Everyday foreign policy: Performing and consuming the Russian nation after Crimea

By Elizaveta Gaufman

While everyday high level practices have become an important area of study, the everyday of the every(wo)man has been overlooked both in theoretical and empirical conceptualizations. Building on feminist, sociological, and ethnographic research, this book argues that everyday foreign policy is an assemblage – a combination of physical and cultural practices that inhabit digital and bodily spaces. Following the feminist call to liberate international relations from the straitjacket of high politics, this book contextualizes foreign policy within daily practices of regular citizens, who also have their own motivation behind reposting memes, eating a certain kind of cheese or shaming women for their dating preferences. This book focuses on Russian grass roots foreign policy after the annexation of Crimea, zeroing in on fetishization of Putin, militarization, sanctions, Russian-Turkish and Russian-American relations, FIFA World Cup and the COVID-19 pandemic.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: May 30, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526155405

Book preview

Everyday foreign policy

Everyday foreign policy

Performing and consuming the Russian nation after Crimea

Elizaveta Gaufman

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Elizaveta Gaufman 2023

The right of Elizaveta Gaufman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 5541 2 hardback

First published 2023

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Cover image: Kazimir Malevich, Woman with Rake, c. 1932. Alamy Stock Photo.

Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Ethan

Contents

List of figures

List of interviews

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1 Theory and methodology of everyday foreign policy

2 Cult of personality

3 Militarization

4 Sanction me this

5 Not going to Turkey

6 Trump’s the man

7 World Cup

8 The COVID-19 pandemic

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Figures

Interviews

Interview A (1 September 2020), United States, WhatsApp

Interview B (1 September 2020), United States, WhatsApp

Interview C (2 September 2020), United States, WhatsApp

Interview D (4 September 2020), United States, WhatsApp

Interview K (22 September 2017), Krasnodar Krai, in person

Interview L (22 September 2017), Krasnodar Krai, in person

Interview M (13 January 2021), Netherlands, GoogleMeet

Interview P (11 January 2021), Russia, WhatsApp

Interview S (22 September 2017), Krasnodar Krai, in person

Interview V (16 January 2021), Russia, WhatsApp

Interview W (27 August 2020), Russia, WhatsApp

Interview Y (28 August 2020), Russia, WhatsApp

Preface

This book was researched and written during the years before 24 February 2022. My original acknowledgment reflected the anxiety I felt at the time – as I watched troops amass, I was scared to think that my book was no longer an exercise in poststructuralist theory and empirics. A Soviet-era song from World War II goes On June twenty-second, exactly at four o’clock, Kyiv was bombed, we were told that the war has begun. As trivial as it might seem, this song reflects a deep discomfort and trauma that still exists in the region scarred by World War II. It was unthinkable that a large-scale war had begun again and even more inconceivable that a country that prides itself as the victor over fascism would be the one doing the bombing. And yet.

Re-reading the chapters after the war began, I could not help but see the signs of the impending disaster: the cult of personality, the militarization, and the attempts to forge a new, post-Crimea consensus that had started to wane. Post-factum, we could offer more signs that a large-scale war was coming. The statue of Volodymyr the Saint, the Kyiv prince who baptized ancient Rus’, was erected in 2018 next to the Kremlin, surely a sign of Putin re-imagining himself as another millennial ruler who would re-unite what he considers to be ancestral lands. Surely, the incessant drivel of the pro-Kremlin media painting Ukrainians as Nazis since the 2013 Euromaidan uprising was not just a way to appropriate government funds. Surely, toddlers dressed in military uniform and the creeping popularity of the we can repeat it sticker was some kind of indication of the current still-contested level of acceptance of the war against Ukraine. After all, how easy is it to suspect Americans of poisoning Russians through chicken thighs – the so-called Bush’s trotters of the 1990s – and move on to poisonous Ukrainian soda, a viral message on Russian WhatsApp that suspected the popular Ukrainian-produced drink Tarkhun of containing a toxin aimed at Russians?

