FROM DOGMA TO COMMON SENSE

The scholarly consensus seems to be that Soviet ideological machinery was pervasive, but not particularly persuasive or sophisticated. Soviet ideology was poorly suited to making common sense for people because of the deep gap between ideology and reality, especially as that reality grew progressively consumerist and lifestyle-oriented in the “late” socialist era. The material means by which its ideas and symbols had been put in circulation were also scarce and unimpressive compared to the level of technology available in the world at the time, especially in the ideological centers of the USSR's political rival, such as Hollywood. This, in turn, raises the question of why it was as effective as it was and so long-lived? How did it work?

There are two types of answers, relating to violence, and to language. The former, which I will not dwell on here, is about the disenfranchised, resigned, apathetic populations who were brainwashed through political violence. Answers of the latter type fall within what I will herewith call “linguistic” models. The first of these, exemplified and pioneered by Steven Kotkin (Reference Kotkin1997), portrays Soviet citizens as historically interested in the socialist project, and therefore willing to learn, and use in their everyday lives, the powerful cluster of Marxist-Leninist symbols, concepts, value hierarchies, and forms of speech, for which Kotkin famously coined the term “Bolshevik-speak.” This model seems to suggest that this totalitarian, formulaic “Bolshevik-speak” somehow transferred largely unchanged from manifestos to minds. Alexey Yurchak (Reference Yurchak2005) offered an alternative approach. In his widely followed school of thought, ideological doctrines circulate as performative social orders, as truth-claims that are measured less on the basis of their veracity or falsehood than their effects on life as it is lived. This view canceled the previously unquestioned division between what were seen as the “official” (ideological) and “unofficial” (ordinary) worlds, or words. These “worlds,” Yurchak asserts, were separated socially and spatially, and yet they depended on each other for their mutual existence. Because of that, for example, Beatlemania could have been, and was, constructed as “outside” of official ideology; on the other hand, one could have found, and did find, commonalities in the content of the socialist and hippy-esque ideals. Yurchak therefore resolved the question of the “paradox” of in/efficiency of Soviet ideology largely from a formalist perspective.

Some ethnographic studies, however, have claimed that the weakness of ideology does not need to be explained or justified at all. It did not impede but stimulated interpretive effort, and therefore was not detrimental but advantageous for the process of sense-making. Sonja Luehrmann (Reference Luehrmann2011) provides an insight by looking at the work of rank-and-file workers in Russian ideological institutions. They received abstract, schematic, or dogmatic guidelines regarding topics to be discussed with their audiences and the conclusions to be drawn. But it was their task to fill, and to explain, these rather empty (or, perhaps, “performative”) schemas using real life situations, people, stories, aphorisms, and jokes. In the words of Michel Foucault, propagandists were given discursive frames and instructed to show how “scientific” medicine is better than traditional healing by comparing science and religion, or to prove that a happy individual is always aligned with the collective by comparing collective and individual power. Their task was to show how and why this was the case and to make their evidence relatable to the lives of their listeners.

Luehrmann's work shows how the schism between ideology and life could have been accepted by people not as a reason to be “cynical,” “ironic,” or otherwise distanced, but instead as a challenge of creative interpretation and artistic execution. It also prompts an important and scarcely researched question: what were the ideological means outside of, or on the border of, what we usually see as mechanisms of ideology? One that requires our special attention, in my opinion, is the work that ideology does in the largely centralized curricula of mandatory secondary school. For instance, the lengthy studies of (mostly Russian) literature within this institution have never been researched ethnographically. I can employ auto-ethnography to explicate what I mean. My mother, a secondary school teacher of literature of roughly forty years’ experience between 1960 and 1998, often asked me to help her with her work. In my own schooling years (1982–1992), I helped by sorting out and taking notes from what can arguably be seen as “the tools of propaganda”—specialized journals and the “methods books.” Though this was the time of perestroika, she was still expected to explain Russian (and increasingly, as the country opened up to global influence, foreign) literary works in the “correct”—and Russian-Marxist—ways.

I can attest, however, that, not unlike materials received by Luehrmann's propagandists, these left a lot of leeway for an enthusiastic teacher in terms of explaining and relating the topics to the public. For instance, my mother was given lists of “eternal” (supposedly universally human) “questions” that emerged in the biographies, convictions, and circumstances of literary characters, to be discussed in class. But these were never sufficiently detailed or engaging to organize a class discussion around them. (Dialogic education in the form of questions and answers was in line with Marxist dialectics and “activity”-orientation, and therefore encouraged.) Like propagandists, teachers had to decide how to fill the gap between ideology, literature, and the lives and interests of their students. On the other hand, and unlike propagandists, the teachers had to work with immensely rich and nuanced literary texts that often aligned uneasily with, or could not be exhausted by, the ideological schematics. While many teachers may have read Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky “ritualistically,” in the way a bad rabbi would read a Tora, good teachers, like good propagandists, were numerous in the USSR. They also filled gaps in a material sense; I spent many hours drawing stengazetas Footnote ³ on Pushkin or Mandelstam.Footnote ⁴

The best way to particularize this work, I argue, is through a model of hegemony. A more general anthropological model of power production and reproduction, it does not draw an indefensible borderline between “official” and “unofficial” worlds, or ideology and common sense. Instead it asks, like Luehrmann did, how exactly ideology is received and interpreted to eventually become common sense (and the latter can be, as I will show, intensely anti-ideological). Drawn from the works of Antonio Gramsci, the concept of hegemony became popular in anthropology as an alternative to “culture” and “ideology.”Footnote ⁵ Hegemony, argued Raymond Williams (Reference Williams2015 [1979]), goes beyond culture in the necessary recognition of dominance and subordination, and it goes beyond ideology by encompassing not only ideas and beliefs, but the whole lived social process organized, in practice, by specific and dominant meanings and values. While hegemony is attentive to the content of official or “ideological” meanings, their conceptual utility, and the details of their development, it also assumes that there is practical activity outside of ideological institutions that is aimed at utilizing dominant notions to make sense of lives, often subsuming the strange and the incongruous under the familiar. Hegemony, therefore, can be useful in explaining why there has very often been no irony or distance separating the ways people use Marxist concepts in their daily lives, how these concepts can be effective even when contradictory or conceptually underdeveloped, and how Marxian ideas could, and in fact did, outlive Marxian ideology.

