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Mediation, Imagination, and Time:

Speculative Remarks on Russian Culture

"Everybody thinks for some reason that Russia

remains an empire and still treats it as an empire."
—Vladimir Putin, President of Russia (ITAR-
TASS, 9 October 1999)

The study of Russia's imperial heritage began to garner renewed interest from a number
of prominent social scientist in the early 1990s.1 In addressing the topic, I acknowledge
the existence of a normative usage of "empire" that ranges from the reverential to the
opprobrious, but I stress here instead in its functions principally as a set of structural and
cultural categories shared—with significant variation—by the dynastic polity from
Middle Muscovy onward, the socialist heir from the 1930s onward, and Russia today. In
agreement with such studies as Doyle, Pagden, I would identify several key structural
features of empire—its status as a composite polity; a core-periphery system with
hierarchical access to goods and services; its inclination toward expansion and periodic
collapse—as well as key cultural features that range from the pragmatic (such as the
uneven availability of specialized higher education or the distinct distribution patterns of
cultural texts), to the lofty (such as the state's preoccupation with a mission civilisatrice).2
I will resist the temptation of an extended account of what I take to be Russia's
distinct features of empire—briefly, its geographically contrasting models of
colonization; a tendency toward centralized, state-driven modes of cultural production; a
marked divide between elite and demotic identity systems; an historically subdued
engagement with nation-formation; a heartland bearing features of what has been
described as internal colonization3—in order to concentrate instead on the issue that
1
For a brief overview of how this research paradigm re-entered scholarly language, see
Suny ("The Empire Strikes Out!" and "Ambiguous"); Motyl. We are also indebted, of
course, to Ronald Reagan for renewed interest in this research thread. Cf. Reagan's
speech at the 1983 meeting of the National Association of Evangelicals (8 March 1983,
Orlando, Florida):
In your discussions of the nuclear freeze proposals, I urge
you to beware the temptation of pride, […] to ignore the
facts of history and the aggressive impulses of an evil
empire, to simply call the arms race a giant
misunderstanding and thereby remove yourself from the
struggle between right and wrong and good and evil.
(http://www.nationalcenter.org/ReaganEvilEmpire1983.ht
ml)
2
Doyle's oft-quoted definition holds that "empire […] is a relationship, formal or
informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of another
political society" (45). See Motyl for a productive polemic on the differences between
imperial and hegemonic rules, as well as a devastating assessment of Hardt and Negri's
Empire, especially as it concerns the second world (Hardt and Negri 252-58).
3
Cf. Gramsci; Lenin 172-77, 269, and 363ff. For a more recent discussion of this term,
though with radically different conclusions, see Hechter (on England's internal
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interests me here, namely the challenges faced by scholars of culture who ask about
Russia's imperial legacy.4

Matching language with empire

During the same decade as our social-science colleagues were rediscovering the
productivity of imperial paradigms, Slavists working in culture, by contrast, were
becoming more cognizant of a different, competing project, loosely referred to as cultural
studies, originating at University of Birmingham.5 By 1991, cultural studies (as it came
to be understood in the US academy) had been traversing the Atlantic Ocean for several
years already to US departments of English, Communication, and foreign-language
departments, but still had little circulation in US Slavic departments.6 US Slavists still
tended to construe theory somewhat insularly as a distinct institutional zig-zag from the
formalists to Bakhtin to the Prague School to Tartu, deftly skirting the signposts of
Marxist theory. Under challenge, a gestural acknowledgement of Pereversev was
sufficient to confirm the US academy as a free marketplace of ideas.
And while US scholars in Slavic studies (humanities and social sciences alike)
still shared many vital research interests, those of us who had worked primarily in Soviet
culture found ourselves adrift by 1991. On the one hand, our object of study had
disappeared; on the other hand, we were acutely aware that the kind of cultural theory
referenced in English departments and elsewhere had neither time for second-world
modernity nor curiosity about the possibility of alternative postcolonial theorizing outside
the rubric of the overseas empire. And so US Slavists, whether now struggling with
Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams or with Gayatri Spivak and Homi Bhabha, did so
without an adequate vocabulary for the ways in which our newly configured object of
study—perhaps an empire, but not principally a maritime one—might produce
profoundly different cultural articulations than those of the thalassocratic empires figured
in much Western cultural-studies research.
As Slavists, therefore, we shared a potential interest in postcolonial studies, but
had a different empire. And while we had a common empire with our social-science
colleagues, we spoke a different analytic language. I wish, therefore, to focus here on
three issues that complicate and enliven our work in examining the imperial legacy of