The sad irony of starting my book in Ukraine, both as a title and as the site for the first epigraph, does not escape me. Ukraine has occupied a disproportionate place in the geopolitical imaginary of the Russian political elite, an obsession that could be traced back centuries and culminated in Putin’s vile speech on 21 February 2022, when he denied the nation’s existence – attributing it to some historical mistake by Soviet leaders, completely and willfully oblivious to centuries of Ukrainians’ struggle for their statehood, language, and culture. The brotherly nation myth propagated by state-run media had to be quickly replaced by the Kyiv regime and the necessity of ridding Ukraine of German, Anglo-Saxon and Jewish colonizers, according to the propagandist-in-chief Vladimir Soloviev. The racist, colonial, ahistorical, and imperial claims spouted by the Russian political elite are aimed at fomenting or at least trying to repeat the chauvinistic ecstasy of 2014, the annexation of Crimea, built largely on successful attempts to depict Ukraine as a neo-Nazi state.

Despite the widely publicized high levels of support for what the Kremlin regime refuses to call a war, the everyday has not caught up with state foreign policy. The Kremlin has tried to astroturf support for the Special Military Operation by appropriating military insignia used on Russian military equipment: Latin letters Z and V. Some governmental employees went as far as to replace their region names (for instance, Kemerovo Oblast, or Kuzbass, is suddenly KuZbass) or putting dying children in Russian hospices in Z formations. What unites these disparate though numerous incidents is that most of them were instigated by government employees or other people eager to be perceived as loyal to the Kremlin. Most sociologists note that there is no everyday grassroots creative re-appropriation of the pro-war symbolism. If during the implementation of sanctions in 2015, many Russians ruminated melancholically on a potential loss of their burgers; in 2022 they overwhelmed McDonald’s restaurants before an imminent closure was announced. For a discourse scholar, it’s hard to admit that sometimes actions speak louder than words, but for a practice theorist, it makes a lot of sense.

I have no doubt that there are war supporters in Russia. One group that I have been monitoring on the Russian social media site Vkontakte for almost ten years, the Antimaidan, still has around 500,000 subscribers. Over the past years, they have posted vile, dehumanizing, and hateful anti-Ukrainian rhetoric. They have advocated genocide and cheered on rape. The group has reveled in atrocities. There are numerous similar groups; many of them are now on Telegram, often fueled by Kremlin trolls who try to create an illusion of Z-support. We know now that some of this rhetoric has had real-life consequences. Memes about supposedly loose Ukrainian women have turned into devastating accounts of sexual violence. Ukrainian civilian and military losses of life are hard to estimate, but they are enormous. Millions have been wounded, millions more displaced, families separated, and some forcibly removed to Russia. Livelihoods, homes, schools, hospitals, museums, and libraries have been destroyed in the quest to erase Ukrainian identity, language, culture, and history. The eastern and southern parts of the country will take years to demine and face an environmental catastrophe almost on par with Chernobyl.

In 2015, I published an article: Memory, Media, and Securitization: Russian Media Framing of the Ukraine Crisis (Gaufman 2015). The argument of the article was that the Russian government successfully instrumentalized the memory of World War II to legitimize the annexation of Crimea. The Great Patriotic War, as World War II is known in Russia, commemorates not just the defeat of fascism, but also the survival of the nation in the face of extinction. It is the most important heroic and unifying event in recent Russian history that has been used for nation-building purposes even before Putin. It is not surprising then that the Great Patriotic War was instrumentalized by the Russian government to justify the annexation of Crimea, where Ukraine was represented as a neo-Nazi state threatening Russian speakers. This narrative did not fade away in the eight years that separated two Russian wars against Ukraine: the same rhetorical devices and tropes were used to legitimize a special operation. However, in the face of mounting casualties, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the Russian government to maintain the so-called Donbas consensus, which is now only sustained through mass media control and ever-widening repression against critical war coverage and anti-war resistance.

If in 2014 the Kremlin insisted largely on a seemingly bloodless takeover of Crimea and peddled T-shirts promoting Putin as a polite president of a polite army, even the most jingoistic supporters admit that in 2022 there are causalities. Of course, in 2022, it is a crime in Russia to call the invasion of Ukraine a war; it is rather a special military operation. Those who disagree face up to fifteen years in jail. However, the Kremlin’s attempt to tie the war against Ukraine to the memory of the Great Patriotic War has unintended side effects, as the intensified commemoration of the war against fascism provides a very uncomfortable comparison with 2022.