My first point, therefore, is that we should examine Russian Marxism as a hegemonic process. This optics does not indicate a particular form of power, but rather a model of any system of power production and reproduction, which can nonetheless be particularized to encompass local cultural and historical specifics. In line with this, I assert that we need to analyze Marxism as a “vernacular.”Footnote ⁶ Marxism did not just “trickle down” to “the masses”; transformed through propaganda and education, it was used as an instrument and practice to explain life, as in the Soviet slogan, “Marxism is not a dogma but a guide to action.”Footnote ⁷ “Vernacular” Marxism is therefore a social theory living an everyday life, through the process of interpretation that is inherent in the hegemony model of existence.

The following situation demonstrates how vernacular Marxism still appears conversationally, both conceptually and as language. One day, having a drink at the home of SvetlanaFootnote ⁸ (an electrician, born in 1974) with another mutual friend, Stepan (a policeman, born in 1975), I happened to mention “Soviet ideology.” Putting “Soviet” and “ideology” together struck a nerve. In the Soviet Union, Svetlana asserted, movies and books were “not ideological” because “the authors never wanted to ‘say something’! They merely, simply, stated the facts!” Stepan added:

So, I asked, “If the writer describes a ‘merciless reality,’ there can be no ideology in it?” Svetlana replied, “No, there is no ideology in it! It is not a flag or a banner in a parade; it is left to your own perception. You choose how to interpret this.”

ONTOLOGY OF SEMIOTICS

The majority of my informants belong to what I call “the teens of perestroika” (Kruglova Reference Berlantn.d.), or indeed the “last” Soviet generation (see Yurchak's broader definition of the “last Soviet generation” in his Reference Yurchak2005 eponymous book). They are my friends and peers, and most were born in the mid-1970s. Their income levels were the median for Perm in the time of my fieldwork (Kruglova Reference Kruglova2016). With regard to the education, however, one must note that while 24 percent of Russians are credited with some university education, this figure stands at 30–34 percent among those born in the 1970s (Bessudnov Reference Bessudnov2012). It may be more common for people of this age to be nostalgic for the Soviet past, and they do not deny sharing the sentiment. They lived through drastic social changes as they were maturing and they were often traumatized by bumpy starts to families and careers in the turbulent 1990s. This is contrasted with the timelessness, secure certainty, and serenity of their late socialist childhoods.Footnote ¹¹

But their childhoods were also “Soviet” in the sense that they were by no means insulated from the indoctrinations delivered at schools and the quotidian public communication that assumed a degree of mastery in thinking with, and speaking with, a number of “pseudo-sociological” (Magun Reference Magun2014: 206) conceptual and discursive elements (see also Lemon Reference Lemon2004). Significant among these “objectified social imaginaries” (Kalinin Reference Kalinin, Etkind, Kukulin and Ufel'man2012) was obschestvo, “society,” an imagined collective of Soviet people—the builders of communism. Another famous one is a “collective” (see Kharkhordin Reference Kharkhordin1999), which has much to do with criticized, and yet not entirely abandoned, sociological and anthropological divisions between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft (community and society). This is not surprising, since Soviet social engineering was very concerned with organizing the ways in which small groups could be brought together to constitute the society. Other key elements were “the question of women” (zhenskii vopros), which encompassed Soviet understandings of feminism and gender relations (although, famously, never sexuality); the condemned “race” (rasa); the endorsed “ethnicity” (narodnost’); and the morally ambiguous “class” (klass; see Fitzpatrick Reference Fitzpatrick1993). Through education and the media, the notions of “power” (vlast’; specifically “Soviet power”), “history,” and “progress” became equally habitual, but not at all, or not necessarily, meaningless or “ironic.” “Culture” was learned through the guidelines for cultural production in the “Houses of Culture” (Grant Reference Grant1995; Donahoe and Habeck Reference Donahoe and Habeck2011), and via the manuals on how to be “cultured” (Kelly Reference Kelly2001). “Morality” was explained through school curricula, activities, and special brochures like the “Moral Codex of Communism Builders” (Kharkhordin Reference Kharkhordin1999: 231–51). “Language” was a focus because of the incessant touting of the sublime qualities of the Russian language. People differentiated between “theory” and “practice” and between “work” and “labor,” and they valued “activity” as a moral way of life.

The paths for analysis of these meanings and social imaginaries were numbered and authoritatively decreed (see Lemon Reference Lemon2004; Reference Lemon2008). Since 1991, the usage of such words has been understandably on the decline because of their association with the once compromised and now controversial Soviet symbolic order. And yet, like “ideology,” they were a part of daily life and its problems, and not only as “just saying” them—a riff or an irony. They became schemas, explanations that, however habitual, connected cultural, social, and historical contexts to the ways of practical moral reasoning. The very concept of “ideology” continues to provide cognitive and affective tools for the objectification of one's own and others’ social and historical conditions, for thinking about social and cultural aspects of life as if they were separate from life.

