassed her. The family moved back to the village of Beryozovka, then moved to the station of Polovina because it had better schools, or for some reason like that. I long pestered her asking to write a memoir, notes on her life, and at some point, she gave in

56 and filled a journal with her handwriting. She was in search of a good husband after thedeathof Vasily. She was remarkably unlucky in love. My grandmother’s last husband was called in our family Granddad Kolya, but it was hardly ever forgotten that he was not a real granddad. He was a beautiful man: tall, wide shoulders, with a wave of brown hair in a somewhat-Soviet way, inexplicably: he had something of that cunning openness in his face—with that wave—that somehow marked him as a Soviet manager. I do not know a lot about him and have little to say. It may seem inappropriate to include him intomy chronicles anyway. My grandmother and he did not have a peaceful life. They were constantly arguing, and witnesses of these arguments became us all whenever we visited. I remember he insisted everyone would drink cogniac while my mom leaned the glass above her plate to pour out excesses. I was ready to point at it with indignation to everyone, but she spotted that I spotted and stopped me with her sight. About ten years my grandmother and granddad Kolya spend in the city of Bratsk, together, before they finally split or divorced, and she moved in to her solitary one-bedroom apartment in the city of Angarsk from which we replanted her to Moscow. There was a lot of enigmatic things about this union, as in, why did she kept tolerating him for so long even as she seemed to be unable to tolerate him? A forever-naïve question every outside insists on asking even if they themselves had the experience of what is called “abusive relationship” and “codependence.” They clearly had a clash in those “Siberian characters” she claimed to have possessed. They were both stubborn, unyielding, categorical, and brisk. For me, he was not a bad grandfather. He gave me a transistor once, I think, on my eleventh birthday. The transistor radio on a little leash, a beautiful little thing, a technological wonder.It had one flaw, I soon discovered: when you pressed a protective membrane on the speaker, the membrane would only spring back with difficulty. Once when I pressed it, it did not spring back at all. I had to use another pair of mom’s manicure scissors to unglue it from the speaker. But it turned out that scissors left traces, indelible marks that now freckled my beautiful transistor radio. It was so disappointing that the radio had to go. It went, to a wardrobe where it was

57 hidden successfully before being discovered, with the traces of my crimes. If I was reprimanded by Granddad Kolya, it was gently. Once when grandmother and he visited us in Moscow, he gave me a box of colorful pencils. She sharpened them all during that evening at the kitchen table working above a leaf of newspaper, putting the shavings there: they created an interesting colorful mass. One pencilwas sharpened from a wrong end: from that point where golden letters where bound to be erased quicker than if the pencil was sharpened from another end. That was all I personally held against him, but it did not change the fact that my grandmother and granddad Kolya were not a durable couple. Later, when she lived with us, she recalled with a poignant mix of jealousy, resentment, and shadenfreude how he would go to a restaurant without inviting her. But women in there, unlike her, a simple accountant, were working in supply, she went on, and they would tell him, not so fast, and he will crawl back to her telling her she is the best. I need to find that fragment in Russian where I recorded this drama more precisely. What she hated the most is the necessity to iron his shirts. Shirts, shirts, there were always those shirts to iron. They seemed to never end. “He loved to wear a well ironed shirt, you see.” That is how he is now known to me: the wave, the open face, liked to wear ironed shirts, sharpening pencils at a dinner table. Sometimes I cannot help but think, what if there had been no “drive” in her or in my father to move—“drives of migration,” the mobility studies call it—what if my grandmother had led a sedentary life and spent her life in Anosovo, and, of course, most of all, what if my grandfather had not died a premature death? His death seemed to be the change that propelled the movement of the family, and to this day I seem to continue on the trajectory that this event put the family. My brother met me at Sheremetyevo airport from the New York flight (they cancelled direct flights Houston–Moscow a time ago) with a troubling declaration that I do not have anAmerican accent. From that I inferred that I kind of do. I had stopped searching for English words writing in English. I began struggling to find a Russian synonym to an English word that would popup in my mind during a conversation in Russian. The materiality of my body changed, too. My jetlag feels like it is due to the change ofepochs

58 more than it is due to change of time zones. The nonplace of the airports does not help. My body appeared to be heavier at home—it felt significantly older at once and also somehow more real. Our Moscow family apartment had been renovated and redecorated. In my absence, what I would have kept was thrown away, and what I would have thrown away was preserved. Materiality and palpability of objects and their textures, even of the walls, triggers a swarm of memories and associations. I was under an avalanche of recollections launched by objects. I began recalling conversations I forgot took place. Thus, I recollected that my grandmother Valentina used to give me bizarre advice under the guise of antediluvian wisdom. When I had a boy over for dinner (the boy survived), she caught a glimpse in the door of my room how he sat on my bed. In the corridor, with him still present in the house, she told me in a horrendous whisper, “Do not allow a man to sit on your bed. He would lay down and invite you to sit next to him under the pretext that he is not feeling well.” How right she was! She opposed my practice of eating rye bread for breakfast. Everything I did was somehow wrong in her eyes and required attention and correction. When she fell ill and was admitted to the hospital, she was displeased with her newhelp- lessness, her dependence on nurses, and also with me for not sending letters to her numerous friends and her remaining sisters—three; there used to be four, not counting her, in total. She never asked me to write those letters; I was to have guessed to do so on my own. “I could die here among you all, and no one will ever know,” She said. I dismissed this as a whim. To keep the kind of correspondence she demanded was an unfeasible project. I would never find the time and energy for this in my busy Moscow life.Idid not even know the addresses, grandma! I barely knew the people she enumerated. During my childhood trips to Siberia, I was introduced to some of them, but I had no idea that I was supposed to keep track of them. Bored, I could not wait to a clangor of the lock on the hospital gate after running through the summer garden; I barely listened to her complaints. This is my belated letter, almost twenty years after her death. Not to my grandmother’s

59 friends, even though some of them, predictably and yet unexpectedly, I met in Anosovo; of them the tale is ahead. At any rate, this is written not in the language that they read. To whom, then? Memory dictates subtle movements of the body in space. Objects slip away, but the body remembers space as things were. Perhaps this is what they call “embodied experience.” “When are you going to be home?” my mom asked my brother and glanced at the wall where a clock used to hang, above the door. Time flows, and clocks disappear. Walking around the house without a goal, I was about to glimpse the mirror that used to dec- orate the wall in the room where my grandmother Valentina put it. I stopped myself in advance, deciding that I would not fall for the same trick, and that the mirror was surely gone. I experienced a bout of astonishment when I discovered that the mirror remained where it was. Looking in it, I felt like I was conversing with her ghost. I am becoming more and more like my Siberian grandmother the way I knew her the best, later in life—irascible, pedantic, and controlling. It was possibly a reverse of what she herself called her “Siberian character.”38 From my childhood, I knew her as a person of uncompromising decisiveness and unbending will. I am hoping to wind up being a tolerable old woman—soft, kind, nurturing, forgiving, and sympathetic—in awhim- sical hat, but my hopes diminish with time. I am more like her than a generic urbane grandma of my dreams, from a package of milk called “Little House in the Village”: an older woman in somewhat-German-looking round glasses, with a noble strike of grey color in her hair, in a blue dress with a white collar, in an apron above the dress, near a birch tree that, I imagine, sheds a laced shadow, and a cow is pasturing idyllically in front of a log house. A perfect image of the rustic life, and a perfect participant of such a life, a grandmother that always bakes, I am sure. It is silly to compare the idealized ad images of rustic life to life in the village of Anosovo, or myself to a fictional grandma, but all these things, I assume, coexist in something befuddlingly called “culture.” I searched the house for the souvenir that grandmother brought from Sochi or Kerch years

38What it means to be a “Siberian” as opposed to and intersecting with being Russian, Buryat, Yakut, or other ethnicity is a subject of discussions. Some suggest that “Siberian” is an “ethnicity” (natsional’nost’)(Remnev, 2011), others think more in terms of the “unity,” and even “a ‘state of the soul’ [sostoyanie dushi]” (Anisimova and Yechevskaya, 2012).

60 Figure 14. A package of the milk “Little House in the Village.” ago—a crab on a piece of translucent plastic—with the inscription “Happy Holidays! Sochi—or Kerch—1960—or something.” But I have never seen the thing again—it is probably gone forever. And yet, given all of the above, my Siberian project is not an act of reckoning with family history. What is at stake in admitting that, as a researcher, I am motivated by the trajectories of my family rather than by a more appropriate detached scientific curiosity? My project was an act of wrestling with time and with the questions “Why everything? Why are we here? For what purpose and to what end? Who are we, and at whose expense are we here?”—the broadest anthropological questions. Yet in Anosovo, I was reminded of my grandmother often, too often. When I was going to the semi-abandoned village of Karda (that turned out to be not abandoned at all, of which the story is ahead), at a store in Anosovo, I saw a woman I met at Valentina’s birthday. Her name was Zina; she was a cashier. She told me that she sent me a friend request on VKontakte, disarming me completely (“I fooled around and sent you a request, is that ok?”). I wanted to crush myself to bits to assure her that it was very ok, and we talked warmly like we

61 knew each other for years. I have to admit, too, that, in my self-absorption, she strangely and mysteriously reminded me of my grandmother. My grandmother had a wide face, short nose, wide-set brown eyes with “a vaguely non-Slavic cut” (“Kakoie-to ne slavianskoie litso u menia,” “I have a somewhat non-Slavic face, non-Slavic eye cut (razrez glaz),” grandmother mused. At some point, at a market buying a coat she asserted to a seller that she had “the Tatar blood herself” in her veins. When I asked her about it later, she said that it was a joke, and it is in Siberian nature to be a bit cunning buying coats “from the Tatars.” That was striking. This will sound pedestrian, but despite my years of anthropological training, I do not know what to think about this, exactly; there are layers here. I will return to the fluid presence of the ethnicity and “(self-)ethnicization” (too often a euphemism for “racialization”) throughout this work. “Siberians,” too, are an entity deserving of a separate treatment; I write some of it later, although not in a degree of depth or volume that this question deserves; this work poses some limitations on me. Grandmother Valentina did not appear to me to be a startling beauty in any of the photographs; this was, no doubt, European standards of beauty speaking, preceding my evaluating childhood gaze cast at her. I only knew her dyeing her grey hair a radiant red chestnut color, but when she was young, she had wavy, dark hair. She was wide-boned. She appeared to be full of calm, quiet energy as far as one can judge by the photographs. I was looking at Zoya’s fast and precise movement around the store, almost a dance, as I named the items from my list—sugar, tea, candies. It was a small store, the Soviet-type, where you ask a seller to give you everything rather than pick things for yourself. For some reason, she resembled my grandmother so powerfully to me—even though, strictly speaking, she only remotely resembled my grandmother in appearance. Staring at her in an impenetrable cloud of my memories, like through a glass jar, I kept imagining my grandmother moving like that—projecting an image of the dead—I saw my grandmother back in her fifties. When I was in her house, I still remember curtains, or think I do,andmy mother, who was in her thirties, was surely the most beautiful woman on the planet for me. As grandmother Valentina progressed aging, as I was growing up, I still looked at her from the point of having an age difference between us. In my twenties, I was half-certain that I would always

62 Figure 15. My grandmother in 1950: “I am—17.” remain young. How things change peculiarly. You live in a world of adults until suddenly people around you become, in mass, younger than you. The median age of people on the planet has increased in the past few years: from 23.6 years in 1950 to 26.4 in 2000. That still leaves us with a planet of awfully young human beings. There is a whole branch of anthropology now studying age and aging. All I can offer is that aging is a weird human experience to go through, ahuman—a terrestrial—condition. But this is a condition that is almost possible to reimagine, in Siberia. (On the wish for immortality, more later). My grandmother was re-animated in my imagination by an energy similar to what moved

63 Zoya—powerful, enlivened, scintillating with an air of certainty and decisiveness about her. Could this be part of what she called the “Siberian character”? The plasticity of her movements, the impressiveness of her laconic features, and the imperviousness of her demeanor—everything was beautiful about my grandmother. She was beautiful and powerful, and all the time that I had known her, it flew over my head. That photograph that she inscribed with “I am—17,” her portrait in a dark dress, wasamong many in her photo album to which she added captions. These captions are many but often their contents are maddeningly scarce. Whatever she omitted is no more possible to resurrect outof the unknown now than it is possible to resurrect her. The inscription “I am 17” on that photograph is a palimpsest. In one shade of blue, shewrote, “17,” and only later, with another blue, not exactly matching, she added, “I am —.” Presumably, she flipped through the album and was prompted to add “I am,” which is a striking addition. Whom did she mean as an addressee when she added this? (“I — am 17”). She is standing against the adorned background: the dark blanket, evidently, stretched across the logs, but again, in an insufficiency as if intentional: some of those logs are out; she is standing against thewallofa house. Other pages of her album also bear traces of light editing. In her revisions, she leaned towards the third-person narration, whereas at first, she framed many things as a first-person story.She rewrote captions in her album for an unknown viewer, a stranger, possibly, for someone who knew no more about her than she knew about this supposed future reader. This might mean that, as a writer of those captions, she, consciously or not, envisioned herself among the dead and addressed it for posterity. The captions were not meant for me or others among her immediate family. We knew that that was she who was 17 there. But it is not like someone altogether outside of the circle of people who knew her was to look at the photographs, either. Because, the intended addressee of the “I am” knew her, or she would add her name somewhere in the album, on the first page? Perhaps — maybe—possibly, she did not mean to address anyone, it was just a flow of writing, the shifting rules of narration, a semi-automatic gesture of picking up a pen that guided her.Itis

64 Figure 16. The caption reads, “We are waiting for the Dad at Yandy mooring.” By the “Dad,”she means the father of the child, her husband Vasily Orlov. strange that she never signed the album with her name, thus making the “I am” supplied in the unmatching blue a deadend. Why add “I am” and never explain who “I” am, never add a name? In another photograph from her photo album, she, older, stands with two men—I do not know them—and a child—my father—captioned, “waiting at the mooring for our dad” meaning her husband, my grandfather Vasily Orlov. She is waiting. He is not dead yet in the photograph, he is just somewhere else. But he is not there. He is absent. This is at the mooring of Yandy. Yandy is not under the water yet. It is not yet pulled from under her feet. The photograph is therefore

65 taken before 1961. 1961 was the year Yandy was flooded with 248 other villages in the zone ofthe Bratsk dam flood. 1961 was also the year my grandfather died. In 1961, my grandmother became a widow and a single mother. In 1961, she was 36. But none of that had happened yet. She is standing at the mooring, her child by her side, next to her two men she knows. They all look into the lens of the photo camera. The men wear caps. One of them has a valise standing athisleg. She has a watch on her wrist. They are waiting for a riverboat. The riverboat will take someof them somewhere; that man who has a valise is waiting to depart. She is waiting for her husband to arrive. He is coming from somewhere (Irkutsk?), somewhere where he is. 1.3. Photographs Are Turning Their Back On Us I mentioned already that my grandmother wrote a memoir. An excerpt from her memoir was published in Istok (Source)—a little almanac that the workers of the Ust Uda museum printin several copies but also put on the website. I have also reproduced her memoir in full in my book (2018, 211–239). One place I found particularly haunting: “I remember how my grandfather and I were going fishing. We went far, to the mill… The miller boiled tea and allowed me to lookhow the grain grinds.” “It was high there! (Vysoko tam!) You should climb the stairs to the second floor to look. Two millstones rotate rubbing against each other. The grain falls down the gutter, and the flour is milled. The flour pours down into the bags secured on hooks. The water rumbles belowand moves a big wheel.”39 (Orlova, 2014, 5). The recollection of the mill of my grandmother was haunting not only because it isatrea- sure in the family history or depicts her day, but also because it contains a vivid description of the everyday impressions. Ethnographers described those mills and barns, only in far less personal terms. One such ethnographer, Lyudmila Saburova (1921–1988), was specializing on the ethnology of Russians, and in particular, Russian Siberians. Saburova was a Kandidat of historical sciences (Russian degree equivalent to a Ph.D. in history). My grandmother had five classes of school before she went on to work as a youngster (maloletka), as she writes in her memoir.

39The mill was in the town of Ust Uda near the house of her grandfather.

66 Figure 17. The cover of the issue of Ust Uda “literary and ethnographic collection” Istok (Source) where an excerpt of my grandmother’s memoir and a page of my father’s recollections are published. The house in the cover photograph, I suppose, was sitting straight, but the way thephoto- graph was inserted makes it look as if it leans to the right side. A teacher and a group of pupils are gathered for a group photo in front of the building of the school in the village of Yandy. The windows of the school seem to have cracks. The photo also includes two occasional figures disrupting the premeditated arrangement: a black dog at the forefront, and a man seeing the photographer from the background. He is leaning on the fence, his hands in his pockets.

Saburova described different types of mills, documented clothes, tools and details ofthe byt (everydayness) that my grandmother and her family lived. I am saying it in a metaphorical sense; Saburova did not study my grandparents’ byt specifically. Apart from the unlikelihood of such coincidence in general sense, ethnographic expeditions to Priangar’e where she partook were mostly located in the Bratsk Subdistrict. According to the

67 Saburova’s collection in the photo archive of Kunstkamera, the locations included Bratsk itself, before the Bratsk dam construction, the village of Koblyakovo to the North from Bratsk, the village of Bolshoi Mamyr to the East North from Bratsk, as well as the village of Ust-Vikhorevo now flooded by the Ust-Ilimsk dam reservoir, and other settlements. But Lyudmila Saburova still collected the photographs of objects and tools that were in use of the generation of my grandmother’s parents and grandparents. These tools and objects, signifiers of practices, such as fishing and sewing, weaving andhunt- ing, constructing of buildings and machines, are encompassed by the word “byt” by Saburova herself (in the title of her work) and is a venerate focus of ethnographic studies. Uttering the word “byt,” it is perhaps useful to consider the newer ethnographic preoccu- pations with it. It is now understood that “byt” is something more than just everydayness, or even not an everydayness at all but rather a regime of reproducing it. Recollecting Jakobson’s observations of the changed order of things in the 1920s—in the more or less immediate aftermath of the 1917 Revolution—when the previous order was falling apart, and the literati were caught in the wind of history like some sort of sentient debris, Oushakine defined byt as “the habitus, whose fundamental importance in structuring one’s life becomes especially striking at the moment when it falls apart” (2004, 394). Jakobson himself famously believed the word “byt” to be untranslatable. Byt represents the order of things small and big, how things were and are done, in their routine way, and what is the correct way of living life, from addressing a stranger to raising a family. In Saburova’s writings, it is evident that the previous byt in Priangar’e was to be changed irrevocably with the advent of the Soviet power. With the change of the “basis” (economic relations), superstructure such as the relations within various economies, including the economies of affect. Saburova transmitted certainty that the bright future is tocome. In all the dissimilarities of their fates, Saburova and my grandmother were both “children of the war,” so to speak: their early years, childhood for my grandmother, youth for Saburova, were affected by the war, licked by fire. My grandmother was twelve years younger than Saburova. She spent the time of the WWII in Siberia working and suffering hunger. Saburova, who was 21 at the onset of war, volunteered to be sent to the front. When the commissioner tried to turn

68 her down for the day, she refused to come another day and sat there demanding to be accepted. She went all the way to Berlin as a nurse. Another commonality in all the improbability of such parallel: my grandmother left a memoir at my request—Saburova recorded her memories of the WWII period (published 2003). It is striking for me to think that Saburova described the Siberian byt (“everydayness”) of my grandmother’s world. As a Soviet ethnographer, Saburova focused on the positive and ambivalent aspects of the So- viet industrialization, urbanization, and modernization, including the empowerment of women, dwindling down of the institute of arranged marriage, and coming of age of the nuclear family prevailing over extended family (1965). Reading her now, decades later, one does not know if one can trust her evaluations, as clearly part of the spectrums of interlocutors’ opinions could not make it into her work. It begs the question, what are the blind spots of the contemporary ethnographers which will be evident soon? Saburova also followed the colonial hierarchies that habitually cast indigenous peoples as less civilized and less capable. Thus, she writes that in the early Soviet times, “relationships between the Russian population and the Evenki acquired a new character not only in the economy, but in byt also. The patronage (shefstvo) of the Russian population over the Evenki unfolds widely. The help was given in the development of literacy and of various forms of cultural work(formy kulturnoi raboty).” (1965, 33). In this, she is not a challenger of the enduring colonial hierarchical structures but rather an agent. She was evidently invested in the civilizational project of the Soviet state. And yet, Saburova, in all the ideological transience of her work, is one of the earliest and most prominent ethnographers of Priangar’e—possibly the first woman ethnographer of Priangar’e. For decades, she meticulously labored on depicting the order of life—mills and barns—that for my grandmother was an environment. Saburova is a character bound to resurface in my work. As an anthropologist, Saburova portrayed big pictures while attending to scrupulous detail detailing, for instance, clothing—belts and headgear of women. But what emerged out of her portrayals is that the Soviet power was coming to bring enlightenment, prosperity, and progress to everyone—

69 Figure 18. An illustration from ethnologist Lyudmila Saburova’s essay “Clothing of the Russian population of Siberia” (1972). The plate contains the headgear and the adornments including “pins” (“д,” “e,” and “ж”). and the task of an ethnographer was clear: to preserve the world slipping into oblivion for the curious gaze of the future generations. The movement in Siberia, of which my grandmother’s movement was but a trajectory ofan electron, was wide-spread and impacted everyone one way or another. It was far from homoge-

70 neous. As Lyudmila Saburova, the Russian ethnographer who studied the Russians in Priangar’e before and after the flood inflicted by the Bratsk dam, writes

Relocation to Siberia meant a considerable breakage (lomka) for the Russian population. Here, the population found itself in a new natural-geographical environment and different social conditions. It came into contacts with local peoples. All of these factors differed depending on the time and place. The Russian population arrived to Siberia from various places carrying with it similar and yet in many respects different production skills and cultural traditions… In these conditions, for three centuries, the Russian Siberian population and its culture formed… Mass relocation to Siberia in the end of the 19th century brought a new direction into the development of this process in Siberia. In many regions, newcomers outnumbered the oldtimers, which lead to the further unification of the culture losing its ‘Siberian’ features.

—Saburova, 1972, 99–100

Saburova does not clarify what constitutes the “Siberianness” of the “Siberian features” that the Russian Siberian culture continued losing as the newcomers continued to arrive from parts of Russia and other regions of the Russian empire. She does not define nor explicate on the “Siberianness” of the said features putting “Siberian” in quotation marks. I assume, that meant some distinct—interesting for an ethnographer? Obvious? Bright? Markedly local, distinct as “Siberian”—in whose imagination? Lyudmila Saburova devoted a lot of effort to the ethnography of the descriptive kind, in detail portraying clothes, tools, food. The quote above is from the introductory part of the article entitled “Clothes of the Russian population in Siberia” describing clothes. In her works, there is a lot of detailed descriptions accompanied by drawings. And she also supplied her descriptions with these openings contextualizing the emergence of a specifically Russian Siberian culture in Priangar’e. Luydmila Saburova also created a photo archive, a striking subset of which is photographs of people in the traditional clothes from the back. In the photograph taken in Mordovia in 1955, two women stand with their backs turning to the camera, and some women look directly into the camera. Those who look into the camera are not at the center of an ethnographer’s attention. What Barthes calls studium or “ethnological knowledge” of the photograph was supposed to be all about those rare clothes. The photograph taken in the moment when characteristically local

71 Figure 19. This image from Kunstkamera is of the women in traditional costumes captured from the back (there is another image of them photographed from upfront). Mokshavat. 1955. Mor- dovia, Krasnoslobodskii Rayon, settlement Staroie Sindrovo. From the collection of Lyudmila Saburova. Courtesy of Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

features are not lost but are in the process of being lost. Thus, a woman on the left in a light dress of floral pattern resembling polka dot is clothed as an industrial-generic-colonial-contemporary- looking person, even with the kerchief on her head. (The people in the surroundings of the scene, to me, is what Barthes calls punctum, an interesting and somewhat odd detail. What is this scene that is unfolding here, of the ethnographers photographing, some willingly playing the role of the models, and everybody else observing the observers?). The women, dressed so differently, nevertheless share a historic moment and the same narrow space of the photograph.

72 Figure 20. Birchbark tursuk (container) for mushrooms and berries. Irkutsk Oblast (District), Bratsk Subdistrict, the village of Bolshoi Mamyr’, 1957. From collection of Lyudmila Saburova. Courtesy of Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography.

The image of the women pictured from behind fascinates me. It seems to me to bean“old ethnography” picture. In a new kind of ethnographies, one would rarely see something like that—not because, I presume, the local costumes are that much harder to find, although they probably are. But because we seem to have moved on from the descriptions of material culture to something that is beyond it trying to get to something that would have a universal meaning and somehow answer, with any kind of stretch, to the “so what?” question of an indifferent other. There were other images of the kind in Saburova’s archive. Most of these images havecoun-

73 Figure 21. An old woman in everyday clothes, view from the back. Krasnoyarsky Krai, Kezhemskiy Subdisctict, the village of Gol’tiavino, 1959. Photographer Gorelov. From Lyud- mila Saburova’s collection. Courtesy of Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. terparts: the photographs of the same people from the front, in the same attire. But it is the existence of the photographs from the back that interests me. I am bringing them here thus composing a sub-collection, of sorts, from the one put together by Saburova. I am doing it in order to think of those illusive features that get to be marked as “ethnic,” and “Siberian,” in particular. These images, of people turning away from the viewer upon the photographer’s request, canbe read allegorically, as a symbol of the generations of people living before us who turn away from us to look into that what their figures obscure, a past ever more elusive. By focusing onthe photographs from the back, I eradicate, in this particular narrative, the faces of these people. But

74 Figure 22. A woman in winter furry garment “dokha,” view from the back. Irkutsk Oblast, Bratsk Subdistrict, the village of Kobliakovo, 1957. The three photographs quoted above are collected by Saburova over the course of the two Angara expeditions of the Institution of Ethnography, Academy of Sciences USSR (that took place in 1957 and 1959). Courtesy of Museum of Anthro- pology and Ethnography. they are to be viewed allegorically, as a refusal of photographs and other “ethnographic material,” to tell full story. These are the mundane ethnographic pictures, purporting to capture theethno- graphic “reality” from the rear end. And only the merciless selection makes them potentially into something else: a series of photographs of refusal of a full revelation, the impartiality and incompleteness of ethnographic and possibly any scientific knowledge, and a reminder of those “Siberian” features that my grandmother, Luydmila Saburova, and many other named but often failed to define.

75 1.4. Affective Infrastructures Of Belonging If I have scratched the surface of “Anosovo,” it is no more than that: a scratch. Taking it slow, doing this “slow ethnography,” as Stewart calls it, I must pause to ask myself a series of questions. Have I interrogated my grandmother, or even my grandmother’s shadow here, as I aspired and promised? What can I offer in conclusion? Do we better understand how people belong, to places, or places, to people? Do we now know “why people move”? The curious thing about this last question, of moving, is that there is always some sort of ascribable reason to a decision. Rationalizations seem to be offering themselves easily, but reasons, rarely. We can easily infer things and close the theme. In the case of my grandmother, she could not find a place, quite literally, for a long time, having lost her husband, faced with the memories of her husband’s death, having encountered sexual harassment, moving so many times, losing possessions, downsizing. As far as the ruins are concerned, there is a long-standing idea of mine that I hope to develop at some point: people are ruins, or potential rot, the future remains and reminders. That on which we exist today is no longer important tomorrow. Existence is fleeting, and so are the traces of existence. But it would be a mistake to dismiss those traces as therefore unimportant. The consequences of even small events are too complex to fully capture. My grandmother, with her theories of the Siberian character that she exemplified (according to her), left unaccountable traces in the world. I could say that I am one of those traces. I could say that this writing is such a trace, attempting to unpack “an irreducible absence within the presence of the trace,” asDerrida calls it (2016, 50–51). I am tempted to return to the idea that this writing is a belated letter to my grandmother’s friends, a missive from the world of the (temporarily) living to the world of the (forever) dead. As the living age and objects around them fall into decrepitude, the ephemerality of human existence so elaborately framed in many writings remains a ringing constant. I tried to generalize “affective infrastructures” tying us to a place. Keeping affective infrastructures in mind—for which there shall be a place and time, I keep hoping—my “affective attachment” (I do not like theword “attachment” here) is “infrastructural” because of the networks of ties—kinship ties andmemory ties. My configuration of belonging (to Anosovo and the world) is defined by my grandmother,

76 her photographs, this writing. Each of these things adds a layer to my sense of belonging—and a failure to belong or take root. Tracing a person’s story is like tracing a path of an electron in a world full of the Brownian motion of human particles. I do not think my grandmother ever anticipated that she would be buried in Moscow. Montaigne says, “It is equally pointless to weep because we won’t be alive a hundred years from now as that we were not here a hundred years ago.” And: “I want death to find me planting my cabbages.” By which he probably meant planting actual cabbages, but that can also mean “writing my essays” or “doing other usual work that a day contains.” It is not too dramatic to think of one’s own death while interrogating the dead. Every archival work is interrogating the dead in some sense, which is something anthropologists have been doing together with historians, and the family archive is similarly an arena for such a study. It was important for me to portray my grandmother in these sketches as someone without whom my Siberian project would not have happened. In her dead hand and despite not being here for about a decade now, she is holding one of the ties that connects me to a place—the village of Anosovo—and situates me within those infrastructures of belonging that I investigate further.

Chapter 2. Women’s Stories: Waiting for Divine Remuneration

2.1. Svetlana Sergeyevna And The Demand Of Immortality Anosovo emerged as part of a changed world. The previous Angara River, fast and clear, was drowned by another Angara River, wide and slow. After the Bratsk dam flood, the river was not even marked as “river” in navigational charts. It was now “Bratsk Reservoir.” I have those charts. Svetlana Sergeyevna gave them to me. The collection belonged to Svetlana Sergeyevna’s husband. The book of charts caught my attention when I was at Svetlana Sergeyevna’s house.Seeing how excited I was, she gifted it to me. I said that if she ever needed the book, I would return it. Svetlana Sergeyevna was 71 and died the winter after we met. I repeat here in writing that if

77 Figure 23. The book of navigational charts of Bratsk Reservoir “for restricted use” issued in1974. Number 505. her daughter, grandchildren, great grandchildren, and so on ever claim this map from me or my descendants, the map shall be returned to them. A manila cover of the book of navigational charts was printed by the Ministry of the River Navy Glavvodput’—one of those Soviet abbreviations— that literally means “MainRiv[er ]Path.” The copy is “for restricted use” and numbered “505.” It is one of those things that wasfora restricted use for reasons far from apparent today. I went home carrying the precious folio. I could not believe my luck. I felt the trembling spirit of the dead anthropologists looting the village. I conducted a sacrilege. I took a precious object. At home, to my disappointment, I discovered that the spread with the map of Anosovo was ripped out. My guess is Svetlana Sergeyevna’s husband did not need all the detailed charts from the unwieldy folio. He must have taken the pages he needed.

78 Does it make a difference if the river is called “water reservoir” in charts? Do people view it differently? Anosovians still call the Angara River a river. The difference resurfaces inand out of documents and conversations beyond Anosovo. The difference is not merely “semantic”: the disconnect discloses the identity of the changed river: what historian Paul Josephson calls the “brute force of technology” swelling into the dam has produced the “industrialized” river and altered the view of nature itself.40 Svetlana Sergeyevna’s thoughts often turned to her dead husband. There is a final significance in death that makes the connection between people—the living and the dead—sometimes exceptionally strong. I was interviewing people about coming and going to Anosovo, departing, staying, and arriving, and once in Irkutsk, I heard a rationalization in Irkutsk from Lidia (she is also here, in the next chapter) declaring proudly and with conviction: “I will never return [to Anosovo]. I have nothing left there.” After a pause, she added, “Maybe except for the graves of my parents.” Even mentioned briefly, the graves stood in significance.41 The tombs trembled for a moment in an Irkutsk café where Lidia and I drank our coffee and ate ice cream at the table covered with a cheerful oilskin cloth. Ancestors showed up in a cloud of smoke—Lidia smoked, we

40Nature fused into the entity supplemental to industries, from metallurgy to tourism. If “nature” as an object came to life with the emergence of the bourgeoisie, as Frykman and Löfgren, following Foucault, seemed to argue (1987), then in the Sovietoscene, nature is living through a transformation. In Industrialized Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World, Paul Josephson suggests that industrial enterprises irreversibly transformed nature: “In Farewell to Matyora, Siberian writer Valentin Rasputin describes an island town in the middle of a turbulent river whose residents must pack up and move away. The waters beyond a newly completed hydropower station will soon cover the island, obliterating their homes, land, businesses, churches, schools, and memories. They must move to mass-produced prefabricated boxes—apartments—typical of the Soviet era. Matyora is fictional, but the dams and rivers are not. Farewell to Matyora could describe the human consequences of the Grand Coulee Dam just as well as those of the Kuibyshev and later stations. How much longer must we say farewell to nature itself?” (2002, 68). Only some inhabitants of Matyora resettled into mass-produced apartments—some would preserve their living in the villages, but the details of byt and human connections—affective infrastructures—were nevertheless irreplaceable or, as Bennett calls them, “inalienable” from the place (2014). As we shall see, the displacement did not obliterate the memories. 41A connection to the graves and the drama of parting were prominent for Valentin Rasputin’s characters in Farewell to Matyora: Darya begs her son to take the graves of their dead—her mother who, when alive, was afraid of drowning (1991a, 43–44). Her son, Pavel, promises unfirmly. The dead is the least of his worries. “I can’t thinkabout that now, Mother… I am exhausted as it is” (44). Many families—but not all—did dig out their dead and transport them to the new cemeteries before the flood. The assault of the cemetery in Matyora in order to “sanitize” theplaceand prepare it for the flood—tearing down of crosses shedding photographs—is a heartbreaking event for the villagers demanding justice from power represented by the local administration. “‘What have you done?’ Darya asked… The lonely, naked graves, reduced to anonymous silent hillocks, at which she was looking in her flaming sorrow, trying to grasp the enormity of the deed and getting more and more depressed by it, suddenly lashed at her withtheir multilateral damage.” (1991a, 18). After such a destruction, it seemed, there could not be a return to normal, andthe realization of the imminent relocation of Matyora set more firmly in Darya and others.

79 Figure 24. This is the leaf of the navigational charts folio with the village of Karda. Thestoryof the village of Karda is in the fifth chapter. sat outside—with their surprised faces. Approvingly, I imagine, since they got the confirmation that the dead still connected Lidia to the place when the living failed to do so. For many people I spoke to, myself included, the relationships with the dead continue with an intensity the living could envy. The dead are always nearby. Ethnographer Tatiana Konradova described venerating the dead in the Ural Mari in the village of Potam in Sverdlovsk District, Russia (2019). The rituals merge traditional beliefs with the post-Soviet innovation—a grassroot movement called the Immortal Regiment. The movement’s central yearly event is a march,a parade, a walk, or a procession that can happen in any location and is now happening everywhere (currently, in 80 states and territories, according to Wikipedia). Anosovo is one of the locations where the Immortal Regiment marches, organized by the school director. In the Immortal Regiment procession, people carry the portraits of their great-grandfathers

80 and grandmothers, the fighters and laborers of the home front who served in WWII. Tatiana Konradova described how, after the march, a family in Potam venerated their grandfather. “We always try to congratulate him on Victory Day. We pour one hundred grams [of vodka, “sto gram,” a portion]. We always light up a cigarette for him. He rejoices! You see, the cigarette burns. It is so awesome, as if [there is a] living person [smokes].” (Konradova, 2019).42 The kinship connections remain vibrant beyond the grave—upheld through visits and little rituals, like lighting a cigarette. Such connections serve as a vehicle of affect: the rejoicing of the grandfather is felt. The awesomeness of the dead having a smoke is a shared experience of the living.43 Svetlana Sergeyevna was fond of her deceased husband. She visited the cemetery every day for twenty years. Every day, rain or snow, she walked to her husband’s grave. I almost found it hard to believe, but it was impossible not to. She was sitting in front of me on her old sofa and punctuated each word with the movement of her fist in the air. “Every! Single! Day!” The persistence appeared to me to be staggering. I could not bring myself to mention it in English even though I recorded it in Russian, since it was so striking.44 (Orlova 2018, 115). I thought that by translating it I would either expose the improbable sentimentality of Svetlana Sergeyevna or make myself appear gullible and as if I were portraying ethnic fairytales. But perhaps if I left this detail out of Svetlana Sergeyevna’s portrait, I would lose more than a mere other bit out of that overwhelming experience that I almost got used to calling “fieldwork.” It seemed to be saying something about those affective infrastructures encompassing our connection to the place andto ourselves, which exist only in our heads, but are not at all unreal. Part of my fieldwork was listening to sighs, sound of slippers around the house in longpauses of what comprised a “conversation,” and attending to dreams retold. Many years ago, Svetlana Sergeyevna’s daughter saw her father in a dream. Her father appeared to her. She asked, “Dad,

42See also: http://uralmary.smerty.net/ 43The Russian spontaneous public movements include the march and the total dictation. The “total dictation” is a Russian grassroots movement, an element of “public-making” (Sidorkina, 2015). There is irony that the most “totalitarian” or totalizing genres of self-organization imaginable—marches and dictation—emerge spontaneously as part of “biopolitics from below” (Allison, 2013). Inevitably, this produces the impression that Russians left to their own devices will organically march, dictate, and demonstrate. However, these are of course by far not the only forms of public life or spaces of sociality or places of polity. 44In a series of “momentary photographs” but in a sense that the photograph is an occurrence of the language, “Toska po umershemu” (“Longing for the Dead”) in The Anthropology of Everydayness (2018, 114–115).