colonization of Wales, Scotland, and Ireland), 8-9, 166, 342-51; Rodolfo Acuña,
Occupied America; Mario Barrera, Race and Class in the Southwest. For a local
application in a more culturally inflected mode, see Etkind and Groys (358).
4
A more elaborated argument in contained in Condee, The Imperial Trace, but they are
most locally in response to Mark Beissinger's presidential address (17 November 2007),
"The Persistence of Empire in Eurasia."
5
For a brief account of the origins of this enterprise, see the three pieces by Stuart Hall in
Works Cited. See also Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies." Key texts critical to
the formation of cultural studies in these early years include Hoggart (1957); Williams,
Culture and Society (1958); and Thompson (1963). For a valuable retrospective
assessment, see Colin MacCabe's interview with Stuart Hall in Critical Quarterly.
6
The principal collections in the early years of US cultural studies include During,
Grossberg et al, and Storey.
 Condee 4/16/2021: 3

Russian culture, linking it with cultural studies on the one hand and to some of the
research of our social-science colleagues on the other.

Mediation: culture's eternal puzzle

The principle challenge, large enough to require a lifetime's answer, is mediation. The
question here (and not only here) is the same as it always is: how does one claim to move
between cultural text and social reality? The historical variant of the same question asks
about the relationship between the artistic text and history—itself, after all, a text—where
knowing bears a different cast than that of either the artistic text or contemporary social
reality. The question of mediation does not presume an answer, but issues an implicit
challenge to the most available and newly attractive solution, namely content analysis,
operating in isolation from other issues.
Verifiable, grounded in image or narrative, conducive to supervision, content
analysis alone falls short for several reasons, among them for this one: important, cultural
information inevitably eludes the story line, expresses itself in explicit contradiction,
insinuates itself with unexpected force because its features are not necessarily prominent
as empirical evidence, but rely to a greater or lesser extent on conjecture. While we
might be superficially interested, therefore, in the ways that the legacy of imperial culture
is explicitly figured—let us say, in Rogozhkin's Checkpoint [Blokpost], Bodrov's Captive
of the Caucasus [Kavkazskii plennik], Abdrashitov's Time of the Dancer [Vremia
tanzora], Balabanov's War [Voina], Mikhalkov's Barber of Siberia [Sibirskii tsiriul'nik],
Sokurov Russian Ark [Russkii kovcheg] or Aleksandra—it is a more difficult task to ask
about the same legacy where it may be most suggestive, operating instead at the margins
of visibility, in less obviously pictorial ways.
Could it be argued, for example—in a more subdued fashion than the surface
narrative—that Lebedev's 2002 World War II film Star [Zvezda] may function as an
effort to displace Russia's recent military conflict onto the earlier, anti-fascist one, as if
the glory of one conflict might restore the honor of the other? Right or wrong, on what
basis would we claim to make this argument when the artistic treatment—precisely
because of its contemporary relevance—is spectral and fleeting, interpolating today's
soldier into a mid-century war and vice-versa? And while this analytic act always risks
being carried out in error, we surely know at the same time that artistic strategies do not
restrict themselves to mimetic representation in the narrative line. In examining those
features that the text may most powerfully invoke, the scholar must rely on what micro-
historian Carlo Ginzburg (95-125) has productively referred to as conjectural
knowledge,7 where the effort to read beneath the surface of the text requires, among other
skills, a tolerance for contradictory phenomena.
Inseparable from this enterprise, as has been argued most extensively in such texts
as Jameson's Political Unconscious, as well as Said's Cultural and Imperialism and
Orientialism, is an account of culture's refractions that accommodates the text not only as
the instrument of social legibility but also as constitutive of its conditions. Bearing in
7
In his "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm" (101), Ginzburg argues for the latent
affinity of conjectural fields through a diagnostic method common to psychoanalysis (the
reading of symptoms), sleuthing (the reading of clues), and cultural analysis (the reading
of "pictorial marks" on the canvass). I am grateful to Marcia Landy for several
productive exchanges on this aspect of Ginzburg's work.
 Condee 4/16/2021: 4

