Copyright by Vasilina Orlova 2021
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Copyright by 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 by 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 ac- cess 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 discus- sion 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 by 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 peo- ple 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 infrastruc- tures. 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 ........................