81 Figure 25. Svetlana Sergeyevna in her hat and a mauve dress at the stairs of the Anosovo house. did they let you into the paradise?” “Yes,” He replied. “Where do you live there?” She asked. “In a city,” He replied. “Where do you work?” she asked, to which he replied, “I am still resting.” Svetlana Sergeyevna relayed this dream—which was not hers and happened many years ago— in one breath, which indicated that she had repeated this narrative. Evidently, the dream was repeated, as it bore significance to her because it told her something that she desperately wantedto know about the post-mortem fate of her husband. It was interesting because Svetlana Sergeyevna’s husband lived in a village all his life, but in his daughter’s dream, he lived in a city—a city of paradise, I suppose, a city of the future, quite literally, even if a dream city, a city of the nocturnal

82 fantasy of the daughter. Moreover, he was “still” resting—presumably, going to return to work soon. I repeated back to Svetlana Sergeyevna that it sounded like he was about to return to work. Svetlana Sergeyevna produced one of the Communist slogans: “[Let us take] from everyone, according to their capacity, and [let us give] to everyone, according to their needs.” The demand of justice and the necessity of work were the principles she lived by. The dream did not seem to be all that important, yet somehow it was still significant. Even after his death, resting ina paradisiacal city, her husband was to take a break only temporarily. He lived here, in the village of Anosovo, which sprung into existence on the wave of Soviet industrialization and construction, in a place previously covered by the pine forest. I guess I do not know what my point is; I am wrapping my mind around the infinitesimal social fact that a girl—now a grown-up woman—had seen her dead father in a dream decades ago. Here is that Derridian “complete electro-cardio- encephalo-LOGO-icono-cinemato-bio-gram,” which is still incomplete (1987, 68). But what if we had enough of brain power to comprehend and portray the depth of each dream of each individual on the planet? The Brain Institute in Moscow devoted to Lenin’s brain could be replicated across the galaxy in the Borgesian library fashion where each of our brains would be studied no less assiduously by a team of scientists, from physiologists to linguists. Once Svetlana Sergeyevna walked the new streets of Anosovo barely cleared from the taiga. The clay mud was so deep and sticky that her knee-high boot was left in that mud—and shecould not pull it back, so she had to leave it there—more than once. Later Lespromkhoz made sidewalks of wooden planks along the main streets. Nowadays, Svetlana Sergeyevna had spent winters in Irkutsk where she had a little dacha. But for a big part of the year, until transportation byriver was available, she lived in Anosovo. The family of her daughter, to the contrary, lived in Anosovo throughout the winter and spent summers in the city. I wondered about this arrangement. Why return to Anosovo? What keeps them tied to the place? Or, if they are so connected to it—with those affective ties—then why return to Irkutsk? Many people on the planet divide theirlives between two places. I am doing it too. Is this comfortable? Why do we do it? Is this how our

83 place of belonging, an emplaced citizenship, is now constructed—in a nomadic as much as settled fashion? Svetlana Sergeyevna’s class and urban affinities were signified by her sartorial choices. She wore dresses adorned with brooches and whimsical hats. There was something “Soviet” about it: many older women across the “former USSR’ wear brooches—something the younger generation does not seem to be doing. An intelligent, highly cultured woman carrying herself with such panache, Svetlana Sergeyevna nevertheless spoke the dirtiest language. There was a certain tension, if not contradiction, between her forbearance and imperialness—and her speech. Perhaps that only seemed like a contradiction, and perhaps only to me. Clearly, she inhabited a world where elegant dresses and cursing were not mutually exclusive. She smoothly and masterfully wove abundant expletives into her monologues. She carried herself high, a priestess of Anosovo, in the persistent Anosovian mud, and was always put together. Like my grandmother, Svetlana Sergeyevna was a stern disciplining master. She schooled me: she told me that wearing camouflage pants—that I bought specifically for my travels for their durability and unnoticeability of stains—was in extremely bad taste (“Are you camping or what?”). I repented and stopped wearing them in Anosovo; I sported them once or twice in Austin. She schooled everybody else; not everyone liked Svetlana Sergeyevna for that reason. In her whimsical hats and dresses with brooches, Svetlana Sergeyevna was easy to piss off. I was lucky to be one of her favorites and was spared from her custom of blurting things out into people’s faces. Her way of framing things was something of which to be cautious. In a playful anecdote, she would immortalize a character with a couple of strokes. Once a lespromkhoz’s chief, she told me, wore a medal on a trip to the meadow with his lover and lost it. “Did he find it?” I asked. “The heck he would not,” She responded, “All the lespromkhoz was searching for it!” I inadvertently pictured the lespromkhoz workers brushing the meadow in search of the lost medal. Another story: a father came home drunk and fell asleep on bags of sugar in the veranda. Sometime in the 1980s–1990s, sugar was bought in bags for the deficit of it; in my family Moscow apartment, a sugar bag hid behind an armchair in the living room. The man urinated in his sleep, but the

84 sugar was of such value that the family still used it. “They drank tea with it all year,” Svetlana Sergeyevna concluded. When I met Svetlana Sergeyevna, I did not know that she and my dead grandmother Valentina were friends. Needless to say, the lack of knowledge regarding us in relation to my grandmother was mine only: there was no confusion on the part of Svetlana Sergeyevna that I was her friend’s granddaughter. Affective infrastructures of the ties, through the dead, were firmly in place even as I was unaware of them. My grandmother and Svetlana Sergeyevna also had a common friend, Zoia Petrovna Marchenkova, whom I must thank for putting me up once in the town of Tyret’-1, as well as thank hersonMitia for his hospitality in the town of Ust Uda every time I was running too late for the ferry. Even though there was no reason, apart from this connection, for him to make room for me, this relation, far-fetched as it was, was evidently not meaningless in Siberia. Svetlana Sergeyevna and Zoia Petrovna were the two among those friends to whom my grandmother commanded me to write when she was ill, to notify them of her sickness. She did not mention them specifically, but I knew she included a grand circle of people, and I seemed to recall that in 2008 in Irkutsk, when there was a party for my grandmother leaving, Zoia Petrovna was present (but Svetlana Sergeyevna was not).45 I also remembered how, when my father used to encourage my grandmother to socialize with old women who, like herself, lived in our one-porch, twenty-four-story house—they liked and still like to congregate on the bench at the entrance—grandmother cut it off with a stern and uncompromising, “I already have friends for life.” She replied as though a talk on a bench would somehow endanger her life-long relationships with the women from whom she found herself separated by thousands of miles. This is another series of miniscule recollections that I feel uncomfortable bringing into text because I am potentially taking up someone’s time with them. But my hope is that something of more significance grows out of them, namely, the stories of relocation, belonging to a place, and interconnectedness in the infrastructures of affective ties. The connections between the living and the dead were prominent for the older womenin

45I described the party in the short story “Provodini” (“Partying”) in The Anthropology of Everydayness (2018, 159– 167).

85 Figure 26. Svetlana Sergeyevna (right) and Zoia Petrovna drink tea in a “summer kitchen.”

Anosovo. Not only would they recall the dead and kept them nearby in photographs and recollections, but they imagined themselves to be dead. Once Svetlana Sergeyevna, Zoia Petrovna, and I walked around the Anosovo cemetery. Svetlana Sergeyevna pointed at the nameless tomb in a deep shadow of pine trees and announced: “Here lies Svetlana Gurevich.” (Svetlana herself). She added, “She was a good old woman, blessed be her soul.” No one said anything. As we went further, she stopped at another grave and said, “Here, Marchenkovikha is laid buried. She was a harridan, annoyed everyone, and grumbled all the time. People, do not recall her in your prayers!” Zoya Marchenkova laughed first. And now, the imaginary is real in that Svetlana Sergeyevna is dead. And I am interrogating either the dead or my memories of them. Nothing seems unimportant now, as my newly acquired interlocutors, the first who welcomed me in Anosovo, recollected my dead grandmother witha regret allocated to all their dead friends. They mentioned her from time to time, suggesting that I either look very much like her or nothing at all. It was a game for them. In a different light, and on various days, they declare a conclusion only for the next verdict to render it preliminary. It was apparent that, as I was projecting the image and idea of my grandmother on them, I was also

86 a screen for their ideas of me and all of us: the way we are connected and the ways in which we are separated. I was a living reminder of their old friend; this was a factor in why they greeted me warmly and unreservedly told me everything there was to tell about them—or so it seemed. My grandmother was a link between us, despite her physical nonexistence. She remained a transmitter of connection, a warm memory—a joint in the affective infrastructure, an element that was both absent and present, like a lamp in a garland that would not light up. In the New Year’s Eve celebration, my father used to fix a garland of that kind. In the garland of Soviet production, the bulbs were connected in the series circuit, and he had to check one bulb after the other, until he found a culprit and replaced it. Death preoccupied Svetlana Sergeyevna. “Why is this arranged like that?” She demanded. “Okay, suppose someone dies. I can understand that. Several years pass—fine. But why can’t they return so that we can cast a glance? Just one last glance?” she inquired. “Have you not heard anything out there, in the world?” “About what?” I asked. “Is it not heard, somewhere out there? Do not people return from the dead yet?” She waved her hand indicating those unknown places, somewhere beyond the horizon, where the dead might come back to life. I am not sure where “out there” she expected such news could possibly arrive from. Moscow? America? “No, Svetlana Sergeyevna,” I replied. “They do not.” “I see,” she nodded. Now that I think about it, I could have told her that there are projects to preserve a dead body. They put it in a liquid—I imagine, green, yellow, and viscous, like a liquor that will allowtokeep the body not alive, but as if alive. Which is not good enough, but it is still something. People do keep hoping that in the future, resurrection will become a tangible possibility. The Russian philosopher Nikolay Fyodorov believed that humanity would reinstall allthe dead, or, at least, grandfathers—I suppose, grandmothers are included, unless, of course, they are not. Fyodorov calls the substance from which the ancestors will rise “simple elements” [elemen- tarnye stikhii] and ashes [prakh](1903, 961). The resurrection will happen according to the willof God, as humanity is God’s tools, but without any miracles, strictly through the rigor of advancing technology.

87 Maybe we could reinstall Svetlana Sergeyevna’s husband. And my grandmother, provided that women are included in the omission of the promise to resurrect the grandfathers. I worried about the postmortem fate of my grandmother in Fyodorov’s universe. Grandfathers seem to have secured their place, but what about her? Svetlana Sergeyevna was an unknown theorist, or, perhaps, a practitioner of Russian cos- mism.46 Rereading her testimonies, I am catching myself on the notion of a cosmic babushka that she exemplified—she was not rural or urban, and she cut across many classes at once: a memberof village intelligentsia, wearing fancy hats, but also leading a very austere life, Svetlana Sergeyevna represented that post-Soviet citizen, an inhabitant of the city of the future, who is virtually impossible in any other setting. This is what they call a “hybrid” post-Soviet identity, exemplified by one woman: supposedly, this identity brings a bunch of disparate elements together. “Once I was cleaning my husband’s grave, and a man came along to the cemetery,” Svetlana Sergeyevna continued. “His wife hanged herself,” She clarified. “He came to clear her grave too. And there he is, telling me, ‘Hi, darling, I have a proposition to make,’ and I replied, ‘What proposition?’ He says, ‘We should live together.’ I said, ‘What? You should look in the mirror one of these days! Why would I replace my man for the likes of you? I am not out of my senses yet, and I am squeamish. Would I walk with my man—and he is like a painting!—or I will walk with every bastard coming along?”’ That left her suitor speechless. I, listening to the story, was near speechless too anddecided to clarify, “But, Svetlana Sergeyevna, your husband is dead.” “That’s exactly what I’m saying!” she retorted. “I would never exchange my dead man for the likes of these living.” Svetlana Sergeyevna spoke about her dead husband as if he was still alive and maybe even “more alive than the living,” as Lenin famously was, in the Soviet necropolitical imaginaries.47 I thought of Nikolay Fyodorov again, and now I have one more point on my list of worries in regard to the Fyodorov world, and that includes Svetlana Sergeyevna in addition to my grandmother:

46Fyodorov has not lost significance today. His views can be interpreted, in more contemporary terminology, as reconstructing the dead out of DNA but preserving the personality, which is, of course, not something that the DNA codes—it only carries predispositions. Lived experiences play an important role, and they are not transferable. 47The popular slogan of the Soviet times “Lenin lived; Lenin lives; Lenin will live!” is authored by poetVladimir Mayakovsky (poem Komsomol [Komsomolskaya]).

88 Figure 27. A leaf of my handwritten photo album, with my first draft of the story of Svetlana Sergeyevna. (This was my project of bringing together handwriting and photographs to sortout fieldwork impressions). The grave in the Anosovo cemetery is adorned with a tin painted star, but many new graves are commemorated with crosses. will she be resurrected? Did he write anything about grandmothers? A little instruction, an addendum lost amid addenda?48 48To me, the Fyodorov’s reinstallation of the dead is inseparable from the Tsiolkovsky’s idea of populating other planets. The dead reinstalled among the living will not have space on earth. Hence the intergalactic conquest, which was a part of the Soviet utopian promise, becomes a must. The central theorist of the conquest was Tsiolkovsky, who prophesied the human repopulation of those planets, which was decades later published in the journal Technology—to the Youth! (1981). But Tsiolkovsky’s vision included the destruction of the “inferior forms of life” and the colonizing of planets by superior life forms. “Is this not cruel?” Tsiolkovsky rhetorically asked his readers. “Not at all,” he answered himself. The inferior forms of life are subject to meaningless suffering, and extermination ofthemis therefore a gesture of good will. Instead of subjecting them to a long and tiresome century-long evolutionary process,

89 When I returned to Anosovo the next year, Svetlana Sergeyevna was not there. I learned about her death earlier; someone messaged me on Facebook. Her absence was palpable. I liked her. I got attached to her. She made me joyous so many times throughout our conversations, and I imagined how I would lay out her stories and frame them. Now I was not sure that this was to be. I felt like I spent too little time with her. I liked the cool calm of her house. It was like the house of some alternative childhood of mine. I said I imagined her to be my grandmother, and she knew my grandmother, and I also could easily imagine myself my grandmother and being a friend of Svetlana Sergeyevna. About thirty-forty years divided us at that time. She was merely twice as old as I was. Now Svetlana Sergeyevna is kind of frozen in her age, forever 71. Whatever I do, I will be approaching her on a timeline until where I will look at her as a peer and then perhaps a younger one among us. In her house, the table in front of the mirror was adorned with little glass bottles. A decorative plate hung on the wall. On the nails, two pairs of scissors were suspended, open—held this way as observable and easy to use. Tulle curtains concealed burdock blooming in the yard. Once upon a time, Svetlana Sergeyevna maintained luxurious flowerbeds all around the house. Her stamina waned, but she managed to cultivate potatoes for herself and her family. Her grandchild was in his early twenties, and the love Svetlana Sergeyevna extended to him was abundant. She gave him her pension card and never asked how he spent money. She told him, “As long as I live, that will be your allowance.” She described him proudly, “My grandson has gold signet rings.” I was, admittedly, judgmental: the guy was flaunting golden rings while Svetlana Sergeyevna denied herself things. But I possibly misinterpreted her expression of admiration and satisfaction. Maybe she was proud of herself for helping him have these possibilities. Golden rings were not the superior form of life will clear the planet from them and reign themselves instead. “It is clear that the latter is a million times better than the former” (Tsiolkovsky, 1981). Strikingly, Fyodorov used the same word—unichtozhenie— annihilation—but Fyodorov spoke of the annihilation of the enmity between worlds, not about the annihilation of life deemed inferior. Curiously, Tsiolkovsky did allow that some superior forms might find humans inferior and therefore subject to annihilation. Tsiolkovsky’s pointed cruelty is another side of the “rational” Soviet utopia: What was old and did not serve purpose—the parasitic and unnecessary, excessive forms—were to be cut unsentimentally. That was Lenin’s revolutionary spirit, which was present in the satirical and merciless sheets of Komsomol Extinguisher, and that was part of the high philosophy, idealistic though it was, represented by Tsiolkovsky. In short, it was a domineering, hegemonic spirit.

90 Figure 28. The kitchen and the mirror of Svetlana Sergeyevna. The objects that hang onthewall are a tea strainer and a garlic press. There are two stoves: an old Russian stove and the other,a product of Socialist mass manufacturing. the only object of pride. He had received good education, too. I do not know what she lived on if she gave her pension away though. I spent too little time with Svetlana Sergeyevna before I had to part with her and, itturned out, never to see her again. That summer of 2016, on my last trip from Anosovo, in the riverboat, I witnessed death. It was a case of a man who drank himself to death, or so the passengers smoking on board decided. He was seated near the entrance at the riverboat. It was said that he complained of not feeling well at home but refused to go to the doctor. It was only when he lost consciousness that his relatives grabbed him and dragged him to the moor. He was carried into the riverboat as if he were a child, his head resting against someone’s shoulder. He was put on a seat, and his wife sat across from him. About an hour later, death instantaneously and mysteriously transformed his body. From the riverboat, he was already carried by strangers, policemen, like matter not only inanimated but which had never been animated, was not born and cared for by a mother—a deformed bag of potatoes. There was a loss of human-ness in this death, post-mortem. Carriers held thebody

91 by its already-darkened arms and legs, his head was thrown back without support and dangling close to the ground. They shoved the body into a van at the shore. The widow, her facered from tears, stumbled after the little procession. I remember her dress: it was dark green.The passengers exiting the riverboat wore vaguely sympathetic expressions and hurried toward their business in town. The nearest hospital—in the town of Ust Uda—again proved to be too far from the villageof Anosovo. Life in Anosovo resulted in untimely deaths. Had he been given medical treatment earlier if the hospital in Anosovo still was in place like in Soviet times, perhaps he would have survived. That was the first time I glimpsed what seemed to be a hard-bent reluctance toresort to seeking help, even at the face of extreme anguish and pain in Anosovo—something tales and scenes of which resurfaced and that I connect later to a certain “nonchalance.” These deaths, the one I witnessed and the one that was to come of Svetlana Sergeyevna, occupied me. It seemed to me that there were bones of neoliberalism, or whatever you would call it, that were usually hidden elsewhere but were naked and observable in Anosovo.

The sense of loss has been gripping me despite the fleetingness of my encounter withSvetlana Sergeyevna. I clearly was projecting the loss of my grandmother onto her. I thought about Svetlana Sergeyevna’s hats and her grandson to whom she sacrificed her pension. I have not met him. Iwish there was more of everything, but there will not be, since she is dead. I wonder about my sense of loss. I clearly projected on her my grandmother and the loss of her, and then, as I lost Svetlana Sergeyevna, whom I began comfortably thinking about as an interlocutor for myself who would tell me all about Anosovo and through whose eyes I would assess so much, this layered loss deepened.49 The psychotherapists say that one abandonment—and death is a form of abandonment, the finalact— tends to trigger all other instances of abandonment, loss, and rejection in us. This is why another loss is not hurting in proportion to itself but is a layer that activates all the previous layers. I have not been to the house where Svetlana Sergeyevna died—it was at her Irkutsk dacha. But I lived in the

49I think I was longingly thinking about Tsing’s book In the Realm of the Diamond Queen, in which the anthropologist is attaching herself to her primary female interlocutor who becomes an entrance into the world(1993). I lost the possibility of this methodological approach with the death of the woman whose tales and insights, I thought, would become my territory of discovery of Anosovo and what it all was about.

92 Figure 29. An Instagram story, captioned for an Instagram audience, pictures the room where my grandmother Valentina Orlova died. My father cared for her: he repositioned her body every four hours to escape bedsores, fed, washed her, listened to her entangled tales where the impressions of days, dreams, memories, and apparently hallucinations were enmeshed. room at our dacha where my grandmother died. These two places overlap in my imagination. Maybe that is what Foucault meant by heterotopia: two or more topoi connected in an inexplicable way in one location.

93 The room where my grandmother died was small and dark. When for the first timeIsaw my grandmother in that room, on her bed, after her stroke, I was terrified of how the sickness wrecked her body. She was pleasantly plump before. Now, she was little more than a skeleton. Skin tightly enveloped her bones. She seemed to have recognized me. But her questions were off. She did not seem to remember that I recently gave birth to my child, her great grandson. When my grandmother Valentina had a stroke, she lied for several hours on the floor at our dacha near Moscow where my parents lived and returned every evening. My father, fighting back tears, told me how he discovered her lying there. He grabbed her, put her in his car, and went to a nearby hospital. When he delivered her to the hospital, he was met with the question, “Why did you drag her here?” [“Zachem vy eio syuda pritashchili?”]. He replied, “You sound like you lost every sense of humanity here. What do you mean? This is my mother.” Ashamed to hear it, the medical personnel hurriedly accommodated her. When we talked later about it, he lamented the people’s indifference (ravnodushie): “I don’t know what makes us so indifferent to the pain of others.” Indifference is a “structure of feeling” that, as we will see later, the people inAnosovo have to confront in others. She was dying, and she was dying far away from Siberia where she lived for the biggest part of her life. I am having a hard time imagining what that was like for her, and I cannot fully fathom that she was born in a Siberia that did not have the Bratsk dam. The immensity of this event—the construction of the dam—was ultimately what defined so many focal points in her life and the lives of many others. The ways in which the dam changed individual worlds are hardly even numerable. For some, like Bratsk city-dwellers—“first hydroconstructors,” participants of arts, the construction of the Bratsk dam and station was a deed of life, and many recollect it as a joyous event.50 For others, like Valentin Rasputin’s heroes, it was a tragedy, the end of life and history as they knew it. For my grandmother, it was one of the events that changed the trajectory of her life. The changes that the Bratsk dam brought to the world—extremely disruptive to theenvi-

50Pervogidrostroiteli were the first constructors of the hydroelectric station. I have met one of the first hydroconstructors, Boris Salnikov, to attest to it. I am not describing this encounter in this work, but I am hoping togetit later.

94 ronment like dams are—did not pertain only humans, their migration, and their way of living. The geological changes included erosion of soils. In the archives of the Irkutsk Ethnographic Museum, I found a brochure documenting the changes of soils. I was not allowed to copy the brochure on my phone and decided, rather than paying to copy sheets I thought I was unlikely to use in my work, to copy it into my notebook by hand. I was enraptured by a text that I did not expect to fascinate me. L. Bydin, L. Shteinwartz, and V. Kasianova—by the practice of the Rus- sian academic tradition, they did not even disabbreviate their names—in a rather matter-of-fact, dry tone described the changes the flood brought to the river (1966). The speed of the wind at the reservoir multiplied five-six times, which was “equivalent to the power of the storm” (7).An “abrasion ridge” (abrazionnyi ustup) was moving deep into the shore as the reservoir began to fill in one place. Soil layers deteriorated in another. At several points, sand was washing offand breaking, crushing the bank’s line. The newly forming shores were avalanching. “The winding further advanced the process.” The ancient layers were wetted, which brought up landslides. The crevices in the soil indicated the directions of further corrosion of the hills (3–16). What they did not record, though, and either did not know or deemed outside of the scope of their account, is that the crushing of the shores resulted in events. Several times in Anosovo I have heard the same story. First, a man of sixty years old told it to me as the story was of his uncle Gerasim, long dead, and the unlucky child, Gerasim’s nephew. When Gerasim was young, he was entrusted with the care of his three-year-old nephew, David. “Everyone went to the scything, and Polya said, Gerasim, take care of the little one, and Gerasim said, alright. He went fishing and sat baby David on the hill above the river. The shores were still setting.The shore collapsed under baby David and buried him. Gerasim dug, and called, and scratched the earth, but it was too late. The boy suffocated. Gerasim found him already breathless. For therest of his life, he was carrying that weight on him.” The man who told this story was carrying it around all his life, and now, it wasmyturnto carry it in me. I transmit it further via the affective infrastructures that I am constructing: to you. Such events constitute a world with a lot of grief written in it and barely acknowledged. The deaths and changes, by most accounts, were blameless. It is as if they never hadanyactors

95 behind them. There were victims, but no perpetrators. Or, the perpetrators themselves werethe sufferers, even if wordless enactors of the “slow violence” of “the51 State” unfolding seemingly by itself. Life changed with the flood: shores collapsed, people moved, ecosystems adapted, or not.The altered river hosted a transmuted life. Old fish and plant species vanished while new appeared. My older interlocutors never stopped recollecting the drowned Angara River—submerged by the Bratsk reservoir—replete with salmon, tench, burbot, thymallus, dace, Northern pike, European perch, and Arctic cisco. My interlocutors wanted to enumerate fish time and again. Those were delicious sorts, they said. They dismissed the fish species that lived in the slowed-down waters now and overwhelmed the fishing nets. “We used to consider those trash fish[sornaya ryba].” The catches were catfish, Common bream, Common roach, Common carp, and Crucian carp. “They have a lot of little bones, and their meat is not as delicate and sweet,” Alevtina (61) said.She recalled, “The water was crystal clear, and we, children, caught fish with mason jars. Putonalid, do a hole, put some bread inside, and in a minute, there will be fish.” 2.2. Alevtina And The Search For Justice I turned to Alevtina as one of my main interlocutors after the death of Svetlana Sergeyevna. Alevtina will remain with us throughout this account. Alevtina and her younger sister Irina are relatives of ours—not blood relatives, but what is called svoistvenniki—in-laws, even though fairly remote. I will not elaborate here on how exactly Alevtina and Irina are kin to me, just say that they are.

51The capitalization of “the State” is coming from Deleuze here; capitalizing “the State,” I am assuming, meant something else other than a concrete state contemporary to the events—but rather the incarnation of the Hobbesian Leviathan, a monster, a Cthulhu with tentacles but possibly without any center like a head or heart, but rather spread along the many living beings. “Slow violence,” a recently popular trope, refers to the decentralized, insidious, and creeping forms of violence: abandonment, forgetting, decay, and erasure. The trope originated from Rob Nixon’s Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (2011) and originally connoted a range of “slow violence[s]” “from climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil spills, and the environmental aftermath of war takes place gradually and often invisibly.” Once again I am thinking that, positioned as I am within a web of relation in Anosovo,Ihave no way of calling my interlocutors “the poor” as this would be offensive to them, I imagine. I never tried tohear if this, indeed, would prompt an offended response because I never dared to say it to the faces of my interlocutors. Same goes with Agamben’s “bare life” (1998), Butler’s the “ungrievable(s)” (2016), and Ann Allison’s “existentially bereft” (2013, 63). The question is, in all these impositions, theorizing these notions, how far removed arewefrom the people we are describing? Has it become possible to speak of them in these terms because they represent an irreconcilably inassimilable other?

96 Figure 30. Another leaf of my handwritten album. “Elena” is photographed here, in the photo below, with her granddaughter. My Orthodox Christian friends in Moscow, when I showed them this picture, admired it and said that there is some real Russianness still going on in Siberia, that Siberia was a sanctuary of Russianness. When they said so, they were not aware that the grandmother and her granddaughter sang the translated hymns of the Baptist church in this picture.

Alevtina and Irina belong to the only church in Anosovo—a Baptist church. The church was founded by a wayward German missionary. He arrived at these shores inspired by the possibilities to bring the inhabitants of Anosovo the light of Christianity. But, for whatever reason, his resolve did not last for long. He went back to Germany, but he managed to establish a filial, if that is

97 the word I want, of his church, consisting of Alevtina, Irina, and Elena (who we will meet in Ust Baley). I knew Alevtina and Irina before I visited Anosovo for the first time. They came to Moscow and stayed with our family for several days in the late 1990s. This was a somewhat embarrassing visit for them, for years to come. But now the story is common knowledge in Anosovo. And rather than embarrassing, I see it as a testament of people’s honesty. Alevtina and Irina traveled to Moscow, on a long and costly trip, because one of them received a flyer in her mail promising a huge lottery win. It was in the late 1990s, when spam was fresh, and whatever came through the post seemed to possess authority. There was no indication that something like that should be discounted as fishy. They asked their father to lend them money for the journey underthe pretext that they wanted to visit us, relatives, and went ahead. When they arrived to our house, they decided, after much hushed deliberation, to disclose the goal of their visit to us.Myfather told them straight up that they fell victim to the scam. They listened to him in disbelief. They were hesitant to trust that they underwent such a journey for nothing. They needed proof. They wanted to know for themselves. He took several hours off his workday to bring them, with that flyer, to the firm that promised the reward worthy of a trip across the country. “When I saw Irina descending the stairs, she carried on herself no face [Na nei litsa ne bylo],” my father recalled later, in the Russian expression for the state of extreme anguish. In the evening, stumbling, Irina related how a young lady with a red manicure drumming a pencil on the table im- patiently and dismissively explained to her that this was a preliminary notice, and that Irina and Alevtina must now pay a sum of money comparable to the one they spent on the trip Anosovo– Moscow for a chance to participate in the lottery and compete against other winners. It was,in short, a Ponzi scheme that proliferated all across the Soviet Union and reached Anosovo for the first time in the early post-Soviet times, via the post—an institution regarded as reliable. Alevtina and Irina returned to Anosovo ashamed of their gullibility. Their father forgave them the debt they made with him. Somehow over time it became known. Last time I heard it, at my own birthday party in Anosovo in 2017—Valentina threw me a surprise birthday party—Irina was present and gracefully laughed at it, covering her mouth with her palm. She does not harbor any

98 Figure 31. “Alevtina” in 2016; pictured on a moor waiting for a river boat. negative feelings towards the young lady with a pencil, but I still do, even though the lady herself was but a function of a structure, and far from a key one, at that. If anything, Alevtina and Irina’s is another story of the “collateral damage” of “slow violence”: luckily, Alevtina and Irina lost relatively little on their trip. But how to account for the blowto their belief in humanity? Others were still less fortunate: people lost fortunes, families, homes,

99 Figure 32. “Irina,” younger sister of “Alevtina.” She is photographed here at another mooring waiting for a river boat. These two photographs—of Alevtina and Irina—were taken on different days. The way light is reflected in the booths of the mooring made these two photosintoa diptych. and lives in Ponzi schemes of the 1990s and 2000s.52 Proliferation of the Ponzi schemes was one of the features of early marketization. 52In a lawless period of privatizations, when rules could not keep up with, let us call it, the entrepreneurial spirit of the people, Ponzi schemes abounded. Such schemes included the famous “MMM” pyramid and a host of other enterprises. “Sergei Mavrodi’s MMM, a network of companies whose complexity and mystery have yet to be completely unraveled, was both a producer and a product of the most effective and unrelenting media campaign inthe former Soviet Union since Mother Russia rallied her sons and daughters against the Nazi invaders” (Borenstein, 1999, 46). I would not quite put it in these words, so many years later, but this sentence captured, albeit a little exoticizing, the craze of the financial pyramid’s promise of the immediate affluence unleashed on the often unsuspecting citizens of the “former Soviet Union.” There was an undeniable connection, observed by Borenstein, between the popularity of the melodramas (soup operas, mostly Mexican) of the time and the advertising campaign responsible 100 The period of transition to the market economy was rough for Anosovo. In the 1990s, people scavenged for metal scraps of tractors and trucks abandoned in the taiga.53 Scrap collectors passed their gain on to metal processing offices. When I was trying to ask for details, people shrugged itoff, “We collected the scraps, what about it?” [“Nu sobirali i sobirali”]. No one was fond of recollecting that time.

Alevtina and Irina—sometimes their neighbor Galina joined them—gathered three times a week for the Baptist service at Alevtina’s house. They read the Bible—a chapter a gathering—and also sang hymns. While they were reading and singing, an old mother of Alevtina and Irina, Zinaida Vasilievna, sat in the room next to the one where they were, and talked aloud. Zinaida Vasilievna long confused days and nights. She sang, talked, and slept whenever she felt like it. Another woman who, like my grandmother, was bedridden for several months after a stroke before her death. I am telling her story in chapter 4. I began coming for the sermons suspecting them a hub of sociality and was rewarded with various encounters and glimpses of lives in the village I would not otherwise see. One day Konstantin (36), a lumberjack and Alevtina’s son-in-law, entered during the praying in what seemed to be an agitated mood. The praying was not interrupted but shortened consid- erably while Konstantin, sitting at the edge of the chair at the table, drank tea and lookedatthe women. for the initial success of MMM. Soon, however, the press was filled with stories of people losing their livelihoods and homes on the altar of their dreams of a quick and effortless enrichment. On a yet-graver note, the number of people who suffered from MMM is estimated to be between 5 and 10 million, The Moscow Times reported in 1994 (“MMM’s Mavrodi Voted Into Duma,” November 1). The Russian population in 1994 was 148.3 million. This means that virtually everyone knew someone or had relatives who suffered from MMM. Add to the picture hundreds of Ponzi schemes that similarly unfolded a grand advertising campaign—and add those companies which did not. Among many examples of schemes of the 1990s which the overwhelmed law failed to cover were also examples of the coupon economy. One such example described by Caroline Humphrey has qualities of a Zeno’s paradox: “The coupon system… is beyond the law. You can be prosecuted in some regions for illegal distilling, but not for issuing coupons. In Yakutia a large cartel printed thousands of counterfeit vodka coupons. When this was discovered, several hundred people were arrested. But they were released because no law could be found under which to prosecute them. They had not sold the coupons and benefited financially; all they had done was to issue their own licensetogetdrunk (depriving other people of vodka).” (2002, 9–10). 53Abandoning machines in the taiga could seem a wasteful practice of the Soviet past. But the idea that a capitalist owner would treat property differently turned out to be far-fetched. It often remains more practical forthefirms to abandon tractors and trucks in the forest rather than take pains to transport them for costly repair, the chief of Oblcommunenergosbyt Leonid Petrov attested in our conversations.

101 Figure 33. Irina, Galina, and Alevtina: a Baptist praying circle in the village.

“What happened?” Alevtina asked. “These fuckers annoyed the hell out of me.[Da eti kozly zamotali uzhe sovsem],” Konstantin said. He was referring to the timber firm management that invented a new feature to keep workers in check: polygraph trials. During Soviet times, the village of Anosovo’s “city-forming enterprise”54 was Yegorovsky lespromkhoz (the state-owned Socialist timber harvesting firm). For decades, the lespromkhoz provided the means of livelihood for the village; that was its “city-forming”—main industry— function. Even though Anosovo was not a town, it was close to a “settlement of the urban type,” in the Russian classification of settlements.55 What was left of the lespromkhoz premises—privatized in the 2000s, sold, or abandoned—was

54Gradoobrazuyushchee predpriiyatiie, the enterprise that usually provided livelihood for a settlement, a widely replicated notion of the Soviet times (Collier, 2011, 4). 55Anosovo had more than 2,000 dwellers in the 1970s, and the “settlement of the urban type” in Russia begins with three thousand people, and 85% of the population has to work in the industry as opposed to agriculture. Two thousand would be enough for the settlement to be “of urban type” in Belarus.

102 used and misused by capitalist firms. Several smaller companies came to take the place ofthe lespromkhoz and harvest pine trees. Two of these companies—Severlog and Timber Management— the names changed—worked until recently, when Timber Management left Anosovo, for whatever reasons, and Severlog effectively became a “monopolist.” The headquarters of both firms were in the cities, Severlog in Irkutsk and Timber Management in Bratsk. The firms paid their taxes in Irkutsk and Bratsk, respectively, without contributing to the local budget. The firms used buildings and sites constructed during Soviet times: garages, checkpoints, storages. The local budget did not see a kopeck from their taxes, and the firms did not pay the village rent money for using the base either. Severlog’s manager in Anosovo was Misha (31). With hay-like hair and covered in tattoos, Misha sported a massive golden chain on his bare chest when I met him in the summer of 2016. The firm’s CEO, Yevgeny Voronov, lived in Irkutsk. Misha lived in Anosovo; he knewworkers and their families. He built close relationships with them, spending weekends in hunting, fishing, or drinking pursuits. Those were not just mindless entertainment but “corporative celebrations designed to strengthen the spirit of the company,” he informed me with a wink. Before long, a conflict sparked between Misha and the city CEOs, and Misha went ontothe Lena River. “Podalsia na Lenu,” in the words of my interlocutors hilariously and intentionally tapping into the context of the tales of Cossacks and other “free people” roaming Siberia in the 17th century. Misha took his best workers with him, promising them better wages. The firm in Anosovo remained without a local administrator. The new managers visited Anosovo reluctantly and only for short periods. Disorganization intensified. The firm exerted strained attempts to establish authority. Finally, the CEOs came out with a solution that evidently appeared elegant to them: they were excited to explore the use of a polygraph to check the trustworthiness of workers and prospective hires. It was triumphantly announced that everyone was to go through the procedure of re-hiring, accompanied by a polygraph check. That caused an outcry. The conversation that Konstantin had with his mother-in-law and others about the polygraph was not the first conversation about the matter. He already shared his anxieties before. The polygraph aroused a distrustful curiosity, anger, and many rumors.

103 By virtue of it being present, the polygraph already functioned as “a truth-telling,” or rather, truth-generating machine.56 The machine not only constructed the would-be interrogated subject, already anxious and disturbed, but weaved the surroundings and entanglements in which people operated. The polygraph had not been implemented yet, but it had already created apara- noid world. Konstantin was deeply offended that the firm stood by its distrust of the workers. Alevtina, her sister, and their neighbor sat at the table, all compassionate about Konstantin’s anxiety and annoyance. “Maybe some of us did take some details,” Konstantin permitted. “We have such folk: ifit lies badly, it’s gone.” He used the Russian expression “plokho lezhit,” referring to objects thrown around as if no one needed them anymore. “Our people are like that,” he theorized. “It is in the Russian mentality. Am I wrong?” “If you are guilty, tell them so,” Alevtina said, cutting to the chase. She evidently interpreted Konstantin’s theory of the Russian mentality as a concealed admittance of possible guilt. “Iam always telling my children,”—she continued, turning to me—“If you are guilty, tell them like it is. To tell the truth is always good in the eyes of God.” Konstantin smirked. “Besides,” she added, “They steal plenty from you too.” Alevtina went on to elaborate on the absence of social benefits and, deeper, that the firm occupied and used the infrastructure—buildings, the road—that was constructed by the Soviet workers, including Konstantin’s father. “They annoy greatly. (Oni dostali).” Konstantin repeated. “I will not be working for them. I will go and work for an oil and gas company.”57 Alevtina sighed. “They do very little,” Galina offered by way of support. “We’ve been asking them tomendthe

56“Truth-telling machine” is Geoff Bunn’s formula (1997, 6); “truth-generating” is my addition. 57Konstantin indeed eventually went to work for an oil and gas company. The last time to date that I appeared in the village, in 2019, Konstantin was a seasonal worker and traveled to the working site where he lived his working schedule, if I remember correctly, was two months at a site—one at home. He received more than he used to earn in Anosovo. However, the oil and gas company did not pay off his expenditures for the travel, which ate a considerable portion of his salary. He also missed his family and children. The conditions of working were tolerable, he said. He lived in one of those blue wagons I saw in the taiga heading to Zhigalovo once. These settlements of oil and gas workers are temporary and made in a new manner. If Soviet temporariness stretched into the future and meant the relocation of families, the new forms of temporariness of a settlement meant that mostly men came and lived ina place, worked intensely, and then were given a break to go and visit their families, after which the cycle was bound to repeat itself.