This is why the “ideology” explanation could be raised, as Stepan recounted, without my “anthropological” presence or unwitting provocations from me. This is also why we should study these ideas not merely as “slogans” but as concepts that cannot be fully comprehended if we fail to understand their connections to local variants of Marxism. My interlocutors were indeed concerned with the power of ideology as a sociological problem, because their education conditioned it, since the pernicious power of ideology was a central suspicion for Marx. As I see it, Svetlana and Stepan believed that ideology, to be ideology, has to be a “message” and a “banner,” a clearly formulated statement of intent—what John Austin calls “an illocutionary act.” Existentialist portrayals of various uncertainties—accidents and panic and chaos—they find explicitly not illocutionary, since intentionality, or interpellation toward the spectators, is absent. In the absence of a clear political statement, or when social contexts are not declared or at least implied (“absented,” as Nafus writes in her Reference Nafus2006 article), the subjects of ideology are free from its power.

We cannot say that this “ideology of ideology” is a “mythology” coming from the specificity of local contexts. It is a self-aware epistemological—and existential—opinion. Conversation about “ideology” is not dissimilar in its form, procedures, and concerns from what anthropologists and other scholars often identify as theory. What theory, then, can be “applied” to such a material, and how? Can this “local” ideology of ideology—a telling tautology—perhaps be theorized as a “semiotic ideology”? Webb Keane (Reference Keane2007) sources his deservedly influential inspirations for the concept of “semiotic ideology” in Charles Peirce's semiotics and Michael Silverstein's “linguistic ideology.” “Linguistic ideology” is the hierarchies and values attached to different aspects and usages of language (its capacity for clarity, sincerity, profanity, etc.). Peirce, on the other hand, famously expanded and reformulated Ferdinand De Saussure's classic semiology by describing various types of relationship between material objects and their “names” (signs, symbols, indices, etc.). Keane, one could surmise, attempted a spirit-of-our-time materialist move by expanding Silverstein through Peirce, and therefore moving beyond meaning to directly include matter into equations. When “lay” people theorize the very relationship between things and language, or how things signify, extrapolates Keane, they theorize in terms of semiotic ideology, not linguistic ideology. Semiotic ideology, therefore, is also necessarily a description of the hierarchical types of agency and its distribution in the things of world (ibid.: 1–6). Christian semiotic ideology, for instance, is concerned with the status of the Holy Bible, which some see as divinely agentic, and yet the materiality of the Book(s) and their mechanically reproduced qualia make them ethically and ontologically ambiguous (Engelke Reference Engelke2007).

Marxism is certainly a semiotic ideology, and yet we cannot talk about “local semiotic ideology” without noticing how locals cringe at the word “ideology.” But even more curious problems arise if we keep in mind that Russian Marxism is, explicitly, an atheistic materialist ontology (Magun Reference Magun2014). In “semiotic ideology,” a relationship between a thing and its sign or, as Keane extrapolates, between thingness and agency, assumes a possibility of separation (albeit mostly theoretical, “in the mind”; see Lambek Reference Lambek, Lambeck and Strathern1998) between thingness and agency. In other words, the very idea of semiotics is still premised on a possibility of both completely immaterial spirit and unspiritual matter, with the degrees of spirituality/meaning/agency infusions in between.

For Marxism, therefore, semiotics is problematic because it still affords (in theory) a purely ideal, or spiritual, existence. In other words, semiotics in itself is a semiotic ideology, and from the Marxian point of view, an unsuccessful attempt to overcome traditional European idealism. But curiously and contradictorily, the impossibility of immaterial ideas in Marxism (Leninism) does not cancel the acknowledgment of their practical effectiveness. Ideas are utterly world-making, and transformative. All this, in part, is at the root of why “agency” in the USSR has been so famously contradictory. Apart from purely political reasons of having a population that is both enthusiastic and indoctrinated (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005), my two cents are that “ideology” appears to be the Marxian equivalent of the Christian problem of evil, or the Devil—acknowledged as ontologically impossible if God is good, yet obviously present as the influential not-good. This makes the problem not only epistemological but also ethical. The problem for anthropologists, however, is that in Russia we run into a “semiotic ideology” that already contains, in itself, a critique of both semiotics and ideology. In the vignette above, the “ideology of ideology” is a telling tautology that belies a type of recursivity, a peculiar self-referentiality, which is bound to happen, and indeed does happen, but most of the time goes unnoticed when “social theories” are “applied” to Russian “material” without critical self-awareness.

AFFECT: THE PHYSICS OF THE SOCIAL

Many Marxian notions became our own “anthropological” commonsense vernacular. Just to name a few: production (of both things and relations), exchange, capital and dispossession, commodification, alienation, and political economy. This is especially the case with political economy, a developing product of a variety of intellectual and political movements, some Marxist and some not. Ethnographies of political economies move beyond an explicit concern with modes of production and emphasize class, culture, and politics, placing their subjects within the formation of a world economy and the development of capitalism. It is due to interest in political economy that anthropologists took to researching the circumstances associated with getting a living, and the structures of power that shape and constrain activity (the “structure and agency” problem; see Roseberry Reference Roseberry1988).

“Affective” enchantments emerged in anthropological theory in the beginning of 2000s.Footnote ¹² Affects, the consensus seems to be, are not (just) emotions but “intensities” and “significances” (Stewart Reference Stewart2007) that are intersubjective, historical, and embodied, but impersonal (Mazarella Reference Mazzarella and Dube2009: 11).Footnote ¹³ Special attention is paid to the embodied effects of affects, and to people's real and imagined relationship with things (that is, to semiotic ideologies). Political economy is also a crucial part to affect studies, a way to explicate how affects are structured by their larger contexts such as capitalism and neoliberalism.

