When cynical distance and ironic posturing have become the prevalent means of relating to public life, political humour is no longer considered subversive. It has been argued that both in Russia and the United States, ideology has co-opted satire, meaning that citizens can consume outrage passively through various satirical media products, thereby displacing outrage and abstaining from more active forms of resistance. This articles explores the twenty-first century potential of irony and cynicism to disrupt and subvert through parody, be it in the form of political satire or ironic protest, examining how similar paradigms are expressed across different geographical contexts.

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Political satire and its disruptive potential: irony and cynicism in Russia and the US

This thesis investigates national identification by applying psychosocial methodology to
discourses produced in Russia during the era of ‘Putinism’ (2000- ). Existing literature on
post-Soviet Russia frequently claims that at the heart of the nation lies an absence of
symbolic functions or subjective formations with which Russians could identify. At the
same time, there has been relatively little empirical work that seeks to examine national
identification using a psychosocial approach. The study fills this lacuna by looking for
moments of identification across different texts, such as interviews, surveys and media
representations. Using as its starting point the conditions of possibility of post-2000
Russia, the study pays attention to societal shifts and disjunctures, examining how they
are reflected in discursive patterns and formations.
The dissertation’s empirical element consists of two parts. Through the analysis of
interviews and open-ended surveys, the first part documents respondents’ ambivalent
relationship with Russia and Russianness, which is characterized by splitting and
disavowal. In the second part, the study deploys a case study approach. The first case
study focuses on discourses of rejection and (dis)identification as featured in the Russian
public’s responses to Pussy Riot. It concludes that in their policing of Russianness and
the demarcation of features deemed undesirable as embodied by the group, participants
in the debate have found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and also
of once again ‘enjoying the nation’. The second case study examines discourses that seek
to elicit identification in the populace via representational mechanisms around the figure
of Vladimir Putin. It is argued that the various strategies employed to activate leader love,
ranging from hypermasculinity to hyperrealism, seem to indicate a void at the heart of
the Russian president’s persona and, by extension, his national project, making them
profoundly unstable.
Overall, the thesis provides a rare empirical contribution to the psychosocial study of
national identification. It addresses the interrelation between imaginary and symbolic
identification and the pivotal role of fantasmatic processes therein. The identifications I
locate in the thesis are precarious and fleeting, speaking of the loss of a fantasy of
national greatness, and of an internalization of images and scenes borrowed from
literature and history. The study also offers a consideration of the implications of such
attachments for Russian society, thus providing further illustration of the
interdependence of the psychic and the social.

Moments of Russianness : locating national identification in discourse

The paper explores the role of resources in LGBT activism in Russia. Russian LGBT activism emerged and developed after the fall of the Soviet Union with activists engaging in various activities suc...

Resource mobilisation and Russian LGBT activism

Russian reactions to Pussy Riot’s performance in Moscow’s Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012 indicated that a collective nerve had been hit. This article seeks to explain the surge of public outrage following Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’ through a psychosocial analysis of Russian media debates surrounding the case. By focusing on the negative responses, the following discussion investigates what such a ‘resistance to resistance’ might signify, and how it can point to latent forms of identification. It examines the public’s fixation with the group’s name, as well as the prevalence of fantasmatic enactments of violence in media discussions. Results suggest that in their rejection of the group’s performance, participants in the debate found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and of once again ‘enjoying the nation’.

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A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or Frenzied Uteri

Russian reactions to Pussy Riot's performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012 indicated that a collective nerve had been hit. This article seeks to explain the surge of public outrage following Pussy Riot's 'punk prayer' through a psychosocial analysis of Russian media debates surrounding the case. By focusing on the negative responses, the following discussion investigates what such a 'resistance to resistance' might signify, and how it can point to latent forms of identification. It examines the public's fixation with the group's name, as well as the prevalence of fan- tasmatic enactments of violence in media discussions. Results suggest that in their rejection of the group's performance, participants in the debate found ways of both shifting the threat Pussy Riot represents, and of once again 'enjoying the nation'. Subjectivity (2016) 9, 126-144. doi:10.1057/sub.2016.5; published online 7 April 2016

A psychosocial analysis of reactions to Pussy Riot: Velvet Revolution or

The Class Composition of Russia’s Anti-Putin Movement

‘Few political notions are at once so normative and so equivocal as internationalism’, wrote Perry Anderson 20 years ago. Little has changed: today too, internationalism tends to take the form of a regular exhortation to think or act beyond the border or boundary, yet its political content remains underdetermined. What do we mean when we talk about internationalism? The following discussion sought to approach this question not by returning to first principles – to a definition of internationalism that could stand outside of a given historical context – but by reconstructing different concepts of internationalism developed by a series of lesser studied political movements spanning the 20th century. Musab Younis discusses anticolonial and pan-African internationalisms of the 1920s–40s; Maria Chehonadskih interrogates the interwar Soviet internationalism of Alexander Boganov; Layli Uddin excavates the Islamic socialist activities of Maulana Bhashani; and Dilar Dirik focuses on the meanings of internationalism in the history of the Kurdistan Freedom Movement. These movements bore witness to a fundamental set of shifts in the nature of the international system as empires collapsed and new nation-states were born, while global structures of exploitation and extraction recomposed themselves in the Cold War and post-Cold War landscape. In this context, all conceived of internationalism as a fundamentally revolutionary project.

The Meanings of Internationalism: A Collective Discussion on Pan-African, Early Soviet, Islamic Socialist and Kurdish Internationalisms Across the 20th Century

The translation of Alexander Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism into English may be considered either belated or well timed. First crafted between 1904 and 1906, its three volumes were produced for and by the revolution in Russia, constituting what may be considered a manifesto of heretical tendencies in Marxism, uniting a generation against Plekhanov’s orthodoxy; a collection of essays; or an ambitious philosophical treatise. Empiriomonism expresses a style of 1905 revolutionary thought but has philosophically outlived the urgencies and contexts of its publication. This review essay examines Bogdanov’s contribution as an attempt to unite empiricism and Marxism, as a theory of technics and of the mutually constituted ideological organization of social forms, and as a relevant philosophical tool for engaging with speculative, political, and ecological issues abandoned by the Marxist canon.

Maria Chehonadskih

Papers

The Class Composition of Russia’s Anti-Putin Movement

The Meanings of Internationalism: A Collective Discussion on Pan-African, Early Soviet, Islamic Socialist and Kurdish Internationalisms Across the 20th Century

Empiriomonism: Essays in Philosophy, Books 1–3, by Alexander Bogdanov, edited and translated by David G. Rowley. Leiden: Brill, 2020.