104 road at least, and they just don’t do anything as if they do not work here.” The firm indeed invests very scarcely in social programs. The consensus among many in Anosovo was, as far asIcould tell, that the firm used resources—constructed and “natural, like taiga”—that it did not create and failed to properly maintain. Alevtina’s sense-making endeavor rendered the polygraph less threatening by placing it in a world of fair values. Hers was not an attempt to establish a higher moral ground of virtuousness of open stealing justified by the lawlessness of the firm. Rather, by reflecting on exploitative conditions, she was giving her son-in-law a psychological mechanism to cope with the looming danger of his coworkers, or possibly himself, being exposed as a thief, losing his job, and—who knows what the polygraph could bring—perhaps getting a jail sentence. It is one reality inwhich people say, “everyone steals,” and quite another reality to inhabit disgraced as a thief. 2.3. “Live, Mama, You Feed Us”: Care And Carelessness In Anosovo People traveled to Siberia for various reasons. Some were sent to Siberia—in Yandy, before the flood, people recall Lithuanians and Estonians in Yandy before the flood, remember their crosses at the cemetery—“big crosses, it seemed to me, not of the liking with ours” (Merkurieva in Istok 2014, 13). These were people banished to Siberia in the process of the Stalin’s displacements. Historically, many were sentenced to Siberia—that began during the tsarist time but, strictly speaking, in the continuity of the colonial, has never ended. Others came agitated by the Soviet agitators. My grandmother testifies in her memoir that her father was sent to Ukraine toenlist people to Yandy kolkhoz (Orlova, 2014, 3). He convinced two families; “they were located in new houses which were built in advance. They were given a cow and a pig each.”Orlova ( , 2014, 3). Still others, came in search of a better life. Zinaida Vasilievna’s family was possibly pushed to relocate by an agitator as well, but of a different kind. They were made believe the taleof abundance told with or without an agenda; we will never know. According to a family legend, a strange man traveling from the Angara River to the Western Siberia where they lived, told them the story that nobody needs anything in Priangar’e. It was enough, Zinaida Vasilievna used to relate, that her parents collected their stuff and went to the Angara River. Zinaida was agirlof

105 four at the time. With parents and a bunch of siblings, she came to Siberia with her family by foot in search of a better life. Their hoped were dashed. They were in to a rude awakening. The story of thePriangar’e abundance that Zinaida Vasilievna’s parents believed proved to be false. The family had a lot of hardships at the new place. Back in their native village, they had garden, cellar, house, barn, fence, benches, table—things. Here, they had nothing—“not a potato.” They had to ask their newfound neighbors for help, and once they woke up to their cow killed, out of some groundless animosity—no one knew why. A lingering sense of loss remained. More than half a century later, Zinaida Vasilievna, mother of Alevtina and Irina, was lying half-paralyzed in a room of Alevtina’s house singing and talking day and night. Zinaida Vasilievna’s days were probably kind of torturous. She was spending her time like my grandmother spent the last months of her life in Podmoskovie. Both seemed to be confusing the events that happened in their youths with the impressions from yesterday. In an eerie similarity, they never stopped complaining that they were a burden for the families taking care of them. “It is time for me to die, mama,” Zinaida Vasilievna repeated. “I do not want to annoy you.” Zinaida Vasilievna called her daughter mama. She was disoriented to the degree she thought Alevtina was her mother. To her complaints, Alevtina, who was her main caretaker, invariably replied, “Mother, please live, you annoy no one. Live as much as you want and can, for you are feeding us all.” I have been coming to Alevtina and Irina’s little Baptist church gatherings and heard this dialogue. “How do you mean, she feeds you—the pension?” I asked. “Yes, as long as she lives, she is receiving the state pension,” Alevtina replied (Orlova, 2019b). Much as the pension was miniscule (18,000 rubles a month in 2020, which is $240), it was still a solid supply for the family. This fear of being annoying, or of taking up much space, is something familiar, notonlyby my grandmother’s behavior. It is a type of the female modesty. Perhaps, this reads like a huge generalization, but it rings true to me. For example, in the ethnographer Lyudmila Saburova’s obituary, written by her many-year colleague A.M. Reshetov (1999), I read that she lived in a living room where one could hardly find any privacy. For years, Saburova lived in a living room ofan apartment with her adult son because “she did not think she was deserving” of improving her

106 Figure 34. Zinaida Vasilievna, mother of Alevtina and Irina. Apart from the girls, she had three sons. In the photo, Zinaida Vasilievna sits near an electric samovar, an object of the Soviet mass production (my family in Moscow had one exactly like that in the 1980s—Zinaida Vasilievna drank tea from it in 2006 when I took this picture). Behind her, there is a glass cabinet with porcelain cups and mason jars. She is looking at her domestics out of the frame of the picture. It is unclear if she approves or disapproves of what she is hearing. When I took this photo, I did not think much of it. Fourteen years later, it appears to me to be as a picture of a scene that I may never see again—in the Siberian interiors lately, samovars seem to have been replaced with the electric teapot. No matter how many copies of this exact mass product samovar were made around the Soviet Union, there are still more teapots replicated in the globalized world. living conditions, according to the obituary. All the while she was a Communist party member and a recognized scientific authority who could easily demand a better apartment. I wonder about this modesty of women not wanting to burden anybody with their needs. Saburova’s obituary also states that Saburova believed till the end in the high ideals and in hu-

107 manity. Even though it was praise that the genre of solemn obituary demands, it is plausible to imagine Saburova’ an unhappened theorist of the Siberianness but a tireless enumerator of its features in clothes and tools, believing in the ideals of the heterotopian Soviet futurity while not noticing its coloniality until the end. Writing the obituary in 1999, Reshetov proclaiming Saburova to be a life-long believer in the ideals of the humanity, could not add the modifier “So- viet” or “Socialist” to those ideals but rendered them close enough:

Until the end of her life, she remained a party person, believed in the triumph of the right cause, in the human mind and the power of people’s wisdom. She went out of life with this unbendable belief in the ideals of justice and the light future (svetloie budushchee).

—Reshetov, 1999, 189

The irreconcilable question for those who read this now will remain: what kind of justice and future were deserving of a methodical erasure of whole narratives (those of hunger, not wanting to join kholkhozes, displacement, dark side of collectivization, de-indigeneization)? Who were the inhabitants of that future, the “citizens of the future”? Were my interlocutors? The Siberian grandmothers deserve an obituary too but have never gotten one. Zinaida Vasilievna had an unbendable will and a character that my grandmother called “Siberian character.” Zinaida was not unlike Svetlana Sergeyevna, too, in ways that she did not hesitate to speak her mind no matter who was present. Not all her grandchildren loved her, and I could relate to them in this respect recalling my grandmother’s irascible temper that nobody could predict what would trigger next. Now, I am telling all these cruel things to me myself. Twisting Roland Barthes, “henceforward and forever I am my own grandmother” (2012, 36). Grandmother was bedridden for several months before death, greeting the visitors from the past or other world no one among us knew. When she died, a friend of the family said, “Hers was a good death, common for a woman.” This made me feel trapped. To my understanding, this was not a good death. Is this how I was supposed to die, too, half-paralized, barely in my mind, confusing my son with my father? I would rather die somehow else. “But this girl, mama, with blonde hair, she was just sitting on my bed!” Zinaida Vasilievna implored her daughter. “Give her a cup of milk.” “Mom, no one came here,” Alevtina would

108 reply and began reciting the prayer she learned by heart from a brochure the missionary left here several years ago. In the cover of the brochure, handsome Jesus Christ was opening his hands and having a light cloud above his head, smiling with a Leonardo DiCaprio-like white-toothed smile. “No, the girl, mama. You could not miss her. Next time she comes, do not forget to give her a cup of tea and a sandwich too,” Zinaida Vasilievna insisted. But most upsetting was Zinaida Vasilievna’s feats of jealousy towards her late husband and adult daughter. The feats began before she came down paralyzed and started seeing things.Her husband was not her daughter’s father and some twenty years younger than Zidaida Vasilievna. “Sleep with me,” Zinaida Vasilievna would beckon her daughter, “Be with me. I do not feel well; I want to have you near me, only lie closer to the wall, and I will lie next to you.”—“Mama, why?”— “Lest you run to Yegor.” Alevtina, who lived for years in Novosibirsk and had had three, if not four, husbands, and was quick to dismiss them when something was not right—“I am just this type of person. If I do not like anything: here is God; here is the threshold. (Vot bog, vot porog). Fare you well!”—Alevtina was broken by her mother’s accusations. The feats of jealousy continued well into the paralysis. “Lie with me, mama! Where is he? I saw you two: he was carrying you to the barn.” Meanwhile, Yegor had been dead for half a year. The relatives wanted to keep Zinaida Vasilievna from the stress of informing her about the death of Yegor. This is something that happens,58 but the old woman, much as she was already “one leg in the grave,” as the Russian saying has it, picked on the discrepancies. The relatives told her two different versions explaining the absence of Yegor. Someone said, he was in Moscow in a hospital. Someone else said, he went for the hunting in the taiga and lives in his zimoviushka (winter house). She confronted her relatives, and they finally admitted that Yegor dug potatoes and fell dead. Against their fears, Zinaida Vasilievna accepted the news calmly if not matter-of-factly. But on some days she continued accusing her daughter of having a liaison with Yegor. “But Mother,

58The artworks based on such tragicomical occurrences as hiding from a loved ones the crushing newssurfaced in connection to the collapse of the USSR—most notably, Olga Slavnikova’s novel Bessmertnii (Immortal, 2001) and, with the same conflict line, Goodbye, Lenin movie directed by Wolfgang Becker (2003).

109 he is dead.” “Do not sneak around me, mama.” There was some consistency in how older women in Anosovo refused the irreversibility of the deaths of their men—Svetlana Sergeyevna comparing a suitor to her dead husband, aloud on the spot, and Zinaida Vasilievna, even while not entirely in her right mind. In a sense, death made no difference for these women; it was hardly powerful enough to interrupt the order of things. It is no wonder that not all Zinaida Vasilievna’s grandchildren were comfortable with their grandmother. She managed to blame Dasha, who was a child when her father, Zinaida Vasilievna’s son, died as a result of a tragic circumstances. She blamed her son but she also blamed her granddaughter. “Why oh why was he so careless?” Wailed Zinaida Vasilievna. He put his Volga car on trunks and began fixing the motor. “The car jumped off the trunks and squashed him,”as Yegor put it, back then. Dasha, only nine years old at the time, was at the scene and saw blood foaming at his mouth. She ran around screaming; the adults were not home. She watched her father dying. Dasha told me about Zinaida Vasilievna’s heartless conviction that Dasha contributed to the tragic death of her own father when Dasha and I walked Muia one time in 2018. That accusation probably played a role in their decision to move. After his tragic death, the remaining immediate family—Dasha’s mother, her sister, and Dasha herself—left Anosovo as quickly as they could. As Dasha and I walked in Muia, she looked, composed, right in front of herself, as if she and I had an important goal set ahead. The only goal was to meander about—to have a walk.She walked determined, in a sure stride, via the asphalted (thank god) road. The edge of the village overlooking the gulf of the river looked like an edge of the world. Only a tiny “samozakhvat” (self- claimed) gardens divided the body of water—the gulf—from the road. The asphalt was covered in liquid red clay, and Dasha mused aloud, “Why did we call our planet—Earth? It is like calling your planet Dirt. Seriously? Are we pleased to live on the planet called Dirt? ‘Hey, what’s your planet?’—‘Dirt.’ Is this fun? Consider Mars, Venus, Jupiter. Beautiful names, aren’t they? But Earth? Just that?” Dasha is no longer a child. She has a fiancé. Her fiancé, or at least the boy she is dating, suffers greatly from pain in his leg after a car accident, so greatly that he considers amputation.

110 Figure 35. Dasha on the school stairs covered in poplar fluff in Anosovo, 2006, with a village dog. The dog is shedding fur—this is a stray dog, and no one brushes it. Mid-June, it stillsheds its winter fur.

“Maybe then it will not torment me,” he reasons, she tells me. I am trying to get more from her, but she is not responsive. I tell her that pain might be temporary but losing a leg is for life. But I do not know details and cannot give advice, not that she asks. The story terrifies me though. Dasha’s room was surreal to my eye. A unicorn against the full moon in one picture, tiger in another, patterned wallpaper, a wall clock in the form of a butterfly or, better yet,amoth,toy

111 Figure 36. Dasha as a young woman in her kitchen in the village of Muia with my father apparently trying to ask her questions about her young life. I am noting a bench around the table of the kind that is often seen in kitchens in Siberia and in Russia—and bubble gum comics glued around a bar which is an element of the stove. bear, and a grand collection of flasks at the vanity table, doubled by the mirror—a dreamworld expecting a new phase, waiting for a transformations from maidenhood to a married life. I had trouble imagining what it must be like, to witness the death of one’s father. Whence do you go from there? Then being told by grandmother that you are to blame for it. Dasha’s mother wanted to take Dasha—and her sister—away from that environment. After the death of the husband she (like my grandmother once upon a time, a sudden discovery, another parallel) fled Anosovo. She sold the house in Anosovo and already paid for another house—here at Sredniaia Muia. The owners of the house in Muia wanted more and raised the price, already not toolow.The widow—having sold her previous house and having nowhere else to go—had to pay. She paid

112 Figure 37. With Dasha in her room in Muia, watching MTV. The sound and images of the musical production I got to imbibe there for a couple of days, still haunt me. In one clip, a female character pierced a male character with a spear. The butaforie—very red—blood poured abundantly onto his doublet. it without qualms; to her, it seemed awkward to argue over the price. In a while, people told her that with her dear purchase she contributed to the rising of real estate prices in Muia. “They would accuse me of rising prices,” She told me laughing a still-surprised laugh blowing smoke of her cigarette into the oven. We were sitting at her kitchen past midnight. She recounted again the story familiar to me—rehearsed the wound, of losing husband, grandmother’s craziness, and intolerability of relatives, “these Baptists” to whom she would come to a praying circle and ask unanswerable petty questions of discrepancies in scripture that unnerve believers. 2.4. A Dreamscape In A Magic Ball And Ritualistic Refusals Tatiana Valerievna (75) lived alone. The first day we met, she showed me some of her treasured possessions—including collections of Soviet pins, post cards, and other relics, and among them

113 and the first out of them, particularly prized objects, were plastic balls with photographs placed inside—souvenirs that she and her children bought from Moscow. These tiny landscapes in the magic balls Tatiana Valerievna’s family ever since from time to time, and I am here to attest that they were indeed a wonder. I have not chanced across the likes of these balls before, although some of my friends, it turned out, remember such objects. “Did you really never see those?” Margarita asked. “I thought they were a mass production.” Margarita (56) is Tatiana Valerievna’s daughter. Margarita held the post of the head of the

Figure 38. Tatiana with her children at the Red Square in Moscow.

114 Anosovo’s administration in 2001–2009. Margarita informed me that she did plan, initially, to run for the post. It was an idea that someone else voiced. But then one day she found a missive on her fence that said: “If you become a head of the administration, you and your child will regret it.” The note angered her, she explained, and she decided to go forit. As we all looked into the magic balls, Margarita said, “My, my, it was so long ago that you would think it never happened.” “It very much happened,” Tatiana Valerievna said. “You just could not remember because you were little.” A slight discoloration of the photographs only added to the ethereality of the scene long past. The discoloration seemed to confirm Margarita’s feeling; the images in the pictures seemed on their way to vanish. “People in the photographs grow up or grow old, and Moscow stands as it was,” Tatiana Valerievna commented. The Red Square, with its grey boulder, the far-away Moscow, remained, both real and surreal, reachable and beyond reach, encapsulated in the magic plastic balls, souvenirs from the past, the relics of the time that was “Soviet” because that bit of the past happened during the Soviet time, not because “Soviet” had some particular meaning connecting it to the “Sovietness” of things. Even the red stars on the towers were cropped from view—it just so happened. The “Soviet” in the application to these artefacts was a signifier so big that it nearly lost all meaning. The ballswere perfect little ruins in this sense: depicting the reality that passed and failing to depict itproperly. The stars cut out of the frame as if signified the refusal of these images to be interrogated. “Now, we cannot afford to go there,” Tatiana Valerievna observed. “Mom,” Margarita sighed, “What would you do there?” “Well, maybe I have nothing to do there, and maybe something,” Tatiana Valerievna said. In the picture in a magic ball, Margarita, who I got to know an adult woman full of energy and sturdily built, is a thin-legged, thin-armed girl is a pale, very pale, pink, or perhaps lilac, dress. The dress is short, with laced collar and short sleeves. She is wearing glasses; herhairis in a cut with bangs. She is looking into the camera with an uncertain smile. There are wrapping papers scattered across the square, one near Margarita’s foot in red sandals and pink socks.The “studium” that makes the photograph interesting from the historical or ethnographic point of view is perhaps the traces of fashions of the times, including the short dress, white shoes, and

115 Figure 39. Margarita in a magic ball. high hairdo of a woman on the background preparing for a photo session of her own. Possibly of a fleeting interest are the Mausoleum and the Senate tower, the massive building of theState Kremlin Palace. The familiar dreamscape that is replicated across the world in millions of tourist pictures. What is a man in the background doing, holding his jacket? Is he preparing to put it on for their own photo session? Or he took it off, at this moment, unaware that he is already inthe

116 Figure 40. Tatiana Valerievna looking at the photographs of herself and her children pictured at the Red Square in Moscow, each enclosed in a magic ball. frame of an occasional photograph, that he and his friend are going to be there, adorning with their cameo a magic ball looked into again and again over the years? It looks like a hot day. Margarita is standing at the square, her brother in a wide-brimmed hat so bit as though it was lent to him, and with a white collar from under a black sweater, looking vaguely like a priest, only a little one, and finally of them three together. As I was lookingat them, I was thinking, somewhat-inconsequentially: do I miss Moscow? Do I regret leaving it? Why do people like photographing themselves against historical landmarks knowing that they

117 will pass and the landmarks will remain? Do I have a photo of myself standing at the exact same spot? If no, why? The photographs with their weird diffused light, confined to red-and-white plastic balls contributing to the coloration of the worlds inside, has a feel of a vague nostalgic reminder of something eluding you. When you dived out of these tiny worlds inside their round panoramas, you saw yourself at the kitchen in Anosovo. Moscow seemed unreal from here, as the rest of the universe. What was real was a brick whitewashed stove with a kettle and a big enameled mug, kitchen utensils hung on the wall, oilcloth tablecloth, and—thank you, Tatiana Valerievna and Margarita—bliny (pancakes) and wine. It was great to come to Tatiana Valerienva and Margarita. I walked home from the house of Tatiana Valerievna by bumpy and unlit streets with a flashlight in my phone to illuminate the path, several times in the night time—hills dark against the light sky—every time childishly imagining that I am in a story set somewhere in the 1950s or 1960s, in a weird fulfillment of my dream of going to such a place as a teacher with a fiber suitcase containing all my possessions (the dream that even as I had it I acknowledged was not something I am ever going to act upon). The landscape barely scratched by humans fit, at least in the dark, into the fantasy aboutthetimes when the settlement had just begun and had its new history unfolding in front ofit. In the rooms of both Margarita and Tatiana’s houses, there were wallpaper decorations. Photo wallpaper adorned the houses of my other interlocutors as well. My family had a wallpaper too, in Moscow once upon a time—of a road disappearing in the forest in the golden fall. In Anosovo, the persistent themes were exotic waterfalls, glorious landscapes of palaces—with swans gliding along on the mirror-like surface of the lake—as well as pictures of the vaguely-English-looking chimneys, were common. I don’t know when it started, but wallpaper landscapes were common in the 2006 when I first visited, and they remained common and perhaps even proliferated more and became even more exuberant, thanks to the advancements of Photoshop, fifteen years later, when I was doing my fieldwork. Why were there such proliferation? Possibly because pictures of dreamy landscapes had a capacity to transport the viewer—provided you stare at them long enough—into a sort of a parallel universe; I know they could act this way on me. Tatiana Va- lerievna had two deer coming to drink water from a clearly photoshopped, emerald-green, dream

118 Figure 41. Carpet with deer, one of the populous themes and products during the Soviet time; these carpets could be found all across the Soviet Union and can still be met aplenty. Photo from 2006 Anosovo. To me, this image is memorable because of the austerity, simplicity, and beauty of the interior. There is a photograph of children in a round frame on the top of the carpet,asif the photograph is in the horns of the deer. And the photo portrait is adorned with a New Year’s Eve decoration—a glass ball—surviving since winter; the photo was taken during the summer. stream, which reminded me also of carpets with deer that were common in rural places. Media changed—tapestry to wallpaper—but content endured. Over the course of our conversations, Tatiana Valerievna showed to me post cards and other memorabilia, even letters that she and her aunt exchanged for decades. I confirmed to herthat all of that, in the eyes of a collector and lover of the ephemera of times, was precious, although these things were merely on their way to become treasures. Their main value was sentimental, and, for a cold eye of an outsider, they were not costing much even at a flea market. But I was neither a collector, nor outsider. I was attuned to the sentimental value of these things. Ithink was vulnerable, in a weird way, to the assaults of these little objects.

119 Each of these objects veritably confided a world to me. For instance, when I saw a lipstick at Tatiana Valerievna’s stand, suddenly for a minute or two, that little object became the center of my universe. Suddenly, Tatiana Valerievna, as well, reminded me of my grandmother Valentina. And I, again, was unbeknownst to myself assuming a ready position, in this world, of a granddaughter—very possibly far more easily than I should. Make it make sense, yet I was leaving the realm of representations. Rather, it was an affective plane, where I have been trying to get to. When I was left alone in the room for a moment, I took the lipstick into my hand andlifted the lid to smell the cosmetic odor. I saw a match there, inside, with a bit of cotton wool on it, and I crushed through the years into a spiral of associations. My grandmother Valentina was the only woman in our family who had a vanity case with a red lipstick, among her other treasures. She was a proud “Siberian woman”, whatever that means, (“Ia sibiriachka!”), but (and yet? And so?) she knew hardships and, by and large, pretty much only hardships. Nothing expensive ever belonged to her. Her lipsticks were fruits of the Soviet cosmetic production, and they were bright and held strong smells. I wonder what ingredients they were using to make those lipsticks. When one of those tubes was finished, she invariably stuck a wooden match in it, so that nothing from the precious mass was lost. She kept empty lipstick tubes because (I assume) they reminded her of her past: where and when she bought them and how she wore lips. Lipsticks were ornate precious phials, reminder of possibilities, femininity, occasion to wear. I, again, was powerfully reminded of her modest possessions: brooches with artificial gems, clips, earrings, and scattered among them several bright buttons that, as I admitted, I, too,wanted. Late in life, when grandmother was living with us in Moscow, causes that drove her out of the house were fewer and fewer until they were narrowed down to the local health care provider, a nearby shop, and hairdresser in the next building. And yet her thin lips, prudently pressed together, were always painted with one of those colors she remained loyal to: a violent, hot pink, chestnut brown, or red. This red was so bright and unapologetic that it had the capacity to blossom in the dark, or so it seemed. Tatiana Valerievna was born in the city of Voronezh and came “here”—to be precise, not to

120 Anosovo, but to the village of Karda—to her father. He worked as a mechanic. How did he obtain a position there, why there, she did not know. She was a schoolgirl. Her father implored her not to be late to the last steamboat, yet by the time her train arrived to Irkutsk, the last steamboat was gone. From Irkutsk, she reached Yandy hitching rides. It was something like thirty kilometers from Yandy to Karda, she recalls. From Yandy, she decided to walk those thirty kilometers. It was in October. In Karda, Tatiana met her husband, Maragrita’s future father. The family moved to Anosovo, where he got a job. After the husband died, friends died, some, left, as Tatiana Valerievna enumerated—Nakhimovy moved to Irkutsk, but Fed’ka returns in the summer; Ivanivy are now in Ust Uda, she hears, the Sergeyevs are all here, lie in the cemetery. She remains alone from the “old soldiers” (staraia gvardiia). But when they were young, and the Angara River still had islands, they had marvelous picnics. She shows me pictures. In the photograph that attracted my attention, a group of young happy people in languid poses sit and lie around a tablecloth spread in grass, with snacks and bottles. Most of them are young people, three, children; girls wear braids. A young woman—Tatiana herself—is pictured in the process of exiting the shadow of the bush with a bunch of flowers in her hand. She is wearing a light skirt and a dark top with a collar. It seems like in her hair, there is a bow. The people here, pictured before the flood, do not look like Valentin Rasputin’s characters in Farewell to Matyora—mostly older villagers that I imagined wearing different clothes, that ethnographer Lyudmila Saburova had a professional interest in and strived to depict. They are younger, of course. Possibly the men’s hats is a detail of the time, as contemporary men wear different kinds of headgears: knitted hats, baseball caps. But sometimes one could see those caps aswellon Anosovo’s mooring. The group looked just like any other group of people across the Soviet Union at the time, and, to me, was rather urban-looking. Similar photographs were probably shot at the time in every Irkutsk park. The photograph was glued to the album sheet that had slits of different sizeswherepho- tographs were supposed to be inserted. But the image with the picnic was too small for the slits to hold.

121 Figure 42. Tatiana Valerievna with a bunch of flowers in her hand, moves away from a groupof friends having a picnic at one of the biggest islands of the Angara River.

Tatiana Valerievna did not comment a lot on those island and picnics. There was, or so it seemed to me, a note of sadness in her voice about all these things, gone. Her solitude grew with age, which is a default for human beings, it seems. In Russia, according to NAFI analytical center, 7 million of people older than 60 are living alone.59 “It is difficult to find new friends as yougrow older,” Tatiana Valerievna says. “But I am not complaining. I am a happy one. I have a son, and I have a daughter. And she is like a boy.” “How so, Tatiana Valerievna?” I ask. “Easily,” she laughs mischievously, “look at her.” Mar- garita waves her hand. It is clear that this has been a many-decade conversation between two in which guests and friends were invited. Margarita acquired “male” professions. She is a chief

59https://nafi.ru/analytics/v-rossii-bolee-7-millionov-odinokikh-pozhilykh-lyudey/ For comparison, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated the population of people 65 and older living alone in 11 million in the USA in 2019. It is 28% of this cluster of population (65+).

122 of the diesel station now. “Male” professionalization does not seem to be particularly rare in the women of that generation, but she is still more of an exception than a rule. When, as a young professional, Margarita received her first salary at Yegorovsky lespromkhoz, she bought the motorbike Voskhod (Sunrise). The motorbike and she atop of it feature prominently in her photo album. I learned that she was the one who did the photography, too. These were indeed somewhat marked as “male” pursuits—motorbike driving and photography making—more unusual than usual for a woman and more usual for a man than a woman. Margarita did present an example of a woman defying strict divisions of gender roles. Margarita’s husband died in an accident, on this very motorbike. At the road to the village, he passed a truck and was hit with the steel edge in his head. Margarita flips through the album pages depicting his funeral, “This is not interesting…” I often, looking with my interlocutors at their domestic photo albums, paid attention to the presence of the dead. Often, photographs of dead bodies in coffins comprised a segment of family photo archives. Not seldom, they werekept separately though, in a cellophane package or envelope. Thus, the dead were still close tothe living, and yet, divided from them. The dead were remembered and respected, but the sadness that their departure prompted was set aside for a special recollection. The dead were here and not here, their photographic specters at once retrievable and kept sealed. Before becoming a Mayor of Anosovo, Margarita was a “master” (chief) of several logging brigades under her command. Now, she is a diesel station chief and is also working as a teacher of the subject Labor (Trud) at school. Usually, this subject is divided by gender: boys are learning how to handle a hammer, and girls are learning baking and sewing. This is a sort of remnant, “legacy,” or perhaps even “ruin” of the Soviet times—a ruin not of an object but a practice that endures into the present and reinforces traditional gender roles all over the post-Soviet territory: this is just how things are done, normally, in so many minds that to arrange things differently is bordering on unthinkable. Indeed, the affective infrastructures endure to give salience tothe ideas implicit in the post-Soviet ways that, contrary to the common conviction, did not undergo any “unmaking,” nor are they “no more.”60 They take roots from the pre-Soviet times and will

60“Unmaking” the Soviet ways of living is Caroline Humphrey’s metaphor (2002), and “everything was forever until it was no more” is a famous formula of Alexei Yurchak (2005). Together with “vanishing” (Verdery, 2003;

123 endure well into the future. Even though Margarita herself worked her life in “male” professions and was “like a boy” according to her mother, she thought nothing about enforcing the “natural” gender divide. She could teach boys the male pursuits and did so with pleasure, but she did not teach her girls to handle the tools, and she did not teach boys to cook. Despite being “like a boy,” Margarita practiced a refusal of appreciation that I found was characteristic for women. When in the school, the teaching collective distributed gramoty—merit and appreciation papers, a practice likewise enduring from the Soviet times, Margarita refused. She related that she said: “I think that I am not worthy; I have yet to earn one (Ia schitaiu chto ia ne dostoina, ieshchio ne zasluzhila). After all, I am combining two positions,” she explains. This refusal struck me as a habitual “Soviet” ritual modesty; it was customary, as far as I could tell, to humbly reject honors for the collective to insist. But mores shifted, and the school principal, against the ritual of politeness, said, “Yes, Margarita Petrovna, you are correct, you do not deserve an appreciation paper. However, this is not because you are working two works. This is because you have a criminal record.” This criminal record was a wound of Margarita. She got it when she was the mayor,for the abuse of authority which ensued in a conflict. The record was cleared though. Her school colleagues hearing the principal were offended on Margarita’s behalf. One teacher said, “How many times are you going to bring up her criminal record? It was cleared!” There was an anonymous voting, and Margarita did receive her appreciation paper that she initially modestly and ritualistically refused—and was about to be denied.

This mode of ritualistic refusal is recurring. In this work so far, women ritualistically refused care being afraid of inconveniencing their relatives, like my grandmother and Zinaida Vasilievna, or spoke of themselves as unworthy of recognition of their efforts, like Margarita. Even the ethnographer who could have recognized the cultural pattern in such refusals, like Lyudmila Saburova, instead cast herself as undeserving of the improvement of her living conditions, according to her obituary writer (Reshetov, 1999). It clearly presents a trend. In “Refusal as Care,” Ashanté Reese makes an argument

Oushakine, 2009, 7), these terms constitute the attempts of anthropologists to describe the switch from Socialist to post-Socialist realities in different regions. But the endurance of “ruins,” “legacies,” and naturalized ways ofdoing things seem to signal the transient and superficial nature of this unmaking and the incompleteness of the vanishing.

124 that to refuse is to demonstrate one’s care and the refusal is a sufficient way to make a statement (2019). She is making this argument in the context of anthropological work, but it could be expanded to other situations. In Reese, refusals can be powerful signals to state one’s presence but withhold subsequent engagement. It happened to her as a young ethnographer when a community leader, an older woman, gave her her phone number but refused a continuation of a conversation. She did not give the number to continue but to state her presence and place the ethnographic project into the context in which the project was not directly engaged with but observed. The refusal I am witnessing is of the other kind. It is a refusal of an honor bestowed onsomeone out of ritualistic and ceremonial understandings of personal modesty. Modesty, even if exaggerated, springs from the perception of the appropriate, and rises in a dignified pose as the capability to wait for the recognition rather than to attempt to snatch it. Shunning posts, certificates of accomplishment, and other marks of merits is not only a ritual but is recognized in culture as a dignified response to the lures of the world.

“Essentially, as a Russian modesty, it is very not capitalistic, anti-capitastistic,” Says Margarita when I relate it to her. “It is there, in your United States, people need to shovel elbows into each other’s faces to get into the right places. Here, we need to wait until the collective will recognize our contribution. And then, yes, you are supposed to refuse.” “But what about the Russian saying, ‘they give you, take, they beat you, run’?” I ask. Mar- garita laughs. But I can tell that my question puzzles her. She is not answering that very moment. Instead, she pours another cup of tea to me and to herself. “That is right,” She finally says, “And I agree with that. You don’t have to wait around until something hits you. But the point is, it is still the collective, there is still somebody who gives you something. It says they give you (dauit); who does? Somebody. It does not say, ‘you should ask them’ or ‘toot your own horn’ (sam sebia khvali). Right?” Recalling that conversation, I am also reminded of other refusals to accept the cultural values of the new, neoliberal, order, capitalistic, or globalized values, whatever you would call it. A friend who lives in Moscow once very adamantly refused my USA-born ready wisdom of “fake it

125 until you make it”: “But what does it make you if not fake? How can you fake all the time? You either make it, or you don’t make it. To ‘fake it’ is dishonest.” Attempt to “grab something,” to get yourself a place in life, earn a praise, money, orrecogni- tion without the sanction of a collective, entirely on one’s own and while tooting your own horn are perceived as examples of dishonesty, immorality, of being “fake.” “Remember in Master and Margarita?” Margarita asks. “Never asks anyone of anything. They will come on their own and give you everything entirely by themselves.” This is a quote from a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, beloved by generations of Russians, but the issue with this quote, that I likewise heard more than once and that I probably uttered myself on some occasions with an air of self-importance, isthat Voland pronounces it—that is to say, the devil, of which I remind Margarita. But this devil is working against the petty bourgeoisie’s mercantile interests, Margarita cheerfully rejoints. For this question, she does have an immediate answer.

This chapter, bringing together stories of women—Svetlana Sergeyevna, Alevtina, and Irina,Zi- naida Vasilievna, Dasha, Margarita, and Tatiana Valerievna surrounded by their near and dear or their spectral presences—is doing so intuitively, at this point. I do not know why they come together with the exception that life was not easy on any of my heroes. The stories unfold in Anosovo but also spilled beyond Anosovo. Whether longing for the dead or for an entangled existence entangled, through a son-in-law, within the complexities of survival in a neoliberal economy or having been victimized by the predatory and lawless early marketization process in Russia, these women’s stories are not centered around the relocation due to the flood of the dam but are influenced by this event in their shared past that left pulsating traces. In the next chapter, I move on to the trajectories ofother people in Anosovo, beginning with Konstantin, and introduce other interlocutors, in order to show how this is the story of a dispersal that continues in the aftermath of the Soviet industrialization process. It is also to show how people are connected to—or disconnected from—the place in the dialectics of—and tension between—migration and staying.

126 Part 2

Anosovo On Maps

Chapter 3. Transience and Endurance of the Place

As Valentina was rearranging mason jars with pickled cucumbers, she dropped, “When are we moving?” “I don’t know when you, guys, are moving,” Konstantin replied. He was referring to Valentina and their two kids. The tree in the window in fall foliage did not obscure the steelglint of the Angara River. After a pause, he asked, “Why do I raise puppies? For whom do Ibreedthe bee, horses?” “The bee-horses?”61 She responded, slowly. “I do not know why you breed your bee-horses. You can live with your bee-horses by yourself.” I knew Valentina since way before her marriage. We walked the shore of the Angara River and she was telling me that her then-fiancé, Konstantin, did not want her to go to grad school. He wanted her to return to Anosovo and became his wife. I had an opinion and I think I voiced it. It was 2006. My own first husband who I divorced two years prior forbade me to go to grad school even though my advisor at the philosophy department invited me very warmly. And I concurred! That I concurred was so embarrassing and shameful that only now, so many years later, Iadmitit in writing, long after I lamented the bruises on my wrists,62 and also after I obtained my graduate degree, belatedly, from the philosophy department. Ten years after my conversation with Valentina on the shore of the Angara River, duringmy fieldwork for this project, I was spending time at her house regularly. Konstantin and Valentina spent their time together in playful bickering. For some, it would be too much. For them, it

61In Russian, this hybrid of a word sounds like “pchelokoni.” 62In my work “Pustynia” (Wilderness), 2006.

127 actually worked. Now in their thirties, the Smirnovs—he, a logger and a hunter, and she, a teacher of English in the Anosovo school—have been laboriously constructing a house near Irkutsk. They have been working on it since the 1990s. Valentina wanted the family to move there; Konstantin did not want to. Almost daily, the Smirnovs rehearsed the familiar argument. She suspected he delayed the completion of the Irkutsk house on purpose. The chapter 3 is about the movement in and around Anosovo—people moving in and, separate stories amounting to trends. Ultimately, they represent a tiny bit of movement in the region, the movement unfolding not only in space, but through time. In the continuity between the “Soviet” and “post-Soviet,” where different forms of violence, including “slow violence,” persist, there brews a stew of the heteroutopian visions alive and pulsating today. These visions are not rehearsals of the Soviet murmurs and silences. Rather, they are the precise opposite. Namely, the hybrid imaginings and connections that I call the affective infrastructures encompass more than the ties of people to the place like Anosovo but also the location in a broader sense, a situatedness within historic epochs. My interlocutors carrying the imprint of the state in their bodies show with their experiences how the broader infrastructures define or influence not only their affective life or movement, but also the existential being detectable as being-in-a-place that comprises the everydayness. The being-in-a-place unfolds in a series of automatic gestures. Valentina set upthemi- crowave; it did not begin buzzing. Valentina turned it on once again saying, “Is it broke?” and then added, “Goodness gracious, the electricity is out.” It was the time when it was the turn of this part of Anosovo to go without electricity for four hours. Four hours before Margarita Maleyeva, the diesel station chief, or one of her workers, would turn on the light here and leave the other part of Anosovo without electricity. The incomprehensible irony: Anosovo appeared due to the construction of the most powerful hydroelectric station in the world at the time. And yet, Anosovo remains powered by diesel generators. Anosovo’s diesel generator broke recently. The new diesel generator that the village ofAta- lanka graciously lent to Anosovo was less powerful and could not give electricity for the whole of Anosovo simultaneously. The diesel generator broke early that year—in October. Normally,

128 Figure 43. Ella, daughter of Valentina and Konstantin in their Anosovo house, on her toy horse in the room decorated with a pink wallpaper full of butterflies and a blue clock, 2017. villagers expect the generator to break in the severest temperatures of January and February. By that point, the system would be overloaded consistently throughout the winter, and then go out of order. Even though it is an emergency, it is also completely expected; emergency is in the order of things. The time in the village when electricity is off is the time of silence. TV sets and refrigerators are rendered temporarily useless. Electric clocks, unless they are on batteries, reset the count. The timeline is reboot. If I failed to charge my laptop beforehand, it was down. But peoplekeep forgetting that the electricity was off and nudged it to work turning light switches andsetting microwaves. When the electricity was on, every device got plugged into the system. The sound erupted. TV sets worked. Laptops glimmered. The multiplicity of devices overloaded the system. Looking at this plugging and unplugging, I did not understand, like Valentina, what keeps Konstantin in Anosovo when they had a house in Irkutsk. Throughout the now more than fourteen years that I observed Anosovo, people were leaving, one by one. Their movement, whether

129 they themselves thought so or not, started with the uprooting of the dam. The dam was the event that prompted the exodus from the region even before the flood, in the anticipation of it. And yet, something powerful tugged us all in. People returned to Anosovo, too—sometimes, years after they left. Rodion Romanov (63) returned to Anosovo in the 2000s, after years of living in cities. Heleft the village as a high-school graduate for a nursing school. “It is inexplicable,” he said commenting on his return. “In the 1990s and 2000s, a lot of enterprises were crumbling in Anosovo.” “They were crumbling in many places, right?” I asked. Well, certainly not to the degree they were in Anosovo. As a place “on the margins,” Anosovo had it as some of the worst. My interlocutors tirelessly enumerated what I already knew: Club. Library. Post office. Administration building. Housing for the workers. ORS (Otdel Rabochego Snabzhenia, “division of workers’ provision”), lespromkhoz (Socialist timber enterprise), bakery, and even an airport where small planes Polikar- pov Po-2, dubbed kukuruznik, landed. Hospital and bakery, gone. Lespromkhoz, privatized, its possessions torn between firms, then appropriated by one. Club, administration, and post buildings perished in fire. People rumored arsons. The archives perished too; there was acoupleof computers in there. Now administration is taking on a former private house, the post is huddled at a former banya—in Siberia, typically, a small log house designed for washing. The club was reconstructed. Other things were not. The airport building rotted and crushed; the airport field hosts pine trees undergrowth; villagers gather wild strawberries there. The school had all eleven classes; children came from the vicinities for the schoolyear to live in a boarding school. But the number of children in each class dwindled. In recent years, it was only four or five high-school graduates. Rodion was born in one of the villages that later comprised Anosovo—in Yandy before the flood. Rodion’s mom used to run to the village club leaving Rodion to the care of histwouncles, teenagers at the time. When his young caregivers exhausted their capacity to deal with a toddler, they plugged in an iron in the socket. The iron generated the short circuit in the system; the light in the club flashed. It was the signal for Rodion’s mom to run home, which she did.Shegot

130 this iron in exchange for some other valuable item. Irons were rarity at the time, electric ones anyway. Anosovo beckoned Rodion strongly. That was the word that he used. When he was living in the city of Ust Ilimsk, one day he told his then-wife that he was staying in the city only for one more year. “After that, if Anosovo still beckons me, I’ll leave.” She did not say anything—just shrugged her shoulders. One year after the conversation, Rodion announced that he needed to depart. He and his wife parted amicably. He loaded his Moskvich with stuff and was on his63 way. “I did not want to abandon my stuff.” On a hill, Rodion paused to cast the last glance at hisformer home, a multi-story apartment building. His wife stood at the balcony. She waved good-bye. He waved back. Rodion Yegorovich liked to recollect the pre-flood times. He and I were sitting in the kitchen. As he talked, under the impression of his own speech like an incantation, he began moving slowly. Soon, he flared up and went into something of a dance. He, who spoke in heavy, measured words, stood at the center of his kitchen and launched a sort of performance. He showed—rather than told—enacting a series of scenes of the bygone, how things were going and moving. He waved his hands demonstrating the cylinders of the engine at the Karl Marx steamboat going up and down. He moved his body performing the worker shoveling coal in the stove. Out of a teapot that hung above the stokers for that purpose, they poured water on their half-naked, heated, muscular, bronze body glistening in the streams of sweat. Rodion managed to show me vividly while keeping his plaid t-shirt on. With the use of his body, Rodion displayed to me how, as the worker fed the insatiable stove with coal, the paddlewheel steamboat Karl Marx puffed down the Angara River. He punctured his recollections with exclamations. At that moment, Rodion re-inhabited the past at the little theater of his kitchen. Many years after Karl Marx paraded down the Angara River for the last time, Rodion’s body kept and enacted the memory of it. He rotated his hands portraying huge wheels of the steamboat and waltzed across the floor showing how exactly the

63In the hierarchy of Soviet cars, Moskvich was somewhere between Zaporozhets and Volga (Siegelbaum, 2011, 87). Rodion belonged to the Soviet middle class but was not a party boss or anything like that.