The problem is that in the world of my interlocutors political economy is not a matter of analytical optics, but rather the default human condition, where practically any process is social and a type of production. Affect is most valuable, and the ontological primacy of matter presumes that valuable things cannot be disembodied. This embodied nature of affects, as well as their scientistic nature, may be interpreted from their curiously “physical-mechanic” (Kruglova Reference Kruglova2016) descriptions. But the materiality of affect is often acknowledged unequivocally. One day I complained to my friend of many years Tatiana (a sales agent, born in 1974) about an unusual aggravation in my usual share of troubles. Over a meal we shared at a supermarket canteen, she said that the reason behind my troubles was simple: I talked to people with little caution. Thoughts and words, she warned, are material'ny, “have material substance,” and so they affect objective reality just like any physical matter would:

Initially, I coded this explanation of “communication metaphysics” as “magic/religion,” a kind of Malinowskian “rationality in context.” Tatiana herself identified as a “doer,” that is, as a magician, and also a true legacy Orthodox. But later this metaphysics proved to reflect a common view, hardly affiliated with any kind of magic. One of my interlocutors, to my direct inquiry as to whether such beliefs were magic or science, shrugged it off with a remark that he would not know for sure, but they well may be scientific because “everyone knows that the human body is a battery,” and therefore, there could be “some sort of stuff exuding from us into the world.” We can equally plausible see in this vignette the influence of a “psychologizing” of Russian society (Lerner Reference Lerner2011), and indeed the self-help industry exploded during perestroika, often through translations of Western techniques into local languages and mindsets.

My point, though, is that everything a Western psychology might offer can easily recline on the couch vernacular Marxism has unfolded for it (unless it is FreudianFootnote ¹⁴ ). In this “vulgarly” material Marxian world, affect is of utmost (“moral”? “material”?) value and an exhaustible resource. Affect is vitality and intention produced from within one's self and directed outward, through thoughts, words, and actions, to ever-widening outer circles (Lemon Reference Lemon2008; Reference Lemon2009; Matza Reference Matza2010; Buck-Morss Reference Buck-Morss2000: 104–15).

Affects are like particles in physics in that they become charged as either pozitiv or negativ. The essences of pozitiv and negativ—upbeat and optimistic, or depressed and gloomy—are applied often and to everything: people, places, emotions, thoughts, and words. Negativ is naturally a bigger concern. People nowadays, in the words of another friend, “became zlyie,” angry and begrudged (see Hann Reference Hann2011, on “moral dispossession”), generally in the new circumstances of consumerist, capitalist Russia, but they grew especially so after the crisis and the concomitant communality of the 1990s were over (Shevchenko Reference Shevchenko2009). Communication is filled with a threat of affect dispossession—insidious agendas, unpleasant surprises, threats of “brainwashing,” or “loading”—gruzit’, unnecessarily straining one's affective structure with irrelevancies or abstractions—usually as a prank or to show off (Kruglova Reference Kruglova2016). Depresnyak, therefore, is both a state of mind (often explicitly seen as contaminated) and an intersubjective influence of material affect. Some people, like psychologists and mages, can influence reality and rob you through words and thoughts.

The separation of discourses is also gendered: women lean toward magical explanations, men toward more manly or “scientific” forms of magic such as “astral karate” or neuro-linguistic programming. The latter's tropes sound much like those of battle magic. Tatiana, a curious case of a feminist, viewed herself as a bit of a battle magician. But people with no special skills, or beliefs, could also harm me, she said, especially if they felt strongly when they talked or even thought of me. I may have become a target of envy because people are gullible, and they have been brainwashed to believe that anyone living abroad is rich. (She hastened to add that such people are seriously deluded, considering that I was childless, poor, and still at university studying “God knows what” while approaching my fortieth birthday.) But there still is a living ideal of obscheniye, perfect carefree communion/communication among svoi/ours (Yurchak Reference Yurchak2005), in which affects/energies are produced and shared freely and are enriched in circulation. Tatiana and I both acknowledged that our conversations with each other were obscheniye.

AFFECT: SOCIOLOGY AND ECONOMICS

One day Pavel (a security and tech support, born in 1975) and I were sitting on the patio of a local eatery drinking brandy and coffee, respectively, and watching people enjoy a summer evening. A young and pretty girl walked by and I observed her tan and mascara, and the work she put into her appearance. I thought how Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant2007a: 287) might say that this mobilization of articulated sexuality was a performance of “affective avarice,” “a demand for a feeling fix” that injects “a sense of normality” and “being intelligible” into our shared “precarious neoliberal condition.” Pavel's interpretation of her appearance was similar in that to him it was clearly an expression of an affective political economy:

Whenever I talked about peoples’ relationships at work, the intimacies of kinship and friendship, or intensities of love, they indicated that cultivating desire is a necessary form of work that preserves one spiritually, and this work is taxing. They said desire is a product of this work that can, and should be, exchanged in an economy, in order for production to continue. The girl's performance of sexuality was work of this sort, a cost, and a product that should have been, according to the imagined contract, paid for with equally desirous attention. By exchanging this knowledge in routine conversation with me, Pavel was also performing moral work, because it was in itself an exchange of pozitiv energy. He disapproved of what he saw as the anemic sexual dispositions of the local men who did not pursue the girl. “The guys” were lazy—they lacked abundant productive capacity and so took what they could take for free (“like going to a strip bar for free”), and then left. For Pavel, desire is therefore an economy, as Berlant suggests, but if it is virtuous, it is never “affective avarice.” In vernacular Marxism, desire is a generative rather than acquisitive process,Footnote ¹⁵ and therefore indeed more of an affect than a “desire”—it is internal sociocentric production projected outward, given to others, sometimes violently (Lemon Reference Lemon2008), rather than something entering from outside, like filling a void.