A case in point is the Twitter account 22 June. Minute by Minute which chronologically tweeted out Nazi Germany’s attack on the Soviet Union in 1941 in 2022. The message read: An awful anniversary is upon us in the history of our countries. A vile dictator attacked in the middle of the night without declaring war and forbade even to use the word war. But in the popular memory everybody will remember the words [‘]Kyiv was bombed and we were told that the war has started.[’] However, many pro-Kremlin accounts thought that this was a reference not to the attack by Nazi Germany in 1941, but instead to the attack on Kyiv on 24 February 2022. Hence, many people actually reacted to this post by saying that it was the best day that the Russian army started to liberate [the] brotherly Ukrainian nation from terrorists. It is illegal in Russia to compare Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, but users seem to have very quickly recognized the parallels, even though the account has been active for years.

Even the Starbucks Krasnodar coffee mug that I mention in the conclusion is adorned with the image of sunflowers, now a widely recognized symbol of Ukrainian resistance. In order to show support for Ukraine, social media users now put a sunflower emoji into their handles; they have grown into their own everyday foreign policy. While the coffeehouse company itself has left Russia, together with many other brands such as IKEA and McDonald’s, I would not have been surprised if the coffee mugs with those sunflowers could serve as a pretext for arrest in Russia for discrediting the Russian armed forces. This new law has led to people being detained for carrying volumes of War and Peace, green ribbons, sausages, imaginary posters, or eight asterisks – each one referring to the letters in the net voyne slogan – no to war.

I am lucky that I have the freedom to say it out loud.

Нет войне.

Groningen, 1 July 2022

Acknowledgments

This was a long and difficult project that came to fruition despite precarious academic employment, pregnancy, and parenting, as well as an international move and living through a pandemic. Apart from personal challenges, the pandemic meant a complete overhaul of research and fieldwork plans, as well as some substantial content changes. As I am watching the news of Russian troops amassing at the border with Ukraine, the material in this book becomes much more than an academic exercise in poststructuralism.

I started this project right after I finished my Ph.D. dissertation. Even though my focus had been already on the popular perception of security threats, I could see that there is much more to be said about the way regular people deal with foreign policy beyond the security focus. This project would have never come about without the support of Klaus Schlichte, who offered me the chance of an academic career at the Institute for Intercultural and International Studies (InIIS) at the University of Bremen. Thanks to the InIIS gang: Roy Karadag, Sebastian Moeller, Ulrich Franke, Anna Hollendung, Anna Wolkenhauer, Martin Nonhoff, Peter Mayer, Philipp Schulz, Kressen Thyen, Kerstin Martens, and Eva Johais. You all helped move the project along and there are traces of your intellectual influence in this book.

My father, Boris Gaufman, and uncle, Eugene Gaufman, contributed greatly to the rhizomatic thinking that underpins the theoretical understanding of this book. My family and friends were my constant sounding boards for reading and commenting on earlier drafts: Vera Gaufman (we disagree on many issues, but you kept my bias in check); Ekaterina Antonidze (for your perfectionism and critical eye); Leor Nadison (for love, emotional support, great food, and lots of baby-watching while I wrote); Jeffrey Nadison (for helping me get rid of my excess jargon and adding the missing prepositions); Valentina Celik (the resident Turkey expert); and Laleh Gomari-Luksch and Sandra Andrews (for both being sources of emotional support even from far away). Linda Monsees, thank you for holding my hand through a nuchal translucency scan and theory revisions.

The EPS team at the University of Groningen helped me get through the pandemic, physically and intellectually. Thanks to Lars Rensmann, Ben Leruth, and Stefan Couperus, there is a football chapter. All the tea and coffee-drinking with Leonie de Jonge, Rachel Johnston-White, Simon Tundermann, Hugh McDonnell, Adrian Rogstad, and Piero Tortola was invaluable; I learned a lot from all of you. Discussions and teaching with Ksenia Robbe encouraged me to reflect on a number of cultural issues I raise in the book. I am also grateful to our student assistant Milena dos Santos Bendixen who helped out with the index.