131 worker lifted the heavy shovel and threw the coat in the oven. He puffed, emulating thesound of the steamboat. I spectated in amazement. I wondered what it was. I think I can truthfully say that I have not seen anything quite like this before, and I was sold. When I recollect the scene now myself in writing, what I see in my mind’s eyes is not only Rodion in his plaid t-shirt and sports pants jumping all over the place with an imaginary shovel, but the half-naked stoker sweating throwing a shovel after a shovel of coal in the furnace of the steamboat, as if I witnessed itmyself. The steamboats and islands that many of my interlocutors recollected to me, were theele- ments of landscapes that constituted a shared experience. These objects were the moving parts in the affective infrastructures of belonging. The affect can be transmitted from one jointofthe infrastructure to another, from person to person. The emplaced pleasures remain irreplaceable in human experience. They constitute a part of the inhabitability of the place. In thememoir Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes recalled a caboose—an open car—that ran on a trip from the place of his childhood, Bayonne, to Biarritz. “Everyone wanted to ride in that car: through a rather empty countryside, one enjoyed the view, the movement, the fresh air, all at the same time.” (2010b, 50). When Barthes was writing these words, the caboose was long gone. “This is not to apply a mythic embellishment to the past, or to express regrets for a lost youth by pretending to regret a streetcar.” Barthes adds. “This is to say that… the pleasure which vanishes vanishes for good, there is no substitute for it” (2010b, 50). The sense of emplaced pleasures that the caboose embodied for Barthes, for Rodion and many of my interlocutors, the steamboat exemplified. When Rodion got tired from the bodily exertion his performance demanded from him, he sat at the sofa at the accurately served table—his second wife just parted with us; she had urgent work to do—and offered me tea. That evening was the beginning of our proper acquaintanceship, even though I think we knew each other before as Rodion visited my father, who, if the reader remembers, lived in Anosovo at that time. Yet that Rodion was the author of the map of the village of Yandy before relocation, I found out not from him. The Ust Uda regional museum informed me. In composing of the map, he relied on memory but also interviewed others. It seems like his was the only map of the Yandy in existence.

132 Figure 44. The map of the village of Yandy before the flood drawn by Anatoly Kopylov inPaint- brush.

I got to see how Rodion and my dad, both in their sixties, scooped over the map opened on an iPad. My dad purported to make corrections to it based on his memories of the place of his birth. They were trying to get on the same page regarding how things were in reality. Where the club was, in regard to the church. “No, the school was closer to the Butakovs’ house.”—“I, to the contrary, remember it here.” They moved things around first with a spoon, then opened an image editing program and promptly drew a lot of blue arrows across the map. I do not think that they firmly agreed on anything, so I do not reproduce the resulting artwork here. The meaning of the séance was something beyond the apparent, or so it seemed to me. It was a point of the devising and reaffirming of the topographies of belonging. It was a session of spatial recollection whose true purpose was to confirm to each other that Yandy existed and was not just adream but a locale of shared experiences as well as imaginaries. Yandy was the oldest settlement and apparently the biggest among the ones Anosovo sub-

133 Figure 45. My father (left) and Anatoly Kopylov discussing the map of Yandy that Kopylov created. sumed.64 The toponym “Yandy” was semi-lost: Verkhniie Yandy and Nizhniie Yandy arenow bays; those used to be the creeks falling into the Angara River. I heard a hypothesis, not specifically collaborated by any document I was able to lie my eye on—not that documents are credible

64Small villages used to be situated in walkable distance from two to several kilometers from each other. Weddings and “red days of the calendar” were celebrated from one village to another, which included traveling in various carriages, stay-overs, and frequent visitations. The “largening” of settlements according to the government plans changed everything. Small villages were replaced by bigger settlements standing apart on the distance practically unsurmountable by foot. (Although I know people who walked the frozen Angara River from Ust Uda to Anosovo; that is ~56 kilometers, or ~35 miles, and a feat accomplished in exceptional circumstances).

134 Figure 46. The map of Shishimorovka (Zayandy), also named Podyandushka, which toponym means, “Below-“ or “Near-Yandy,” was a khutor—a standalone neighborhood or little settlement—that was separate from the village of Yandy. In some sources, it is considered a separate village, others, including many of my interlocutors, like Svetlana Sergeyevna, dismissed it as not deserving such a status. “Settlement” is not a clear-cut notion; Shishimorovka was no doubt to be transformed into a neighborhood of growing Yandy eventually, were it not for the flood. This map was published by Valery Nikiforov on the Russian social network Odnoklass- niki. Despite my best efforts, I was unable to come in contact with the author.

sources in such matters—that “Yandy” did not sound Russian, and this was why “Anosovo” was preferred. Anosovo does not seem to have been the biggest among the submerged settlements, either. “I cannot fathom why the new settlement Anosovo was not called Yandy, considering that approximately seventy percent of the population of the new Anosovo consisted of the displaced from Yandy, and about five percent from Serovo and Khutor” (Juri Bezrukhih in Istok 2014, 10). 3.1. Photographic Memory Rodion and I had several sessions of looking at his photo albums. The living room in his house was big and adorned with reproductions of paintings. In the window, dark poplar trees, blue against the dark sky, stood, tall and narrow, taking the whole window-frame. The trees looked like surreal gigantic yatagans stuck in the body of the earth. The treetops were tall, and the

135 window was positioned high above the floor. As Rodion and I were sitting at the table nearthe window, I felt like we were miniature—perhaps playdough figures at a toy table—against these poplar trees towering above us. It also felt, to me, as if the trees were about to fall forward or are already in the process of falling forward, to where we were. Awaiting the imminent but never happening fall of the trees, we were slowly going through photo albums. Of all the images that I collected that day, two tiny ones—one, blurry—impressed me in particular. In one picture, a woman was standing with her elbow placed on a tree trunk. The second photo, taken from almost the same point, was of a boy sitting in a tree. The boy in the photo was Rodion himself in the year of 1959. It were the patchesonhis knees that stood away for me in his photograph. “Since the Photograph is pure contingency and can be nothing else (it is always something that is represented)… it immediately yields up those ‘details’ which constitute the very raw material of ethnological knowledge,” Barthes observed (2010a, 28). When I was going through my interlocutors and my own photographs, as well the photographs my father took on his iPad, I rephotographed many images, pensive and lyrical to me, and many contained a lot of detail and were in possession of an affective atmosphere. Some of the photographs depicted worlds: an old woman—“this is grandmother Dusya,” in her garden, with a dog, and a stripe of a river on the horizon, and then a stripe of a hill; hay stack gatherers putting hay in stacks; people waiting for a ferry or at the riverboat mooring—as these photographs did provide context, situate people somewhere, and had what Roland Barthes called “studium,” a kind of boring even if useful information “of the time and place,” but many, to me, also had what Barthes called “punctum”: something striking about them as opposed to a generic “ethnological knowledge.” I do not know about “ethnological knowledge,” but details are always something that jump from the photographs into the eye. Patches on pants of Rodion as a boy, buttons on his shirt, seemed to be conveying the sense of the existence other, more official photographs, would not. I did not select the more “informative” photographs—of a collective of medics standing in front of the hospital, for example—not because those images were not worthy of being analyzed, but

136 Figure 47. A photograph of his mother in Yandy before the flood from Rodion’s photo album. because these photographs were still somehow more expressive or indicative of the particularities of the place. Perhaps these images were more intimate. In the photography, these things that we think of as temporary, get to be preserved and then express or rather be perceived as something about “the time” or “place.” It is the blurry picture of a woman—Rodion’s mother—was striking to me, for two reasons. First, having heard some of Rodion’s childhood memories, and the memories of others, I came to be thinking about the submerged frontier of Yandy as about the place where life was radically different from Anosovo.

137 Figure 48. A photograph of himself as a boy in Yandy before the flood from Rodion’s photo album.

Out of people’s recollections, Yandy unfolded as a fairytale place. But from the photographs, it appeared to me that Yandy was just like Anosovo. Marks of the familiar were all there. There was a huge puddle glistening—an overexposed blank space— behind the woman. There was a wooden building on the other side of the road that appeared to be decidedly less sturdy than buildings in the ethnographic open-air museums Taltsy and Angara Village. It was on the basis of sturdy, gergeous buildings in the museums, diligently collected, reconstructed, and preserved,

138 that I imagined the village of Yandy, erroneously or, by the very least, only partially adequately. Of course, it is not surprising, nor should it be (and yet it was, to me), that Yandy in the photoalbums was not like houses in ethnographic museums. Yet I did reconstruct Yandy as about a different world based on the memories full of longing that my interlocutors shared with me and the “village prose.” The second—and contradictory to the first—reason why these pictures struck mewasthat together and despite putting into doubt the narratives of the village of Yandy as a miraculous place in my imagination, these photos also confirmed them. As I was looking at the photographs, I felt the gripping longing for the lost world which was Yandy. Somehow the images did contain, together with imprints of the celestial puddles and leaning fences, the marks of the irreversibility of everything. Puddles and houses were such signs pointing at the transience and foreverness at the same time. The houses did not live up to the impressions from open-air ethnographic museums, and yet, they outdid them at the same time. It was a living, breathing world, as opposed to its mummified and lacquered model constructed for the viewers. In my perception, the pictures, particularly blurry photographs, inexplicably captured the poignancy of the human existence on Earth. A light figure in a flowery dress of Rodion’s long dead mother was almost devoid of the characteristics that would make the person recognizable. It was possible to transport this figure, without straining imagination, into any other place and almost any other epoch. She could stand, elbow on wood, or so I felt at that moment, in any settlement throughout the world. If there was anything of “universal human experience” atallin the multiplicity of human experiences, perhaps that was that: the ordinariness of it. And yet, she stood not somewhere—she filled, with her body, a portion of the space of the drowned frontierof Yandy. 3.2. Forms Of Recollection Rodion’s connection to the place through bodily memory expressed through a performance was uncommon, but the vividness of his memories was not. In conversations with me, people expressed memories differently, and many, through the recollection of taste and smell—the private recollections that, together, amount to a collective memory. Older villagers often recalled steam-

139 boats, drowned churches, small brick factories, and other enterprises that the previous settlement had, with longing and visceral detail. Alevtina spoke of the taste of the sparkling lemonade at the riverboats of the past. “Children would run aboard and buy lemonade.” The recollection was that of taste. Before the relocation, Anosovo had the church. Sermons were not served there for a long time. A kolkhoz storage was located inside instead. Shortly before the relocation, the fire took the church. It was not a planned fire—in my father’s recollection in Istok, “Men poured water on themselves and delved into the gap of the gates. They carried bags and boxes out of it… Later, my peers and I dug in the ashes searching for the baked sweets. The sweets were bitter and smelled of smoke.” (Orlov, 2014, 3). This recollection is repeated in the tales of others. Thus, in the same issueof Istok, there is the testimony of Alexandra Sotnikova: “I remember very well the fire at the storages of ORS that were near the school. For a long time, we (children) were digging in the fire pit retrieving boiled condensed milk” (Istok 2014, 12).65 Children who participated in a feast on the scorched candy remembered the taste for life. The power of the taste, its memory, and its triggers, like smell and taste, has thecapacityto transport a person to a place making it a layered, heterotopic experience of being here and somewhere else at the same time. Stoler argued that in the Dutch colonies in the Indies, authorities used “sound, smells, tastes, and touch” in the effort to develop in children the appropriate sensibilities: “proper ‘feelings’ and ‘attachments’ to things Dutch and… ‘disaffection’ for that which was native” (2004, 9). Perceived from this angle, the famous taste of Proust’s madeleines is not an idiosyncratic recollection nor a flavor of home or mark of a personal childhood. Rather, the taste is an emblem of class, bourgeoisie as opposed to peasants, and a certain spatio-temporal and political belonging that are part of the affective citizenship.66 Effectively, experiences of a

65I heard about baked treats from others in the field. Other witness, Lyubov’ Gubzanskaya (Kustova) recall that the church fire was so strong that the windows in her house were “heated very much” (Istok 2014, 11). 66“Affective citizenship” is a term that originates from Stoler’s theoretization of “affective states” and thewayaffect played a role in the colonial governmentalities. Stoler does not seem to have used the term “affective citizenship” in her work. Others who theorized “affective citizenship” linked it to “emotions that include… love, fear, anxiety, empathy and hope,” which evidences a familiar inability to distinguish between emotions and states that habitually affects affect studies. (Love or anxiety, for instance, are clearly not “emotions”). Affective citizenship intheSoviet and Russian modernity is likewise connected to the embodied experiences of affect. Thus, taste and smell ofthe Soviet treats are prominent in the public recollections.

140 shared taste connected with the material changes became the markings of participating to what sedimented into a local history. Sharing in these tastes experiences—not only occasional, like the baked sweets in the fire pit, but also regular, like “Soviet ice cream,” a point of contention of the memories of the Soviet past67—became perhaps a barely detectable but still a stamp of belonging—to a generation, time, and place. 3.3. Elena And Refusal Of Aid Not everybody had defined the connection to the place through taste and smell. not everybody expressed the willingness to indulge in recollections. This depended on positionality, and a lot revolved around the family history and the experiences with the Soviet and contemporary neoliberal state. I have mentioned Elena several times. She was the third member of the Baptist church in Anosovo before she moved to the town of Ust Baley. It is on my way there that my car broke and the master refused payment, which prompted my companion Sergey Kluyev to pronounce that there will never be a market capitalism in Russia, due to the spirit of mutual help and connected to what scholars called “moneylessness of money” that brought forward systems of barter, blat, and corruption (Grossman 1986, 49, Pesmen 2000, 126–145, Ledeneva 1998), but was also a foundation of the ecosystems of gainless mutual aid. Elena and Vasily Krasnov, both in their sixties, moved from Anosovo to the town of Ust Baley three years ago. They bought a house and began renovating it. Traces of the ongoing renovation were everywhere: the walls were patched, the floor, covered in different pieces of linoleum. “You can only begin the renovation, but never finish it,” Vasily joked. It was a popular Russian saying encapsulating the switching temporalities of the observable world. Despite it being a worn-off wisdom, whenever something like that was said, it amused everyone as if that was a fresh finding every time. “There is a beginning to the Revolution, but no ending,” added Vasily. Another

67Some say, Soviet ice cream was exceptionally good and inexpensive, others insist, it had only a limited number of flavors, was cooked by the recipes stolen from the West, and is only good because the childhood recollections made it so. In this semi-anecdotal disagreement, there is a tension that points to the limits of the idea of the “shared Soviet experience.” While the experience may be the same (having ice cream during the Soviet time), the affective power and charge that it carried were obviously different for everyone.

141 Figure 49. Elena and her granddaughter in Anosovo in 2013 as photographed by me. I have shown this picture already as a part of sheet of handwriting, and here it is one more time by itself. Elena and her granddaughter here are singing Baptist hymns. That is the photograph that, according to my Russian Orthodox friends in Moscow, was a pastoral, a photo-insight into a lost paradise where some true Russianness was taking place in some miraculous alcoves of Siberia. They assumed that Elena was reading a children’s books to her granddaughter—and not inculcating her into a “false belief” which, for my friends in question, was anything but the Russian Orthodoxy. popular apothegm referring to the idea of permanent revolution. So much for “everything was forever until it was no more.”68 68The famous aporia formulated by Alexei Yurchak on the basis of work with his interlocutors, “Everything was forever until it was no more,” is getting at the defining the surprise and shock that the collapse of the USSRproduced in many people. I am here to confirm Yurchak’s finding that the end of the USSR was indeed fairly shocking, tomany. I also distinctly remember a kind of apocalyptic excitement at big changes visited upon us. Still, applied to Anosovo and thousands of other settlements, Yurchak’s formula will make folds. Taking into consideration Anosovo’s temporality that was written into its foundation, the maxim of the Soviet collapse may be reformulated as “everything was temporary, but it is still there.” Change-driven, temporality-anchored, divide-acknowledging, absurdist-flavored statements of tensions between the temporalities of the Socialist and post-Socialist time are likewise evident in Russian politician Chernomyrdin’s gem “It never happened, yet here we go again.” Another example is the folk “We never lived well, let us not start

142 I visited Elena in her home in Anosovo for the first time in 2013. After she and her granddaughter finished singing those hymns, Elena repeated to me several times, very clearly, that she will not stay in Anosovo. She enumerated, angrily, Anosovo’s disadvantages. No road, no central electricity, no water, apart from the unfiltered, taken right from the Angara River. “No civilization,” Elena said. Her house, too, was falling in disrepair. She told me, “I shall not repaint these windows.” The window frames appeared to be sponge-like in texture as she pressed them to demonstrate to me how old they were and apparently full of bugs grinding wood into powder. As Elena and I met again in her new house in Ust Baley, she proudly displayed “the lights of the big city” visible from her garden. “So beautiful!” From her porch at night, one could see the skyline of the city of Angarsk. The city shone on a distance, taking about one fifth of thehorizon. The rest of the horizon was dark beyond the yellow moon. Elena loved it. The displayofthe illumination was a contrast to the nights in Anosovo—luminous nights, stars visible, close to the earth, blinking as if observing you (no electricity at night in Anosovo any season of the year). Elena spoke with a disbelieving horror of light her children had to use in the absence of electricity, when a diesel generator broke by the end of January “as usual” (kak vsegda). They lit candles made out of animal fat, “fattings” [zhiroviki]. “Thankfully, everyone tended to a lot of animals.” In the evening, her children did their homework trying not to stain notebooks with zhiroviki’s melting fat. I asked Elena if she considered going to Anosovo for a visit. “I am not even risking going there,” She replied. “The battered road was bad enough back then, and what is it now?Idon’t even want to think about it.” Surprisingly though, Elena now claimed that she never wanted to leave Anosovo. I told her that to me, she appeared rather decisive about leaving. She denied it, “That can’t be.” Elena recalled that they had even started the renovation, “We foamed the house [zapenili dom—went through log cracks with insulation]. We would have renovated it, and it would not be bad. We’d paint the window frames…” She was talking about the same frames she pressed to show me in 2013 that they were spongy, to demonstrate that there was no point in painting them. now.” And, of course, the hackneyed and yet still-amusing, “There is nothing as permanent as the temporary.” There is not quite as much “no more” as we want to think, and it pertains to many social changes.

143 The discrepancies in peoples’ accounts show the intense inner work behind such a decisive step as reconfiguring the whole way of life by changing location. “Recounting one’s lifeisan interpretive feat” (Bruner, 2004, 693). Discrepancies happen as the need for a adjust the narrative arises. The labor of making sense out of the world—a readjustment of the universe—suits the needs of the construction of a coherent self. “In the end, we become the autobiographical narratives by which we ‘tell about’ our lives” (Bruner, 2004, 694, emphasis is the author’s). Even when the “drive” to move is so strong it ends up materializing, it still takes a lot of inner work to collect one’s thoughts, gather and abandon things and familiar landscapes, and move. Only if there is no more the sense of belonging, people shed the place easily. “A phenomenology of the inhabited shell” suggests that we inhabit the houses and places like hermit crabs (Bachelard, 1958, 127). When we grow out of previous places, we move to the next ones. Elena’s family trauma has not gone anywhere from her system. Elena’s ancestry was from the Kuban Cossacks, she announced. She took pride in that. On some level, she was permanently in the process of comprehending what transpired in the family. It remained unfathomable. Her great grandfather was arrested by his brother and son. They were the NKVD officers: Uncle Senya, the brother, and Uncle Vanya, the son, as Elena referred to them. Uncle Vanya stood, the family memory related, near the window. He was trying to roll a samokrutka (cigarette), his hands shaking so bad that he was unable to do this automatic motion. All the while “his father was being killed,” Elena says, tears in her throat. After the other members of the arresting crew gave Elena’s great grandfather several blows, he was ordered to get ready. He sat at the bed and attempted to roll a cloth foot wrap[portyanka] around his leg. But, also unable to perform this everyday task, simply threw portyankas into his boots and got up. The bodies were refusing to follow their owners at that scene. He wassentto camp and shot shortly thereafter, in 1939. This inability of bodies to perform the gestures that were familiar to them to the automatism— historic gestures too, outdated, not everybody is now able to roll a cigarette or wrap a foot wrap— was a detail of disassociation from everydayness at the face of the historical drama setting apart

144 the fabric of the mundane. And yet, how mundane these inabilities were. They were also ordinary in some sense, ordinary and terrifying. The arresting crew brutally beat Elena’s grandmother. They gave her a black eye, cuther lip—blood was dripping on her dress—and repeatedly hit her stomach. Her ribs were fractured. A list of injuries Elena evokes, like some sort of prayer, enumerating, where grandmother had bruises, as if this is some sort of historic retribution, a speech at the trial, a solemn testimony of a witness. When the WWII broke, “Uncle Senya” came to his brother’s widow. He did not offer apology. He offered her to take his mandat—the enlarged ration he enjoyed as an NKVD officer. The times were hungry. Having the ration or not could be a life-and-death alternative for grandmother and her children. There would be no shame in accepting it. In a sense, it could be asortof retribution—very partial and inadequate, and yet restitution for the unrectifiable trauma inflicted on the family. But, she rejected his offering and told him to go away. He died in 1941 “under Moscow” (in Podmoskovie, as the war rolled close to the capital). After arrest of great grandfather, Elena and her siblings—there were five children inthe family—marveled why kids stopped coming to their house to play. They could not find the answer to this question until they grew of age and realized that this was because “we were the enemies of the people,” Elena recounted. Elena used this phrase, rather than “grandchildren of the enemy of the people,” since the distinction was evidently unimportant. They were treated, as kids, by other children, as enemies. They bore a full weight of the supposed treason of their patriarch. The parable of Elena’s tale—of the great grandmother refusing the mandate—rendered itinto something that passes down from one generation to the next. The presence of her testimony in my work expands it to the limits where I could not have predicted it going. It is no longer a story of Anosovo or connection to the place. Instead, it disaggregates into the space of shared and not shared history, experiences of belonging or failing and refusal to belong to the state and its many “ruins.” When she was telling her story, at that moment, Elena and I were within the space of a historiosophical rather than other disciplinary framework, if anywhere, within “history” rather than “time.” And the story was fundamentally both redemptive (through the

145 grandmother’s refusal of aid) and not redemptive. Some of Elena’s relatives, like her father, were entitled to compensations from the state but never applied to it. The compensation was of no more use for them than the enlarged ratio of her brother-in-law was for Elena’s great grandmother. Elena’s family relied on God instead. Elena’s great grandmother had a miraculous icon that Elena now possesses. Whenever someone among the children fell sick and put the bits into their hot tea, the great grandmother cut the corner of the icon, grate it in thin layers. A corner of the icon is gone now. The violence of the Soviet state existed in brutal forms; students of history arecomingto terms with repressions. Even in its spectaculariness lending itself easily to spectatorship, violence remains mundane; violence is at once mundane and spectacular. The family trauma is passed along the generations. It does not go anywhere. It does not, in itself, somehow expire or resolve itself as time passes. It is still there, having happened decades ago, re-manifesting itself in the everydayness of today, taking time, tears, thought, and a prayer of recounting with it. But, most importantly, the violence itself did not disappear, it merely takes different forms. And in its enactment, it, too, defines the situatedness of the people in particular circumstances andkeeps them attached to the place. 3.4. Vera And The Limits Of Cruelty The many forms of violence and trauma in Anosovo and around it, mostly, in the stories ofwomen, opened for me the depth of suffering to observe and commiserate. As I was told these stories, therewas a methodological or epistemological, or perhaps even ontological problem rising for me. How do I tell them and make sure that I do not minimize the pain and do not speculatively spectate? How do I, in short, not engage in a kind of a meta-metaphorical “ruin porn” that is an exploitative objectification of ruins—or, in this case, people—the “trauma porn”? The claim of me being connected to Anosovo is clearly not enough, and I am far from feeling righteous in my wish to tell these stories. And yet, I do tell them because, “if not we, then who?”—an old Komsomol—Communist youth organization— principle that some of my interlocutors ridicule. This is the feeling I already described as that ofa chronicler—“If I don’t tell it, no one will”—even if the stories, such as the advancements of the Nazis into Russia, or the songs by Vladimir Vysotsky, are also being passed on by others. I am guided

146 by my research question—why and how do people stay or move?—but as I begin asking questions, the answers get interlaced with the stories for which the “migration” or “mobility” framework is insufficient and inadequate.

Back to Anosovo, I talked to Vera (38) of her plans for the future and having what was meant to be a preliminary conversation. But Vera intended to tell me a different story. Sitting at atea table, in the presence of her son, Vera recounted what she endured from her husband who was now in prison for murder. When he was working away from the village, Vera asked him if she should keep her last pregnancy, “So, are we keeping it or liquidating?” That was precisely the word she used (“ili kak, likvidiruiem?”). “He said her pregnancy was not from him. “Not from him—fine; I know the ways.” And, sharing something of a recipe, she described the process: “Take laurel, tansy, and some other glasses—I do not remember what I cooked, but I made a good concoction—drink, lift something heavy, like tree trunks, and everything will fly out of you.” She did what she told she would, and, meditating on the interruption of her pregnancy, remarked: “Mom always tells me, Verka, you are a total badass (bezbashennaia ty, Verka). What I think about, that’s I am doing. However, now I think, imagine if I cooked a heavier potion than I wanted, and the blood flow would open in my womb? They will never, not in a million of years, take me from here ontime to the hospital. Goodness gracious, they will not evacuate me from here. I would die. But, I did not die. And I am very glad I did what I did. My mom says, if I have something on my mind, I do so.” Indeed, they would not bring Vera on time to the hospital. I recalled the man dying at the riverboat and being carried unceremoniously to the shore. He was a victim of his own reluctance to seek medical help but also of the systemic issue: the absence of the hospital in Anosovo. No doubt Vera would perish if something in her experiment went wrong. After the auto-administered abortion, all was done between Vera and her husband for good. If before some sort of relationship with her former husband she was willing to uphold, after the self-abortion, she did not. “I simply told him never come back here. Well, he already found someone else. That woman had six children. She was the one who killed that guy—he took the guilt upon himself.”

147 I immediately recalled the story about my grandfather serving the prison sentence for a fight with the knife. According to the family apocrypha, he took the guilt of his uncle upon himself. I thought about how little one could trust to such stories given that people taking someone else’s guilt serving sentences for crimes that they supposedly did not commit was a narrative trope. “I said, never come back here—I had too many things from you. My daughter—who was two when we began living together with him—never even utter the word ‘father.’ I even tried to bribe her. I bought a vest from the Belykhs and told her, here, he bought you this vest, call him ‘dad.’ She would not even read this word in class. Her teacher asked me, why your daughter would not even read the word ‘father’ when we read aloud books in our class? “When he was drunk, name me the place where we did not hide. If he comes to my mom, and I am there, he breaks windows. When Tosha (son) was young, that’s how we lived: he was on this half of the house, we, on that half. Whenever he comes, I am grabbing children and to that side of the house. That half was not heated, mind you. So I had something of adenbelow the bed: I threw there clothes, warm furcoats. So I put children there and wrap them in coats, and he is walking. He is walking—we are lying there, silently, noiselessly. Oh what if he finds us! We are lying there, shaking. And if he finds—hits immediately. He broke my nose. I called the police to recorded injuries, and? The police came; he gave them a couple of smoked pikes, and they wrapped it up. They fined me—fined me for calling them a thousand and five hundred rubles. I recalled just now, when I took a card for Tosha’s medical records. I knew that my former husband was a cruel man. He grew up without father. But to the degree that he stuffed pepper into the anus of the child—I am sorry, this is way too much. And I fought with them. The surgeon, imagine, ‘did not find anything,’ so they nearly gave me fifteen days for filing the false report. Or, take the saw Ural—he starts it, the electricity flows, and he forces the child to stick a finger in the holder, so that the child is hit with electricity. They came here and photographed the saw, but then they said they will confine me for fifteen days.”

I am again thinking of the Christen Smith’s book Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Per- formance in Brazil disentangling the doings of systemic violence. The stories that I collected—Vera’s story is semi-representative of many of the kind. Semi, because it possesses these details of daughter

148 not wanting to read the word “father,” family hiding under the bed from a drunk father coming home, and the despicable torture of the child—would also talk to some sort of basis of violence, gendered violence, patriarchal violence, sadistic violence, violence of punishment and control. The injustices of it and inextinguishable traces of such intimate violence once inflicted, carried on by the father and backed up by the state, will construct me the victims and the perpetrators. While there is nothing wrong with clarity of who the victim is and who the perpetrators are, I am fearful of slipping into the predictabilities instead of just sitting with the unfathomable cruelty of this. Vera had theword for that: cruelty (“I knew that he was cruel”) in the same breath she both issued an apology of him (“grew up without father”) and finally condemned (“but not to the degree”). Importantly—and this, too, is a shared experience of many victims around the world and their advocates, as she was advo- cating on behalf of her son—she was not believed. The institutions that were there to protect them, the people who were there—the medics, the police—found the story so disturbing even as they no doubt saw many of the same kind and dismissed many of the same kind—that they preferred rather to punish her, the bearer of the news, and silence her by the threat of punishment, rather than attempt to inhabit the world in where things like that happen and demand intervention. They happen and not as seldom as one, for the sake of one’s sleep, would sometimes like to believe. It has been now two years since I heard Vera’s story, and only now do I finally have guts to translate some of its details, but I did render it in Russian quickly, and, having anonymized appropriately, posted it—on Facebook—under the lock. (I have now, having taken further steps to obscure identities of the involved, published that piece in a literary journal in Russia, 2020). Before, I had some other episode to portray Vera in this text—who I did not want to reduce, too, to this story of horrific violence—I had an everyday conversation about her choice of the place—staying in Anosovo. And I decided by now that it can all remain but AFTER I told her story I meant to tell.

In the same conversation, Vera assured me that she will never leave the village of Anosovo. No, she won’t. As with other things with Vera, frank and outspoken, that admission surfaced by itself, without me asking. As the reason why she was rooted in a place, Vera brought up her cow. “I always dreamed about having a cow. Now that I have it, I would move somewhere else?” For me, this was unexpected. Not only because I was made into a champion of her going

149 Figure 50. Chamomile meadow in the town of Ust Uda, 2016. away from Anosovo, but also because she could easily keep her cow in the town of Ust Uda, in thirty-five miles, and have a year-round electricity. Much of the town of Ust Uda is rural-looking neighborhoods of one- or two-story houses and big gardens. When I pointed that out to her, Vera replied, “I do not like Ust Uda. Never liked that place.” But when I returned to Anosovo next year, Vera, her children, and her new husband—who her daughter did call “dad”—were gone. They departed for the town of Ust Uda. Was Vera notthat closely attached to her cow as she thought she was. Perhaps, the cow figured in our conversation as a rationalization of staying. These things do not need to be mutually exclusive: the attachment and rationalization can go hand in hand. The work of attachment is a work of “cruelly optimistic” rationalization: we are “maintaining attachment to a problematic object in advance of its loss,” as Lauren Berlant puts it (Berlant (2011)). The cow can be both: a connection, a breathing, warm, and much-wanted presence—Vera dreamed of a cow for a long time, she said—and a trope figur- ing in her rationalization of staying in a place as neighbors moved away. The tie to the animal was part of the “affective infrastructures” of the place, an element in the affective circuits always on the move to acquire a structure and attaching a person to something. Indeed, “infrastructure”

150 is a cold word to apply to the connection of soul. But one could keep “affective infrastructures” on par with “infrastructures of violence” that hint at violence’s systemic, mundane, and naturalized omnipresence. If there are infrastructures of violence, there should be infrastructures of affection—or affect in general, provided that affection is a form69 ofaffect. I have not seen Vera in Ust Uda yet. Let us hope that this is in the future. I like Ust Uda. Or, not as much “like,” as I inhabited it as the Bachelard’s hermit crab inhabits a shell of the place. I walked the streets covered in soft, warm dust and poplar fluff and in snow. The main streetof the town of Ust Uda used to end abruptly; it kind of lost itself; the street ran out its course and expired. At the other end, the street falls into a square with an administrative building. Passing that, we will have timber planks by way of pavement on the one side, and a ground road. The other side of the street is now coming to a new building of a school—a newer town acquisition that was not there when I began my research. The town of Ust Uda has a great future. It will only grow, advantageously positioned, with roads and multi-story buildings. If the city wishes, it would eventually have skyscrapers—unless skyscrapers are outdated by the new architectural vogues. The town of Ust Uda also knew the dam flooding, but only several neighborhoods were relocated—not all, from what I understood. One of the main cultural marks on the timeline was probably the birth of the writer Valentin Rasputin. At the jubilee celebration of the author in 2017, the museum hall devoted to Rasputin opened in a stand-alone beautiful log house. It opened the same year, and even a bit earlier, than the Museum of Rasputin in the city of Irkutsk. My acquaintance Ust Uda museum worker Yaroslava generously conducted an excursion for me and

69Efforts to define and talk about “social infrastructures” are productive in different registers. For example,Lauren Berlant calls for the creation of the new “infrastructures for troubling times” (2016): a system of ties and connections beyond kinship, much as Donna Haraway calls for the recognizing of the across-species kin in the Cthulucene (2016). For Berlant, infrastructures are not “identical to system or structure, as we currently see them,” but rather “defined by the movement or patterning of social form” (Berlant, 2016, 393). My understanding of affective infrastructures proposes to study the ones that are already in existence. When Raymond Williams calls about the “structure of feelings,” I believe it is about the private feelings; the individuals may not know about the collective and systemic circulation of them as demonstrated by Heiman in her study of the American middle-class where children are not permitted to step on the carpet because the carpet is to display the middle-class belonging, as opposed toforthe coziness of those inhabiting the house (2015). The infra-structural aspect of affect as opposed to “structure of felling” points out at the systemic and collective nature (“infra” is what is beyond).

151 several other odd-hour visitors with me. She lit the ceiling which showed a night sky: a wonder, she explained, of the schoolchildren who visit Resputin’s museum. There was an old school desks of the kind Rasputin and people of his generation, including my parents, sat at. Those tables that were part of the environment of the “French Lessons” short story. There were inkwells that they had back then. A photo portrait of a beautiful womanina beret was there on display—Lidia Molokova, who was a prototype of the teacher of French, Lidia Mikhailovna in the short story. In the short story, a mother sends her son to the town where he lives at his aunt. The teacher takes a special interest in the boy and gives him lessons separately because he is not making a lot of progress with French in class. It is a post–WWII period, and he is starving. She attempts to feed him, even sends a package to him as if it is from theboy’s mother. The boy returns the package. Seeing that, Lidia Mikhailovna invents a way to provide for him: she plays with him in a game on money trying to lose. She is caught at the act red-handed by the boy and at that moment they are both caught by the school director who is aghast with her lack of moral scruple. She is expelled and returns to her home town from which she sends the boy a package with apples. In reality, Lidia Molokova left the school in Atalanka on her own accord, probably when the time that she had to teach there by the contract with the university expired.70 Then Lidia Molokova, I was told, lived somewhere abroad. She either visited the museum and saw her portrait on display or was in correspondence with the museum and gifted her photograph, I am sadly forgetting now. I have recollected the photo of Lidia, but in the same display side by side with her there were portraits of others. I rephotographed the stand on my phone, and in my photograph, beyond Lidia, there is a “prototype” of Alyona from the novel Fire—Galina Slobodchikova. Lidia and her beret caught my attention, but perhaps for others, it is the portrait of Galina that was striking (“punctum” versus “stadium”?) as her direct look into the camera, white collar, and duck nose are

70The higher education in the USSR was free, but the young specialists had to work two or three yearsafter graduation by the assignment. Often it was enough to root the professionals for life in the place where theywentas people came of age, got married, and acquired a place to live.

152 Figure 51. “Prototypes” of the characters in Valentin Rasputin’s works. inexplicably “Siberian,” as opposed to Lidia’s features that can be placed in any vaguely-urban settings across place and time, or so it seems to me (presumptuously, perhaps). As the stand with the portraits of the prototypes and also tales of my interlocutors confirmed,71 not only there were figures of people who inspired other works, but they were subject to very literal interpretations. Duly so, perhaps: Rasputin did not see himself as a “fiction” writer. Rather, he considered himself a portraitist of reality as is, in the spirit of the “artistic truth” that

71I am still hoping to be able to analyze them in a separate project.