A moral subject therefore produces affect by being industrious in its production and also by following the technologies of its production. Only certain types and circumstances of exchange, contact, or conflict (dialectical tension; see Lemon Reference Lemon2008) with others produce the “something,” not entirely tangible, which works behind—or rather through—“words” and “communication.” Virtue therefore requires knowledge, readily shared, of various “sociological” conditions of gender, generation, ethnicity, class, and institutions that facilitate or hinder the production. Unfairly, it seemed to Pavel, the girl's work and her product were cheap these days, or “the guys” had insufficient affective currency to reciprocate with equally articulate gestures. He recognized the “social fact” of the imbalanced “energies” in the gender market, reiterating, it seems, the long-standing discourse about the emasculation of Russian men (Zdravomyslova and Temkina Reference Zdravomyslova, Temkina and Ushakine2002; Utrata Reference Utrata2015). But unfairness in affective gender exchanges in Russia was common fact, common knowledge, and a common topic of conversation. Elena (who works in tourism, born in 1974) said bitterly that she had almost abandoned any hopes of marrying. Nonetheless, she learned to play poker and went to predominantly male poker parties “to absorb some male energy.” She did not specify whether she gave any of her own feminine enthusiasm in return, and I assumed that a poker party was a place where, like the street promenades, some gendered energy could be gotten for free.

Not surprisingly, then, some men confided in me about their spousal infidelities and framed them as affective therapeutic and moral charity, as generosity with their male energies. Stepan, who discussed ideology with Svetlana and I, took pride in his athletic physique and gift of gab. He told me with a mixture of pride and irony how he was “picked up” (snyala, a word that also applies to prostitution) by a very wealthy woman: “She asked me, ‘Do you drink cognac?’ I went with her to her apartment.” I interjected, “For a ‘cup of tea’?” “Yes!” he responded, laughing, “I had never seen such a palace before.” The affair lasted for a while. His interpretation of it was that he saved a nearly “lost” woman from a crisis of affective production. His work was so important because it is hard to begin desiring again after a prolonged break. Like a factory furnace that stands cold for too long, the man or woman risks never being able to get hot again. One who does not strive to exchange one's desire, social conditions notwithstanding, risks an affective and therefore spiritual bankruptcy, reaching a point of no return—a prospect that haunts local moral imaginations. Stepan made it possible for his mistress to maintain the good work, the good production, until she found a suitable bachelor to marry.

This is an example of how affective charge can work, to some extent, to mitigate the widening inequities in the Russian class landscape. The exchange took place across recognized class lines, to mutual benefit, and Stepan's mistress was wise enough to appreciate it despite her higher (bourgeois, burzhui) status. He still proudly receives her respectful congratulations on the “Defender of the Fatherland Day”—a celebration of “men in general” since, theoretically, all men undergo one year of mandatory military service. It serves very conspicuously as a counterbalance to International Women's Day.

Pavel was more modest than Stepan about the “net value” of his contributions to his mistresses. He was equally generous in his energies, but he acknowledged the unfairness of the exchange in a market where his masculine but supportive sentimentality was in high demand. “In a land with so much negativ” (material energy, or “affect,” of burnout and grudge) and “so many single women,” as Pavel said, his energy was much sought after. “Every second woman here is a single mom, or, you know, semi-divorced,” he said, “and all that they want is just some personal attention … and a toy to play with.” It was not clear if by “toy” he referred to himself, or to the common custom of expressing sentiment not with voluble words (or one would say, ideological statements), but rather with simple yet material tokens, especially flowers and stuffed toys. So Pavel was offered, and took, more than just casual pleasure. Many of his life opportunities—loans in time of need, contractual favors, great advice—came from women who rewarded him for his affective articulations. He charted out his relationships with them as multi-sided equations (see also “hermeneutic algebra” in Lemon Reference Lemon2008): good sex he found with every woman, but one was a particularly good listener to his troubles, another cooked, and yet another was “a very, very good person, smart and kind,” in addition to being “rich and well connected.”

In time, the equanimity with which Pavel accounted for the transvaluation between the bodily, interpersonal, social, financial, and ethical qualities of these relationships seemed to dismiss “love” as some sort of ideology and therefore a form of dishonesty. But this frankness, some would say cynicism, acquires depth if read with/through/as vernacular Marxism. For a vernacular Marxist, I argue, the European idea of “love” as a “natural” “force that conquers all,” and hence is cost-free, effortless, mindless, and apolitical, remains not just a romantic but an exotic im/possibility.Footnote ¹⁶ In other words, the moral intensity of his transvaluation revolved around the very conflict between the possibilities of affects being natural (essential and therefore cost-free, naturally produced within subjectivity) or social (constructed in the way of being a work of the soul, which is also highly susceptible to social influence). Affect always reflects, and expresses, the infamous contradiction of Marxism, and with it also the vernacular-Marxist morality, which sees energy as an alienable value because it is a product and an exchange, but also a moral, inalienable virtue because it cannot exist without moral work by the self (see Lambek Reference Lambek2008).