mind that Russia's imperial preoccupations are not merely a representational matter, a
costume drama, we are asking here about non-representation mediations, the ways in
which the empire's conditions of production, circulation, exhibition, review, regulation,
and consumption inter-determine artistic elements of the text.
"We need not decide here whether [...] imaginative knowledge infuses history and
geography," suggests Said, "or whether in some way it overrides them. Let us just say
for the time being that it is there as something more than what appears to be merely
positive knowledge" (Orientalism 55). That "something more" than positive knowledge
requires of its scholars a curiosity beyond the requirements of textual analysis, about how
its imperial trace may reside in a formal style, a structural register, an infrastructural
system that produces the artistic terms of the text itself.
As an example, on a less abstract level, let us mention the recent work of
Vladimir Khotinenko, a talented filmmaker increasingly concerned with the imperial
tradition, state-driven knowledge systems, and official narodnost' in the television serial
Death of the Empire [Gibel' imperii] or his historical drama 1612. 8 Little need be said of
the content; in each case, the text analyses itself. At a meta-textual level, however, one
might see in both works an elaboration of content in the external features of its funding,
production, distribution, and exhibition, elements that, like an exo-skeleton, ensure its
survival. Its instruments of support (most evidently the five-year programs for Patriotic
Education of Russian Federation Citizens and Channel One) provide a network that
efficiently constrains debate of such sensitive topics as imperial collapse in a fashion
familiar to us from the Stagnation period. As Chinghiz Aitmatov, for example, had been
sanctioned to explore the stylistics of magical realism or the thematics of ethnic amnesia,
so patriots of today are licensed to address, among other topics, Russia's vulnerability to
periodic collapse. A simulacrum of risk, this institutionalization of crisis strategically
undergirds and strengthens precisely the myth of imperial continuity over the centuries, at
the behest of a highly centralized, statist production structure.

Dressing like your cousin: habits of imperial appropriation

If the issue of mediation poses the greatest challenge to cultural analysts trying to make
sense of Russia's imperial legacy, a second challenge concerns our account of the
imaginative realm in itself as that place where the text flaunts the rules of empirical
realia, engaging instead in a series of lateral shifts, loan fantasies, cultural impersonation,
or ludic appropriation. This cultural play is common to all times and all regions, but it
has new and particular interest in the effort to understand the range of possibilities as one
imperial culture draws upon, re-circulates, and creates a playful masquerade of a kin
empire, provocatively suggesting their interchangeability or latent commonality. Their
"sameness" must not, of course, be taken at face value—any more, let us say, than any
artistic transvestitism—but is scripted so as to emphasize the tension between sameness
and difference. To return briefly, therefore, to Khotinenko, the anglophile academicism
in 1612, redolent of Lord of the Rings, is an inflection that is neither a random choice nor
a mere set of artistic artifices, but rather exists as a structure of appropriation with a long
production history, a renewed opportunity for identification with England that both
cancels out and supersedes the thalassocratic cousin.
8
On Death of the Empire, see Condee, "Vicarious Catastrophe."
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In a different medium altogether, Aivazovskii's seascapes might be seen as a