153 I already mentioned in my introduction. In the reflection “Where did my books come from,” Rasputin wrote: “The fate of my co-villagers and my village is in almost all of my books,and those fates would be sufficient for many more than I wrote. I do not like to fantasize; theright of the writer to fabrication I use only for corrections which clear the moral streams of reality (moral’nie toki realnosti) as you transport it into the book” (1997). In the museum, there were some objects that belonged to Rasputin and passed as gifts from family, including his watch, his table, a lamp, a modest grey costume. Rasputin’s objects were blended with the objects of the epoch, that is, a yesterday’s contemporaneity. Only a curator could tell what belonged to Rasputin, and what did not. Several oil and photo portraits, one of them of Rasputin in a jeans costume, were likewise there. Yaroslava told the story of the second marriage of Rasputin after the death of his first wife. The wife’s dying wish was thatValentin Georgievich remarried so that someone would take a good care of him. She knew his future wife and approved of her. “I think it was a chaste marriage,” Yarovlava hypothesized. “I do not know for sure, of course. This is my interpretation.” Chastity was a feature, whether right or wrong,as if taken from a hagiography of a pair of Orthodox saints like Pyort and Fevronia who, according to the legend, were like a brother and a sister later in their lives. Valentin Rasputin acquired features of a nearly-saint in the museum of his native land that he honored in his works. The land was paying him back idolatrizing him or at least applying to him an understanding of loyalty that resisted the idea that the second marriage could be consummated. Even early on, when I still did not enter the museum of Ust Uda, did not know its curators, journalists of the newspaper, people of assorted trades living in Ust Uda, had not met the mayor of the Ust Udinian Rayon, nor spent several nights at the house of Zoia Petrovna’s son Mitia having missed the ferry, I could see that unlike Anosovo, Ust Uda has a sure footing on the ground and is a vibrant center which knew that it has more in its future than in its past. My encounters confirmed it, but also confirmed that Anosovo remains a “deaf“glukhaiia village”— derevnia,” as Rasputin called the neighboring Atalanka—the village of his childhood (1997). Once, I met a known Norwegian photographer in Ust Uda hotel. I checked his website; he had series of photographs of workers in Siberia, including timber industry, oil, and gas. The Siberian album

154 Figure 52. The town of Ust Uda with a view at the Angara River in November 2018, zoomedin and put in a grey frame by Instagram as a non-standard format. There are two silhouettes, ofa mother and a girl, at the foreground. was uninventively titled “Russian winter.” Diligently spectacular photographs were numbered “022Russland,” “042Russland,” and so on. He said he was in search of lumberjacks at work to photograph. I tried to sell him the idea that Anosovo is a place to find such lumberjacks. From a polite look of bewildered mistrust on his elongated face—him rubbing uncertainly his cheek with a short stubble—I could tell that he was not buying it. That, indeed, was the ultimate problem of Anosovo that brought to a halt so many business and cultural initiatives: what was obtainable

155 there, was equally obtainable everywhere in the radius of one hundred miles but with less trouble, images of lumberjacks included. 3.5. Post-Soviet Planners Many of the former Anosovians that I talked to in the city of Irkutsk, towns of Ust Baley and Ust Uda, and in the village of Sredniaia Muia, recollected Anosovo with nostalgic longing but in an abstract way. Several expressed an unadulterated joy that they have moved away from Anosovo. Lidia (54) was one of those. “Thank god I was brave enough to move away!” She said. Wewere still eating that ice cream to which I keep returning to in an Irkutsk café with an oil tablecloth. She said that the only connection to Anosovo she still keeps is the ties to her parents’ graves; I discussed it in the first chapter of the second part. Lidia was content; she enjoyed herself fully as an Irkutsk dweller. “Last years in Anosovo it was very hard.” She explained. “Every winter you have to bring water from the Angara River using a sleigh; you needed to chop wood for heat…” “Did Irkutsk fulfill the expectations?” I ask. “Of course,” she says. The only problem is that, unlike in Anosovo, she can’t save money. But the kids love it here: her ten-year-old son is attending martial arts sections, and her daughter is preparing for the college. The girl is dreaming about studying in Saint Petersburg, but “we will not pull it off,” Lidia says“Eto [ my ne potianem”]. Lidia was an accountant, and she was able to find a job in Irkutsk. She had many friends and relatives who moved away from Anosovo. In the 2000s, everybody moved to the town of Sayansk where the apartments were “relatively inexpensive,” she said. No one she knows, she tells me, regrets leaving Anosovo. “I will never return,” Lidia said. She meant that she will never return for good, but she did return to Anosovo every summer with her son. Her son usually spent one month of the vacation in a summer camp, but he missed his mom and did not like the camp food. He called her from camp every day, sometimes in tears. He could not wait until he could go to Anosovo, and his mother did not mind. But the travel to Anosovo became more difficult as the riverboat from Irkutsk was now going only halfway, Bratsk–Balagansk. The official version was that the riverboat could notreach Irkutsk because the level of the Angara River dropped. “The water is only a pretext.” Lidia says.

156 “When the water rises back, the riverboat will not return.” Lidia and I had this conversation in 2016; as of the last river-traveling season, the riverboat was indeed not back. “This is an unoffi- cial policy, to show people: your presence here is unwelcome, and you have to move away. It is cheaper for them to close the village.” Lidia shared the conviction spread in Anosovo, a conspiracy theory of sorts that the state’s plan was to squeeze people out of the village. The officials deny it, perhaps predictably. Leonid Petrov (57), the chief of Oblcommunenergosbyt—the service responsible for providing diesel fuel to settlements—told me that people were definitely very welcome to remain where they are:in the villages.72 Any program to move people away would be expensive, he explained. However, there was no agenda to improve life in Anosovo either—nor in any of the forty three villages powered by diesel generators. It was just too expensive either way. Once upon a time there were plans to bring central electricity there. “Really?” I asked. “In the Soviet times,” he clarified. But now, it is unfeasible. Dividing himself from his own position, Leonid explained that even dragging the electric wire or paving the all-seasonal road could work out for the economy in the long run. But season after season, the state opted to cover the immediate needs instead. Investing big sums into big projects would take decades to pay off. He flapped his hands in a trained gesture of powerless acceptance portraying his inability to do anything. Here he was, sitting in front of me in a room with the map where all those forty three villages were demarcated, a tentacle of Leviathan, while I, a tentacle of Leviathan as well, a Western-trained Muscovite anthropologist was sitting in front of him asking if he was going to do something for Anosovo he has not done yet, for whatever reason. He smiled pleasantly and asked a secretary to brings us cups of coffee. Later he accepted me in his house, and his wife Maria and I went through their photo albums, not that it helped. We were all caught in our supreme incapacity to do anything about anything. “The state’s claim on modernity can… lapse because its reach, however powerful and all-encompassing, is still lacking in comparison to

72Oblcommunenergosbyt—“District communal energy supply”—is the Irkustk subdivision of the Russian state enterprise that, among its other functions, is providing diesel fuel to more than forty three villages in the Angara River area which, like Anosovo, do not have central electricity.

157 the ontological immensity of space and time” (Kruglova, 2019, 485). If progress and unification of everything was the goal, they were unachievable either way. Leonid knew that things were coming into decrepitude in villages, and that it was a high time to renew wires, bring communications, filters, heat—you name it. But he saw this in a big partas a responsibility of locals. “For example,” Leonid said, “I came to Verkhniaia Gutara and pierced a pole with my finger. With my finger! That is to say, everything rotted, and the only thingthat holds the poles is wires stretched between them. The first strong wing will fall it all like domino. Or, to give you another example, the wires without isolation come into the façade of the house. Directly! I go to the owners of the house and tell them, ‘How is this possible? Imagine the rain getting there—you will have a short circuit, and the house will—puff, in a fire.’ Andtheyreply, ‘Nah, we’ve been living like that for ten years.’ Like, you are a chief who came here to frighten us. (Priekhal nachal’nik nas pugat’).” The expression of nonconcern in Leonid’s story struck me as “cheerfully nonchalant”—a kind of the blasé attitude. It is not a resignation to fate because the house inhabitants hoped toescape the fate. I theorize “cheerful nonchalance” in the chapter 4 with the help of my interlocutors in Anosovo. Some in Anosovo see “cheerful nonchalance” as a national Russian trait—however, the settlements that Leonid brought by way of examples going further—Verkhniaia Gupta and Nekhta—belonged to the “small people” the Tafalar. He was talking about Tofalaria. Now it is a land with three settlement. During the Soviet time, when extractive industries worked there, Tofalaria had seven settlements, where then-newcomers also lived. Leonid spoke of these settlements in particular constructing them with the tropes of a certain inability or lack of wish to care for themselves in which the class and difference in colonial positionality played a role. The competence against the supposed incompetence and lack of want or capacity to care for themselves are familiar tropes of imperial hierarchies. Leonid was hardly aware of it blaming the nonchalance, perceived or real, on the “Soviet mentality.” But he did not cast others quite in this light. “They live like that, in a normal regime. Lamps are all on because electricity is practically free. Our tariff for the people is sixty-four kopecks while the average tariff is twenty-two rubles;

158 the population (naselenie) pays approximately 2.5%. Why? Because these are the reminders of the Soviet mentality (Sovetskii mentalitet). They live like that.” Leonid added to the nonconcern bordering on negligence—of letting the wire go into the house without protective wrapping—the wastefulness of using access to the resources judiciously. Without reflecting on it, he portrayed an indigenous rural population in the tropes of laziness and spending prodigiously that what the state was giving them. “To the settlement of Hekhra I came, conducted a gathering, told them, to do the reconstruction, like you want, we need to install counters, do you have questions? The mayor said, ‘Yes, I have a question, do we really need to install counters?’ What was I just telling them for forty minutes? You see, this is a mentality. They said, we thought you will come and do everything, like a professional. I said, I can bring your stuff in order, but I cannot bring your heads in order. This is something you need to do on your own. “Or, another example. They established a diesel generator station there, built a school, and the exhaust from the station goes directly to the school. The ‘ecologists’ (ecology inspectors) will come and say, ‘What is this? You need to relocate the station.’ That means, additional expenditures. They need to relocate the station, but the valley where it stands is narrow… There needsto be transportation. And there is no transportation. In the summer, helicopters can sit there. For half a year, you can only reach the place via the helicopter. “The helicopter flight costs 67K rubles, but for the tourists and locals, the statemadeit700 rubles. They receive money from the Federal government—there is a small people there, the Tofalar. Well, for 700 rubles I, personally, with a great pleasure will come there and fish: it’s a good fishing spot to catch Thymallus.” As far as the development of Anosovo went, Leonid was of the opinion that that, indeed, was a huge oversight during the Soviet time continuing into the present. “People were uprooted and the sotsium (society) in there was not developed, right?73 There is no infrastructure, but there are

73The Russian word “sotsium” that I preserve here usually means society. However, society in Russian is also “obshchestvo.” While there might be no difference between the two notions and they could be and are often used interchangeably, I observed that the word “sotsium” was used more often by city intelligentsia, perhaps as more sociologically-sounding and therefore lending credibility to the speaker being a mark of the educated and those who want to signal their belonging to a higher class. There are however attempts, however unconvincing, to distinguish

159 resources, including forest. However, someone needs to develop that infrastructure, and the only people who can develop it right now are businesspeople. But the companies think in different scopes. I spoke to a forest harvesting businessman and asked him why they did not harvest more forest—there is a wonderful pine tree there, of a very high quality. Siberian timber has a high density because of the low temperatures. But he told me, the railroads we use, to China, South- Eastern Asia, to the Maritime territory—to the water—have a bottleneck. Only forty carriages can go through a month. They cannot send more. Whether we send timber as round logsor processed wood, it is still forty carriages. They can only produce this stuff in a distance of ninety, perhaps one hundred kilometers from the railroad, otherwise the transportation costs will eat up the profit. I always recollect that short story by Jack London… Remember it? About eggs.He wanted to bring eggs to the Yukon, as far as I recall. He bought eggs and brought them there, but they rotted. He lost his fortune, but people following him brought normal eggs. That istosay, he pioneered the road. Someone must pioneer the road to Anosovo, to build the infrastructure. Everyone will follow, use, and benefit from it.” After a series of such conversations with officials of various ranks and businesspeople in Irkutsk, Bratsk, and other locations, I knew that nobody was about to offer anything to Anosovo. Many prophesied that people in Anosovo will vacate their homes, and Anosovo will simply close as time progresses. It will die down, they said, and nothing will stop the process. Thus directly denying Anosovians’ suspicions that the official policy was waiting until the problem exemplified by Anosovo dissolved by itself, the closely intertwined in the neoliberal Russia bureaucracy and business confirmed it in essence. The doom vision was fairly depressing, and the example ofthe village of Karda, officially closed in 2008 but continuing its existence, seemed to contradict it. The government’s doom vision of the future of Anosovo no doubt had the capacity tofulfill itself. Since the village is on its way to dying, there was no reason to spend money on it any-

between the terms. These attempts as far as I observed are within individual systems of political philosophy, rather than an ethnographic or media analysis revealing the potentially- existing distinctions between how people use the two notions. For example, B.M. Kondorsky thinks sotsium is a system consisting of individuals, while obshchestvo is a totality of human activity (2014). It is not how others use the word obschestvo though. It remains to be elucidated, too, whether and how sotsium could be imagined outside of human activity, and why this distinction is necessary or beneficial, but I am bringing it here to show that there are interesting attempts at dividing the twoterms.

160 way. And because there were no basic infrastructures in place, the village could not improve its conditions. It is no wonder that the neoliberal state’s collective lapses and lacks came across to many who lives in Anosovo as utter and malicious indifference—ravnodushie—echoing the “nobody needs us” (“My nikomu ne nuzhny”) noted by anthropologists in other places as well.74 The feeling built into a sense: the faceless collective incapacities, through rumors and convictions—vehicles of affect—amount to a suspicion, a sense of abandonment, and the conviction that the planwasto evict people from Anosovo. And, while there was no such “plan,” there was no other plan either.

Chapter 4. Anosovo’s Nonexistence

4.1. “Every Beehive Is A State” “Women, it does not matter what we like to think of them, could not do their job correctly.” That was the phrase with which Ust Udinian District Mayor Dmitry Goncharov (39)greeted me at the threshold of his office. He was expecting some paper to arrive to his table, and thepaper lingered somewhere in the Ust Udinian squeaky “power corridors.” I was fresh out of a post on Facebook I was typing, in the same corridor, frantically, about some feminist issue, hoping to send it while I was within a good web connection coverage, which, in Ust Uda, was best in and around the administration building. I understood his statement as mixed sensibilities of seeking a stamp of a female co-conspiratorial approval in which a woman should be honored by the trust bestowed upon her and, simultaneously, as a gesture of putting me preemptively into place. I decided to make the conversation happen instead of detonating a random bomb along the lines “I find what you just said tobe offensive and rather misogynistic.” I was even amused. Sexism is often amusing as inatwisted way it flatters our internalized misogyny.

74Thus, in Saint Petersburg, a social worker described to Tomas Matza those with whom they work aspeoplewho “nobody needs.” (2018, 18). One would think that in Anosovo, such feelings, but in regard to self, will be especially pronounced, and in fact, I did hear plenty of confirmation to it. However, as I show below, an upbeat spirit of “cheerful nonchalance,” or not caring in one’s turn, was another prominent affective response.

161 A woman walked into the office with the necessary paper, saying, “Here is that contract you ordered.” He was signing documents, while I let my gaze meander the vast table with semi- precious gem stand for pens, windows with several plants in pots, and shelves. The plants were familiar and resilient Russian offices plants, irrepressible breed; I think we had the same onesat my Moscow school. I keep encountering the familiar things repeating: we have had it just like that, in my childhood and youth, in my parents’ life. Effectively, these things constitute a shared experience. After Dmitry was done signing, he put the pen aside and asked me, “So, how is America? How is Trump doing?” I said that America was doing okay but wrestled with its own problems. The ridiculousness of this exchange and its stereotypical rehearsals were, weirdly, fun. The mention of American problems evidently put him at ease, and after some back and forth he spontaneously turned to the theme of his passion: beekeeping. He said that his ancestors came to Siberia by foot. During the 1930s, the processes of collectivization and raskulachivanie drew the family here from Ukraine. “We have been rich peasants,” Dmitry said. “And were equated to kulaks.”75 Beekeeping was one of the family trades, and Dmitry was keen on it too. “Every hive is a separate state. Our timelines are different. For instance, while a year passes here, centuries pass in a beehive. We do not know if God exists, but for God, an hour passes while a thousand of years pass for humans. For the bees, you are like God. A lot depends on you. If you make a mistake, they can die. Therefore, you need to be prepared, have knowledge, have information. Bees are not pigs. Beekeeping is science. “Some people say that in Russia, we do not have democracy. That it is plutocracy that we have here, a power of the rich few. We are each for ourselves right now. Homo homini lupus est. By contrast, bees have a collective mind and follow principles of solidarity. Queen bee, working bees, and drones could not exist separately, without one another. Every panic event or a stress situation leads bees to work collectively. For example, I open a lid and see that the queen bee

75“Kulak” (literally: “fist”) was an assembled identity indicating a wealthy peasant possessing land and hiring others for services. Part of the Stalin’s collectivization—bringing property to state-owned and -organized enterprises— was raskulachivanie (“defistization”). Those identified as kulaks risked being murdered and were often displaced (Brown 2004, 2015). Interestingly, Goncharov still distinguished between rich peasants and kulaks: the first category is good in the post-Soviet Russia, but the second still bears negative connotations as rural exploiters that they were portrayed before and during Stalin’s campaign.

162 died. How do I see it? Bees relate it to me through their behavior. They express their distress in gestures, movement, and buzz. I just see that there is a scatter going on, a disorder of some sort. I don’t know, I just see it. Bees can speak with humans. At least, this is what I think. And any beekeeper hears if a bee flies by—to flies to bite. Just from the sound ofit.” He spoke about geneticists’ conviction that genes define everything, whereas in bees, whether an egg is going to hatch in a drone, queen bee, or a worker bee depends “on social milieu” (sot- sialnaia sreda). He spoke about bees able to do what scientists have been trying to do in vain: freezing alive bodies preserving life until the better times would come. I thought again about Svetlana Sergeyevna and the longing for the dead, of Fyodorov’s immortality project, and of those firms to the existence of which I failed to alert her. The immortality firms that preservethe material husks of us—the dead bodies in cryogenic liquid—in the wait until technology is able to resurrect us from formaldehyde and make live. Such enterprises, I suppose, comprise part of the biopolitics of the present—or necrobiopolitics not letting the people fully die preserving their bodies instead as the potentially resurrectable bodies that can become productive again. Dmitry Goncharov, another post-Fyodorov and post-Soviet dreamer—we can all be called such—offered a model where human state was a metaphor of the society of bees and vice versa. Dmitry spoke about bees capable of keeping themselves warm collectively, unlike people, without needing fire or using extracted resources, through the warmth of their bodies. “Wethink that we should keep fire, should use timber, throw timber in the oven, waste those resources, while what we really should do is to hug each other and keep it up.” He concluded this utopian vision with, “Science tells us that until the bee is going to live, the human is going to live.” Beehorses were everywhere. What kept Konstantin rooted in Anosovo and what Valentina dismissed as a tie connecting to the place—puppies, bees, horses, cows—were beings breathing side by side with humans. For Dmitry, bees contained the capacity of transformation for people and were a model of a better order of things in a collectivity whereas humans stood each ontheir own and pursued only their own benefit through the extractive practices. A hive as a metaphor for the state reminded me again of Krupskaya’s “city of the future” as the “living envelope (zhilishchnaia obolochka) of the Socialistically organized society” (1929). The kinship-building of “staying

163 with the struggle” of Donna Haraway is imagining of the humans-and-other-than-humans col- lectivities portraying the utopias far beyond the Soviet ones. It was a heteroutopia in which the fantasies of a better future—be they capitalist or socialist—had some sort of common ground with roots perhaps running as deep as the “human nature” if this is a thing at all. “Every beehive is a state” was a rich socio-political emblem. The biopolitics of the Soviet state moving Dmitry’s family to Siberia was inseparably intertwined with his effort to tend to his bees; the skills preserved through generations possibly meant survival for his family. The very possibility of my conversation with Dmirty was predicated on the state-wide displacement and movement of the masses of people, animals, and insects. A movement of masses commanded by the state was part of this biopolitical process. The materialized result of the human-and-other-than-human impacts of movement across the region, the village, a post-industrial hybrid of Anosovo, lied on the shore of the Angara River itself transmuted—industrialized and drowned by Bratsk reservoir. The settlement did not quite know how to go about becoming in the present, not to mention achieving prosperity or blending into the neoliberal bio-necropolitical order. And yet, Anosovo had the past to mine from, and it had dreams about the future. 4.2. “Settlement With Serfs”: Anosovo’S Pulsating Existence If Anosovo did not have an official or even veritable plan for its future, part of the reason why was because its presence was a bit wobbly. As I was to learn, in some topographies of the present, Anosovo did not exist at all. Igor Alexeyevich (52) was standing at the stairs of the village club surrounded by several villagers who went out of the club for a smoke. The Severlog CEO Yevgeny Voronov—who wanted to implement the polygraph tests for the workers—nominated himself for the Legislative Assem- bly of Irkutsk District (Zakonodatel’noie sobranie Irkutskoi oblasti). Voronov came to the village, as he rarely did, to solicit the villagers’ support in the election. In exchange, he promised the road—maybe not to pave it, the district budget clearly did not have such money, but to level it out, at least, with the machines that the firm had. Voronov was sitting at the stage at a table shifting while villagers spoke their concerns tohim

164 and the Court representative—a presentable lawyer—as well as to other regional officials. The conversation was rather charged. Voronov’s electoral team consisted mostly of young women wearing business costumes and heels. Women gripped folders to white knuckles. I later saw one of these young women in the restaurant—more like eatery—at the town of Balagansk that the team selected as some sort of a headquarter of the campaign. Women—and two or three young men—were sitting around the table with various documents counting budget and planning the next advancements. The woman recognized me, and we had a short conversation. She said, unprompted, “We understand in these backward villages (dremuchie derevni), people are depressed. We are not offended they yelled at us because we understand that the population (naselenie) there has a lot of issues.” Daria Georgievna (61) perhaps did not yell but spoke to Voronov in a very loud and demanding voice. Her manner of speaking unnerved many in Anosovo and beyond. It was her wont, as she had to insist on many occasions, to be direct in her expressions. She was categorical in her statements, the way she carried herself, and if someone was displeased with this, she would say, “I cannot do anything about it; this is just how I am.” My grandmother would definitely recognize her as being in possession of that enigmatic “Siberian character” she herself had, I thought. I was likewise reminded of Svetlana Sergeyevna never slow to dart a curt word. At the gathering, Daria Georgievna demanded the answer to the question, “When will we have our broken road (razbitaia doroga) mended?” She wanted the answer there and then (zdes’ i seichas), not anywhere else and certainly not tomorrow. Anosovo’s road used to be maintained as recently as 2003. The memory of benefits it brought was fresh in collective memory. “You could see in a car, and in a blink be in a city,” as Margarita Maleyeva once put it. Accordingly, the demand to rebuild the “BAM” was loud and insistent. The BAM was how villagers jokingly called their road. The “BAM,” or Baikal–Amur Mainline,a decades-long Soviet construction, was an ambitious project of the Soviet industrialization. Ap- plied to the local road, the “BAM” was an absurd, willingly inadequate trope that pointed at the all the feelings and expectations invested into the road in Anosovo. The BAM, a microcosm in itself, is a railroad going through 4,287 kilometers (~2,664 miles) piercing the distance from Tayshet,

165 Eastern Siberia, to Sovetskaya Gavan, Khabarovsk Krai. Its construction absorbed the enormous amounts of labor.76 Anosovians called their road “BAM” ironically referencing all the labor, complicated logistics, capital, effort, heroic tales, untold stories, and downright horrors that wentinto the construction of the real, prototype BAM. Even as calling the Anosovo road “BAM” grew in daily speech, it rarely failed to amuse my interlocutors, which was evident in intonation. “How will you go?”—“I’ll travel the BAM.” [Poedu po BAMu]. Voronov, hearing the BAM complaints, gave the Marie Antoinette style line musing aloud as to why cannot Anosovians use a helicopter if the matters with the road were as bad as they insisted. At that point, the audience exploded. In a royal gesture, then, Voronov suggested his own helicopter to use—and ordered right here to one of his aids to give the villagers access to his helicopter stationed in Bratsk. The villagers were to call the aid at any moment and demand the helicopter. (Apparently, Voronov did want to be elected badly). The offer was rejected right there though: Daria Georgievna, surrounded by other womenand clearly supported by them, inquired severely, in a voice that did not promise any mercy, “What if I am dying already? What if I need to get to the hospital right now?” More promises in response. I supported her too, in my mind: the travel of the helicopter from Bratsk would likely take two to four hours, provided the pilot would be there at any given moment. Besides, the helicopter was not going to replace the road—the road was used to deliver goods to the village. At the stairs of that club, Voronov’s aid Igor Alexeyevich continued the conversation with the electorate as Voronov was still inside answering questions and shifting on his chair. “You should realize that we cannot immediately fix the problems,” Igor Alexeyevich went on explaining the situation to several villagers around him. I joined the cirle. “That, we realize.” “Voronov cannot, right now, give you much—that would be a voter bribery. This law is so rigid, a sleezy law… Not before the election.” “We realize that. But when?” 76In the year of completion, 1984, the BAM provided employment for more than one hundred thousand of people of over 108 ethnicities (natsional’nosti) (Krylov, 2019).

166 “Maybe after the election. You know, I like this saying—Voronov is not the sun, he willnot warm everyone.” “Understood.” “But you need to realize that the businesspeople will not fix the road. Some statesperson should do it. Somebody smart and knowing your situation,” He continued to hint. “Small issues— like one hundred thousand, fifty thousand, ten thousand rubles—are the issues solvable onthe level of entrepreneurship. But, if we are talking about the governmental approach (gosudarstvennyi podkhod), nobody among the businesspeople in Irkutsk will build these roads. This is a state- level issue no matter how badly a businessman wants to solve it. And the state doeshavere- sources. It has money to allocate for the pavement of your road, the road that leads to Anosovo, specifically.” “But no one does anything.” “Yes, this is why you need your candidate in the Legislative Assembly.” The villagers continued smoking looking at the aid. The aid did not smoke. Heprobably went here simply to escape the heated atmosphere in the club building, or, perhaps, he had an assignment from Voronov to continue the agitation outside while Voronov promised the same thing inside. “According to cadaster documents, there is no settlement here at all. There is forest here, according to cadaster documents. There is no village, according to those maps. No Anosovo. In the forestry (leskhoz) we were assigned this land—not land, but a timber harvesting area—and we discovered, to our amazement, that this is not all forest but a settlement, like, with serfs (posyolok s krepostnymy)!” He emitted a kind of a soundless laughter that evidently was connected to the recollection of how amused Voronov and himself were at this discovery. “Yes, in our documentation, there is no settlement here,” He continued. “Anosovo does not exist. What exists here is forest. I told Voronov, “Yevgeny Olegovich, you are a nobleman now (dvoryanin).” He smirked again. As he was not particularly supported in this amusement by people who

167 surrounded him, or maybe simply because the joke can only be funny so many times, he turned serious and said, “Your mayor needs to announce the limits of the settlement and pass them onto the cadaster office. Cadaster office will divide the land, and Yevgeny Olegovich will have torefuse this plot. People cannot privatize their houses until the cadaster office recognizes that there isa settlement here.” Not only were people in Anosovo to get the opportunity to privatize their houses, but Voronov himself, according to his aid, was ready to take upon himself the expenditures. “Even so?” I asked. “Of course! He says: you only demarcate the settlement.” In his conviction that the villagers supposedly did not demarcate their settlement, Igor An- dreyevich echoed closely the chief of Oblcommunenergosbyt Leonid Petrovich’s sentiments. Ad- mittedly, this conviction was wrong. The limits of the settlement were properly announcedand documented by the Saint Petersburg Institute of Urbanism in 2004. The Institute of Urbanism not only demarcated the village but came out with a plan of development for Anosovo and received money for this work. The Institute of Urbanism is a former influential city-planning bureau Giprogor founded in 1929.77 In recent years, the Institute was tasked with creating maps of federal significance. On the basis of these maps, citizens were supposed to be able to privatize their houses. Anosovo was one of the spots for which the Institute did the work. The Institute created a plan for the development of Anosovo. Once upon a time, the Institution’s developmental plans were solid: money would flow, and a planned settlement will rise. But by the time the institution came to Anosovo, its supreme power waned. Unlike the Institute’s plans of the Soviet past, its post-Soviet plan for Anosovo was not brought to life. What is more disturbing though, is that an apparent miscommunication between the Institution and regional power apparatus led to Anosovo being overlooked on the regional cadaster maps. The map that the Institute of Urbanism created was entitled “Rules of the land usageandde- velopment of the Anosovian Municipal Unit of the Ust Udinian Rayon of Irkutsk District.” The

77Giprogor—an abbreviation of the first slogans of the phrase “State institute of cities’ planning” (“Gosudarstvennyi institut proektirovania gorodov”). The Institute created the plans of development for Lipetsk, subdistrict centers of Briansk and Leningrad (now Saint Petersburg) Districts. Among cities that the Institute planned and created there were cities built from scratch, including Krasnokamsk and Kirovo-Chepetsk.

168 Figure 53. The plan of the Institution of the Urbanism for Anosovo, courtesy of Anosovian archives. The “recreational zones” and “zones of social and business-construction” are marked in the plan among other locations. plan presupposed the transformation of the mooring into a “hovercraft territory.” This imaginary “territory” looked particularly utopian given the known history of two last hovercrafts in Anosovo—one, privately owned, perished in fire ignited likely by someone in Anosovo, another, gifted by a benefactor, was sold for lack of fuel and technicians that would allow tokeepit.

169 When I asked questions about the map, people in the Anosovo’s administration shrugged shoulders. Apparently, the Institute representatives, planners, came without inquiring much about the life of the village and lined everything up on a map in a manner that arised irritation and laughter so unrealistic, utopian, and out-of-sight it appeared to some. This plan was unset- tling, as if there was a real possibility to materialize it, but something did not work properly, and so nothing came out of it. The plan was a bit too glorious, too urbane. The future village appeared something of a hip city neighborhood standing on its own. Considering that architec- turally ordered places generate ways of being in the city and therefore identities, the modern village dwellers who were supposed to inhabit that village were engaged in markedly different pursuits from the villagers currently present. For me, there was a certain hauntedness to the Saint Petersburg project, since their vision of the future was a continuation of the efforts of the Soviet planners. The image of future that the project portrayed was radical in terms of howlittle it took socio-economic realities of the place into account. As I mentioned in the Introduction, a certain logic behind planning of the city in the Soviet times expressed itself in a number of consitutive enterprises from dom kulturi (“house of culture”) to the cinema theater. The current Russian architects were adhering to the urban planning logic that was undeniably different. The cinema theaters were hastily remade into 3-D movie theaters, malls, or demolished; supermarkets replaced rows of Soviet stores, and the Orthodox church, a new attraction of the neighborhood, often dominates the landscape. The heterotopia thatarised from the map, or heteroutopia, to be more precise, built upon the Soviet-time planning but developed it into something different, new, unheard of. But, at the same time, the bureaucratic and administrative consequences of this planning were that people were further disenfranchized by having their claims to land put further into question due to some apparent miscommunication. In this heteroustopia, the territorialities were overlapping: a fantastic one, a real one, imaginary one, the past, Soviet, utopia, serving as a “basis” for a “superstructure” of the contemporary utopia, all together producing something livable, inhabitable, and at the same time, living up and failing to live up to the plans, dreams, and expectations. The new plan of Anosovo barely offered a superfluous commentary on how Anosovowas

170 conceived of by the Soviet planners. The Soviet ideas of the cities followed the rules of the imperial capitols for which, as Slezkine notes, the governing principles were “symmetry and legibility” (2017, 586).78 The cities they were supposed to embody and freeze, in stone and concrete, intothe monumental expression of power; all the Soviet architecture in this sense was an iconography of Socialist power and future, inhabitable by the new Soviet person. The new plan of Anosovo was supposed to produce different identities, except foritdidnot offer any tangible or even alluring possibility of it. The Institute created a plan itknewwasnot going to be implemented for people it barely paid attention to and who did not care for this plan precisely because it was unreal. What people did care about is being properly demarcated. Ironically, it was precisely that was not given to them. The mayor wrote to every agency there was. The Prosecutor’s Office requested by theMayor replied that the settlement needs to sue the cartographers as to why their map was nottaken into account as the forest recourses map were drawn. The settlement did not have resources to sue. The Mayor sent the letter to the Forest Ministry of the Russian Federation. TheMinistry answered that they, on their part, see no obstacle why the settlement cannot be recognized as such, which, the Ministry suggested, needs to be done at the regional level. “The regional level” reported that they have their maps in their archives already. Why Anosovo fell in between maps, why was not it on cadaster maps, remains a question probably answered with “oversight” or “negligence” or “gaps in the intersecting areas of influence of a different state institutions.” Inthe public cadaster maps, accessible on the web, Anosovo is properly demarcated. Speaking about it years later, the Mayor waved his hand in a gesture of “cheerful nonchalance”: “Ah, it will dissolve by itself. (Samo rassosyotsia).” The experience of recognizing the slow rotation of the state machine served him and thousands of other Russian officials pretty well. The most efficient strategy in their opinions was to let things dissipate. Things did resolve themselves provided they were not disturbed too much. The ultimate efficiency for running around and making excessive body movements (telodvizheniia) was not proven by the practice.

78Slezkine’s implicit argument is that the “House of Government” on Bersenev embankment of Moskva River was a model of the ideal city, of sorts, and I have been building this work on the premise that a settlement around a lespromkhoz was a tiny model of the Socialist “city Iof the future.”

171 Figure 54. Anosovo in the public cadaster maps of Rosreiestr (“Russian Registry,” a Federal Ser- vice of Registration, Cadaster, and Cartography). Yet, in the Irkutsk cadaster map, Anosovo does not exist.

While one could easily detect Anosovo on federal cadastre maps, Anosovo was not on forestry cadaster maps. Moreover, Anosovo was only one of many hapless Russian settlements who were

172 victims of an apparent mistake or oversight. The ministries do not even have a consensus regarding how many such cases they recognize. Thus, according to the Federal Agency of the Forest Enterprise (Rosleskhoz), there are 263 thousand instances of intersections of overlapping territo- riealities where land that belongs to the settlement is demarcated as the forest land. But, according to the Russian Registry (Rosreiestr), there are 8,674 cases of the intersection of the landscape land with the land of the settlements.79 Despite that the problem is of the state, it is nevertheless supposed that the owners of such plots should solve their problem individually.80 I imagine Zi- naida Vasilievna, Svetlana Sergeyevna, Alevtina, Irina, or anyone I know in Anosovo embarking on such a task, all while divided from the paved road by the eighty kilometers (approximately fifty miles) of the road unpaved. This is unrealistic, so the villagers solve this problem justlike the mayor: by nonchalantly denying its urgency or importance. “It will dissolve.” (Rassosyotsia). And, time and again, it does. Voronov wanted to be elected, and elected he was. In several months after the meeting, no road leveling was forthcoming. I think a brief ironing of roads was done, within Anosovo. But he was running on the promise to fix the road. That was the main selling point of the campaign, but Voronov knew that promises dissolve quicker than anything. To the best of my knowledge, no villager ever used the generous offer to call for Voronov’s helicopter, either. If they ever needed it, they figured out how to get by without“perebilis’” it( ). 4.3. The Cross-Marked Border The demarcating of the settlement was the work taken seriously enough in Anosovo. Ayear prior to Voronov’s descant, the Mayor demarcated the settlement symbolically. The marks of the visions of Anosovo’s future belonged not only to language, public, or personal imaginaries but also found expressions in various initiatives. One of such initiatives, establishment of the cross at the entrance to the village from the road, was the mayor Dmitry Bodrov’s (60) idea. He ordered the cross and the sign to carpenter Nikolay Starostin paying with his own money as the village

79Website леснаяамнистия.рф [forestamnesty.rf ] is devoted to the law initiatives designed to fix the problem. (http://xn--80aanoankfd9agm7nh.xn--p1ai/). 80As Irkutsk real estate experts remarked, “Citizen who bought the land lawfully (na zakonnikh osnovani- iakh) but learned that the land is in the borders of the land fond, will have to solve this problem independently. This inconsistency will not resolve itself.” (https://irk.sibdom.ru/journal/1774/?fbclid=IwAR28rV_ 8SUzoQ9RkgSMryVPgWLnxyzmQ5V7Q3d6TXqvi2FfvMvIc6EAJhFA).

173 Figure 55. Erecting the cross at the entrance to Anosovo on the June 24th, 2016.

budget did not have room for such expenditures. The sign read “Anosovo,” and, on the reverse, “Fare you well.” “I am an atheist,” says Bodrov. “That is how we were brought up. But placing border crosses [mezhevye kresty] at the borders of Russian settlements is an old tradition. This tradition is,I think, beautiful, and it even became somewhat fashionable.” In his view, the cross demarcated Anosovo as a Russian place and also a place that keeps up with the vogues of the times. Organized by Bodrov, a group of men gathered to establish the cross. He sponsored them with beer. I observed people gathering willingly, even if not exactly brimming with enthusiasm. Their willingness impressed me. I expected that the initiative coming from the state represented by the village administration requiring exertion will be met with skepticism and reluctance. “People miss a great project,” declared Bodrov. He theorized that, even though the project of establishing of the cross required hard labor, the effort yielded immediate results, and that is why people readily answered to the call. I reminded him that the effort was immediately rewarded with beer, too. He rejected my consideration declaring that people “in Russia” (as if I was a foreigner) miss the grand projects of the (Soviet) past. In Bodrov’s universe, such projects, even though they

174 entail hardships, were something people missed. The ghost of the Soviet “grand constructions” appeared to accompany the process of the erection of the cross the way the ghost of the “BAM” haunted the local road. “For many, the Soviet time was a time of hardships,” continued Bodrov. “But a greater common good, grand Communist visions, were worth sacrifices.” In this post- Soviet apologetics, Bodrov was certainly not alone. The sacrificial discourse tends to resurface as people analyze the Soviet past.81 The cross was put in a huge specifically constructed pot and balanced with boulders. Several workers continued ensuring the stability of the cross by searching boulders around, ungluing them out of the road clay, and putting them in a pot. Bodrov’s ideas were echoed by another participant of the project—Vasily Petrov (58). As men sat at the petrified hip of clay to have

81In the Russian language, “zhertva” means at once “victim” and “sacrifice.” In recent years, sacrificial discourse resurfaces in connection to the apology of Stalinism. Thus, the “Russian News Agency” of the “Russian Societal Movement ‘Vozroahdenie’ [‘Resurrection’],” states, “Stalin’s repressions were a necessary cleansing of the country from parasites.” (Romanov, 2015). The “Agency” purportedly explains how Stalinist victims were either necessary or otherwise justified. For example, they sort out victims as “professionally incompetent persons,” “people who belong to the categories of the artists, writers, or architects most of whom traditionally (sic) did not distinguish themselves with any outstanding talent, artistic or expressive abilities.” The author comes up with thirteen categories of people expendable, one wayorthe other (Romanov, 2015). “Boris Solovyov,” on the same website, taps into the “necessary sacrifice” discourse in 2019: “Stalin did not conduct repressions. He exterminated enemies and betrayers of Russia.” He is accusing “democrats” of denialism of the “necessity and inevitability of the ‘repressions’ of the 1930s.” (2019). (The aforementioned “authors” contributed one article to the website each; other materials of the sorts gounsigned, like the editorial titled “‘Victims of Stalin’s Repressions’: Who were they, those innocent people, in reality?”). Thus, the one-time revolutionary discourse of a necessary sacrifice grew into the discourse of necessitating, in Stalinist imaginaries, the victims of Stalinist purges. The ideological purchase of Stalinism, its psychotic political affect, demands the employment of psychological mechanisms such as denial, rationalization, and minimization; it widely uses dehumanization as a trope. The central claim of Stalinism is casting zhertvy (victims) as sacrificial, beneficial, inevitable, and necessary (and also fewer than others—“democrats”—would think). Sacrificial moments are strong in the Russian culture, as evidenced by contemporary literature. Thus, Minkova (2018) finds self-sacrificial motifs in Prilepin’s novel San’ka; it is a “self-sacrifice in the service of astronger,more self-assertive Russia” (122). The discourse of sacrifice stands in the foundation of the Communist thought and is rooted in Christianity asa curious expansion of it. Thus, in the dispute with Metropolitan A.I. Vvdedensky “Christianity or Communism?,” Lunacharsky said: “I was told how during the general Shkuro’s attack on the Caucasus (during the Civil War—V.O.), they arrested a communist. In the camp of these enemies surrounding him and ready to torture him to know if she was a Bolshevik, he admitted that he was a Bolshevik and began, in most energetic expressions, to castigate them uncovering their true essence, and flung them into such a rage that they immediately tore him to pieces. Wasit rational? It was rational because everyone of us must stand at the point of view that we must be ready for every sacrifice to prove that we regard our common cause above our own life, because only in this case, if a certain collective places its cause over lives of separate members, it can be assured in victory. From this point of view, sacrifice is a very important agitational example.” (1926). In other text, Lunacharsky specifies that “The righteous could never understand that ‘love asks for exculpating sacrifices,’ and not merely from one’s own side—this the righteous will fathom—but making the sacrifice of others, as it is happening in every cruel battle.” (1924; Lunacharsky quotesfrom Nikolay Nekrasov’s poem—V.O.).