Tatiana espoused the same generative (or productivist, or realist?) view of desire. Money was hard to come by, but at least its sources were known, and she worked hard to mine them. In the 1990s, she left behind her “useless” university degree in philology to build a career in wholesaling consumer goods, putting her social skills and personal charm to great use and general success. “Male energy” was a different matter. She claimed that she declared in no uncertain terms to her prospective beaus that she sought only what can be seen as the practical, use-value of casual sex, but she would tolerate no excuses for sex itself. And yet the majority of men simply failed to satisfy her. To find those who behaved with bold and manly articulateness, she had to suffer through many unpleasant dates: “Yes, he said that he wanted it. But this was just so fucked up! I cannot be around such men. He talked and talked and talked. It was okay when he talked to compliment me, but when he started this—I don't know—I said, ‘Yes, I get what you mean already. I got you.’ That was all, enough, you can move on! On! I could not stand it!” Tatiana's ideas of manliness were inseparable from articulating desire through a forceful bodily action, which, in the same economy, was “rewarded”: “In truth, I want a man who can smash his fist on the table so that I will shake a little in fear! … Yes, I keep up an appearance of being unavailable. This is because I like men who take risks. Those who take the risk, get rewarded!” The traditional and sanctified “rituals of talk” (Ries Reference Ries1997) may be about performance, but they obviously were not doing enough for Tatiana. Her suitor articulated his desire with an outpouring of words, but in the end she could find no substance, in the sense of bodily, physical, material, or use-value. She found no “praktika” or “aktivnost’” (activity).

To conclude this section, I ask: can we, following theories of affective engagement with the theories of the world's neoliberal condition, interpret the “exchange of energy” on the gendered affective markets of Perm as “neoliberalism”? On one hand, the economism and emotionalism of this exchange, the imperative to sustain one's productivity, could indeed be seen as a neoliberal triumph. Even the charitable concerns in this exchange (as in Stepan's story, above) may fall in line with the concept of the global neoliberal who is increasingly a “moral neoliberal” (Muehlebach Reference Muehlebach2012). But Marxism, if anything, is a powerful critique of capitalism, and therefore necessarily a critique of neoliberalism. When routine conversations and judgments among “laymen” are not illustrations or inspirations for theory, but instead reflections on and indeed contestations of this very theory, then analysis of theoretical frames and their silences requires a special self-awareness.

AUTHENTICITY OF AFFECT: THE TALE OF TWO DACHAS

Pavel seemed appreciative of his family's economic success. His in-laws owned a dacha, a summerhouse with a vegetable plot attached for some small-scale husbandry and agriculture.Footnote ¹⁷ His in-laws did not only well but good: like most dachniks, they engaged in the production of use-value goods, catering to basic human needs of sustenance and consuming the produce rather than selling it as commodities.Footnote ¹⁸ Although the words rabota (work) and trud (labor) are often used interchangeably, there is a conceptual difference along the lines of Hanna Arendt's distinction in Vita Activa between different activities and their costs to humans. Activities that reflect the cultivated and civilizational, and therefore less natural aspects of human existence incur injuries from which more natural activities are free. Gardening and other dacha activities, like house chores, are seen as more labor than work, and therefore moral and restorative rather than energy-costly. The dacha is an escape from work to labor, from city to countryside, from civilization and modernity to archaic, peasant, status-less commune, away from the hierarchies, wages, clocks, and other demands of the urban working week.Footnote ¹⁹ Pavel called it “our” dacha, thus identifying with its hustle and bustle and abundance of use-value goodness. “There at our dacha, it is nothing short of a khozyaistvo [literally “a homestead”; a self-sustaining economic unit]. We have a hundred rabbits, maybe forty egg-bearing hens. Three cockerels. Rams. Sheep––one should lamb soon. Then the geese, maybe twenty of those. Three dogs, two cats. A whole khozyaistvo!”

And yet, the situation at the dacha was deeply troubled. I heard the turn of the tale when I dropped in for tea at the apartment that Pavel still shared with his wife. She was a bit of a hoarder, and the dacha was the main excuse for the hoarding to continue. Every scrap of leftovers—milk, bread, fruit, meat, a battery of opened jars with a smudge of jam or a single pickle on the bottom—all were stored outside or in two huge overfilled refrigerators in the heat of summer, where they were saved “for the dacha” to feed the animals. Scraps of building materials and heaps of old clothes and empty plastic bags lie around in case they might be handy, one day, at the dacha.Footnote ²⁰ Pavel, seeing my (forcedly nonjudgmental) astonishment at the flat's hoard, got excited and switched into horror story mode. The dacha was a problem. Pavel's wife obeyed her mother's orders and worked through the day and into the night, while her family scorned Pavel for “laziness.” They, too, toiled from dawn to dusk, churning out agricultural produce. All this effort to earn money was in addition to his wife's full-time job, her and her mother's small but lucrative business making fur accessories (a commercial, and therefore morally more reprehensible enterprise), her father's pension, and Pavel's own salary. Yet they disapproved of spending on gadgets, cosmetics, clothes, vacations, or other goods that are the small pleasures of nascent Russian middle-class consumption (Patico Reference Patico2005; Reference Patico2008), things that are the vectors that help the outward articulation of desire, like the tan, mascara, and pink lingerie of girls strolling the streets of Perm. Instead, Pavel's in-laws collected foodstuffs, poultry, livestock, timber, and sugar, all “simple,” morally good materials of clear use-value, albeit in quantities too great be consumed. He noted that they risked cholesterol crisis and heart failure from trying to eat all the eggs laid by the hens.

Pavel believed his marriage by then to be entirely loveless. He was sad at the prospect of divorce, which his wife was likely to initiate, but nothing could be done—she “did not want anything anymore.” She produced no affect (at least not toward Pavel). This stoppage of outbound flow, the focus of his narrative, worked in seamless tandem with the stoppage in the outbound, generative material flow, the motion from inside to outside that took the forms of gifting, spending, giving away, or even throwing away. Instead, all sorts of piling, muddying, and stuffing up took place: in houses, in bodies, in souls, and in the palpable verbal inarticulation that inevitably and negatively charged his marital life (I witnessed the awkwardness on several occasions). Despite all the signs of virtue—the use-value, the labor, the nature—the in-laws misrecognized the dacha by failing to see that affect was not produced there. They were blind to their own spiritual death. Perhaps the most painful part of it all was that no one “had the time,” as Pavel said with portent bitterness, to care for an elderly member of the family who suffered from dementia.

