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Topography of Post-Soviet Nationalism: The Provinces—the Capital—the West

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2017

Lyudmila Parts
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Abstract

The cultural myth of the provinces provides the contemporary cultural elite with a semiotic apparatus for formulating Russia's new, postimperial identity. Today, cultural production locates true Russianness outside newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow. In mass culture, the traditional privileging of the center over the backward provinces gives way to the view of the provinces as a repository of national tradition and moral strength. Conversely, high literature and art-house films provide an alternative, harshly critical image of them. In both cases, a particular concept of Russianness is negotiated, one in which the provinces play a central role. Ultimately, both redirect nationalist discourse away from the deeply unsatisfying model of Russia versus the west and instead offer a hermetic national identity based on an “us versus us,” rather than “us versus them,” model.

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Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 74 , Issue 3 , Fall 2015 , pp. 508 - 528
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 2015

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References

The epigraphs are from Nikolai Piksanov, Oblctstnye kul'turnyegnezda (Moscow, 1928), 58, and Liudmila Saraskina, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (Moscow, 2009), 823, respectively.

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38. This ambiguity is reflected even in such basic components as the main characters’ identities: the town's police investigator mistakes Liubov’ for someone he knows as a criminal named Liudmila/Liusia, and before long she begins using that name herself; the police investigator turns out to be a former criminal; and for the purpose of finding her son, the heroine is constantly being asked to identify various people as him—that is, her son, too, has numerous incarnations.

39. This representation of the provinces speaks both to the uses of the provincial myth and to its imperial essence: “The provinces—this is the capital's term for the marginal territories, the gaze (and edictal gesture) from the center, and from the top down. The term can be scornful, condescending, and even moving to tears, [but] it doesn't alter the disposition of the relations…. After all, the provinces are not tangible matter but merely an attribute of the imperial spatial structure.” Vladimir Abashev, Viacheslav Rakov, Andrei Matveev, Dmitrii Kharitonov, and Nikolai Koliada, “Liricheskuiu repliku Vitalii Kapil'di ‘Provintsiia kak fenomen kul'turnogo separatizma’ obsuzhdaiut Vladimir Abashev, Viacheslav Rakov, Andrei Matveev, Dmitrii Kharitonov, Nikolai Koliada,” Ural'skaia Nov', no. 1 (2000), at http://magazines.russ.ru/urnov/2000/l/otklik.html (last accessed April 26,2015).

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