contrastive, but equally striking example of this libidinal engagement with the maritime
empire, a painterly admiration of imaginative dominion at once British and not-British.
Aivazovskii's seascapes associatively embed Russian realia in a maritime drama, in
evocative vistas that convey both social tumult and imperial, anglophilic mastery in the
imaginary realm, as in his canvass The Mary Caught in a Storm (1892). Under the
influence of English Romantic seascape painter J. M. W. Turner (1775-1851), whom he
met in 1842, Aivazovskii completed two canvasses remarkable in their similarities. A
cursory examination of Aivazovskii's 1846 View of Constantinople by Moonlight with his
View of Odessa by Moonlight in the same year cannot overlook the painterly, thematic,
and ideological compatibilities not only of these two imperial ports, but also more
broadly of their participation in what Mark Beissinger ("Soviet Empire") has
productively described as an imperial family resemblance.
Here there is of course enormous variation. Aivazovskii's work may engage in
little more than visual contemplation (as in, for example, his placid Black Sea, 1881), but
elsewhere—such as his anguished Ninth Wave (1850)—one might reasonably risk a
political extrapolation that connects this canvass as a form of social commentary with
earlier, Romantic renditions of imperial calamity, such as Karl Briulov's Last Day of
Pompeii (1830-33), which collates the myths of Roman imperial catastrophe with the
specter of a Russian one. Elsewhere, Aivazovskii's mountain expanse—as in his 1869
Mountain Village Gunib in Dagestan—is so similar in palette and form to the expanse of
sea cliffs in his later 1876 Shipwreck that landscape and seascape seem virtually
substitutable for one another, blurring the distinction between land and ocean range.
A related cultural investigation in this regard concerns imperial travel and
pilgrimage texts. It requires no detailed argument to suggest that the narratives of
overseas and contiguous empires might, in a realistic register, offer distinctly different
accounts of travel. Distinct practices of preparation, farewell, departure, return, and
celebration may mark off the trope of the overland traveler from the figure crossing the
third space of water between home and the empire's edge. In contrast to the moment of
shipboard embarkation, the overland journey may be structured in a realistic register as a
kind of endless incrementalism, a protracted, undifferentiated middle space. Moreover,
this geographic feature may also—as Dostoevskii, Goncharov, Nekrasov, and others have
variously suggested—be extrapolated as a symbolic category, as in the Russian soul, "too
broad" for its own good, the supine form as an implicitly geographical oblomovshchina,
or the relentless, spiritual pilgrim who walks his feet bloody traversing the overland
space.
But none of this is required of the imaginative text, which engages not only in the
representation of reality, but forces upon us as well its own hermetic realities of a
representational system. Moreover, these protocols of an imaginary realm are by no
means limited to the artistic text. When historian Vasilii Kliuchevskii writes of the
Russian imperial subject, dreaming of "the level, empty fields, which appear to curve
around the horizon like the sea" (70), his Russian subject may have different loyalties
than his English cousin, but their dreams, both nocturnal and textual, are deeply
compatible with each other. This difference and sameness not only cannot be resolved; it
must not be resolved if it is effectively to capture the latent sense of symbolic kinship that
underlies the surface of the text.
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And finally, of course, one must turn to the question of a different kind of polity
altogether, when the cultural text engages in the loan fantasies of nationhood. Why
should it not? Like any kind of masquerade or textual play, it does not contribute to the
realm of proof, but exists in the realm of artistic imagination. In mulling through some of
the examples one might cite, I am drawn to the famous lullaby scene towards the end of
Grigorii Aleksandrov's 1936 film Circus. It interests me for the following reason: one
could argue (wrongly, in my view) that this scene magnificently figures as "evidence" or
Russia's nationhood, a microcosm of civic life, its citizens passing from hand to hand the
mulatto child, bringing into the fold this outcast from rabid capitalism, this victim of
foreign racism. We do, after all, have the topos of grand inclusivity, comprising not only
Russian and also minority citizens from the Caucasus and elsewhere, including the
Jewish actor and director Solomon Mikhoels, whom the security police later would
murder.
The sequence is familiar to any literate Russian or foreign film scholar: two
Slavic women begin the lullaby. They are quickly enjoined by a disembodied, insistent
male hand to turn the child over. And from then on the child is passed from hand to hand
exclusively by the men, who are oddly empowered to nurturing in the symbolic realm of
this sovereign, boundarized space. The camera passes from one man to the next,
eventually settling on a Black man, conveniently present to receive little Jimmy and
continue the multi-ethnic lullaby. "National identity" in the Soviet state film industry?
Hardly. The nice man is there as a state placeholder, Mosfil'm's improvisation of a place
had "always already" been prepared for Jimmy to fall into, official narodnost' at its most
decorous, with all the fine points—nails, hair, and ethnic costumes—attended to. The
sequence offers us state symptoms that mimic nationhood, as if taking on the behavior of
another mammal for predatory purposes.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, the film's climax leads to the moment when the state
industry can sustain the masque no longer. Its heroine, the demonically cheerful actress
Liubov' Orlova, is transformed from Mary (American girl outcast) to monad of state
desire. Unable to remain clothed in the civvies of private life, she arrives at the stage
when she must expose the substance that has inhabited her. Her eyes take on a
bureaucratic glaze; her face acquires the state grimace. Throwing off everyday attire, she
is not merely transformed into a woman in white. She is raptured to Red Square, the
imperial epicenter of Soviet power, where she joins other monads in the state parade,
surrounded by the symbols of its legitimacy and coercion. Words fail; there must be
singing. Shoulder to shoulder, they march forward and—as if continuing a previous
conversation, but in fact in reference only to the supreme acquisition of state knowledge
itself—her friend turns to her with the only question left: "Now do you understand?" ["A
teper'—ponimaesh'?"] her friend asks. "Yes, replies Mary with the confidence of a life-
form indiscernible from imperial knowledge itself, "Now I understand."

