Styob and the Soviet Superposition
It is easy to mock the Soviet Citizens; certainly, I've done my fair share of laughing at their expense. Experts such as Silantiev and commentators in the media try to have it both ways, highlighting the absurdity of some of their views while still insisting that they represent a clear and present danger. That the group lends itself to diametrically opposed critiques might set off alarm bells. Are we being played?
If we are, it is not by the Citizens, whose rank and file appear to be depressingly earnest, while their leaders shift back and forth on the spectrum from grifter to deranged. The Citizens are not engaged in ironic performance art. But we can learn something if we engage in a brief thought experiment, imagining an alternate history in which the Citizens were engaging in the kind of ironic overidentification that Russian call styob.
Brought into the English scholarly lexicon by Alexei Yurchak in his 2006 book Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More, styob (commonly spelled "stiob" and occasionally "steb"), Styob superficially resembles more familiar forms of sarcasm or mockery, but with an important innovation. Styob "required such a degree of overidentiflcation" with its target "that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two" (Yurchak :250). Before 2015, the most obvious American analog was Stephen Colbert on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report: Colbert's right-wing blowhard persona (based on that of Fox personality Bill O'Reilly) was a long-running joke always played straight. Colbert mocked O'Reilly by inhabiting him thoroughly, exaggerating the Fox host's worst tendencies while never stepping out of character.
The Citizens of the USSR are, of course, not a character; they are a social movement. But that alone would not make it impossible for them to be engaging in styob. In the United States in the 1980s, a group of activists repeatedly disrupted rallies featuring the antifeminist, homophobic Phyllis Schlafly. Calling themselves "Ladies against Women" (LAW), they donned hats, gloves, and aprons, and carried picket signs with such slogans as "My home is his castle" and chanting "Hit Us Again, Hit Us Again, Harder, Harder." When speaking to the press, they always stayed in character, admonishing female reporters for neglecting their domestic duties ("Did your husband give you permission to come to this rally?").. [1]
Ladies against Women were not merely funny; every one of their actions and utterances ridiculed the target of their overidentification. If the USSR Citizens were engaging in styob, what would it say about their target(s)? And what would that explain about the hostility mobilized against them?
The obvious answer is Soviet nostalgia and imperial revanchism. Nostalgia is structured around loss, absence, and distance: why be nostalgic when you've never left home? In their insistence that the USSR never fell, the Citizens are literalizing the metaphor behind the constant backward glance towards the Soviet Union, the compression of history by the New Chronology and the trite plot device central to Time Crasher stories: they collapse the Soviet past and the post-Soviet present into one time frame. Their assertion that a defunct country supersedes the reality of currently recognized nation states uses deliberate conflation of space (the USSR/the Russian Federation) to perform a similar feat for time.
In "Our Nuthouse Is Voting for Putin," the lead singer of Rabfak asks, "Why is today yesterday and not tomorrow?", explicitly calling attention to Putinism's retrohistorical orientation and its inability to imagine a future that is not some kind of revival of a lost past. But that is in one of the song's verses, not the chorus. A closer examination of the song shows that its satire is based on a structural tension between the overt, oppositional critique of the lyrics (which complain about the living conditions in the "nuthouse") and the styob of the chorus, which always reaffirms the authority of those in power ("The doctor is right/I'm guilty/ Our Nuthouse is Voting for Putin/ Putin is definitely our candidate").
As performers of styob, the Citizens occupy the subject position of the song's chorus rather than its verses: the Putinist regime views the Soviet past through rose-colored glasses, but the Citizens love it so much that they simply refuse to accept the idea that the Soviet Union is gone. The fact that so many of the Citizens are of retirement age only makes the joke sharper. What better way to show a country fixated on the past than to create a social movement dominated by people whose youth is behind them?
Crazed, belligerent, or at least outraged pensioners abound in post-Soviet culture. Their plight can be poignant, as in Eldar Riazanov's 1991 film The Promised Heavens (Nebesa obetovannye), about displaced, homeless pensioners living on a landfill, whose self-appointed "President" convinces them that benevolent aliens are going to take them away to a better world. Or they can be murderous, as in Mikhail Elizarov's The Librarian, whose best set piece is about hundreds of previously comatose grandmas fighting gang wars (more on this novel in the next chapter). In the media and online, Russian viewers have long been treated to the antics of "Putin's Brigades," a network of elderly women who rant publicly about anti-Russian conspiracies and the New World Order. Soviet nostalgia is not exclusive to the old, but angry pensioners are a handy tool for ridiculing the impulse to look backward.
The problem with styob is, ultimately, part of the problem that the Putinist state has with the USSR Citizens: the ridiculousness cannot be contained. Styob is absurdity at its stickiest. You can touch it, but it comes at a cost to your self-seriousness. For the past decade, Putinism has faced the intermittent challenge of oppositionists who refuse to grant the regime the kind of evil solemnity previously accorded to the Soviet state by late Soviet dissidents. One of the earliest moves of the new Putin administration was the February 2000 closure of the satirical television program Puppets after it aired an episode portraying the Russian president as an evil gnome. Yet mockery could not be silenced for long, and one of the galling things about the 2011-2012 street protests or the overall demeanor of the leading opposition figure Alexei Navalny was not a 60s-era earnest demand to "live without lies," but the constant readiness to laugh in the face of the regime's stupidity and incompetence. When Navalny was nearly killed by an (alleged) poisoning presumed to be the work o the state security forces, the regime suffered a double hit: first, the simple fact of depositing the poison in Navalny's underwear meant that the name "Putin" and the words "Navalny's underwear" often found themselves sharing a sentence, and second, that Navalny and his team were able to expose his poisoners live over the Internet by essentially prank calling them.
By the end of post-Soviet Russia's third decade, styob had become such a reflexive framework for Putinist excess that it had become self-perpetuating. Agency was no longer required. Or perhaps it would be better to say that intent was no longer a prerequisite: styob could arise on its own, independent of its authors' point of view. Styob is now as much an interpretive strategy as it is an artistic device. In this, as always, it mirrors its object. Not only can we no longer tell if the propagandists on state television believe their most outlandish stories, but, as I have argued in Plots against Russia and elsewhere, their belief is irrelevant. They are putting propagandistic, conspiratorial utterances out in the world, to circulate as they will.
The same holds true for statements and positions that could function as styob, and this is one of the things that makes the USSR Citizens a problem. Their extended rants about the USSR's century-long lifespan might be drivel, but they also sound like an overidentified parody of Putinist nostalgia. The State and the media can either ignore them or demonize them, but they always run the risk of being tainted by the fundamental similarity between the Citizens' belief system and the discourse of the State. The Citizens are Putinism's embarrassing, snaggle-toothed backwater cousins, the relatives one might prefer never to have to acknowledge. But they do exist, and they do share a lineage with their more powerful and respectable kin. But where the Citizens strive to resurrect a fallen kingdom through sheer force of will, the State is not trying to create something from whole cloth. Instead, the State/media apparatus is engaging in demiurgic magic, attempt to redefine and transform this embarrassing movement into a quasi-terrorist, quasi-sectarian threat. Inflating their danger makes them a more worthy adversary, or, at the very least, serious enough opponent that engaging with them will not make the state look absurd. One does not need the dreams of a thousand cats to make this happen; all that is required is the much more realistic attempt to make a handful of kittens look like bloodthirsty lions.
Note
[1] Ladies against Women came out of the Berkeley-based Plutonium Players, who included it on a list of fictitious groups endorsing one of their rallies in 1979 (along with "Reagan for Shah" and "Mutants for Nuclear Power").