175 a smoke break, Vasily added to the argument, “Putin would be better off if he followed Stalin directly. This is how: I would, on my character, shoot everyone disagreeing with Putinina ditch,” Vasily said rolling a samokrutka and lighting it up. Bodrov emitted a curt laugh and said, “Really, Vasily Sergeyevich?” But Vasily Sergeyevich did not support the laughter. He spat to the ground, emitted a cloud of smoke, and said, “Absolutely.” As workers continued filling a cross pot with boulders, they made further references tothe Soviet-time times. “Hold the cross.”—“I am holding.”—“Dammit, Dmitry Alexeyevich (Bodrov— V.O.), you gave us a construction of the century project [stroika veka] right here.”—“Go on, comrades, everyone should go to the Komsomol construction sites [Vse na Komsomolskie stroiki]!” Related to a local cross, these markings of (national? Post-Soviet?) belonging were made in jest, but their joking manner did not deny nor negate the nostalgic tinge and “positive” meaning. When men surrounded the cross with boulders for balance so that it stood straight, they took a step aside observing the results of their work and evidently enjoying it. But the mood was not quite of celebration. Vasily Petrov suggested that these monuments will fall under the load of snow. Grigory Kuznetsov objected, “By winter, they will be burned down.” He was referring to the suspected arsons in the recent history of Anosovo which devoured a lot of precious things and centers of social life: the building of the club (twice!), the old building of administration, together with the archive and computers, the post, and private possessions too, including the last private hovercraft in Anosovo.82 The arsonists, presumably, were those living in Anosovo themselves. The closest village,of Atalanka, is ~25 miles via the road no better than the one connecting Anosovo to Muia. Despite such calamities befalling them, Anosovians took things lightly, or so it seemed. It appeared to me that they were nonchalant about it. I took it that the evocation of the calamities served like a reverse prediction: because such prophecy was uttered, it was not meant to fulfill itself. Itwas an expression of hope that the fire would not consume the cross—while expressing the certainty that it would. 82The owner of the hovercraft was almost always available, for a certain sum, to deliver the people inneedto the city for urgent callings. The owner of the hovercraft left it on the shore over one night only to discover, inthe morning, the scorched skeleton of his vehicle.

176 Indeed, contrary to skeptical predictions, four years later, the cross still stands. The establishment of the cross was unmistakably a hopeful and future-bound endeavor, as it meant that Anosovo was there not to dissipate but, to the contrary, to re-demarcate its borders. The sign and the cross brought a border to Anosovo. The cross rooted the place in time, marking the spaceas having something to deal with the Orthodox Christianity that enjoyed the rise in the post-Soviet years.83 The cross and the sign was more than demarcating of “a spatial limit”(Gordillo, 2014, 61) in a performative defeat of the “out-of-way-ness” of the place (Tsing, 1993). It was an act of tying together the disjointed time. Bodrov’s referencing of his atheism, “tradition,” and Russianness conveyed that even if the Anosovo’s cross was, in a sense, a symbol of religious renaissance, it is better read as a symbol of national belonging which naturalizes Russian ethnicity. The cross’s affective power was rooted not in religion, but rather in the context of local and national identity. The cross became an arbitrary placeholder of a state symbol. It was a symbol used by local authorities to establish and maintain a state continuity. In a conversation with me, Bodrov remarked that it would be great to adorn the cross with the image of Saint Georgiy slaying the serpent, or Babr holding a sable in its teeth.84 But because these images were difficult to create, the cross would do for now, he summarized. The people in Anosovo built the sign that demarcated the territory as an inhabited placethat was also a part of the Russian state. In this sense, the reclamation of the land has been ongoing. The colonization has not happened “once,” nor it is a state of affairs. Rather, the tensionsare ongoing. The cross and the sign were attempts to defeat, to counter-balance and overrunthe

83Crosses, churches, other Christian constructions populated the Russian landscape as various Christian denomi- nations, and the Russian Orthodox Church in particular, rose to the producers of ideological meanings after decades of state-imposed atheism. In different parts of Russia, these religious constructions are interspersed with other reli- gions’ sacral places. In Siberia, other religious symbols prominent in the landscape include Gasar’s pillars and other signs and constructions—gazebos, fireplaces, trees, and benches—consecrated to the indigenous epos and believes, Buddhism, and/or shamanism, in various combinations. 84Saint Georgiy slaying the dragon is another popular figure in the post-Soviet times: he is in the Moscow coat of arms. The animal with a difficult provenance called “Babr” is a symbol of the city of Irkutsk and IrkutskOblast. Babr represents a long-standing enigma and is an object of many speculations because “[o]n first glance the animal looks as if it might be a large member of the mustelidae (or weasel) family. It is obviously carnivorous since it has a dead sable in its mouth. However, it looks quite different from a wolverine or badger. The babr is black with a head and body that look almost feline; its feet appear to be webbed, and it has a broad flattened tail.” (Platoff, 2009, 22).

177 temporality, ephemerality, and transience of the settlement in the place. The sign can bereadas an object that makes Anosovo’s delineation more “real,” changing it into a settlement that has a sign with its toponym at the entrance, not unlike other settlements.

Okay, maybe. This could be so. But, wait a minute. How do I analyze this Vasily Sergeyevich’s readiness to shoot Putin’s opposition in a ditch? How do I write it into the fabrics of the past, present, and the future, of Anosovo and the world? I could not let it slip. How to understand the contempt of this expression in its casualness and matter-of-factness? It could be analyzed from the standpoint of masculinity and nonchalance. Would that understanding that the rural places in the USA vote “conservative” help? Or the parallel is too far-fetched? Most importantly, what does it tell us about the “post-Soviet subjectivities”? And affect? I was more surprised than anything to hear it. Mybody did not react to this threat. But I imagine it would, in other circumstances. Where the fulfillment of it is less theoretical and more plausible. I am reminded of Elena’s story in Ust Baley, recanting the family history of dissent, real or imaginary, with her grandfather shot, grandmother beaten, and generations suffering thereafter, with minimal or no acknowledgement from the state ofthese sufferings. And here Vasily Petrov sat, smoking, the same age she was, on a summer day, seemingly ready to reproduce a circle of violence that devastated others—and nonchalantly pay it no mind. 4.4. “It Is In Our Mentality”: Nonchalance, Pofigism, Carelessness, And Indifference (Ravnodushie) The theme of nonchalance resurfaced throughout this work. Nonchalance bordering oncare- lessness met expression in disregard to danger of which Leonid Petrov accused the post-Soviet mentality broadly, but, characteristically, on the example of the indigenous population. Some- times the nonchalance was demonstrated by the representatives of power themselves, like it was in the case of Anosovian mayor refusing to be bothered, beyond a certain threshold of efforts, about Anosovo falling in-between of different types of cadaster maps that made the privatization of houses impossible thirty years after the turn to the market economy that included privatization as a key element. There were other examples that did not make it into this work: a previous mayor did not appear to the courts after a conflict involving the money and replacing the poles in the village, in what may be called an apparent expression of nonchalance, which ultimately led

178 the village to debt. Nonchalance is a feature that some in Anosovo themselves readily theorize as a feature of the national character, a feature marked by both Siberianness and Russianness. Nonchalance arises in the situation that is perceived, as I already highlighted, as utter and malicious indifference (ravnodushie). The lack of care for Anosovo and its inhabitants fromthe outside world, government, state, and institutions feeds the idea that Anosovo was a temporary settlement from the year of relocation. The constructors of the Bratsk station anddamdidnot care for preserving of the initial way of living, proclaimed, in the voice of their poets, like Dobron- ravov and Grebennikov (1964), the break from the old world. The new neoliberal times brought the dissolution of the key city-forming enterprise like lespromkhoz together with all the social infrastructure including the medical center. But some Anosovians will not leave their settlement finding living in the city very inconvenient. Nor do Anosovians cast themselves solely as victims of circumstances, offering a range of affective responses instead, and nonchalance—caring less or not at all—is a prominent one. 4.5. Nonchalance Of Traveling The Ice A group of his family and friends, overloading a single motorbike, burst into all directions when he hit a pothole on the frozen Angara River. “What happened?” I asked, but for Valery (54), the event ended where it began for me. “Nothing happened,” he cheerfully responded. “Everyone returned home wet.” Every year the Angara River claims lives in Anosovo, during summer and winter alike. Valery knows that he and his family were in mortal danger: that is what makes the story hilarious to tell. Valery’s disregard of danger, affected or natural, struck me as nonchalant. There couldbea moment of bravado in it, but the only reflection of danger was that the story was being told. The moment that Valery described demanded a “thick description” of the anthropological omniscient knowledge that I once again found difficult to achieve. “‘Thick’ presumes thatas ethnographers—our bodies as tools, our words as cultural translations of what these tools have collected—we can know more than we should” (Reese, 2019). Presented with a scene of cold- blooded amusement, I am deeply unsure if I can trust my instincts to know what is dangerous and what is not.

179 Figure 56. Conversations about ethos (mentalnost’) in Anosovo happen in the kitchens, zimovies (winter barns), and at the benches near houses.

Anosovians know about this “nonchalance.” I keep calling it that; there is no word in Russian that nonchalance would precisely translate to. Sergey Kluyev would readily frame to me the attitude theoretically: “Russian disregard of danger (prezrenie k opasnosti) has been long noted by the Russians themselves and the outside world. It is in our mentality (ethos; mental’nost’).” Sergey also called Valery’s attitude to the danger “veseloye… razgildiaistvo” (cheerful carelessness). The pause that I marked with three dots was to signify that he purportedly chosea milder synonym to raspizdiaistvo, an obscene word that I heard far more often than its literary version. Raspizdiaistvo has the root cunt and refers to the state of disorganization and rampant irre- sponsibility. The word is often used as a general evaluation and a critique of the order ofthings. Razgildiaistvo, a literary word, is also more “good-humored”; its mood is mischievous rather than

180 downright neglectful and irresponsible, unlike in “raspizdiaistrvo.” Both words name a type of behavior that is largely indifferent to an outcome of one’s actions. Both words are disapproving, although in different degrees, ways to call someone’s actions or attitude. To utter suchwords would be a moral judgement, a suggestion aiming at defining a character. “Take these words, ‘avos” and ‘nebos”,” Sergey continued his explanations. “Somehow we know that everything is going to sort out by itself. We refuse to be bothered, decline to sweat small things. It is in our Siberian character, Siberian ethos.” “Avos’ da nebos’” are two elusive twin notions of the Russian language and culture alluding to the reliance on things miraculously aligning by themselves. It is the fate, chance, or god that is the acting subject in the subjectless phrase like “avos’ proneset”—“Let us hope that [it] will pass us.” “Avos”’ and “nebos”’ belong to the mundane register of the language and are marked “razg[ovornoe]” (colloquial) in dictionaries. They are the linguistic vehicles of nonchalance; ready linguistic and cultural categories one can use to mark and bolster one’s stoic and unbothered attitude. The affective attitude of nonchalance is connoted by and transmitted in a variety ofexpres- sions. According to Sergey, words that marked nonchalance included expletives “pokhui,” “do pizdy,” and such, all roughly translated as “I do not give a fuck” but variously alluding to male and female genitalia. “Take ‘pofigu,’ a milder version of ‘pokhui,’” Serguey suggested (the attitude of not giving a fuck). “From ‘pofig,’ the word ‘pofigism’ sprung, like an attitude (otnoshenie) in general.” Sergey developed the idea that pofigism was a characteristic attitude that older generations criticized in young people in the 1990s–2000s. “They felt like youth lacked personal responsibility and had a general nihilistic outlook on life,” he said. Kluyev’s theory was that the older generations’ experiences conditioned them to expect tangible rewards for certain behaviors, but for the “post-Soviet” generations, expectations of rewards for the same behavior were unrealistic because the whole system was no longer in place. People were not in the same position anymore. Indeed, anthropologist Serguei Oushakine was remarked before that short-term achievements in the post-Soviet realities failed to translate into the sense of life-long accomplishment as the

181 new economies of everydayness came into being (2009, 26). If we agree with this feeling—for others felt differently, excited for the future that contained packed opportunities—pending such convertibility, the attitude of pofigism, or nonchalance, apathy, and a matter-of-fact dismissal of things, emerged as a reasonable response. The previous social contracts did not work, and the emergent contracts sidelined those who were from the rural or urban-outskirts neighborhoods and not already in possession of resources and skills. Sergey Kluyev saw such nonchalance as an entirely warranted response and also something more than that. He spoke of it admiringly. For him, nonchalance was a uniquely Russian and Siberian trait deserving of recognition and appreciation (“Russian disregard to danger,” a characteristic of “Siberian character / ethnos”). Risk-taking, contempt to hardships, and a readiness to overcome difficulties were adjacent such nonchalance. Such nonchalance was cheerful, triumphant, buoyant, effervescent, as people, in his view, disdained dangers cheerfully, were care- free. While Sergey appreciated this kind of dismissive attitude, others, also getting at it, inmy view, lamented that people would not care for their lives well enough. Nikolay liked to recall in conversations a chain of injuries and premature deaths he witnessed. “Life here is often shorter than it should be,” He remarked. “When you are young, you know, you think that you will live forever.” Nikolay buried his adult son about ten years ago. After his son died, Nikolay, who used to love company and feasts, adopted a strict dry law. “And you know what is fascinating? When I had vodka on my table, day and night, I had so many friends! But now, no one comes to me. Suddenly, everyone is busy.” Nikolay concentrated on growing tobacco that proliferated in his backyard enmeshed with poppy flowers. Neighbors expressed concern that poppy flowers will arise the interest of authorities— much as Anosovo seemed to be beyond supervision. To these concerns Nikolay replied, “Who cares? I never sow those poppies.” “Who will listen to what you have to say, Nikolay?” Neighbors objected. But he dismissed concerns, and poppies continue to flourish. In my eyes, he is respond-

182 ing to warnings with the same attitude, that I dubbed here nonchalance, that he reproached the people getting themselves injured because of carelessness. (“You think that you will live forever”). Examples of nonchalance can be multiplied. Discussing Valery’s adventure around the pothole, I talked to Oleg who, it was remarked, was a visible example that the ice was safe to travel. The conviction ran that traveling ice is safe “when Oleg the water-truck driver goes acrossthe river.” “How does Oleg know?” I ask. “Well, he just knows.” Laughter. The explanation is once again not forthcoming. I suggest that Oleg comes by this knowledge by glancing at the river. I fantasize that he casts a glimpse at the river and instantaneously realizes, “It is time.” Or maybe he makes a series of inquiries examining how ice looks, how it sounds, noticing tempo with which ice deepens in the outside temperatures. My interlocutor hints, mainly through smiles and gestures, that Oleg is the first to take the risk because heis restless and needs to go places where others have no business going. Whichever way Oleg comes by his knowledge, it is rather reliable since his living example proves, visually, for the village, that the ice is indeed travelable. I had a conversation with Oleg and asked him how he knows when the ice is safe to pass, that it can carry a vehicle. How does one know when one can go and not crush? Oleg smiles and shrugs his shoulders. The silence is open to interpretations. I imagine Oleg bracing for a risk—this is unnecessary, to me, for no one lives on the other shore of the Angara River across Anosovo for many kilometers around. Indeed, there is no specific business driving him there. But, on the other hand, why not go? Imarkthis in-between state as nonchalance, a disregard to danger. Oleg tells me that the travel is dictated by not much but a certain sense of danger. He is curious: will he make it there and back again safe or not. This kind of gamble is baffling to me. The stakes are high, and there is no tangible reward. In the eyes of others, his tripthere and back again does not look particularly heroic or deserving of a special respect. But it does prove to be useful for the community: when Oleg conducts his travel, others know it is safe. Thus, nonchalance of a community member brings unexpected benefits for everyone—not thatit should. This appears to be one of the unintended benefits of an attitude that one may callreckless.

183 For myself, I theorize that nonchalance springs in conditions of indeterminacy (it is unclear when the ice is safe), as a way to deal with uncertainty (by proving that the ice is travelable). I now have two examples of “nonchalance” playing out in stories: Valery’s family bursting around pothole, with Valery being amused about it, and Oleg traveling ice curious if it is going to endure him, deciding, it may.

Chapter 5. Kardinian Dreamers

Rumors about Karda in Anosovo are abundant and contradictory. Some people say that there are pigs so fat they can barely move and lie in the middle of every street, and chickens walk around unafraid of dogs and passersby because dogs are well-fed and well-trained, and passersby, nonexistent. Some say, there are only two individuals living in Karda. Others insist that the Kardinian population consists of ten and even more people. Ever since Karda was formally closed, in 2008, and the state relocated Kardinians to the towns of Ust Uda and Ust Ilimsk, much of the communication with Karda ceased. Few Anosovians have ever been to Karda: “What is to do there?” (“Kogo tam delat’?”).85 In 2016, I glided down the Angara River in a riverboat to Anosovo and passed the village of Karda. The village of Karda used to sit high on the hill. One could not see Karda from theriverboat because the settlement hid in a gulf. The riverboat used to go into the gulf and stop therefor several minutes. Now the riverboat passes Karda without stopping. I saw two men approaching the riverboat on a boat. The water sparked, dropping from a pair of oars. A passenger ofthe riverboat jumped into the boat, someone threw him his bag, and the boat departed to Karda. As I observed their boat stirring back to Karda, I asked a crewman of the riverboat whether they lived there alone. “A woman cooks (kashevarit) for them,” He responded. “And what if something happens?” I asked. “If something happens, then it happens,” he rejoined with a familiar to me nonchalance. I was looking at the boat quickly turning into a spot against the bright surface of the water

85The question is vaguely evocative of the lists of “things to do in such and such a city” that American citiesputs on their websites to attract tourists.

184 as the riverboat picked up speed. I tried to imagine what living in Karda must be like, and if I ever could live like the people I just saw did. I failed on both occasions: I could not envision their lives, and I could not step into their shoes even hypothetically. Mine turned out to be a common puzzlement. When I told my interlocutors about Karda, people in Anosovo, Irkutsk, Moscow, and Austin tried to put themselves, mentally, into the place of Kardinians, and a frequent verdict ran, “no, I could not live like that,”—not that anybody was invited. It proved to be not easy to get to Karda. I asked around; Konstantin was willing to have a small expedition to Karda from Anosovo on his motorboat. But he was giving me a difficult condition: he will get me there if I provide gasoline. How was I supposed to obtain gasoline in Anosovo? I tried to offer him money, but he had no surer way of obtaining gasoline than Idid. “What use is your money? I cannot power the boat with money. We need gasoline!” He insisted. The money was once again moneyless in Anosovo even as it seemed to be pretty moneyfulin many other places of Russia. The enclaves of moneylessness that Daniel Pesmen observed inthe city of Omsk in the 1990s (Pesmen, 2000), seemed to exist in Siberia (I have also recalled how a car master refused to take money explaining that one does not require payment if the car broke en route). Finally, two years after first thinking about it, in 2018, I managed to bring to Anosovo atwo- hundred-liter barrel of gasoline from Irkutsk, and Kostantin had to agree, which, reluctantly, he did. He did not suppose that there was anything to do there, but since I wanted it so badly, he did not mind. He provided me with a pair of the mountaineering pants and a coat that belonged to his wife. We were all set for the trip. I went to Anosovo’s shop and had the daydream there which I described in chapter 1, projecting an image of my grandmother upon the unsuspecting Zina while selecting for the unknown Kardinians tea in bags, a bottle of vodka, a pack of candies, a can of condensed milk, and a block of cigarettes. On a light October day, the dreams were coming true, and Konstantin rode me in a motorboat up the Angara River. We were riding into the unknown. Out of the fates of all the settlements in this area, the fate of Karda is one of the mostunfor-

185 tunate. By the apparent miscalculation of the Soviet planners, the village of Karda after relocation was positioned high above water, which made it especially difficult for people to get water, which ultimately contributed to its demise. In 2008, the village was closed, and the riverboat ceased stopping there. Local newspapers portrayed the last days of Karda and the struggle of its people. Their outcry was recorded by journalists; one of the articles depicting the anticipation was memorably titled “Bag Mood” (Chemodannoye nastroyenie). After a handful of remaining villagers moved to the state-provided alternative locations, the houses were left to decompose under snow and sunrays. Some of the Kardinians lived through a double forced relocation: first, in 1961, as the future reservoir was preparing to accept masses of water from the Bratsk dam, second, forty-seven years later, they had to leave the new Karda. But not everybody went away; some refused. 5.1. Layered Heteroutopia Of The “Abandoned” Village In 2008, when most people living in Karda were gone, two brothers, Dmitry and Edward Ogurtsovy, stayed. Dmitry went to the town of Ust Uda, looked at the decaying house that he was offered from the government, and turned back. Edward was in the army when the relocation took place. When he returned, the village was gone. Soon the brothers were joined by Karolina who moved from Atalanka to become Dmitry’s wife. Another man from Atalanka, Anton, decided to come to live with Kardinian dwellers. They formed one small community of Kardinians. Back when Parfyonov, who theyoften recalled in their conversations, was alive, he lived on his own. The vagabond Maxim Belodedov once approached this shore and settled here. When Belodedov was sick, Parfyonov helped him and possibly saved his life. Later, Belodedov relocated from a house uphill to near the water; he lived nearby, in a couple of kilometers, alone. Another family in Karda living separately consisted of a father and a son between his twenties and thirties. Dmitry, Karolina, Edward, and Anton expressed their unanimous misunderstanding as to what the father was thinking allowing his young son to live here without a family of his own and without a prospect of ever getting married. As they shrugged their shoulders, I watched

186 them in fascinated disbelief: Anton and Edward, of 39 and 36 years, respectively, appeared to be in the exact same position. But if the first Karda disappeared at the bottom of the Bratsk dam reservoir, the second Karda, ghost Karda, remained as little more than a pile of ruins, the third Karda that my interlocutors inhabit was a solid little place consisting of sturdy houses. Officially, Kardinians donotwork anywhere. “We are loiters (tuneiadtsy),” they say laughing. But inofficially, they observe several tourist houses built by a Ust Udinian businessman; as of now, houses stood empty, but businessman appeared from time to time. The third Karda budding in the underbelly of the second, abandoned Karda, was energetic and optimistic. It firmly grasped the earth on which it stood. The stripe of the houses built closeto the river were armed with solar batteries and round sputnik television antennae. The society had looser ties than one could expect given its miniscule size. Dmitry, Karolina, Edward, and Anton rarely communicated with their neighbors: a family of a father and a son and Belodedov who lived alone. There were at least three Kardas combining into a heteroutopia, three in accordance withthe main three layers of the Russian colonization or “appropriation” of Siberia: the drowned Karda, the disbanded Karda, and the contemporary Karda—all take on a slightly different geographic location. Thus, the three Kardas existing together, some on the border of visibility or beyond, nonetheless share one quality beyond the toponym: indeed, they all were frontiers, but frontiers of different countries despite the traceable continuities. While the first Karda, drowned, belonged to the tsarist imperial Russia and the second, ruined and abandoned, was the product of the industrialization of the Soviet state, the third Karda, alive and well, is a manifestation of the Russian Federation in its current state of continuing readjustments of the norms and searching of the ways of living. Thus Karda was a manifestation, in my topographies, of one ofmany post-Soviet “heteroutopias”. The contemporary Karda arouse as a utopia of connection tothe place despite the state’s attempt to interrupt it and a utopia of a peaceful living aside from others while upholding norms. Thus, it was not normal, according to Kardinians, to keep a twenty- year-old in this remote place but was quite right in regard to them in their thirties. Kardinians

187 did not offer me any manifesto as to why and how they opted for this seclusion; andIdidnot ask direct questions knowing that they will sound judgmental and will not give me any good answers. But our hosts did make it clear, when we sat around tea—which means a shared meal rather than just tea—that they were quite content with their way of living. Karolina offered a mason jar of salted mushrooms. The conversation revolved around common acquaintances; I happened to know Anna from Atalanka who Karolina knew, and we solemnly acknowledged and commiserated with her grief as she buried an adult daughter who asked a father to drive a tractor, hit the boulder, overturned, and died on the spot. Konstantin and the men had several acquaintances in common as well. As I kept my main questions unasked probing their individual trajectories instead, I felt that there were unasked questions to me as well, as to why on earth did I come and spent my day and the day of Konstantin, simply out of curiosity, to come to strangers and invite ourselves over. My actions were just as, if not more, strange as an urban dweller could perceive the living in a willful self-isolation. I noticed a switch in my own perceptions: Anosovo compared to Karda did not look like a “remote” place difficult to reach; Anosovians decrying the noise and commotion of the citywhile pledging allegiance to Anosovo themselves produced quite a bit of words and movements compared to here where one could finally be with the self for an extended period of time unbothered by strangers or people one would rather not maintain connections with. For me to know what our hosts’s days indeed consisted of, I would need to spend time living here, participating in the activities, and listening—engaging in the proverbial “participant observation.” Karolina and Dmitry told me that they rarely ascend to the razvalini of the previous Karda on the hill; there were no reasons to go there. The damned “Kogo tam delat’?” question posed itself again. But Karolina and Dmitry indulged my wishes to roam the remainders of the second Karda. Konstantin refused to go—“Why beat the legs?” As we embarked on our walk, I saw that Karda was indeed far from the water, which meant, the water truck delivering water spent quite a bit of gasoline delivering it to houses. For whatever reasons, there were, traditionally, no wells on the Angara River: why dig the well if the river is right here? The Angara brings water

188 Figure 57. The village of Karda before the flood of 1961, the map recreated by the UstUdamu- seum workers based on the hand-drawn map by Nikolay Ruposov. Courtesy of Ust Uda museum. from Lake Baikal. Before the flood that turned the river into the water reservoir, the water was clear and tasty. Now, water has the sediment and, on windy days, is delivered to the houses of Anosovo with sand. Still, Anosovo gets its water from the Angara River. I am not sure what happened with water in Karda; perhaps there were some wells, but being situated on that hill, it continued dwindling down. In the 1970s and the 1980s, about five hundred people lived in Karda in houses with intricately adorned window frames. In 2002, 79 people lived there, according to Goskomstat.86 In the last years before the government relocation, only several people remained— the announcement of the plan to relocate alone was already sufficient, as a self-fulfilling prophesy, to cut the cord. Karda was a populated location once upon a time. Journalist Nikolay Ruposov in search of new themes and characters for his essays in “Angarskaya Pravda” and other local publications, drew a map of the village of Karda before relocation, later redrawn in Paintbrush by museum workers. The map shows a village of one street, bifurcating at one point, along the river,and

86http://irkutskstat.gks.ru/wps/wcm/connect/rosstat_ts/irkutskstat/resources/ 645798804e45a78fa021babfab39d37f/2.pdf

189 Figure 58. Karda in 1980, on a new place above the hill, the map drawn by Nikolay Ruposov. Courtesy of Ust Uda museum. preserves the houses ownership: the house of the Zamaratskys, the house of the Beryozovskys, the houses of the Kapystinys, school, garage, club (community center), bakery, settlement administration (selsovet). The map of the village of Karda after the relocation and consolidation tells another story:itis a village of four streets and alleys crossing them at the right angle and marks a road connecting the villages on the right shore of the Angara River that used to be graveled but now is back to land road and is barely passable and at times unpassable at all; the road to Karda is not maintained and blocked by fallen trees. The principles of the planned settlements are embodied in the second Karda: the “combination of symmetry and legibility” (Slezkine, 2017, 586) are the marks not only of imperial capitals but also of the small settlements which are likewise “the spatial representations of the cosmic order” (Slezkine, 2017, 585). Slezkine writes about the ideal cities that were the emblems of the magnificence and power of the future and rule—in application to Siberian centrally planned settlements, the order is perhaps not “cosmic,” but easy to navigate, andwhich offers the directions and ways of further expansion, are readable in the map. Another detailof the striking difference between Karda-1 and Karda-2 in Ruposov’s maps is that the second Karda

190 Figure 59. My interlocutor, “Karolina,” is walking the remnants of Karda. does not have the markings of familial belonging: the houses are relatively new, and they are simply too many. As Karolina, Dmitry, and I wandered on into the abandoned quarters of the village, the streets and alleys were still distinct even though the houses mostly succumbed to gravity, the wind and precipitations. In the photographs that I saw on the web, Karda was still withstanding the gnawing of time and harsh Siberian weathers. Tilted houses scooped under formidable piles of snow, but streets were fully obvious. In the field that is taking over the remains of the second Karda now, it takes work to read landscape as once that of a settlement. Even though only ten years passed since the official closing of Kadra, most of the houses collapsed—albeit not all—and piles of broken wood mapped the space. “Ruiny” (ruins), sighed Karolina. Here ruins meant the traces that in the observable future will be subsumed by the taiga. For the archeologists of the future, only a handful of these “ruins” will be left when the wood dissipates—constructions that left raising piles of broken bricksand

191 concrete plates, the remnants of the club. From the wooden building itself, little remained, but the technician’s booth, with the twisted armature spread in the air, will endure as a wordless memorial to the effort of the Soviet industrialization. Standing there, Dmitry recalled thatin the 1980s, he watched movies here, in the club: Indian melodramas, late Soviet films, and the Western cinematographic production. Among the latter were The Terminator and Back to the Future. I watched roughly the same set of movies in the club of a Ukrainian village where I spent my summer vacations. “Did you watch Flight of the Navigator?” I asked, “There was a silver rocket, flying saucer, and the aliens abduct the child to return him later to his parentsand grownup brother.” We had a world of experience in common thanks to the Western films that we both watched in the locations that were the centers of reproducing of the late Soviet subjectivities. Part of the upbringing was watching the same movies together: a collective experience shared by those growing up on the shore of the Angara River and all across the Soviet territory. As we walked, we spotted a car near one of the better-preserved houses. That housewas evidently maintained. Dmitry and Karolina said that the car must have belonged to the forest rangers who appear and disappear and sometimes create improvised bases for themselves. Rangers did not come in contact with locals, and Dmitry and Karolina had no interest in talking to them either. The vistas that included the remnants of the mechanic’s booth and rangers hardly evercoming in contact with Kardinians, had, to me, a distinct sci-fi feel. That feel did not only pertain to Karda but region as a whole. During the Soviet times, in the 1960s, presumably geologists built wooden towers in taiga. At the time, children—now old people—recall climbing those towers. Since then, those towers mostly fell. If they continue standing, it is unsafe to climb them. Towers and other traces of previous activities—indeed whole settlements abandoned—were like vestiges of a civilization that no one knew much about despite that its existence was so recent. It all produced the feeling that we were in the “zone” from Tarkovsky’s Stalker movie, or some other phantasmagoric tale. Today, the village of Karda is a small economic and social ecology that can be described as self-sustainable, self-sufficient, and eco-friendly. A businessman from the town ofUstUda

192 built guest houses here in view of making the place a tourist resort. While the resort houses remain vacant, Kardinians’ farmstead flourishes: pigs indeed, much as the rumors circulating in Anosovo suggested, were fat here. I have not seen them lying in the middle of the road, but they energetically honked from their barns. In a way, Karda was a sustainable local community that does not rely on the state. In this, it was strikingly unlike Anosovo that continued expecting that the neoliberal Russian state will begin to provide at least some of those social benefits the Soviet state used to provide. 5.2. “My Fate Slipped Away”: Solitary Dwelling In Taiga But the main surprise of Karda, for me, was my meeting with Maxim Belodedov who resigned himself to live there alone. He arrived at this shore of the Angara River when he was in his 30s and stays to this days, more than 70 years of age. Maxim Belodedov, the seventh “Kardinian,” lived on his own but also on what appeared to be premises of an Ust-Udinian businessman. What made the story of his dwelling interesting for the people in the area and me is that he guarded his solitude and created a manual of self-sustainable living that he himself enacted. After he resided briefly on top of the hill, he moved further into the depth of the gulf and set a house there,in about two kilometers from the rest of Kardinians to dwell alone and to dream about the future of humanity. Belodedov was not the only hermit or recluse in the vicinity. One could even say, Siberia has a tradition of solitary or remote, periodical and constant, way of living that people uphold, from religious seclusionists (like “Ringing Cedars”) to hunters. As Konstantin and I rode the boat to the village of Karda, we passed the margin of the area with cut forest where, he told me, an ex- guard continued living for years, alone, after the timber-harvesting firm went away to another location. The ex-guard decided to stay and for several years he has been known to live there, but Konstantin nor his friends ever got curious to visit him. It would have been considered an intrusion, besides, solitary living in taiga is not something to be particularly curious about as it was just something that people did. However, to me, the questions how does the solitary living take place, what do people occupy their days with, and how they kept their sanity while alone were the interesting questions. I thought about affective infrastructures whose functioning or

193 malfunctioning landed him there, as an element of these infrastructures, or cultural forms of which the solitary dwelling is one, and of heterotopia and Bachelard’s seeing out hut as our shell. Here, the affective infrastructures are the societal conditions (materialities and socialities) that push a person out and eventually situate them in a position of social isolation. Anne Allison with links to Gaston Bachelard wrote about how our home becomes shelter for us to do a “dreamwork” (Allison, 2013, 108). Shelter is a protective space that allows us to do the dreamwork necessary for survival, in which we drift in and out of the dream. Shelter that affords for a dreamwork is not necessarily a spatial characteristic or an enclosed form; it could be an interstitial momentary allocation of time and space. It can come in the heterotopic inhabitable gap of a long telephone call (“tiny sliver of space and time”) relieving the overworked mother for a moment from the labor of care she incessantly provides (Allison, 2013, 104). It can be a fleeting insular mobility of the car or even a collective dream in public transportation (Sivkov, 2017). Home in its continuity becomes a place of hiding, self-isolation, and inner life. The agglomeration of everyone’s dreamwork produces the “dreamworld” of social spaces (Buck-Morss, 2002), a space of collective dwelling (Benjamin, 1999) that entails the collective dreaming, is arguably existing in the lasting “reverie” lingering from one’s childhood (Bachelard, 1960). The dreamwork is the inner work of “reverie-ing” the inhabitable world that an individual, this constantly-daydreaming entity, indulges to make the reality endurable, being, bearable, and keep the body—already attuned to the shifts of the environment—going, swimming in whatever streams that the system produces or fails to produce. Images of people who preferred to live by themselves, on the fringes of villages and in remote zimovies are bright in the collective imaginaries in Siberia. Stories about hermits who, with different intensity, rejected the societal way of living in favor of taiga, solitude, silence, self-isolation, and disconnectedness in these places of which some think as already “remote,” circulate as tales of something perhaps remarkable but not outstanding. A literary report of one of Siberian seclusionists belongs to a journalist who created a heroic tale of late Socialist constructions:

I recognized him right away, and he recognized me too. Ten years ago, when we put the first BAM zimnik down the Nyuksha River, a feeder of the Olyokma River, we stumbled upon this Styopa guy, who inhabited a solitary, just like this new one, taiga izbushka (hut). Our

194 chief sternly demanded a passport from Shilov, which surprised him greatly since to that date everyone in the one-thousand-kilometer radius knew everybody just fine without any passports.87 Styopa did not like the people’s intrusion, and he went away to the estuary of the Khani River, and when, in a couple more years, a working unit disembarked there too, [he] omaded [perekocheval] over the riffles. Since then, he stayed there sustaining himself with hunting and fishing. Stepan is not greedy; he has exactly what he needs: tobacco, bread, sugar and whatever else is there from the subsistence minimum [prozhitochnii minimum]. He willingly and curiously listens to the news from the big world on the radio, but he perceives them as stories from another planet. Wondrously live those Martians. He tried to be like others, but the regimented way of living and people’s mores were burdening his freedom- loving spirit [vol’naia natura].

—Sungorkin, 1988, 50

The freedom-loving spirit, or character, “vol’naia natura,” speaks to Valentin Rasputin’s people’s freedom (narodnaia vol’nitsa) he considered to be key to Siberianness (1991b).

Here we are, sitting after a soulful dinner at the threshold of the hut unrolling theballof recollections. Styopa is shaking his leg in a flipflop made out of valenok (felt boot). The hat on his disheveled head is put on back to front. Finishing a quirly, he accurately hides the stub in a special bag half filled with butts and asks a rhetorical question, “Why people cannotlive quiet?” He means either us, himself, or those whose muffled voices sound from a transistor radio. And to me, it looks as if not Stepan Shilov, taiga-dweller [tayezhnik], sits in front of me, but a man from Khabarov’s expedition…

—Sungorkin, 1988, 50

The spectrum of “Khabarov’s expedition”—one of the first trips of the Russian explorations of Siberia that leads to subjugation (pokorenie)88—confirms, on an imagery level, as it were, the understanding that this subjugation is an ongoing process and loners who might never think of themselves as “colonizers” play a role in it as well. The Siberian tradition of solitary living spanned from before the Soviet times andhadexam- ples in Anosovo. About three kilometers from Anosovo was a place where a “balaganchik” (hut) once stood, by the Sergey Klyuev expression. At that spot, “Nachinkov lived”—with his wife, as surfaced in conversation. The place came to be named the Cape of Nachinkov, Mys Nachinkova.

87Paper passport is the primary form of ID in Russia. 88Yerofey Khabarov(1603–1671) is a Russian explorer of Amur region. The city of Khabarovk is named after him.