Imperial time
It may seem an obvious point, but we are accustomed to thinking of the long historical
trajectory of imperialism as one of accumulated splendor, overreach, collapse, and
postcolonial aftermath. My third and final argument suggests that perhaps a more
accurate account of a Russian historical variant, at least as far as its cultural legacy is
concerned, would describe a double existence: on the one hand, this ordinary, linear
 Condee 4/16/2021: 7

history; on the other hand, an oddly reconstituting circulation of several sets of colonial
relationships—new, continued, regenerated in near-simultaneous, contingent presence.
That these regenerated relationships do not exist as a stable or coherent colonial
state is not surprising. Russian colonialist patterns have historically been kaleidoscopic
and improvisational: unless my social-science colleagues correct me, I would argue that,
while the nineteenth-century Ukrainian metropolitan elite, for example, might
intermingle with the ethnically Russian imperial elite, the Belarus local elite was more
subject to what might be described as a French pattern of suppression in favor of the
Russian metropole. If the imperial drive in the Far East was marked by the interests of
financial and missionary expansion—resembling a Spanish model—then the imperial
pattern in the Baltics, at least prior to the 1917 revolution, was more recognizably British
in its appropriation of an already existing German elite. Russian culture today, both
postcolonial (with respect to the former Soviet republics) and colonialist (most evidently
in the northern Caucasus) counterposes to the Atlantic linear narrative of sequential
stages a virtual co-presence of different imperial temporalities, a variant of imperial time
with a strongly regenerative and cyclical dimension to its structure, for which collapse
has served the inadvertent function of producing a modernity with substantially different
features than that produced by the nation-state. A regenerative and cyclical model of
imperial time—collapse, reconstitution, expansion, then again the early signs of volatility
—survives without the modernizing story of nation-state in part because collapse may
contain its own modernizing functions that we, in culture at least, are still ill-equipped to
describe.
In this respect, theorists of nation-formation offer unintentionally useful lessons.
If we have learned nothing else from Gellner, it is this: once one says that nation is
modern, one is constrained to say what kind of modernity it is. This task turns out to be a
daunting one if one proceeds from the position, put forth by Hosking, Lieven, and others
(and with which I would agree) that Russia has historically resisted nation-formation and
that the empire nevertheless managed to modernize itself without this feature that—in
Western theorizing—has often placed the nation-state as a key dimension of its identity,
no less central, incidentally, than capitalism. No matter how much, therefore, a certain
anglophilia may permeate elite Russo-Soviet culture, it is a relationship that is textually
reproduced in the absence of the nation-state, a condition that imparts to the task of
empire-building by the educated, metropolitan elite a profoundly different valence.
The contribution of constructivist turn in the early 1980s proved to be a critical
point in the theorizing of nation, one that facilitated a sharper distinction between
"nation" and narod. Such key texts of 1982-83 as John Breuilly's Nationalism and the
State (1982), Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities (1983), Ernest Gellner's
Nations and Nationalism (1983), and Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger's edited
Invention of Tradition (1983) marked a new stage in debates of nationhood. At one level,
I acknowledge, these texts were profoundly different from one another, not only in their
disciplinary origins (political science, cultural analysis, sociology, cultural history, and so
forth), but also in their location of modernity's site—in Gellner, science and industry9; in
9
I necessarily restrict my reading of Gellner to those works pertinent to nation theory,
avoiding for practical reasons his contributions to psychology (The Psychoanalytic
Movement), philosophy (Words and Things), and political science (Conditions of
Liberty). See Lessnoff, Gellner and Modernity for a fuller treatment of these aspects of
 Condee 4/16/2021: 8

