My Address Is the Soviet Union
How do you prove that the USSR no longer exists? The obvious route would be to point out that , by the end of 1991, all the former Soviet republics had declared their independence and been accepted as sovereign states by the international community (with embassies, UN seats, recognized national borders, armed forces, national governments, international agreements, and all the other accoutrements of sovereignty). When the constituent republics declared the Soviet state defunct, and in the absence of any resistance on the part of military or governmental forces representing the USSR, the relocation of the Soviet Union from the present to the past tense was now part of consensual reality. The USSR ceased to exist because there was no one with any authority left to declare otherwise.
The many former Soviet citizens who lamented their country's collapse were left with few options: impotent nostalgia and obsessive melancholia, membership in increasingly marginal communist parties, agitation for a new form of empire, or the disenchanted retreat from the public sphere. It took two decades for some ex-Soviets to develop the most straightforward response to their collapse: denial.
The various groups that espouse the continued existence of the USSR do not agree on everything, but they do share a familiar point of departure. As many anti-liberals have said since 1991, the people who declared the Soviet Union dead had no legal standing to do so. Not only did 77.85% of respondents to a March 17 1991 referendum vote in favor of preserving the Soviet Union, but the subsequent actions that dissolved the USSR were not provided for in the Soviet constitution. Boris Yeltsin, President of the the Russian Soviet Federation Socialist Republic (RSFSR), should not have had the authority to rename it the Russian Federation, since the republic was still under the jurisdiction of the USSR's Supreme Soviet. More important, the leaders of the three Slavic republics did not have the constitutional authority to declare the Soviet Union defunct.
Three decades on, these all sound like moot points, or at least purely theoretical ones. Giorgio Agamben famously called into question our received notions of sovereignty when, building on the work of Carl Schmitt, he argued that the power of the sovereign rests precisely on his ability to suspend due process under the law: the sovereign is the sovereign by virtue of his capacity to legally do away with legality. But by what right can the sovereign declare the state itself to have ceased to exist? It is one thing to suspend the constitution, but it is another to declare both the constitution and one's own office to be null and void.
In Plots against Russia, I argued that the Putinist obsession with what I called "bare sovereignty" is a reaction to the traumatic failure of Soviet statehood and the concomitant fear that statehood could fail (or be undermined) in the future. But it is also a rejection of both the very idea of regime change and the possibility that the current iteration of the state could be supplanted by a new one. Putinist sovereignty is built on a paradox: the assertion that the collapse of the USSR was a tragic error that should have been avoided while simultaneously insisting on the legitimacy of the forms of statehood that emerged from it. Nostalgia for lost great power status is one thing, but Western observers are often oblivious to the delicate balance on which Putinist rhetoric rests. Putinist sovereignty gains nothing from an ideology that is tantamount to sawing off the branch on which it stands. And this is why the constant Western drumbeat that Putin wants to restore the USSR is out of step with reality.
When it comes to Putinist geopolitics and post-Soviet nostalgia, Western pundits make a rookie semiotic mistake: they confuse the Symbolic with the Imaginary, and assume a simple, linear connection to the Real. Rather than striving to resurrect the Soviet Union, the Putinist state peddles "Sovietness," cherry-picking the attributes of great power, empire, and purpose without activating either the ideology or bureaucratic structures that underlay them. Even if, against all evidence, we were to accept that a restored Soviet Union is the goal of Putinism, it would be a goal dependent on infinite deferral. Like the arrival of the messiah for rabbinical Judaism, it would be an outcome that is theoretically desired, but never really expected. Instead, the current, technically ad hoc structures are meant to endure in the perpetuity of our profane time. What from the outside might appear millenarian is actually a quite comfortable fit with the current state of affairs.
Actual millenarianism is a threat to the status quo. Just as mainstream Jews have little patience for the Lubavitcher hasidim who (displaying a strangely unselfconscious lack of originality) insist that their dead Rebbe is going to come back as the messiah, Putinism cannot tolerate actual Soviet restorationists. Nor can it abide those who claim that the USSR still exists and the Russian Federation is a fiction. Such groups are a problem not just because of allegations of fraud, brainwashing, and terrorism, but because they reflect badly on a regime that has used Soviet nostalgia as a cornerstone.