195 When they lived there, children tried to prank them by throwing rocks in the window. Nachikov responded by coming to the threshold of his house with a rifle in his hands. Nachinkov lived there “alone” —that is to say, with his wife—because “he did not like to be with people” and be bothered by them. Nachinkov disappeared around the 1980s, and the fate of his wife is unknown. One of Nachinkov’s late claims was that people will not bury him, and so it happened; perhaps, Klyuev marveled, he drowned himself. The taiga was not benevolent to the balaganchik. There was no trace of the house. It stood, as Sergey reconstructed it for me with gestures and wide steps back and forth, behind the first row of trees on the Angara riverbank. I expected to see something similar in place where Belodedov lived. When Konstantin and I approached the Belodedov’s abode at our boat, it was Anatoly Myasnikov—an Ust Uda businessman— who met us. Surprisingly, because we did not anticipate seeing anyone else but Belodedov himself there. Myasnikov welcomed us. He showed us his house under construction and led us to the Belodedov’s hut. He understood perfectly well why Belodedov arouse such interest in us. Myasnikov was of a high opinion of Belodedov and took care of him the best he could. For the biggest time of the year Belodedov, who mostly spent time here alone, was an unas- signed guard of the property of Anatoly Myasnikov. Myasnikov selected this little-inhabited shore as a place for his out-of-town residence. If the first businessman, who built guest houses on the other side of a little Kardinian gulf, had a dream of developing tourism in this area, Myas- nokov was excited by the idea of establishing in the gulf a fish farm for rare sorts of fish: pelyad, sazan, omul. Even though Kardinians are proud of their independence, Dmitry, Edward, Karolina, and Anton had economic relations with the first businessman, whereas the “recluse,” Maxim Be- lodedov, worked (non-reimbursed) for another. Maxim Belodedov turned out to be a man in his 70s. Kardinians united in their opinion on him. They proclaimed that he was a remarkable person. From the threshold, Belodedov announced that for the last several years, he had been perfecting a reactive engine. In the year of 2018, he had a tear-off calendar of 2015 on his table. In his hut, he was surrounded by throw-away books. “Worthless stuff,” he says. “People brought here whatever they did not need(util’). I have read

196 them all.” One of the books lies upside down on his blanketed bed. His instruments are in order nothing short of ideal. Belodedov recapitulates his trajectory for us. He served the mandatory army service in Sev- astopol and worked in the city of Kharkiv at a TV-set manufacture. Then he worked at a poly- metallic mine in the Khabarosvk krai and relocated to the town of Bratsk. From Bratsk, having taken with him a fishing rod and a backpack, he began walking “whenever his eyes looked” down the Angara River and ended up around the area called Baranovka, in fifteen kilometers from the village of Karda. There, he slept ina zemlyanka—a den carved out of the earth (“How do you think people slept during the war?”). Over the course of his life, he slept on shores occasionally having only a sheet of cellophane under his body. “As long as the wind does not blow into my back, it’s all good,” He says. “I could sleep in the forest; I could sleep under rain.” Winters, ferocious in their severity, he spent at villages of Atalanka and Karda where people let him into their barns and zimovies. Belodedov lived as a wanderer since 1983, when he was in his thirties. “I did not work. Fished omul. I am a sloth (lodyr’),” He says self-deprecatingly but with a mischievous smile. His passport perished in a fire, and he became a person without documents. “That’s why my fate slipped away,” he says. Losing the documents was a moment in a chain of attunements that brought him to living alone. He has no attachment to the place of his birth, nor fond memories of it, commenting “a person should be born somewhere.” I ask him if he’s bored sometimes, and he responds, “I don’t like being bored and have no time for it. Either I am reading, or I am dreaming. Alternatively, I am talking to myself. Who else to talk to? I got used to it.” Myasnikov adds: “We are visiting, several times during the summer, and at winter too, sometimes.” Belodedov displayed to us a number of inventions that he produced out of need of survival and in leisure, “See, this is my koryto (basin).” Myasnikov comments, admiringly, again, as if Belodedov is not present, “It is scary to sit in this boat. And he travels the river in it!” The “basin” is made out of the upper part of the salon of a ZIL-130. “Do you mean you used it as a ferry?” I ask, hopeful that he merely cross the bay in it. “No, this is a simple, ordinary koryto.”—Turns out, Belodedov traveled kilometers in this basin.

197 Figure 60. Belodedov’s boat; a “basin” [koryto] created out of a roof of a ZIL minivan.

From Baranovka, Belodedov relocated to Karda, which is to say, this shore. Later, he swam back in his koryto and brought his stuff to the new place, which is his home now. “I am not afraid of the storm. All you need is balance,” Belodedov says. “Oh sure,” Myasnikov replies, “It’s just God saves you; that is all.” “No, you merely need to learn balance: the wave jumps, you lean to this side. Then, you lean to that side.” Konstantin evokes the folk song: “What did the wanderer crossed Lake Baikal in?”

The wanderer crossed Baikal

In an omul barrel.

Belodedov transported an abandoned house to this shore from another place log by log. He built a house now adorned with a solar panel that Myasnikov presented to him and installed. The solar panel is iconographic of sustainable energy, this much-lauded emblem of theecology- friendly living. But its appearance is ironic considering that villages on the right shore of the Angara River do not have central electricity and are powered by diesel generators. I mark to

198 myself that all Kardinians who I came to know seem to be using solar panels, thanks to the businesspeople patronizing them. Thus, these solitary dwellers, living either alone like Belodedov or in small groups are inhabiting the place more technologically advanced than Anosovo and also noticeably better maintained. Perhaps the reason is that Anosovo kind of “stuck” with Anosovo, and Kardinians have chosen to live here, and maybe the credit goes to the businesspeople. Kardinians are using panels bought and brought to them by the Ust Udinian businesspeople who care about them but also use their services. The entanglement of their relationship makes it difficult to say whether it is driven by the considerations of profit, charity, or both.Itisnot merely about the moneylessness of money but about the types of relationships that difficult to monetize or translate in the economic terms. For example, a relationship of Belodedov and Myas- nikov is complex. The former is an uncompensated worker, but the latter exhibits the careofa relative: he presents Belodedov with gifts, took him for doctors, brought others to him, andhim- self constitutes most frequent company appearing here several times a year. The elements of this relationship include charity, friendliness, consideration of profit from guarding, care, and likely a great many things unrevealed to an onlooker. The attunement of the body in relation to other bodies that keeps a person living in a place connected to it with a myriad of affective ties are not absent in case of solitary living—merely rarified. The attunement of solitary living isnever- theless networked and situated within human relationships. Japanese hikikomori can continue existence in the confinement of their rooms as long as their parents provide for them.AKar- dinian “recluse,” capable of living alone on the shore, obtained at least some health benefits from his sparse connections. Economic and relational connections are tricky and lend themselves to alternative interpretations. While Konstantin was under the impression that Myasnikov is a Belodedov’s benefactor who has brought the solar panel, gave calls to relatives, and provided medical help in need, it was sort of overshadowed for me by the circumstance that Myasnikov selected a place to build his house near Belodedov’s hut because Belodedov lived there 24/7. “Since he is here, no one messes things around here [nikto ne bezobraznichayet],” Myasnikov explained. But then, Belode-

199 dov did not consider himself a guard, nor is he seen as a person providing a service beyond what a neighbor would. Myasnikov feels obliged to provide for Belodedov out of what he sees to be a sense of humanity. Belodedov is not employed. He does not receive benefits. Situated outside of the state asan undocumented person, he has been living without social welfare or pension. If Myasnikov had the need, in Belodedov’s absence, to take care of his property, he would need a considerable sum of money to pay a professional for the task of guarding a remote place. But even if this occurs to Belodedov, it is not the subject of his persistent musings. The previous sets of economic relations is in contest with the new, market-driven, understandings of how things are supposed to function (as described by Humphrey in the “unmaking” of the Soviet life, 2002). Belodedov is suspended, but is also actively participating, in a set of social relations that are not merely economic but ultimately do not include him in the existing social order. In the absence of passport, he is not unlike many other, including the Soviet-time tayozhnik (taiga-dweller) Stepan Shilov described by journalist Vladimir Sungorkin (translated above). The absence of documents ultimately is a factor in this exclusion, but had Belodedov had a passport, he would not be joining people. Being left to himself, having brought everything that is in his possession and in thevicinity under his control—garden, house, instruments—in order, Belodedov spends his free time in a cocoon of memories, perceptions, and feelings. No doubt the presence of a listener prompts him to rehearse his stories, but they belong to a repertoire of things he already told himself and others on similar occasions, however few those were. Part of this dreamwork is investigation of the alternative directions that Belodedov’s lifestory never took. “If I remained at the Navy, I’d be a captain or an admiral,” Belodedov announces. Konstantin, a bit startled by this admission but also willing to accommodate the wishes of the owner of the house, joked, “You have admiral’s jaws.” Belodedov’s face, in his early seventies, is elongated, dry, with a sharp, clearly defined nose, grey deeply seated eyes. The appearance, ifwe are to play the Benjaminian game of imagination, of the man easily visualizable in a great variety of settings and at different positions in life. His figure is stooped, hands—he wore a shirt whereas

200 we all wore sweaters on this light but cold October day. In response to Konstantin’s compliment, he remarked, “My teeth crushed out. I have no luck” [“Ne vesyot”]. Belodedov recalled that he wanted to get into the institute in Kharkov, or to continue at the Navy, but a chain of unfortunate events precluded that. In his story enigmatic “they” figured, conspiring against Belodedov on the highest level. Some forces in the world apparently did not want, in Belodedov’s cosmogony, that he was manifested to the people with all of the ideas that he had. When he was in the Navy doing the mandatory service, his commandment unjustly omitted giving him honors, he felt. He had an unfortunate encounter with a commander when the engines he was responsible for stopped working at the sea. He was in the cockpit to meet the commander for the explanation. The whole episode lasted several minutes, but it produced a lasting impact on his life. The alternative futures were not always better than the actualizing reality—sometimes they were worse. There were several moments when he seemed to have escaped a certain death, in tempest so strong that the rain fell almost horizontally, a tree broke across his house but did not break the roof. Belodedov explains that he believes in cosmic power, a fatum. Everything in this tempest was arranged for him to die, but he survived. The next day after the tree fell, two fishermen embarked on the shore, and Belodedov remarked that had he not survived, “Theycould have very possibly come to shovel me in the grave.” But the same forces that were to keep his ideas from gaining distribution were also responsible for keeping him alive in dire circumstances where, it should be highlighted, he exhibited a remarkable presence of the mind. That was one instance when he escaped a certain death. Once, fishing, he fell through the ice—his down parka saved him. “I was like on a bob in it.Theparka does not absorb water right away.” He tried to scramble his way to the hard ground, but ice kept breaking under his weight. “To drown or not to drown, that is the question I asked myself,” he remarked. “It only takes a couple of seconds. But I decided, let me try and crawl out. [Dai-ka poprobuyu, vylezu]. I did not remember that many people crushing through ice crawling out by themselves, but I decided to try. I broke a corridor in ice as far as it kept breaking. I break and

201 crawl. Ice kept crushing beneath me as I continued going forward. Then I stretched my hands and was able to lift my weight up to the waist, and then I finally crawled out.” At this point, I was very curious to hear about the ideas, and the inventor had a great array of them. 5.3. The Ideal House In The Ideal City Belodedov’s ideas pertained to the mechanical invention and ideal domestic organization that had to serve for the betterment of life of humanity. He had projects allowing improvements of everyday tools like electric saw. His engines were to have no “dead point” allowing the motion to continue indefinitely. Even though his improvements were apparently made on the basisof the idea of perpetuum mobile, his enthusiasm was so inspiring that Myasnikov brought him an engineer once. The engineer requested pictures and went as far as providing Belodedov with instruments to draw schemes, but Belodedov insisted on relating his ideas in metaphor-laden descriptions. He was not trained as a draftsman, he explained. Besides, his ideas were so clear that they barely required work of illustration. The engineer patiently asked questions and began drawing schemes himself but quit after a time. He either could not grasp the ideas orsawno validity in them; he did not tell. Ten years later, Belodedov was still expecting the engineer’s reappearance with a final pronouncement.

Table 1. The first page of Belodedov’s manuscript translated М.М. Дедов M.M. Dedov Russian Alphabet the way it is coded in the title of Dedov’s manuscript Полезные вещи Useful things Правильная жизнь Righteous life АбыВыГоДа ЕЁ ЖизньИ Would-be-profit of it, of Life А б В Г Д Е Ё Ж з И Йо Ко Ло Ме Ня ОП – Near Me Hop— ЙКЛМНОП Неправильная жизнь Wrongly lived life – прыжок РайСмертьУФХо —leap ParadiseDeathUphIDesi Р С т У Ф Х ЧетсяЦель чеШется еЩё ReGoal it is itCHing in me to Live ЧЦ89ШЩ Пожить Ъ-лекарство Ы-боль some more Ъ-medicine Ы-pain ЪЫ Ь-лекарство Э-вдох Ю-выдох Ь-medicine Э-inhale Ю-exhale ЬЭЮ Яд-смерть Venom-death Я

89The common alphabet’s sequence is: “ЦЧ.”

202 Figure 61. The first page of Belodedov’s manuscript.

He has also been working on a treatise about the ideal home and the ideal society. In his journal, the descriptions of the imaginary socio-politico-ecological space were preceded by something that appeared to be a font composition or a poem. In the Russian version, the title encompasses and deftly plays with the Russian alphabet. In the English version, I preserved the meaning as much as I could, capitalizing letters. The other pages, totaling fourteen, were devoted to schemes describing the ideal arrangement of the house, the settlement, and the society. The dweller of such a house, he explained tome,

203 will not have a need to ever leave the premises: they will find everything indoors. As I flipped through pages of his manuscript, I saw drawings illustrating the ideal arrangement of the house, the settlement, and, ultimately, the society. “I can give people something,” Belodedov said. “Ican teach them to build a house that everyone likes. If a person begins to live in such a house, he will not have to work. The house will feed him, and he will prosper.” The way the house will prosper, according to Belodedov, is by having bees in the attic and a room full of mushrooms. The bees will produce honey that will pour down the specifically designed tubes. “At the attic, bees will live. They will produce honey. Honey will pour down. Every dayyou will collect five-ten liters of honey. You will sell it, and in one season you will have approximately one ton of honey. And the second matter is, mushrooms. Take penny buns, for example. They are delicious. Look, here we install rows of mushrooms.” In the mushroom room, there will be conus-like shapes “made out of duralumin,” where mushrooms would grow on all sides, and all that will remain to the owner of the house is walk between them and cut mushrooms. “As of now, it is maybe a fantasy,” he allows, “But everything is possible in the future.” Self-sustainable houses are a hit with urbanists, I tell him. The future replete with potentialities fascinates me. Idonot know enough about beekeeping to dismiss Belodedov’s bee-related ideas at a glance. Konstantin probably does, as he is a breeder of “beehorses” as Valentina jokingly called him once, but he keeps impenetrable silence. Once again, like with the manifestations of nonchalance, I do not trust my knowledge about the world and withhold judgment. What if it was possible to make bees behave in the manner that Belodedov expected of them? His ideal world is at any rate no any stranger than the idea of Ust Uda’s Mayor that we should mimic bees in maintaining the warmth of our houses with our bodies. In the illustrations in Belodedov’s, explicating on the ideas he shared, “the Mushroom Room” is depicted and a bee installation shows how the honey will pour inside the room. “The Mushroom Room” was divided from the hall [zal] that was to have two heating systems: one, powered by gas, another, electricity. I wondered if that was dictated by the author’s living in a tiny house that could be quickly overheated and cool just as rapidly at winter that the dream about the room bursting with mushrooms with a stable temperature regime demanded two heating systems. The

204 Figure 62. The plan of attic includes the plan for the bees where the queen bee, workers, and drones are arranged in the way Belodedov finds best. scheme had the “hall” and then “the common hall,” dividing the space, presumably, on the zone suitable for a collective dwelling and more private time. The plan of the attic includes depicts the arrangement of the bees. Perhaps itisthebees themselves who let the honey flow down in tubes. The words like “isolating thickening,” “tape,” and “tray” make it appear like a scheme in a schoolbook. Visually, it strikingly resembles the schemes of the Soviet-time “know-how” instructions in the brochures “do it yourself.”

205 Figure 63. Page from Belodedov’s manuscript depicting the ideal house drawn on the same page where part of the outside world got depicted as well: there is a bunker for wheat and a bunker for threshing, as well as a bunker for wheat ears.

Belodedov’s manuscript contained not only a plan of a house, but an idea of a small settlement. The settlement is to consist of such houses, a road, and a whole number of enterprises including threshing machine, emergency blower, and a slanting sorting conveyer belt. Belodedov’s manuscript contained not merely a plan of a house, but an idea of the khutor— small settlement—around an elevator. The khutor was to have several of these ideal houses,a

206 Figure 64. The scheme of the mushroom room, specifically, includes plots and passing, everything measured in centimeters. road, and a whole bunch of mechanisms including threshing machine, emergency blower, and a slanting sorting conveyer belt. As he tells us about all these fantastic plans and inventions, Belodedov does not want to let us go. He tells us that he can tell many more stories like these. But we are invited to Myasnikov and his son who is also here. We call Belodedov to come with us to drink tea at Myasnikov’s zimovie, but Belodedov refuses.

207 As we drink that tea at Myasnikov’s, the host tells us that he made an effort to find Belodedov’s relatives. Belodedov’s younger brother appeared to be dead. A woman who knew the family reported on the phone that no one was alive. “I told him about it,” Myasnikov says. “He replied, it can’t be true.” Myasnikov carefully suggests that the refusal to accept this news and all of the ideas of Belodedov make him not exactly like us, the ordinary people. “He has a mind that no one else has.” After a while feeling more comfortable with us, the owner of the house shares that inhis60s, he increasingly thinks of death and wonders if it was possible to postpone it. He keeps himself updated on the newest inventions in medicine that are accessible to him in Siberia thanks to his wealth, but he sees that science can do little to keep the body alive after a certain point where everything in it begins to break. He relates his medical history and complains of pain in his arm. We only have about one hour that we can spend before the sun begins to fall, and the travel via the river in the dark becomes difficult, and we have to use this hour to get back toAnosovo. 5.4. “Local Tsiolkovsky” After the visit to Karda was over, Konstantin, inspired by what he saw in Karda, jokingly exclaims that, to have a new beginning, Anosovo should be razed to the ground—perhaps disbanded centrally, by the government. Then, only those who truly choose to live in Anosovo will remain and rebuild everything anew. He will be among them. That last part comes as no surprise as I already know Konstantin as a patriot of Anosovo. Konstantin marvels to his wife and her friends, the guests of the house, about the sturdy mooring built in three layers of wood (“v tri nakata”)—not at all like the rusty iron platform that serves as a mooring to Anosovo. It would be nice to have the sun panels delivering energy sufficient for the needs of the citizens here as well. It wasob- vious that, unlike Anosovians, Kardinians did not and will not expect the neoliberal state to help them; some of them already rejected the help once, offered to choose another location, others came from Atalanka and other places. Anosovians who will choose to rebuild Anosovo from scratch will similarly know what they are doing, why, and how, Konstantin suggested. They will gratefully accept what they have from nature. They will talk to strangers that will come to them to do business or simply out ofcuriosity,

208 and they will shed any need for what do not really have. Most of all, they will be done with all their expectations of the paternalistic state to come and provide for them. I am listening to Konstantin portraying this new world but thinking about Kardinian independence that does not include the independence from “corporations.” The solar panels are possible due to the help of an Ust Uda businesspeople who served as mediators between the community of Kardinians and the outside world. The touristic base that for years was about to open was apart of the businessman’s interest in participating in the life of Karda. There were rumors about some of the connections of these businessfolk; some were known as mafiosos who, in their younger days of the “wicked 1990s,” took lives. It was unclear would Kardinians thrive were it not for these economic-and-going-beyond-economic relationships. It is doubtlessly less expensive for a businessman to give rare gifts and be remembered as a benefactor than pay for the services of hired guardians. Besides, as generations of anthropologists argued, those on whom the gifts are bestowed are obliged to return favor and are imbricated in the complicated politics of reciprocity. Back in Anosovo, Konstantin and I are talking for two days almost exclusively about Belode- dov. He has all those great ideas, but it is easy to poke holes in them. His ideas are nonetheless of the kind that make you want to seek ways to mend those holes rather than suggest the new obstacles to the many that are already presenting themselves. We are discussing logistics. Bees living for the whole year in the attic that will be warm year-round will want to gather pollen year-round. And what were bees to do in the absence of flowers? Suppose it is solvable through the arrangement of a greenhouse above the attic. But then how will bees pour their honey tothe first floor, considering that they tend to create honeysuckles of the octahedral form? We sit in the kitchen and shake heads at these prospects, but we are eager to make it work somehow at least in the imagination. What is the temperature that should be upheld in the Mushroom Room? If it is going to be a space unsuitable for anything else but mushroom (and molds, companion species flourishing in warm wetness)? It would be easy to dismiss the ideas, but they were nevertheless compelling, for me and for Konstantin who recently acquired several families of bees. Our Kardinian tales reaffirming the myths of Karda than dispelling them, spread among

209 Anosovians. Carpenter Nikolay, not a stranger to inventions, announces that Belodedov is our local Tsiolkovsky. And what about Belodedov’s unhappened career? Even if his superiors were unhappy with his performance, they likely saw him merely as a function, a person fulfilling a certain task. There was nothing personal, to them, in their condemnation, but for him,itwas impactful. In short, we found ourselves explaining the biography of Belodedov in a way that would help to explain his solitary living. The overall trajectory of his life was something that held interest: imagine a thirty-year-old walking with a fishing rod from the city of Bratsk to whenever his eyes looked, down theAngara River, and eventually settling on the Kardinian shore (“I tired from counting the years; I’m71”). To me, his story was a story of solitude, but the punchline in it, if there was one, was that he was not any more alone than many people in all ages, who for whatever reason struggle—or refuse— to maintain connections. The dwelling in an apartment in a building replete with people, with the neighbors downstairs, upstairs, and next door, one can experience loneliness perhaps of a comparable intensity. (“Nobody listens to me.”) At many points was Belodedov able to resettle to a less solitary place. For example, inthe village of Atalanka, where many houses were empty. In fact, he was helping to build chimneys there and a place for him would have been found had he cared to obtain it. He was asked to make another stove but refused. Time and again, he chose to live a solitary life over possible alternatives even though he spoke of solitude as an annoying circumstance. He lamented the absence of conversationalists to convey his ideas. (“Solitude? Who could like it? No one listens to me.” [“Odinochestvo? Da kto by ego luybil. Nikto menya ne slushayet”]). The solitude and isolation of the taiga dweller was still relative. As much as Belodedov spends most of the time alone, he has connections with other humans, from Myasnikov who abets him to occasional guests like fisherpeople or Konstantin and me. But what can we know abouta human being who resigns to solitude? What is possible to know about the human being who decides to shun others? Why does such self-isolation happen, and what can it tell about the human condition? Belodedov mentioned “fatum,” fate, a force that led him through life. Not a personal god, “fatum,” nevertheless, in his feeling, both prevented him from disclosing his ideas

210 and enabled him to continue with them by saving him from a certain grip of death several times. His own presence of the mind and resourcefulness saved him. Surrounded by throw-away books in his taiga house where everything is in perfect order and occupying his mind with projects of the future for humanity, he gave up on doing the daily affective work of relating and connecting to others. And the border that separates the person doing such labor from someone who does not is thin and does not protect anyone from slipping into such solitude even in the conditions of less intense isolation. Solitary living is the lot that befalls increasingly more people. Lonely living becoming an “epidemic” (Bennett, Gualtieri, and Kazmierczyk, 2018) and a veritable scenario of one’s future no matter how well-connected one seems to be. Solitary living not in the society which values self-sufficiency and becomes increasingly defragmented becomes a circumstance of not onlyolder but also young people. In a way, Belodedov is a person who voluntarily set himself to his solitude as Anne Allison’s hikikomori, “homeless inside of home” (Allison, 2013, 73), even if their choice is coming for an entirely different set of reasons and in a different society. A Moscow acquaintance has alsobeen once characterized as “he hikikomoris,” as a verb (“on hihikomorit”) as he closed himself within the confines of his apartment spending time playing video games and indulging in childhood memories. It is unclear whether the Japanese hikikomori are pushed out of society or they “willingly” withdraw (“exile, retreat, shut-in, cut-off,” Allison 2013, 72–73). As the connections in the world become increasingly unstable and superficial, human interactions at once are craven, demand too much, and leave a deep sense of dissatisfaction. The case of Belodedov is a case ofa Siberian seclusionist who grew up in a big city. One could say, “he could not find his place in the society,” but the connectivity tissue in the affective infrastructures of which he was a part was thin and when he dropped through it, ties did not as much break as they faded out: he was not announced missing, and relatives either did not file report, or, perhaps, it all was done to noavail as he had banned himself to these shores. Exclusion from society makes a person “ungrievable,” in Butler’s terms (2016), and many people without documents are in this category. However, Belodedov, even as he fell off or what

211 excluded from one system of affective ties was included in another comprised of his adopted neighbor-family. In the city, the solitude and loneliness that accompany the person who cuts themselves off social connections or whom society expels, face and constitute the “already-dead” and “existentially bereft” as Ann Allison calls them(2013, 63). This terminology is striking; I suppose, Allison invokes it to shake people in the awareness of the problem existing on a grand scale, but there is room to question the validity of these terms; for instance, “bereft”—possibly, but why “existentially bereft”? Perhaps to the contrary, people who can endure the connection with others are existentially bereft—bereft of their own sense of solitude that they trade for chatter. In the taiga, Belodedov was, for a tiny circle, a celebrity of sorts—that unusual person with his ideas living completely alone, afar from most, and he no doubt presented in and of himself a sort of attraction and was a source of amusement and wonder to those who knewhim. The solitude can be a trial and a feeling of being discarded and deemed replaceable andunim- portant body left to scramble for one’s own value, meaning, and significance. Yet at thesame time, in solitude, one’s own significance also grows; in Belodedov’s proud and modest presentation of the parade of his inventions and ideas, one saw a person with a great deal of dignity. In the rural place, especially, “everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays” (Berger, 1979, 11). One’s identity is always a contested territory where others and a person intersect to negotiate one’s character, features, qualities, and quirks; in the absence of the others who dictate all these features, the sense of the magnificence of the self emerged that Belodedov, in my view, emitted. Foucault insists that anthropology emerged not sooner than the “man” emerged as the object of science (1994, 340, 344); at some point, it appeared that Belodedov exemplified the emergence and the existence of the “man” in general on a shore beyond the once-abandoned village, afar from a khutor the ideal version of which he imagined. Human being, or man “sees opening up a space whose movable coordinates meet in him; in general fashion, his corporeal existence interlaces him through and through with the rest of the living world; since he produces objects and tools, exchanges the things he needs, organizes a whole network of circulation along which what he is able to consume flows, and in which he

212 himself is defined as an intermediary stage, he appears in his existence immediately interwoven with others” (Foucault, 1994, 351). Foucault, at once pointing at infrastructure here (tools, objects, networks, flows), and multispecies arrangements (the living world), speaks of the corporeality of the organism caught in the network of the living beings and objects. Before the human being even thinks of others, the tools that the person produced already meant all the imaginary world able to benefit from the motor that has no tension and no dead point at which the rotation stops as well as from arrangement of the mushroom room and the beehives miraculously arranged the way honey flows into mason jars by itself. The Belodedov’s version of futurity replicated his own way of living, only in better conditions, and was structured around the idea of a settlement consisting of the ideal houses, and, ultimately, it will always mean, a society where the citizen was supposed to see advantages in a solitary, self-sustainable, and self-sufficient existence. If the citizen of this “city of the future” willget everything that she or he could need at home, that means that they are going to be independent from others and in need of no outside contact. In this striking replication of his own life as the living suitable for everyone, imagining the futurity of humanity where every individual is living independent life within one’s hose with an infinite honey and mushroom supply which donot require them to leave the house, Belodedov was, like many utopian dreamers. In the grandiosity of their solitude, they were perhaps in the closest communication with the humanity as a whole even if humanity had yet not idea and, on many occasions, was not about to learn. Belodedov was creating his own utopia in the “ruins” as it were of the Soviet “utopia” or by the very least an ambitious project of relocating and resituating the village of Karda which ultimately led to its demise and current renaissance and rebirth, in the new Russia. The future will tell what will come out of it; meanwhile, Belodedov, Myasnikov, and other Kardinians and connected are the participants in a heteroutopia flourishing in place of the dreams that did not develop quiteas they were envisioned. But recently, after about a decade-long break, a riverboat began stopping at Karda again.

213 Conclusion

In this work, I have presented a “cartography,” of sorts, of maybe “topography” of part of Irkutsk District from Bratsk to Anosovo to Karda. I began with Bratsk in order to introduce the bigger context in which Anosovo (and Karda) emerged, along with other settlements brought to life by the Soviet planners and comprised out of the ones that emerged “spontaneously” in the course of the Russian colonization of Siberia since the 17th century. On a microlevel of personal stories, I have introduced a multiplicity of “heteroutopias” that reemerge as palpable reminders and reverberations of the visions of the future as conceived in the layered historic past. These futures as imagined in the past, I have suggested, constitute the “ruins” powerful in the present. These heteroutopias are the powerful connections to the places among other affective ties, which I suggest swells into the “affective infrastructures” of connections between humans, inhuman world, animals, and objects. It is the visions of the future that ultimately make the present habitable, promising, and alluring. Connected with a cord of perceptible continuity to the Soviet time and beyond, the heteroutopias in question do not belong to the past and are not about to end; instead, they are indicative of the futures, of the work of the imagining and reimagining of the future that is being done across territories and places. The images of the future are layered in the landscape itself, so to speak. People readthe plausible scenarios from the spatial distributions of objects. The “heteroutopia” is what I propose to call the layering of the visions of the future as there is no one utopia written in the materialities but many. This idea builds on the notion of heterotopia as defined by Foucault andthe development of “heterodystopia” offered by Cons (2018). The Soviet futurities have been long recognized as “utopian” by the Russian and Western theorists alike (Buck-Morss, 2002). But the idea of “free market,” as well as the “American dream” of individual prosperity are no less “utopian”

214 and perhaps even dystopian and nightmarish. The manicured lawn in front of the house wherea perfect nuclear family of four lives became a symbol of not only security but also paranoid state surveillance and hidden violence. The individual prosperity in the situation when the humanity is comprised of mortals is based on the ideals of Protestantism (Weber, 2013) and runs against the crushing flow of time, existence of different languages and cultures, and inevitability ofdeath (Anderson, 1983). Foucault had already woven “utopia” into “heterotopia” into his definition which is as broad as it proved to be generative since the readings of “heterotopias” proliferate:

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places—places that doexist and that are formed in the very founding of society—which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites thatcanbe found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias.

—Foucault, 1967

This could mean anything, and I take it as a poetic way of talking about moments, rather than “places,” in which the place doubles, triples, and multiplies in the perception of the subject: rooms that remind of other rooms and times, and situations in which one is at once present and half-absent while being present somewhere else. The heteroutopias, in particular, are the places in which the feel of the “ideal” or “imaginary” world, the word as imagined by others, makes itself felt, in an overlapping of ideals that can be conflicting. For instance, the hut of the “recluse” in Karda, to me, was a heteroutopian place in which the utopia of a society as offered by Belodedov was superimposed on my perception of the utopia of the “developed Socialism” as far as I imagine it that brought the settlement of Karda to this shore. The dreams overlap; their presence canbe felt. I do not know if this is something in the atmosphere; it proves to be not easy to demonstrate in the text “on ethnographic examples.” Heterotopia as a see it is many “places” contesting a single site. Heteroutopia is the ideas of this place entering the contestation for the site’s future. Returning to the idea of heterotopia in The Order of Things, Foucault writes:

215 Heterotopias are disturbing, probably because they secretly undermine language, because they make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they destroy ‘syntax’ in advance, and not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that less apparent syntax which causes words and things (next to and also opposite one another) to ‘hold together’. This is why utopias permit fables and discourse: they run with the very grain of language and are part of the fundamental dimension of the fabula; heterotopias (such as those to be found so often in Borges) desiccate speech, stop words in their tracks, contest the very possibility of grammar at its source; they dissolve our myths and sterilize the lyricism of our sentences.

—Foucault; highlights are the author’s, 1994, xviii

Heterotopia therefore begins there where the coherence of the language leaves us, and “lyricism of… sentences” is ruptured. It appears possible, from here, to derive the idea of heteroutopia as a moment in which the different utopian visions strive for domination within a single place.A tiny world of Karda, which is a peculiar “zone of abandonment” to use Biehl’s phrase (2013), functions at the same time as a zone of strangely appealing possibilities. It is a “zone” in which some people refuse to participate in the “attention economy,” or the economy of interconnectedness, striving instead for a tranquility that possibly can be found only in a relative self-isolation. Placing Anosovo, Yandy, and Karda on maps in the cartographies of the English language in general and ethnographic topographies in particular, I was aware that I am in some sort of communication with others who did their projects in places that not too often surface to the attention of the public not connected to such places already by virtue of some “ties” or“roots.” Such places on the margins were called “out-of-the-way” (Tsing, 1993), “on the side of the road” (Stewart, 1996), places “not yet forgotten” (Brown, 2015); forgotten by whom, one is tempted to inquire? Certainly not by people who are still living there or frequenting those places. One thing that unites these places is that they are potentially a fruitful ground for inquiries. As Das and Poole suggested, things look different from for margins that therefore have a capacity to illuminate the discourses when it comes to the master narratives of the state (2004). Being in Anosovo, one observes that Putin’s stability that is widely proclaimed in Russia to be a desirable value has a different meaning. In places where “modernity” disappears or at least extenuates, as anthropologist Anna Kruglova noted on the examples of the roads prone to “the sudden appear-

216 ances and disappearances” in Russia (2019, 461), this stability acquires features of “stuckness.” A type of “pulsating” existence, if we may call it that recalling Gordillo’s “pulsating ruins,” is traced not only over space, but also time. On the margins, the point of stabilization was reached simultaneously with a low point of the economic downslide. And yet, Anosovo is a vibrant hub of connections, events, memories, and hopes for its dwellers, visitors, and former inhabitants. In the overlapping maps of the region, Siberia, Russia, and the world, Anosovo is a “center,” in this sense, not unlike thousands of other post-industrial settlements. Anosovo is both common and unique, with people “emplaced” whose stories and histories are what Bennett calls “inalienable” (2014) from the place and inseparable from context. Some- times the place’s very “insufficiencies” constitute a powerful connection to it, another tie inthe system of “affective infrastructures.” Throughout my ethnographic project, I have met with people of various trades and occupations— store workers, business people, stay-at-home mothers and grandmothers, teachers, managers, lumberjacks and hunters, administrators of various levels, and officials of different ranks—in an attempt to find loose ends pulling which it would be possible to somehow improve life inAnosovo. Even though this not a goal of the ethnographic investigation, which is mainly observation and is only so much “participant,”as some of the practitioners of the method insist,90 I semi-hoped to find those who were responsible, possessed power, or could help in the improvement of this life, struc- turally. I could not find loose ends. The organs of power and other actors—Oblcommunenergosbyt, administrations, Saint-Petersburg planners, the Severlog management, the Legislature Assembly members, the diesel station boss, photographers coming and going, Siberian and foreign, ethnographers and museum workers, and villagers themselves, intertwined in a kind of a network, a complex “desiring machine,” an agglomerate of the “affective infrastructures” which were “blind” and merciless in this sense. 90Paul Rabinow: “Once one accepts a definition of anthropology of consisting of participant observation, asIhad, then one’s course of action is really governed by these oxymoronic terms; the tension between them defines the space of anthropology. Observation, however, is the governing term in the pair, since it situates the anthropologists’ activities. However much one moves in the direction of participation, it is always the case that one is still both an outsider and an observer” (1977). But not every anthropologist is an outsider to their field, as the subsequent onslaught of theorizing “observant participation” stressing the latter, as opposed to the former, “governing termin the pair” seems to suggest (Moeran 2009, Wacquant 2010).

217 Every element of this machine was working somehow, but, being “caught” in this system, all one could do is observe how the wheels rotate slowly producing these visions of the future or even alternative universes—resurrection out of the dead, beehive as a state, temporariness of the project of the settlement of Anosovo symbolic of the termporariness of existence in general, cross signifying the limit of the habitable space, philosophizing of mentality, and projects of the universal sustainable living created by a loner in Karda. Yet nothing could be done, applicably, today—the road could not be evened, the water could not filtered, the village could not demarcated, and the houses could not privatized. This human-and-inhuman system just existed in its unmovable colossality breaking intoeach new day just as it have been rolling; nothing could be done about it, but nothing could also stop this rolling. My research question, about the connections that hold people to a place, particularly when the place is experiencing outmigration and suffering from economic and social abandonment, was an inadequte question, way too small, and yet, perfectly answerable: the situatedness in the place followed from the existence of the unmovable agglomeration of systems, an “affective infrastructure” that included “ruins” as its elements. The other elements of this infrastructure were humans, connected to it as moving parts. The ruins included not only architectural or infrastructural remains—the fences withpen- tacles, the cycterns brought to Anosovo in the 1960s and never used for anything, the buildings with the traces of fires, the pavilion with diesel generation churned from one side, the rusty skele- tons of boats from both sides of the village, standing there as memorials to themselves—but also recurrent narratives, the tropes of the enumeration of lost islands, the values, the understandings of what is appropriate and what is not appropriate, for a man and for a woman, and people themselves. We, the people, ourselves became agents of ruins enacting the meanings upon each other in words and gestures. Theorizing and clarifying the “affective infrastructures” was a main theoretical aspiration that accompanied this work. “Affective infrastructure” is a metaphor to imagine people as interconnected and in close relationships with the place, objects, and animals. The sensitive joints in the

218 affective infrastructures, parts of the desiring machines, people move—or do not move—insofar as their bodies are interconnected with these systems.91 In the Russian Marxist teleologies, basis or base [basis] and superstructure [nadstroika] were a widely replicated distinction between the “the economic structure of society” and “superstructure of juridical and political life”; the latter corresponded to the “real forms of societal consciousness” (Marx and Engels 1859, 7, quoted by the Russian edition). One of the features of the Soviet project that distinguished it from the tsarist imperial project was a broad scale of the construction lifting projects from “isolated public works” to “an inter- nationally and transnationally networked activity” (Rindzevičiūtė, 2019, 206), in view for the Communism to wrap around the planet and become synonymous with humanity. The projects included the railroads and hydroelectric dams, communication and electricity supplies for the unfolding of settlements (Collier, 2011, 51). Simultaneously unfolding were the construction sites and regulations of camps, cities, trash disposal, food distribution, money-printing, selections of plants and cattle breeding, as well as systems of information, regime of hygiene and healthcare, population control, schools, and sex education. The electrification in particular figured into the calculation of communist transformations. “Communism is the Soviet power plus electrification of the whole country because without electrification, it is impossible to rise the industry of the country”Lenin ( , 1920, 30). The electrification was a recognized goal of solving of the “khoziaistvennyi vopros”—the economic issue. The economic issue included “transportation, industry, and… the whole system of well-thought-out measures for the lifting of the peasant farming [khoziaistvo] to the necessary height” (Lenin, 1920, 30). The task required the reorganization of every sphere of life.

91If “infrastructures are matter that enable the movement of other matter” (Larkin, 2013, 327), then people themselves are part of the infrastructure. “Infrastructure” is a “movement or patterning of social form” “made from within relation,” and even a “kind of form of life” (Berlant, 2016, 393–394), in which case, the infrastructure that brings Anosovo to life and maintains it where it is an infrastructure of inefficiency and “stuckness” that is nevertheless efficient in reproduction of itself. Infrastructure is “a platform providing for and reproducing life in the city” (Simone, 2004, 408)—and in the rural space. “[E]nduring systems that provide what we might call the infrastructures of social life… enable the movement of people, ideas and information from place to place” (Urry 2007, 12, emphasis is the author’s). What moves in the infrastructures where people are elements is the affect that, “far from being asocial,… is the ongoing force ofthe social taking evolving form” (Massumi, 2002, 205).

