Description:
Examines the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union, graphically described in spray paint by a graffiti artist in Barnaul: "We have no Motherland." Once socialism disappeared as a way of understanding the world, what replaced it in people's minds?
Brief description: Serguei Alex. Oushakine is Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Princeton University.
Review Quotes:
The Patriotism of Despair brilliantly demonstrates that 'culture matters more than ever' during periods of societal transformation. Serguei Oushakine investigates a range of groups--nationalist activists and intellectuals, war veterans and soldiers' mothers--that form communities of loss around symbolic representations and ritual enactments of shared trauma in Russia. Based on fieldwork from 2001-2003 in the city of Bernaull in Southwestern Siberia, the book provides a rare glimpse of culture in a Russian province (most other ethnographies are based in Moscow or St. Petersburg).... The Patriotism of Despair is one of the most significant works on post-Soviet culture to date, showing how trauma is not simply limiting, but generative--of communities and of understandings of what happened, what it means, and what to do. This ambitious undertaking... engages an impressive array of evidence: analyzing interviews, recounting rituals, excavating archives, and interpreting photographs.
--Jane Zavisca "Contemporary Sociology"