Thanks to all the interviewees for letting me pester you with my questions. I know we did not always agree on everything, but I really appreciate that you took the time to talk to me. You know who you are and please know that I am grateful! Thanks to the editors and reviewers from the GSQ journal for helping me flesh out the argument in more detail, especially Brent Steele and Jelena Subotić, as well as anonymous reviewers one, two, and three. Special thanks to the book proposal and book reviewers at Manchester University Press. You had some incredibly useful suggestions and helped me get the project over the finish line.

Introduction

Have you read about the conference on disarmament? One pique vest addressed another pique vest, The speech by Count Bernstorff?

Oh, Bernstorff is the brains! answered the questioned vest in such a tone as if he was convinced of this on the basis of his many years of acquaintance with the count.

Have you read the speech Snowden made at an electoral meeting in Birmingham, this stronghold of the Conservatives?

But of course! Snowden is the real brains. Listen, Valiadis, said the first, turning to yet another old man in a panama. What’s your take on Snowden? I have to be honest with you, replied the panama, Snowden is a tough cookie. Personally, I wouldn’t try to pull the wool over his eyes. And showing no concern for the fact that Snowden would never let Valiadis pull anything over his eyes, the old man continued: But whatever you say, I have to be honest with you: Chamberlain is a real brain, too.

– Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov, The Golden Calf, 1931 (Ilf and Petrov 1999)

In 1931, after the publication of the satiric novel The Golden Calf, Soviet writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov inadvertently coined a new expression for an armchair politician – a pique vest. In their colorful description, older gentlemen wearing white pique vests, straw hats, and stiff collars would congregate at the former Café Florida in Odesa (disguised in the book as Chernomorsk) to discuss world politics. Praising Briand and Chamberlain might have been tolerated in the 1920s and early 1930s, but soon the pique vests had to retreat back into the comfort of their homes – that is, if they had the good fortune to be spared from the coming political purges. The longing for being a part of world politics, however, never went away.

It is not surprising that in the USSR, with its numerous restrictions on the freedom of expression, a particular phenomenon came to pass – kitchen talk (Ries 1997, Johnston 2006, Yurchak 2013), when ordinary Soviet citizens expressed their disagreement with the current political situation in the privacy of their own apartments. Kitchens were also safe spaces to listen to foreign radio stations that provided an alternative take on world events – especially during the times of major East–West confrontations. Thus, kitchen talk became one of the manifestations of everyday international relations (IR) for Soviet citizens who could vent about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in the shadow of spring onions growing on the windowsill in mayonnaise jars while drinking Indian tea with an Elephant.

The Russian internet (RuNet) and Russian social media in particular have, for a long time, been regarded as an extension of this type of fora, a kitchen talk 2.0 (Lyytikäinen 2013) that offered a much larger virtual discussion space for an extremely politicized community of Russian speakers. However, as was the case in Soviet kitchens, the digital fora present a risk of the major listening in,² and thus exemplify both a private and a public space (Morris 2005). Unsurprisingly, foreign policy is still an important part of those digital kitchen conversations (Koltsova & Bodrunova 2019), especially given high-profile events such as the annexation of Crimea. Only this time, pique vests have been replaced with sofa warriors (Asmolov 2021) who have been breaking countless virtual lances discussing Russian foreign policy online and offline.

One of those major battles happened, incidentally, in a café as well. In a newly annexed Crimean Sebastopol, in a restaurant, one of the patrons noticed that he was billed for a rossiyano instead of the usual americano. More restaurants and even vending machines joined in, with some restaurant owners even explaining that decision the following way: Attention! Due to the unstable geopolitical situation, there is no americano coffee in our institutions. Demand Crimean coffee! (Euroradio 2014). Such a grassroots foreign policy initiative that taunted the US (widely derided in Russia for the failure to recognize the annexation of Crimea as legitimate) could not go unnoticed. Almost two years later, former Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev even suggested officially renaming americano coffee as rossiyano (Lenta.ru 2016). One of the restaurants in Moscow even offered patrons a heavy discount if they ordered a rossiyano instead of a geopolitically inappropriate