A Dream of a Thousand Cats

In the eighteenth issue of Sandman, Neil Gaiman’s classic comic about storytelling and dreams, Gaiman and artist Kelley Jones detour from the series’ main plot, handing the narrative reins to an abused female Siamese cat.[1] Traumatized by her owners’ drowning of her newborn kittens, she falls asleep and meets the Cat of Dreams, who reveals to her that the world used to be completely different. In the past, giant cats ruled the earth, with tiny humans as their playthings. But one day, the humans realized that if they all dreamed the same dream of a world in which humans ruled and cats were pets, they could transform reality. When she wakes, the Siamese realizes that she has a mission: to travel the world and convince every cat to share the dream of undoing human domination and restoring the golden age of kitty supremacy. 

The cats’ and humans’ collective rewriting of the world raises questions about the nature of reality, questions that could be addressed through the discourse of philosophy or through its less reputable cousin, the gauzy syncretism of New Age “thought.”   But the cats’ dilemma is as much political as it is metaphysical: who gets the right to define the world? While it is unlikely that even the most outré political activists in Russia are plotting feline restoration, A Dream of a Thousand Cats inadvertently models voluntarist wish-fulfillment fantasies about power, nationhood, and consent in the aftermath of the Soviet collapse.   

Thanks to Benedict Anderson, scholars in the West have long been accustomed to understanding the nation as an imagined community: nations, countries, and all social collectivities are not natural phenomena that must be accepted as given.  Meanwhile, in the wake of the influential writings of Lev Gumilev and his theory of ethnogenesis, Russian social science and public discourse has become increasingly dominated by precisely the opposite notion: the framing of the ethnos as a virtually biological entity with origins and an existence that are close to independent from historical and political contingencies. Ironically, the same historical circumstances that have enhanced the appeal of Gumilev’s theories of ethnos have also exacerbated a longstanding historical tendency to imagine Russia and the Soviet Union as entities that can be redefined through sheer force of will. Examples include Peter the Great’s radical transformations of Russian society and the construction of a new capital in a fetid swamp, the Bolsheviks’ restructure of the empire along Leninist lines, Stalin’s revolution from above, Gorbachev’s perestroika.  The end of the Soviet Union followed hurried, ultimately fruitless debates about redefining the relationship of the Union republics with the central government and renaming the country (which, for a while, seemed on the verge of becoming the “Union of Sovereign States”), with the USSR itself wiped from the map with the stroke of a pen. The last fifteen years of the twentieth century were a serious challenge to geographic object permanency.

Thus contrary to the Putinist fetishization of the sovereign state while still relying on the very feelings of patriotism and attachment that the current government so exalts, it is not so difficult for many within Russia to act as though any given iteration of either the empire or nation-state were not just socially constructed, but the product of collective, consensual delusion. The end of the Soviet Union was both a cataclysmic, once in a life-time event and an abstract, bureaucratic action bordering on conceptual art. On December 8, 1991, the day when the USSR was first declared defunct, no bloodthirsty foreign invaders were breaching any borders, no revolution was brewing in the streets.  It was a Sunday, and the accords were signed by the three Slavic republics (Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus) in secret.  The three Baltic Republics had seceded in August, and eleven of the twelve remaining republics confirmed the December 8 declaration on December 21. Gorbachev announced his resignation on the 25th, and the next day, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR voted itself out of existence. 

But what did all of this mean immediately for ordinary citizens in the newly-constituted Russian Federation?  On a material level, probably little, at least for those who were not directly employed by the Soviet government or military apparatus.  The economic transformations were wrenching, of course, but no more on those particular days than the ones immediately preceding or following them. I was living in Moscow at the time, and I remember a paradoxical sense of both the momentous and the immaterial:  something and nothing were happening at the same time. What could be a greater confirmation of the state as consensual fantasy than the fact that its dismantling was, like some underproduced Soviet commodity, unevenly distributed? 

The state's collapse should have been a zen koan:  if you live in a small village with little contact with the outside world, did the Soviet Union ever really end? Or did you ever really live in it? In the absence of pervasive state violence and surveillance, much of the individual subject's connection to the state is affective, conceptual, and therefore potentially independent of the facts on the ground (at least for women and for men beyond conscription age). One needs a set of strong reasons (intellectual or emotional) to identify with a political structure that extends so much farther than one's immediately accessible environment.  My own personal investment in American federalism is rooted in rootless cosmopolitanism rather than patriotism:  my country is more appealing to me as a large, fungible space where my rights are everywhere the same, and I have little interest (and significant distrust) in local, parochial political formations.  But I also recognize that mine is a minority position.

A voluntarist conception of Russian and Soviet statehood is not just an academic exercise, nor is it merely the stuff of fiction (though rest assured, this is fictional stuff to which we will return).  Since 2010, the activities of several groups throughout the Russian Federation have been the object of increasing state and media attention precisely because of their insistence that the Russian Federation does not, in fact, exist. The Russian Federation, they argue, is itself a fiction, with no legal basis for its existence.  Instead, they claim citizenship to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, a country that is very much alive.  The empire, it turns out, never really ended.  Or at least, this is the dream that thousands of post-Soviet cats would very much like to see as their own reality.

Notes

Sandman 18, August 1990. Reprinted as Chapter 2 of The Sandman: Dream Country.