Anderson, print capitalism, and so forth. At another level, however, these diverse texts
shared a sharper, more delineated argument about nationhood than their predecessors, in
particular than the so-called ethno-symbolists. The anodyne vagueness, for example, of
Anthony Smith's definition of "nation" as "a named human population sharing an historic
territory, common myths and memories, a mass, public culture, a single economy and
common rights and duties for all members"10 falls short, first, because of its inclusivity:
the definition might functionally serve, for example, as the description of a rural village,
a tribe, or indeed our own universities. Beyond this, however, Smith's definition falls
short because of (in a different sense) its exclusivity: it does not adequately account for
the circulation of fantasy, imagination, ideological invention that is very much a part of
the core institutions of nationhood, gestured at rhetorically in a number of contructivist
titles (The Invention of Tradition, Imagined Communities, etc.).
The constructivists have tended to put greater emphasis not only on the invented
(Gellner, Hobsbawm) or imagined (Anderson) dimension of nation construction, but also
on its distinctly modern aspects; its intrication with the rise of the modern bureaucratic
state; and its inclination to primordialize its own existence backwards in unacknowledged
ways. In particular, the last of these—the impulse to project the putative nation's
existence retrospectively so as render it eternal, natural, and immune to analysis—
permitted constructivist theorists to examine myths of equality, answerability, and
autonomous civic association without requiring that the nation's story about itself be an
empirically grounded one.
The inadvertent value of the constructivist contribution—with its greater
emphasis on the active autonomy from the state of a collective subjectivity—is that its
helpfulness in underscoring the non-identity of "nation" and "narod." If we accept the
constructivist notion that "nation" is not just any collective subjectivity (as Smith's more
generous definition would encourage), but one marked by independent, self-affirming
and internally conflictual, modern practices distinct from the state, then this would
suggest a different cultural disposition than that which is historically ascribed to narod.
While the topic a larger one than can adequately be addressed here, let us briefly assert
that a primary myth of the nation concerns its embodiment as a set of common rights,
created and re-created through civil practices. The nation's myths of political autonomy,
answerability, equality, participatory democracy exert a modernizing function very
different from many of the core myths of narod, textually unconcerned with (if not
resistant to) modernization, but also grounded instead in myths of harmony, collectivity,
and obedience. The possible differences between "nation" and narod (with its abstract
corollary, narodnost') was agonizingly examined in the aftermath of the Chaadaev affair,
as editor Nikolai Nadezhdin commented on European civic practices:
I spoke of narodnost', contrasting it to a false Europeanism.
[…] There [in Europe] narodnost' means some kind of
separate autonomy [samobytnost'] […] [I]s it not in the
name of this [European-style] narodnost', this senseless
pride, this dreaming of some kind of autonomy of the
people that the constant upheavals there are committed?11

