Other Russias
Imagining the Soviet Union after 1991 is not restricted to people living or born in the post-Soviet space. Allegations that Vladimir Putin wants to revive the USSR have been a common neocon talking point for decades, although I would argue that they are more the result of intellectual laziness and political expediency than nostalgia. Nor is nostalgia the only explanation for the phenomenon with the Russian Federation. The continued Soviet Union can be seen as one of many manifestations of a wish for, if not change, then something different. From 2006-2010, opposition leaders as diverse Gary Kasparov and Eduard LImonov were part of a coalition called "Drugaia Rossiia" (the name was subsequently taken by the party Limonov founded in 2010). The most accurate translation of the name would be "A Different Russia," but the firmly entrenched English rendering is "Another Russia." The aspiration is obviously not geographical--no one is proposing an expedition to find another Russia located on different territory. Rather, it is the somewhat utopian aspiration that a different kind of Russia could take root on the land where Russia now exists.
To the extent that they can be said to (fictionally) exist, all of these Other Russias can only be experienced in a kind of double consciousness, not unlike Dick's ability to see both the default world and the Black Iron Prison at the same time. Even when the Other Russia is described within the confines of immersive fantasy (i.e., without any diegetic connection to our "real" world), their function for the reader or audience depends on the two worlds' complementarity: each functions as a comment on the other. This makes these Other Russias both uncanny and dysphoric by definition, in that each world, in relation to the other, seems both "off" and familiar, rendering them not entirely hospitable.[1]
Their complementarity recalls the premise of China Mieville's 2009 novel The City and the City , which takes place in two cities, Beszel and Ul Qoma, that exist in overlapping geographical space, but are kept separate by the requirement that the residents of one city "unsee" the residents and the buildings of the other. Those who actually see the other city commit the violation called "breaching," which is as much phenomenological as it is criminal: in seeing what has always been around them, they are acknowledging the uncanny nature of their everyday existence.
The residents of Mieville's two fictional cities must pretend that something real is not there; by contrast, those who partake in the narratives of Other Russias are willing something into existence rather than out of it. Through the sheer force of their imagination, they are undoing a loss or closing a wound.
This imaginative work, then, is usually an example of what Svetlana Boym called “restorative nostalgia, which "does not think of itself as nostalgia, but rather as truth and tradition…..Restorative nostalgia protects the absolute truth, while reflective nostalgia calls it into doubt.” Or, in the more populist vein that I mined in Soviet-Self-Hatred, it is an instance of curatorial fandom, the protective, rear-guard impulse to maintain a beloved cultural object according to a rigid set of received terms, rather than the more fluid and playful transformative fandom. To go back to the example from the the 2010s, transformative fandom wants a “Different Russia,” while curatorial fandom wants to revive a “Russia that We Have Lost.” Both activities are inherently creative, but the former celebrates this creativity while the latter wants to cover up all traces of to maintain the pretense that its proponents are practicing archaeology rather than fan fiction.
Note
[1] If this were the 1980s, I would no doubt be referring to this phenomenon as “(M)Other Russias.” Fortunately, nostalgia for the Soviet Union has not been matched by nostalgia for Eighties MLA Conventions.