Cultural translation of the local situation into an international context is now an enormous problem for post-Soviet Russia, causing dangerous and regressive isolation.

The typical position, which is now very popular among conservative intellectuals and spokesmen in Russia, is one of an inexplicable and untranslatable \u201cuniqueness\u201d of the situation, its inherited difference, supported by references to a \u201cspecial Russian spirituality,\u201d Russian canonical literature like Dostoevsky, etc. This ideological statement, which indeed adopts and appropriates all external stereotypical views of Russia, must be challenged by evoking a concrete and immediate intellectual and political pre-history. We will treat this problem dialectically, reformulating it and reserving some theoretical \u201csingularity\u201d for the post-Soviet situation, but in terms of resistance to dominant conformist right-wing politics and ideology.

It is paradoxical, but in many respects the situation in the USSR has been most easily translated into theoretical and cultural languages. In Soviet times, even the dogmatic and ideologically saturated Marxism that dominated culture and society was clear and recognizable for the global intellectual and political community, just as the various criticisms of the so- called \u201cSoviet experiment\u201d were clear for well-informed late Soviet dissident intellectuals. The language of Marxism was a universal code, a mediator. Criticism of the Soviet project was also conducted in the language of Marxism. First, it was considered as a withdrawal from the principles of Leninist theory and politics. Then, the critical discourse formed around the theory of Thermidor and the domination of bureaucracy. This was first formulated in the \u201cheterodox\u201d language of Trotskyism and then became known internationally. Even the liberal criticism of the USSR in terms of \u201ctotalitarianism\u201d is grounded in Marxism (or \u201cWestern Marxism,\u201d to be precise), at least by the most penetrating theorists such as Hannah Arendt.

The delegitimization and destruction of these codes after the disintegration of the USSR were one of many factors that have made the post-Soviet situation in the intellectual and cultural spheres almost opaque for a "Western" (or any) external observer. As an example of this transition, I briefly examine the symptomatic discussions among outstanding Western and Eastern intellectuals at the Dubrovnik conference (1990), which can be seen as a crucial point in the crisis and decoding of previous paradigms of translation, as well as the emergence of a new disposition. Some phrases from a recent interview with left-wing French philosopher Alain Badiou express the latest stage of this disposition sharply and completely: \u201cI do not understand contemporary Russia at all. <\u2026> We knew the USSR and understood it, we had time to investigate it, and I\u2019d even say we needed the USSR. Everything that happened there helped Western leftist thinkers even if they were not in agreement with its ideology. Just the fact of the Soviet Union\u2019s existence was extremely important for us. And now that it has collapsed, Russia has turned into an extremely mysterious country.\u201d (Marusia Klimova, \u201cAbroad #16: Alain Badiou,\u201d Topos,http: //topos.ru /article/4113)

So then, what theoretical languages can we find or invent for analysis and expression of the cultural, social, and political experiences that have arisen after the USSR? In my talk, I will propose an analysis that compares