A dacha was the symbolic center of tension for Yurii (a journalist, born in 1974), though in a curious and telling reversal from Pavel's situation. Yurii's in-laws did not work or labor at their dacha, and indeed they pointedly abstained from any activities lest they turn into any demanding mobilization of work. The point of the dacha for them was “restful” tea drinking, eating, and sleeping. The dacha, bemoaned Yurii, threatened him on the existential level: “It turned into an exile for me. Because they always push us to sleep—and to gobble, gobble, gobble—all the time! And drink tea, they call it chaovnichat’ [a pointedly rustic word for a tea-drinking ritual]—how I hate this word! After tea, they want to ‘flop on the side,’ meaning to sleep. It was horrible. I mean truly, I was frightened when I realized that I was losing it.”

In other stories, however, Yurii acknowledged that such “restful” technologies of self were virtuous, and told me about his own pointedly “unproductive” pleasures. He went for leisurely strolls with his little son in a buggy. There were sessions of beer drinking and watching television that he himself organized, for himself, on a whim, especially on business trips away from home—he made hotels into improvised dachas. Sitting on a park bench on a good day and watching people playing cards or exercising was one of his favorite pastimes. So what was the difference between the “moral” laziness of beer drinking in a hotel and the “immoral,” “spiritually deadly” tea drinking at the dacha? Comparing it with Pavel's story, why can both working and resting at the dacha be so abhorrent?

In Marxist-Leninist moral education both production and rest are explicitly articulated as a part of a personal moral economy, and a social contract. While Yurii's in-laws’ preoccupations at the dacha are a familiar trope, a key part of the social contract in the socialist welfare state was the human/laborer's right to rest, to concentrate on restful, inconsequential activities, understood as pointedly antithetical to work, in order to sustain production (Kruglova Reference Kruglova2013). Once again, I quote Lauren Berlant (Reference Berlant2007b), who suggested that we see eating, sleeping, and other such activities that are understood as “having no consequences for one's subjectivity” as “lateral agency,” as a form of political agency. This perspective would need no explanation to anyone in Russia except perhaps people under thirty; as I was told, “You don't have to be an anthropologist to understand this.” But “drinking tea” can also be turned around and condemned as being “inactive”—that is, unproductive, as taking the right to rest too far or as fetishizing restoration for the sake of restoration and not for the sake of returning to productive activities. The story's point was that the goodness of simple, use-value foods, or rest, or labor, do not, in themselves, guarantee affective productivity. Virtue lies in a person's capacity to recognize affect and to ward off situations in which the production of affect is falsified, intentionally or not, rather than delivered in earnest.Footnote ²¹

These subtleties and difficulties in recognizing “good desire” may be associated specifically with the intelligentsia ethos (and its own fetish, Russian classical literatureFootnote ²² ), but I have found that both its social base and its uses are much wider. Anyone can point out authenticity or inauthenticity of affect, as a means of gaining symbolic capital, as a moral practice, or as a way to frame one's social milieu. One might say that the intelligentsia merely have more articulate means for talking about it. My point, however, is that frustration with “doing nothing, only drinking tea” was hardly a phenomenon that needed to be described or discovered by an anthropologist or other professional observer, who might later theorize these moments as indicators of the neoliberal condition.Footnote ²³ Russian everyday morality was already organized around the contradictions between this obligation or right to produce and the obligation or right to rest. To mobilize and demobilize: these are themselves already a critique of the neoliberal condition that people voice without filters. What, then, does this mean for anthropologists who assume that they hold a monopoly on reflexivity?

WORK AND LABOR

Another vernacular Marxist ideology, or social theory, describes the relations between self, work, rest, and labor.Footnote ²⁴ As I explained earlier, in Russia mindless and responsibility-less bodily labor became a sort of ideal, a schema that sedimented into values over the decades. Although such labor is sometimes backbreaking (and growing vegetables at one's dacha is notorious for ruining one's back), it is virtuous because it gives one a respite from any (always pernicious) “ideology,” and, ironically, from the default ideology, the Marxian politicization and sociologization of human lives. The bodily focus of concentration on work also allows one to be impervious to the possible negativ of one's own thoughts that come in moments of lonesome idleness. In other words, such labor is one technology of virtue that utilizes unthinking bodily ecstasy instead of the usual mindful, moral vigilance. For this reason, the Soviet slogan “The right to labor” might sound Orwellian, but expresses the labourer's political interest when juxtaposed with activities that are definitely “work.” The post-Soviet landscape, for instance, was characterized by the emergence of many previously unfamiliar types of wage-work, especially in services that assumed waiting on customers, literally, in pernicious, mindful, vigilant idleness. Most of my informants recognized this as truly soul-numbing work, and the connection between the new capitalist order and the proliferation of such work did not go unnoticed (Kruglova Reference Kruglova, Durham and Solwayn.d.). Gardening, by contrast, is a time-honored labor tradition.

Now, folding sweaters on a shop floor may be viewed as soul-killing in most “Western” countries, just as gardening may be seen as relaxing. To a vernacular Marxist, however, these divisions are not merely subjective experiences but truths that are rooted in material science (that is, Marxian ontology). Some medical practitioners in Russia seem to still follow these prescriptions. Energetic home chores are “laborly” and therapeutic, so when Marina (an industrial chemist, born in 1975) consulted a doctor regarding a bout of anger and depression he recommended she take a pillow to a nearby park and beat the dust out of it. With the advent of vacuum cleaners this is a chore one rarely sees people doing nowadays, but it was a regular household task during Marina's childhood (often performed by men, especially for heavier carpets). Not only did she follow this advice, but she also took her five-year-old son to beat pillows in the park because, “You know, the social atmosphere in kindergartens these days is toxic, and he is also very tense.” That physical exercise reduces nervous tension may be common knowledge everywhere, but what would it change if we acknowledged, in this particular case, the connection between common knowledge and Marxian ontology?