Gellner's work.
10
See the Warwick Debates http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/gellner/Warwick.html.
11
Institute of Russian Literature (IRLI), or Pushkinskii Dom, f. 93, op. 3, no. 881, l. 10.
 Condee 4/16/2021: 9

The historical tendency toward a muted articulation of nationhood (whether one

locates an explanation in geography, ideology, path dependency, or elsewhere) does not
therefore imply that nationalism would not emerge as an evident strain in Russia's
political culture. We can see empirically that such a conclusion would make no sense.12
In fact, the opposite could more convincingly be argued: that the urgings of contemporary
Russian nationalism are symptomatic precisely of the frustrations and overwhelming
challenges of nation formation. As Gellner has suggested in another context,
"nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness; it invents nations
where they do not exist" (Thought and Change 169). On this apparent paradox of
nationalism—that it may be read as a symptom of absence of nationhood—one finds
surprising consensus among disparate theorists.13 It is an argument that would suggest
that the intensity and commitment of Russia's disparate nationalist movements may be
measured by the degree of their disempowerment (as autonomous movements) and the
impossibility of their goals.
But there is another interpretation as well, one grounded in what Seton-Watson
has—with some terminological inaccuracy—called official nationalism (83-87, 148).
One would note that Sergei Uvarov's original term, from which Seton-Watson's analysis
is derived, had been narodnost' (not natsional'nost'), a difference that now takes on
greater significance in the context of an argument about the political expectations of
"nation" and narod. One might reasonably argue, it seems to me, that official
"nationalism" (in fact, official narodnost') bears little relationship to nationalism, and is
indeed its opposite, despite the convenient nomenclatural similarity. The primary
function of official "nationalism" has historically been the retardation and control of
those nationalisms that, occupying that space where civic or ethnic autonomy might seek
linkages, would otherwise speak publicly back to the state unless sufficiently restricted.
Official narodnost' provides the most historically familiar instrument to ensure that the
volatile and unmanageable business of nation-formation is frustrated, but more
importantly that its frustration is naturalized as the workings of Fate, Essence,
Geography, and Mission.
Is it, therefore, exactly "nationalism" that we see in the recent cinema of Nikita
Mikhalkov, often characterized as the "nationalist" director of such films Barber of
Siberia or 12? Bracketing for now the artistic value of the texts, I would argue that it is
not nationalism (in the sense of an advocacy of civic society independent of statehood),
but nationalism's opposite, the now routinized production of official narodnost'. To
identify Mikhalkov's work as "nation-alist," we would require a model of nationhood
stripped of autonomy, independently constituted conflict practices, and the
institutionalized expectation of rights—that is to say, stripped of itself.

12
For current analyses, see such sources as The Russian Nationalism Bulletin, an online,
biweekly newsletter, or the reports of Sova Center at http://sova-center.ru/.
13
Note, for example, the compatibility of ethnosymbolist Anthony Smith—for whom
nationalism is "an ideological movement for the attainment and maintenance of
autonomy, unity and identity of a human population, some of whose members deem it to
constitute an actual or potential 'nation'" (24-25) [emphasis mine]—with Eric Hobsbawm,
for whom "nations do not make states and nationalisms, but the other way round" (10).
 Condee 4/16/2021: 10

It can only be anticipated that Russian culture will not soon leave behind its
imperial legacy in all its magnificent, uneven richness, but will retain patterns that reveal
in and through its artistic texts diverse habits of this articulation. Our analysis of these
habits would be sorely impoverished if we restricted our interest to the topical, the
costume drama. To venture beyond this realm is to risk interpretive error or worse,
speculative conjecture. Perhaps, however, it is by means of speculative conjecture that
we get glimpses of a different kind of knowledge that deepens our understanding of the
complex cultural practices of Russia's imaginative life.

Nancy Condee
University of Pittsburgh
 Condee 4/16/2021: 11

Works Cited
Acuña, Rodolfo. Occupied America: A History of Chicanos. New York: Longman,
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