219 The “cities of the future” (Krupskaya, 1929, 128; 1930) that were to become a “housing envelope [zhilishchnaia obolochka] for Socialistically organized society of the future” raised in dreams which attempted to find manifestation in reality concretizing in numerous settlements acrossthe Soviet Union. The production of space meant the production of subjectivities, ways ofrearing children and ultimately the “fruit” of the new man (and woman—chelovek), in works of educators: “Remember the words of the great gardener, Comrade Stalin: ‘People should be reared with care and attention as a gardener rears his chosen fruit-tree”’ (Makarenko 1937, quotedby Oushakine 2004). Multiple systems were engaged in such human-production: sports and exercises, collective celebratory work involving weekends and travels with teammates, bombardment by the radio and musical production, production of space, transportation, and communication. All of it were directed to one end: production of the human that would ultimately allow the humanity to colonize cosmos. In Tsiolkovsky’s imaginings, this was to advance the humanity as a species.92 The Communist versions of the future made it clear that there were no limitations for the humans. It is important to note the accessibility of this messaging, as opposed to exclusionary obscu- rity; it was not meant for an arcane circle of academe, literati, or intellectuals, but, for rather a mass reader: thus, Tsiolkovski’s piece was published in a widely read youth magazine Tekhnika – Molodeshi! (Technology–to the Youth!) in 1981, and it was not an isolated vision either, the journal was stuffed with no less ambitious visions of the Soviet tomorrow. The today’s constructions and successes were tokens of this tomorrow. The pieces of the advancements of the Soviet

92As I already mentioned in chapter 2 but recapitulate here, according to Tsiolkovsky (1981), the advanced perfect race (sovershennaya poroda) was to alleviate the sufferings of the undeveloped forms of life by sparing themthe years of painstaking evolutionary development through the extermination. As a result of the slaughter, in place of the senseless suffering “the intelligent, mighty, happy life” comes. Clearly, the latter is a million times greater thanthe former.” (Tsiolkovsky, 1981). According to my interlocutor Bodrov, who established the Anosovian border cross, the unbounded Communist aspirations beget post-Soviet nostalgias of missing the narrative of the great deeds in which people supposedly felt included into circuits of planetary project of bringing the Communism to the planet (and eventually, extraterrestrially). The new Soviet man was going to transform not only the political system oftheworld but resew the fabric of everyday living (Lunacharsky, 1927). And then, he was supposed to conquer other planets (eliminating unadvanced races in the process). While all this flows into quite a merciless world, it had a foundation and seemed to find confirmation in the historic events. For instance, Yuri Slezkine in The House of Government (2017) depicts in detail the fates of dozens of people associated with one elite building in Moscow many of whom were “repressed”: sent to camps or executed in the 1930s. The life on other planets remained a fantasy and a dealofthe future, but the extermination already transpired.

220 science that made incredible prospects appear the matter of the nearest future were populating the pages of local newspapers. The Soviet government and influential thinkers recognized the connection between the affective sphere and the material infrastructure as fundamental, asother imperial and colonial powers did.93 One could conclude that Soviet infrastructures were affective, and their ruins continue generating affective affinities and disaffections—in other words, affective responses. The multimedia directed at the construction of the Soviet man and woman—were variegated; they included discursive, visual, sound, performance, logic of the movement in dance and at work. Rather than conviction or ideological certainties, these were deeply embodied experiences and rehearsed behaviors patterns of which remain as an invisible but reproducible and detectible infrastructure.

Nonchalance

Unlike some of my interlocutors, I do not claim, nor do I believe that this nonchalance as such, in general, is a characteristic of the Russians—or “Siberians,” for that matter. But nonchalance can possess specific features in Russia and Siberia. I am suggesting that a nonchalant attitude can correlate with refusals, commitments, and decisions when it comes to working through the conditions. Nonchalance and its various other names, some of which bear markedly negative connotations, are a double-edge sword that can be used against “the nonchalant.” But, it can also be weaponized by them with their struggle with precarity and the adversarial forces blaming them for their own misfortunes. It is nothing new in the neoliberalism to blame the victim for their positions, particularly, the poor for their poverty, the hungry for their hunger, and the victims of violence for the violence inflicted upon them. Perhaps nonchalance in response to these aggressions is a coping mechanism that allows people to survive. It is not the only response nor perhaps even the most prominent one, but it is a refusal to experience anger offering some sort of what can be perceived “apathy” or irresponsiveness instead because anger is too costly, and a form of indifference in response to systemic indifference is adequate.

93“Governance required a fine-tuned knowledge of affections… Colonial statecraft took seriously the forceof affect and strove for its mastery.” (Stoler, 2016, 225).

221 This is not to praise indifference or deny the validity of other responses, but whatelsecan a person do with a daily struggle with the state and what is perceived colonial rule when they are in a situation when the future does not present a concrete or plausible plan of improvement of their living conditions, such as pavement of the road, central electricity, or wired connections? Anthropologists call such conditions—economic stagnation, hopelessness, absence of tangible alternatives—precarious. Anne Allison defined precarity as the “condition of uncertainty, of rumbling instability” (2013, 13). As I already noted, in Anosovo, the instability itself fused into a kind of “stability,” and there is no big room for uncertainty: one could say with a degree of certainty that the hospital will not return to Anosovo any time soon, the central electricity will not reach Anosovo, filtered water was out of the question. It was more or less certain that thewinter road will not be paved in the near future. Thus, the condition of instability became a manner of stability. Certainty became a feature of “stuckness” in the conditions of the present. The model of this stuckness is a literal stuckness in the clay and puddles of the unpaved road. The attitude of nonchalance and dismissal accompanied a stability of “stuckness.” Nonchalance emerged as the future was deprived of plausible scenarios of significant improvement, as it happens in the “depressed region.”94 This affective responses to precarity in the post-Soviet territories in the subsidized Siberian region of Altai Krai, Barnaul (formally, one of the ten Russian “depressed regions”) has been described as “patriotism of despair” (Oushakine, 2009). Here, I would like to discuss “patriotism of despair” as it relates to “nonchalance” the way I think of it before moving on to another fruitful affective notion—“cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011) —in the attempt to clarify and further develop the idea of “cheerful nonchalance.” “Patriotism of despair” is what anthropologist Serguei Oushakine called a mix of feelings and states that people experienced as they attempted to wrestle with “their feeling of belonging once Soviet power and the Soviet motherland were ‘gone”’ (2009, 2). “[P]ost-Soviet landscape” that emerged in place of the previous, however predictable, coherence, was “fragmented and

94Depressed area is an area where the income is lower than average. In Russia, there are ten officially defined “depressed regions.” Anosovo is not, formally, in one of them, but the level of living there is lower than average in the region, hence it is possible to call it “depressed region” or, more precisely, “depressed area.”

222 disorienting” (Oushakine, 2009, 4). There was no singular aesthetic of meaning-making framework within which the disparate fragments of the “palimpsest” were making a coherent whole (Oushakine, 2009, 15). The visual framework of the city of Barnaul represented a cacophony of fonts, colors, and forms in the layering of billboards of the flourishing advertisement in place of the Soviet pristineness and ascetism in which slogans, tenement housing, and the logic of the squares and every little thing was an iconography of the Soviet power. The refurbished pavements in Barnaul where every store owner attempted to create a coherence within their own little controlled territory, resulted, in the overarching picture of the city, in a palimpsest of patches of different textures (Oushakine, 2000). I have never been to Barnaul, but this observation remains correct in the application to other Siberian cities: Angarsk, Irkutsk, Bratsk, Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Severobaikalsk, as far as I observed, as well as in dozens of smaller towns. Like competing forms, colors, and textures of the reorganized city space, fragments of ideologemes and ideas refused to cohere; instead, new ways of relating and belonging “had to be invented” (Oushakine, 2009, 4). The refusal of things to cohere coincided with a characteristic inability of people tooffer ready coherences. Oushakine called this alleged temporary speech impairment “the post-Soviet aphasia” (2000, 994):

On the one hand, the term will indicate what Jakobson called ‘the “frozen” beginning stage’, a state of lacking, at which the already formed desire to communicate is not yet complemented by the ability to communicate something. From that point of view, aphasia denotes the inability of the post-Soviet subject to use language creatively. On the other hand, like Jakobson, I also understand aphasia as a compensatory type of discursive behaviour, in which lack of a new creative symbolic production (‘disorder of output’) is to be filled by complex patterns of usage of the symbolic forms acquired during the previous stages of individual and societal development. —Oushakine, 2000, 994–995, highlights are the author’s

“The post-Soviet aphasia” was determined, not to say diagnosed, as a state, based onthe1997 data, when the transition was in full speed and simultaneously was muffled and denied, “lost,” in Oushakine’s terms (2000). The in-betweenness and transition were characterized by lackof direction. Perhaps people knew what they are transitioning from but not where, exactly. The point of departure was loosely defined, but the point of arrival covered in fog. “Aphasia,” then,

223 if we are to adopt this term, was an adequate form of expression of the state of in-betweenness. To me, this state is perhaps better described as withholding of judgment or giving a tentative answer; the data itself somewhat overrides the idea of “aphasia” as Oushakine’s respondents offer incisive and eloquent comments on their individual and collective transition. “Aphasia” is nevertheless an important term (and Oushakine offered it a year before Stoler), even given its pathologizing power, to oppose or at least supplement the talk about the “imperial,” “colonial,” or “collective” amnesia, as Stoler put it, because “very little of these histories (she means “racially charged colonial history” (2016, 125)—V.O.) has been or is actually forgotten: it may be displaced, occluded from view, or rendered inappropriate to pursue” (2016, 128). The verges of “unsayable” and “unavailable” may lie not in the inability to remember, but rather in the inappropriateness of speech and the impossibility to speak coherently of them in the public or private settings, as well as the refusal, for these reasons, to analyze or otherwise make sense out of things. Oushakine and Stoler speak of aphasia in different contexts: Oushakine derives the diagnosis from the analysis of his Barnaul informants’ interviews, who might be his circle but, by the very virtue of writing in English, are not part of his audience, and Stoler accuses the elites. Both instances are a creative appropriation, perhaps misappropriation, of a medical diagnosis. Perhaps there can be a move of the stress from “aphasia” as serious impairment, an inability to speak, to the recognition, particularly in the latter case, that this “aphasia” might be not an inability but rather anactive refusal. In case of the evaluation of the Soviet-post-Soviet contexts and especially in case of the recognition of racial violence of the colonial project, such “aphasia” is rather not an inability but an active refusal to define and acknowledge the situation, the instantiation of the withholding of judgment. By the very least, the refusal to recognize the typicality is responsible for the effort to carve a special place for the Russian colonial process as supposedly markedly different from other colonial processes. There is no denying that the change in discourses and narrations as well as the waysofliving have been dramatic and felt on a deep level by individuals because these changes did not merely pertain to the spoken, written, or expressed ideology. In the Soviet State, every ordinary thing was an iconography of the Communist future to come and a token of its advent. The “struggle

224 with thingness (veshchizm)”—that is to say, with petty-bourgeoisie love to consume, hoard, and possess—was “a struggle for the thing” (Oushakine, 2020, 89). The bourgeoise sensibilities’ longing for better things, more things, and accessible things in the late Soviet Union were instrumental in construction of belonging to “a Soviet middle class,” if we can call it that, guided by the feeling “let us make sure that we are not worse off than others” (“ne khuzhe chem u ludei,” as my grandmother repeated). But, even though the “verticals” and “horizontals” of everyday furniture were populated with glass swans, cups in polka dot, and other objects of decoration that were hardly ever in use but signified the propriety of the house, the first impulse of the creation of this furniture and objects of mass production was laid by the designers of the 1920s. And they imagined a revolutionary thing: functional, unusual, efficient, accelerating productivity (Lissitzky), in short, conductive of the Socialist subjectivities. These impulses continued well into zastoi (stagnation) (Oushakine, 2020). The citizens of the future were to be surrounded by the things of the future, and, inmaking objects handy, people were supposed to continue growing into the embodiments of the ideals of the humans that the Soviet theorists imagined. Therefore, when the ideals collapsed, the affective meanings behind the everyday objects collapsed too, which was much more painful, on the affective level, than a purely ideological switch of discursive practices could be. The milieuitself no longer made sense, the habitus did not find place, the rooms frankly refused to be inhabitable and museumized in a blink, and the objects that represented the future became reminders of the past, useless debris even if they remained functional, “vintage” at best and trash by default—what I call ruins. Returning to ordinary things their usability entailed the reinvention of subjectivities. The process of such (re)invention has been uneven. For many, the necessity to reorient themselves was traumatic. “Feeling of loss” of “a country that had vanished” (Oushakine 2009, 6–7) was overwhelming.95 A rehearsal of loss, an active and repetitive “negation” of scenarios of the future became generative as people found a shared ground in such negation (Oushakine, 2009).

95For a period, the trope of “vanishing” in regard to the Socialist realities was popular. Compare “Vanishing Hectar” (Verdery, 2003). But it appears that no “vanishing” had taken place, literally: the disappearance of the previous modes of enterprises did not mean their traceless dissolution.

225 The losses were, at the same time, acquisitions. Even though many post-Soviet denizens hadto work towards restoration of “the sense of collectivity and cohesiveness they felt during the So- viet project”, they found a shared ground, solidarity, community, and belonging precisely in the “deployment of pain” (Oushakine, 2009, 12–21). Ultimately, centering on losses, reiteration, and “recollections of past injuries” were becoming a structure of the feeling of national belonging, the “everyday patriotism of despair” (Oushakine, 2009, 98). The affective infrastructure of “cheerful” nonchalance has a profound similarity with “patriotism of despair” around the figure of loss. For Anosovians, losses, which were also frequently reiterated, were something that not only happened in the past but also awaited in the future powered by uncertainty. The ultimate losses could include in the future Anosovo itself, because ofits perceived initial ephemerality and because the non-privatized property could easily be alienated from the people who lived in houses and on land for years. There were visions of the future for Anosovo, at the time of its foundation, that didnotma- terialize. Such visions were written in the materiality of things. That these visions werenot fulfilled spiked what I perceived to be a ubiquitous feeling of nostalgia enmeshed with hope.Itis difficult for me to say if this feeling was my projection, whether I owed it to my father’sandmy interlocutors’ childhood memories as connected to the place, or a hopeful nostalgia—or nostalgic hope—was indeed prominently present and fused in the air of Anosovo. I perceived the sense of loss of my Anosovo interlocutors as lyrical and benumbed. People seemed to me to have resigned to the idea that the structural improvement was not forthcoming any time soon. But an unex- tinguishable humor, and a prideful, boisterous, and affected-disregard-to-danger attitude that I dubbed triumphant—all-defeating—cheerful nonchalance was an affective condition and adap- tive strategy that allowed life to go on no matter what. There was hardly any detectable traceof despair or depression in a collective affect. Even apocalyptic expectations were connected more with the sense of excitement than fear. Not evening of the road was a great inconvenience for some but a ground of optimism for others. The cheerful nonchalance has therefore some features of optimism. Nonchalance bothre- sembles and seems to be distinguishable from “cruel optimism” (Berlant, 2011). Lauren Berlant

226 describes an affective condition of “cruel optimism” as a “circuit of optimism and disappointment” (2011, 27). “Cruel” refers to the abysmal quality of such a disappointment: “cruelty is the ‘hard’ in a hard loss” (2011, 51). Berlant conceptualizes cruel optimism as of a manner of affective attachment that is both anxious and excited. The “cruelly optimistic” longing knows thatit will not meet fulfilment, and yet, it continues the affective investment in the object impossible to attain. “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is actually anobstacle to your flourishing” (Berlant, 2011, 1). Cruel optimism is a trauma bond and an emotional roller- coaster. The circuit of excitement and disenchantment in “the infrastructures of belonging” is short (Berlant, 2011, 27). The Anosovian relationships with the realities of the world have “cruelly optimistic” features. The hope for the tangible improvement of circumstances is slim. But an enduring hopethat powers the demands to the state make the “cruel” attachment to the place “optimistic.” The similarity of cheerful nonchalance to cruel optimism is in the intensity of the realization of a stubbornness of the unbending world resisting our desires. A longing for a better was elusive and seemed to never reward. The difference of nonchalance to “cruel optimism” is that nonchalance is “unattached” even if such unattachment is only pretend. Nonchalance describes notan affective attachment but a flaunted lack thereof. It is curious that nonchalance in itsattractive side as a disregard to danger apparently prompts people to detect some “patriotic” sense in it. My interlocutor Sergey suggested that contempt to danger is a characteristic of the Russian and Siberian ethos. A New Yorker journalist at the time of hurricane Sandy observed people refusing to leave and called it a “New York–style” nonchalance (Buckley, 2012).96 Unlike these theorists

96Nonchalance does not seem to be featuring prominently as a conceptualized notion in literature. Nonchalance has been connected to mobility, particularly refusal of mobility, and—to bullying. Psychologists used to conceptualize “nonchalance” as one of the responses to bullying (Camodeca and Goossens, 2005). This is problematic because the behavioral nonchalance as lack of reaction or response does not necessitate the inner peace. One old study suggested that nonchalance is a response that diminishes bullying, and therefore it is an adequate retort achieving its objective (Salmivalli, Karhunen, and Lagerspetz, 1996). Nonchalance could be a sign of a certain privilege. Sheila Croucher who studied USA-born Americans migrating to Canada describes their nonchalance as absence of strong emotions that other migrants experience in the process of migration. The privileged travelers did not indulge in the “themes of fear, heartbreak, relief, orjoy”(Croucher, 2011, 121). Their stories were characterized by “limited forethought that preceded their migration” (Croucher, 2011, 121). They assumed familiarity of cultures and often also originally assumed temporality of theirmove(Croucher, 2011, 127). In this case, the researcher concluded, the attitude of nonchalance emanates “from a position of relative privilege” (Croucher, 2011, 123).

227 of nonchalance, I do not wish to suggest that nonchalance is something specifically local in general. Nor it is necessary a “Siberian,” “Russian,” or uniquely New Yorkian quality. Instead, I am inclined to conclude that people embrace nonchalance as a way to deal with precarity. It is in the precarious conditions that we are likely to notice manifestations of nonchalance. Cheerful nonchalance is an affective response to exploitative conditions of work and acer- tainty of uncertainty. Such an affective response is efficient in the affective relations withthe post-Soviet enterprises and businesses that use the Soviet “material basis” to further and advance their extractive practices. Cheerful nonchalance can be perceived and is sometimes viewed by Anosovians as lack of personal responsibility and carelessness. But cheerful nonchalance can also be a factor of personal and community’s survival. The imperturbability of spirit and body when things are not about to get better is strategic. Perhaps nonchalance will eventually be fully demonstrated as an affective attitude that allows people across the world to live fuller lives inthe precarious conditions. At least, this could be a hypothesis for further investigation. Nonchalance possesses certain qualities. First, nonchalance of an individual can be useful for a community even if individual does not intend it as such. This is suggested by the story of Oleg who is the first to know when the ice is safe to travel. Even though he travels it on his ownaccord knowing that the travel is risky, the community is getting the information when the movement across the river becomes possible. Second, nonchalance helps dealing with troublesome situations where other leverages, like collective action, seem to be out of rich. Dismissing the polygraph im- plementation can prove the best strategy in the struggle with the timber harvesting firm: workers may feel exempt of obligations since they never received any social benefits nor were properly compensated for their work. Third, refusal of safety measures while working, that, people know,

On the other side of the spectrum from the privileged, the radically dispossessed seems to exhibit a kind of nonchalance confronted with the alternativeless situations. In Precarious Japan, Anne Allison (2013) speaks of a woman who left a zone contaminated by radiation but returned shortly thereafter. When the woman was toldtheplace is risky, she replied that for her risky where the other places; here, in her home, she at least she had a place and something to do. “Riskiness defined by what and by whom?” Allison asks(2013, 12). Nonchalance can accompany decisions of mobility and immobility. New Yorkers refusing to vacate homes in the wake of the warning of the hurricane Sandy, Americans moving to Canada, and a refugee of a radiation zone returning home seemingly disregarding the dangers of the place when confronted with what she perceived to be greater dangers elsewhere can be said to be “nonchalant” in different degrees and aspects. A certain nonchalance accompanies the bracing for what is to come.

228 could lead to injury but think that they personally will not be affected, becomes a point around which a specific set of relationships is built. Fourth, nonchalance makes itself known in dailylife, in the fabric of everydayness where it participates in mundane actions. Finally, nonchalance is a category that is morally ambiguous: it arises admiration as the disregard to danger and is being condemned as a lack of foresight and recklessness. Nonchalance is nevertheless observable as an affective attitude across socio-economic categories, from privileged travelers (Americans in Canada) to New Yorkers potentially endangered by the hurricane that they ignore. In the Siberian village, nonchalance is an affective condition of daily life. Nonchalance accompanies being and living: connection to the place that takes a lot of bodily resources but gives people a feeling of freedom and being away from state surveillance. To conclude, while nonchalance is not an ethnic or national characteristic, it may be a characteristic of precarious socio-economic conditions. Even though I do not make here explicit that nonchalance is a much more significant response to the post-Soviet realities as opposed to nostalgia that has received far greater degrees of scholarly attention (because making such argument would require a separate work to bewrit- ten), I believe cheerful nonchalance is an affective condition that allows for a continuation inthe absence of reliable hopes for tangible future opportunities.

Language

Mocking humor is one of the linguistic vehicles or the expression of nonchalance, a kind of “imperturbability” characteristic of “Siberians” that is also expressed in “nonchalant” behavior—not caring too much or perhaps not at all—refusing to swear small things, patience, calm, and either knowledge or hope that everything will solve itself with a minimal worry of the humans or, even better, without any trouble. It appears that nonchalance plays a crucial part in the conversation about “mentality” in Anosovo and beyond where all kinds of people participate. Some blame Anosovo’s “stuckness,” disorganization, or lack of infrastructures on Anosovo itself, and in particular, on that “mentality” of refusing to be bothered, and others suggest that nonchalance is what allows Siberians to survive in difficult conditions, as I myself suspect. The language in the 2010s in Ikrutsk District of Siberia and beyond prominently features

229 the tropes and references to the Soviet contexts. It is a continuation of the styob—a widespread everyday linguistic practice mentioned by Pesmen (2000) and decribed by Yurchak (2005)—but, I would argue, with a considerable shift in what it does affectively. Pesmen did her work in thecity of Omsk, and Yurchak is from Saint Petersburg. Styob, a type of mocking, dry humor questioning the status quo in the Soviet and early post-Soviet years, played a role in upsetting or, as Yurchak calls it, deterritorialization of the Soviet master narrative-domineering discourses. It has been a practice of sacrosanct rejecting and subverting every state proclamation or mainstream idea, and one of the main language vehicles of what I call nonchalance—not caring or caring less. Yurchak sees the roots of styob in the carnivalesque parody and outlines where styob tran- scends the limits of the “carnival”: “[U]nlike Bakhtin’s parody, Soviet stiob was not limited to temporally and spatially bounded and publicly sanctioned ‘carnivals.’… [T]he stiob… performed a displacement of the symbolic order” (Yurchak, 2005, 250) in the everydayness, and was as ubiquitous as it could be subtle and difficult fully distinguish from the language of the official discourse. Even though after the official ending of the Soviet Union, there were no more “Soviet” contexts to displace, the post-Soviet spaces continued carrying the Soviet-charged tropes, metaphors, narratives, ideas, and gestures. Unlike many other features of the everydayness, the styob continued being a great tool to deal with the emergent neoliberal realities as well. But styob became something different now: in the speech of my interlocutors, styob, without losing its humorous subverting capacities has also became a nostalgic instrument of invocation of the Soviet realities. Soviet slogans, however ironically cited, are now markings of belonging and references to powerful shared contexts. As the deterritorialization of the Soviet meanings continued, the practices of “styob” shifted: instead or even while remaining a practice of irony, a former (?)styob became a mode of lyrical recollection. The ridiculing of the Soviet tropes is no longer a markof belonging to a counterculture, as it was for the art group Mit’ki as far as Yurchak reconstructs (2005, 238–254). In Anosovo, the everyday use of the Soviet tropes (“There is a beginning to the renovation (revolution), but no ending,” instantiations of calling the local road “BAM” (Baikal– Amur Mainline), and erection of the cross “the great Communist construction,” “Party said, we must; Komsomol replied, we will!”, and so on, are the instances of humorous evocation of the

230 Soviet slogans, but they do a different work than they did when the USSR has not yet collapsed. In the Soviet times, such formulas could be uttered either in all seriousness or as a matter ofa styob (which is largely an ironic practice of city-based intelligentsia, notably of Saint Petersburg and Moscow, not to suggest that other cities or towns are devoid of it). Today, these tropes are jokes that are indicative of the national and epochal, if we can call it so, belonging. The younger people do not use them as often as these slogans are not part of their living memory butrather something their parents and grandparents say. For people who use these tropes “naturally” because they come from their memory and personal experiences, they are a mark of generational belonging. And, however ironically they are meant to be used, these tropes are linguistic ruins of the past and as such tinged with melancholic reverberations. As people continue to ridicule the Soviet tropes, such tropes are at the same time markings of the “post-Sovietness” of the space and time. They are the reminders of the shared past. Even though the grand slogans are(mostly) evoked jokingly, they continue populating everyday conversations for older generations. They may be are a styob, but a fading one, a styob with nostalgic pins.

“The Far-Away Land of Anosovo”: Instead of the Epilogue

My father resigned from his post one year ahead of his term. He had a heart attack in Anosovo followed by surgery in Moscow. An outspoken woman, Daria Georgievna, was elected and took on the post. In the same club where Voronov presented himself to the villagers earlier that year, there was an inauguration of the new Mayor that I attended. Rodion Romanov gave a speech greeting her on the post, and she was giving her oath to the hall full of Anosovians. She swore that she will do all the necessary steps she could to uplift the life in “our godforsaken village” [“nashe selo, zabytoye bogom”]. Then a group of women in vaguely-national Russian-looking long dresses and ribbons in their hair sang, from the scene, a songs composed by, evidently, an Anosovian who once left the village. The song lamented “the far-away land of Anosovo,” even though Anosovo was there, right under their feet. It struck me as the sudden discovery: perhaps “the land of Anosovo” was indeed not exactly under our feet—experiencially, practically, socially, economically and perhaps even ontologically.

231 The land was pulsating on maps—existing somewhere between “there is no Anosovo” andthe self-evident truth that Anosovo was indeed right there, in front of our very eyes. Anosovo was “far-away” in the sense that it was infinitely postponed in the future, in the Soviet planners’ imaginaries and in various contemporary ideas about the future alike. It has been intensely rumored in Anosovo that Anosovo was brought to a new place after the Bratsk dam flood and agglomerated out of previous villages with the thought preceding it. According to this view, Soviet planners designed the place already with the eye on its subsequent destruction. The future demolition of Anosovo, according to this view, was but a matter oftime. The temporariness of Anosovo was therefore wrought into its foundation. The ephemerality of Anosovo preceded its construction. But Anosovo have already exceeded the longest timeframe that Anosovians gave it. Further- more, ephemerality, supposedly embedded into the settlement from the beginning, itself ranged. Some, like Vera, speculated that Anosovo was here for twenty years. Others, who were older, like Alexander Victorovich, suggested that Anosovo was supposed to be there for fifty years: “Once all the good forest in the taiga is vyshchelkan (selectively cut, “knocked out”),” the village was supposed to be gone. Lydia, who moved to Irkutsk, suggested that the state fell back “waiting until everyone will move away on their own or die out.” Contrary to these convictions, the representatives of the state, like Leonid Petrov (Oblcom- munenergosbyt) and Dmitry Goncharov (the mayor of the Ust Udinian Raion), denied the existence of such embedded temporality. But the idea remained, persistent because the unfolding situation—the indifference, the ineptitude of power, business, and broader society—seemed to suggest that there were no plans for the future of Anosovo. And yet, great efforts were expended and invested in the relocation of Anosovo, which seems to indicate the opposite of its planned temporariness. In the 1960–70s, after the relocation, great energy was invested into the construction and sustaining of Anosovo on a new place. These efforts included clearing an area in the taiga from trees and trees’ roots, construction ofhouses, maintaining of the road and wood pavements, delivering cisterns that were to contain liquids and bulk products, construction of the mooring, and establishment of the institution of a Soviet

232 settlement in full scope. I have already listed these institutions with the same persistency thatmy interlocutors enumerated them: airport, post, school, boarding school, hospital, militia, library, club with a billiards desk, and so on. While the rumors of the planned obsolescence persisted, others in Anosovo worked against them. Thus, the settlement’s birthday celebration began as recently as 2017. The birthday celebration started with the impressive jubilee of 325 years. The celebration committee, consisting out of members of administration, village club, and an initiative group made a point of tracing Anosovo’s history not since 1961, the year of relocation, but from the year of 1692. It is in 1692 that, according to the records, the Cossack Fed’ka Onosov came here, to these shores, and founded a settlement, a frontier of the tsarist Russia. In this tracing of its own history to 1692, Anosovo was unlike the city of Bratsk. The city of Bratsk, as some Soviet cities, was “rejuvenated” by the administrative Soviet decision resetting the timeline. The birthday of the city of Bratsk is officially onthe12th of December of 1955. It is the date when the settlement specifically agglomerated for the construction of the Bratskdam received the status of the city. But the Bratsk ostrog (outpost, fortress) was founded in 1631. Instead of claiming this history, duration, or continuity, the city of Bratsk “annulled” its timeline. This “rejuvenation” meant more than just resetting celebrations. It was a restarting ofhistory. By contrast, Anosovo extended its timeline back into the middle ages despite being relocated from the place where it once was founded. As I watched the singers on the scenes of the Anosovo village club singing about “the far-away land of Anosovo,” I was recollecting the same singers starting and participating in the celebration of the Anosovo’s jubilee. That celebration, that extension of history into the middle ages, to me, seemed like not only the reinstallation of history but also a strong claim for the Anosovo’s future.

233 Appendices

Map of the Drowned River

The map of the Angara River before the flood was created by Maria Shipitsyna in2005.She reinstalled form, toponyms, and configuration of the islands and creeks from memory. Hers seems to be the only map of the drowned Angara River. It is now strange to think that when, in 1961, the river was flooded by the Bratsk dam reservoir, no map of the previous river seemsto have been made. Perhaps there were some maps of the Soviet planners, but regional museums, including Irkutsk, were unable to locate those in their archives upon my request. But the displaced were tempted to document the space and the names of the islands and maps of villages from their memory. No one knows how many of such reinstallations exist in domestic archives. People who remembered the previous Angara River are now mostly dead. Maria Shipitsyna died several years ago, and I never met her. She drew her map in watercolors on sheets of paper glued together into a roll. When I first saw her map, it was adorning a hall of the Ust Uda museum, and Icouldnot photograph it. When I visited the museum in 2018, the map was taken down and kept in archives. The museum worker Anna Sokhareva kindly agreed to show it to me. She spread it onthefloor for me to photograph, bit by bit, while she was holding the scroll so it will not collapse back into itself. (The floor was very clean). To my knowledge, it is for the first time that thismapis reproduced in full, with the permission of the museum. The map was printed before in a series of overlapping images on the verses of the covers of regional editions, but the names of the islands are barely legible there. What is this map? It grew in significance for me as the time passed. It was not sooner that I witnessed my many interlocutors recollecting and sometimes arguing

234 about the spatial configurations of the drowned villages that I understood how important such configurations were for people recalling them. They were like a collective dream that people once saw together and then compared and verified, against each other’s memories, where buildings, streets, or creeks were in relation to other landmarks. It was important for them to reinstall the lost world.

235 Figure 65. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Kukoi Island where a pasture was. The settlement Krasnaia Mol’ka stood on one shore, Tashlykovo on the other.

236 Figure 66. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Island Naratai where grew the fruit trees. The settlements of Igzhei, Shakhalayevskiy were on one shore, Kuznetsovo and Konovalovo on the other.

237 Figure 67. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with Islands Sosnovyi (Pine Tree), Bryozovi (Birch Tree), Sarafanin, Konnyi, Bolshoi Ust Udinskyi, etc. The villages Semyonovo and Shcherbakovo were on one shore, and Sharagaiskaya and Angarskaia on the other. In places, adults and children could cross the shallow water to an island by foot.

238 Figure 68. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood showing the settlement of Ust Uda standing on both shores of the river Uda falling into the Angara and the creek Yelovka. On the same shore, there was the villages Zagotzerno and Miloslavskaia, and on the other, Moskalyovo.

239 Figure 69. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood of another Birch Island, Island Listvenichnyi, Gorky kholkhoz, Kluychi—Verkhnie, Srednie, and Nizhnie— and Yandy, where my father was born.

240 Figure 70. The fragment of the watercolor map of the Angara River before the flood with several more islands and villages Butakovo, Zamarayevka, and Atalanka, the village where Valentin Rasputin spent part of his childhood. Because many islands were accessible by foot, they were beloved spots for different activities. The islands were covered with meadows. Cattle would wan- der and graze there. Wild strawberries and mushrooms sprinkled the grass. Valentin Rasputin’s fictional village of Matyora—although the toponym was real and named the creek—was situated on the fictional island by the same name. In reality, there were no villages on islands, butsome- times, the villagers from the shore moved to an island for the summer and lived there.

241 Figure 71. The fragment of the map with islands Korovnik, Ogorodnikov, and Baikalov also known as Berezovyi, and the villages Razboinikovo (Shaidorovo) and Karda. The toponym Karda was preserved after the flood. There was a brief period when the village was considered closed, but now the riverboat stops there again.

242 Figure 72. The fragment of the map with islands Goriachkin, Podvolochnyi, and others. Onthe one shore there stood the village of Podvolochnaia, and on the other shore, Rasputino, Push- mina, and Denisovo.

243 Figure 73. The fragment of the map with islands Sosnovyi, Kamennyi, and villages of Bakarma and Yegorovo.

244 Figure 74. The fragment of the map with islands Verkhnyi Kamennyi, Yelovyi, Nizhnii Yelovyi, Srednyi Kammennyi, and villages of Bakarma, Yegorovo, and Lespromkhoz. I have not named the rivers and creeks. Tatiana Valerievna Maleyeva had a photograph of a picnic on one of these islands in her photo album. The trees were so dense that the island appeared to beashore. Tatiana confirmed: “Those islands were big!” There were lost worlds.

245 Note on Transliteration

Since it is not possible to transcribe Russian words into English and vice versa letter to letter, I often felt like transliteration is a work of reimagining of a word. Whenever possible, Iadhered to the Library of Congress transliteration system, with exceptions of toponyms and names traditionally transcribed differently. For instance, I do not believe that there is a sensible reasonwhy “Anastasia” should be transcribed as “Anastasiia.” Likewise, I much prefer the graphic image of the name “Nikolay” over “Nikolai.”

246 Family Structure of One Household in Anosovo

Zinaida Yegor 1927–2019 1938–2018 Son 1

Alevtina Son 3 Nadezhda Son b. 1955 Irina Son 2 b. 1965 b. 1970 b. 1957 1960–2015

Dasha Son Daughter b. 2003

Valentina Konstantin Son b. 1983 b. 1981 Son 1

Daughter 1 Son 4 Ella Son b. 2013

Daughter 2 Alyosha Son 3 2013–2017

People mentioned in this work Others

Figure 75. One household in Anosovo.

Figure 75 is a scheme of a household in Anosovo that plays a prominent role in this work. This is a household of Zinaida and her husband Yegor, and their adult children: two common and three, coming from Zinaida’s previous marriage. The latter were unofficially adopted by Yegor. The people who I portray or mention in this work are marked in grey. Others, whose stories are no less deserving of attention, go, as of now, unmentioned. The names of all my interlocutors are changed and changed are some of the details of family connections as well as years of birth. This is done in order to preserve anonymity and create a space between the real people and characters in my work. In this work, I have included the photographs of the real people, but real people are not to be read as identical to the characters in this work.

247 Glossary

Baba grandmother, endearing for “babushka,” as well as “woman” in general in some contexts.

Bratskgesstroi a managerial institution directing the work on the Bratsk Hydroelectric station, Bratsk dam, and necessary supplemental organizations.

Girpogor a constructor bureau and a central apparatus of city planning supplementing and working jointly with local organizations.

Khutor a small settlement or a standalone neighborhood.

Kolkhoz, sovkhoz Socialist forms of agrarian enterprises that presupposed collective labor.

Kukuruznik a small plane like Antonov AN-2 or Polikarpov Po-2 and such. Called so because planes were used to tend to corn (kukuruza) and for other agricultural purposes.

Lespromkhoz a Socialist form of the timber industry enterprise.

Oblcommunenergosbyt (“District communal energy supply”) is the Irkutsk division of the Rus- sian state enterprise, a former part of Oblcommunenergo, selling electric energy.

ORS (Otdel Rabochego Snabzhenia, “division of workers’ provision”) the state organization man- aging retail in the USSR (beginning 1932), mostly covering the geographic areas where other trade networks did not reach, such as construction sites and remote industrial enterprises.

Portyanka (plural, portyanki) a cloth foot wrap.

248 Rayon area, district, subdistrict. An administrative division that is part of Oblast, which I translated here as district. In the Eastern Siberia, rayon is pronounced “раион” rather than “район” as it is in Russian. I considered transliterating this word as “raion” and not “rayon,” but opted for a more traditional way the word is rendered in English.

Samokrutka a handmade rolled cigarette.

Zimnik winter land road.

Zimoviushka (zimovie, zimoviyo, ziMUshka, not to be confused with “ZImushka,” endearing for “winter”) A winter house, a hut in the taiga, also: a summer house near the main house fulfilling functions of a veranda, kitchen, barn, or storage, or any combination ofthose.

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265 Vita

Vasilina Orlova is an ethnographer, writer, and poet. She was born in the settlement of Dunay in the Russian Far East in 1979. She grew up in Moscow, studied at Lomonosov Moscow State University, and has a Ph.D. (“k.filos.n.”) in Philosophy earned in 2013. She has published prose, poetry, and essays widely in Russian, in journals such as Novy Mir, Oktyabr, Druzhba Narodov, Moskva, Svobodnaya Mysl’—XXI Vek, and newspapers, such as Literaturnaia Gazeta, Nezavisi- maia Gazeta, and Moskovskie Novosti. She has written books of poetry and prose, the last being Antropologia Povsednevnosti [The Anthropology of Everydayness] (Moscow, Nookratia, 2018). The book was included on the list of best books at the Nonfiction bookfair in Moscow and named among the best nonfiction books of the year by Nezavisimaia Gazeta. In English, Orlova’s poetry appeared in various journals. She composed two collections of poetry, Contemporary Bestiary (2014) and Holy Robots (2016). Orlova is a member of American Anthropological Association and Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. She has been presenting her Siberian work in progress at international conferences since 2016. She is currently working on a series of articles derived from the material of this dissertation, as well as the data and impressions left out of this work.

Email: [email protected]

This dissertation was typed by the author.

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