CLOSE, TOO CLOSE, NOT CLOSE ENOUGH: THE AWKWARD REVELATIONS OF VERNACULAR MARXISM

Describing Russia as Marxian is like describing Europe as Christian: it explains everything and nothing. Still, it is hard not to notice that twenty-first-century Russian morality in many ways is unremittingly Marxian. Russian Marxism(-Leninism) is a habitual formula, a habitus, and also a semiotic ideology that centers on, and complicates, separations of activity and mind, or epistemology, ethics, and ontology (in which sense, perhaps, it is the only true form of Marxism there is). My point is that without attention to the ways Marxism informs the “cognitive organization of the world” (Verdery Reference Verdery1996: 4) in Russia, one can comprehend it to about the same degree that one can understand Jain ethics without reference to, or knowledge of, Buddhism and Hinduism. I therefore call for rediscovering Marxism as a vernacular and a hegemony, as a language and a set of schemas that render Marxian concepts as basic technologies of the self, tools for identity construction, and means of differentiating class and bringing moral condition and moral agency into daily life.

In this essay I have made the case that recognition that this lineage of social science thinking is shared by anthropologists and their interlocutors in Russia, and possibly throughout much of the postsocialist world, can go a long way toward better understanding the worlds we study. Most anthropologists, following the discipline's mandate to connect a generalized set of ideas to particular social worlds, might readily agree with this. Finding tensions between “our” and “their” “social theories” has been our way of capturing the new and rethinking the old.Footnote ²⁵ But today there is a particularly poignant and growing realization that our informants tell each other and themselves stories with plots that resemble those we “anthropologists” tell each other and ourselves: about performativity and modernity, being and becoming, subjectivation and de-subjectivation, liminality and structure.Footnote ²⁶ In Kenya, observes Henrietta Moore (Reference Moore2009), reflections on cultural relativism are on the rise because Christian evangelicals have instituted something very similar to anthropological cultural relativism as foundational to local education systems they sponsor and develop. This illustrates how local “cultures” are not necessarily offshoots of global modernity, but are rather parts of one global conversation about what modernity is, and this conversation includes our “modern social theories.”Footnote ²⁷ People speak and think of their lives in terms and paradigms invented and popularized by scholarship past and present. To draw on Latour's words again, “we” may have never been modern so far as how modernity is described in social theory (Reference Latour2012), but some of us are modern because we use the language of social theory to describe our reality.

Studying among and with vernacular Marxists showcases these problems at their best (or worst). The developments in Kenya Moore describes are relatively recent, while in Russia a state education system has offered up modernist, sociocentric, and materialist philosophies for decades. Just as in Kenya normal talk may be about the interpretation of cultures, conversations in Russia often reflect the (very moralized) relationship between “theory” and bodily, habitual, class-delineating, and therefore quite Bourdieusian “practice” (praktika). Anthropology, in/famously, has been taking a series of “turns”—textual, practical, historical, political, and ontological, to name a few. What do you do when you study natives who are literature-centric, have historical materialism as their ontology, and were taught that everything is political? What does it mean to write on everyday social theory in a place where “everyday life” (byt) has for decades been a local construct, an object of critique, and a subject of routine conversation (see Boym Reference Boym1994)?

What could the tradition of unwillingness to examine Marxian optics in Russia reveal to us? For one thing, it could lay bare how, for all of anthropology's professed efforts to listen to and communicate the salience of other worlds, many of us remain beholden to the very “panoptic” frames of reference we look to move away from. For instance, in their manifesto “Theory from the South” (Reference Comaroff and Comaroff2012), Jean and John Comaroff argued for the need to decolonize social knowledge by moving away from the canons of Western Enlightenment thought. These efforts, however useful, hinge on the practical separateness of non-Western worldviews. What happens when the people with whom we work have adopted the language of the Enlightenment, perhaps even before we have? The problem is not to show that meta-theory is always situated, or provincial; most of us agree that all theories are situated. Yet being situated does not mean being isolated: on the contrary, that very situatedness is a result of political and ethical responses to other situated theories, as the case of Soviet Marxism shows so clearly.

To avoid becoming not just treacherous translators, but also a redundant amanuensis, to our interlocutors, Bruno Latour recommends that we leave modernity to the imaginary of the masses and their social theories (and to those social theorists who still think in terms of “modernity” and its discourses.) The moral implication of this move is that as soon as an idea spreads to a “populace” we need to abandon it and build our ivory tower someplace else. Another suggestion is to collaborate or “co-produce social knowledge” with our interlocutors, as some of us have been asking for in new designs for ethnographic methods (Rabinow Reference Rabinow2009; Ingold Reference Ingold2014). This is a better way to proceed, but my point is that we should always be aware of who “downloads” whose social theories, and how they do so.Footnote ²⁸ Co-producing social knowledge in virtue and not in vice requires more than just a commitment to equality. In the case of Russia it requires that we recognize our shared lineage of thought, something that, as my examples above show, many vernacular Marxists would gladly discuss. This forces the researcher to find ways to narrate others as one might hope to be narrated oneself. It goes beyond recognizing that “what people simply say” may already be more familiar to us than we suppose, to grasping that they are sharing with us their own accounts of history and philosophy that can enrich our accounts of their lives.