Border Conditions: Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders

By Kevin M. F. Platt

Border Conditions combines history and memory studies with literary and cultural studies to examine lives at the limits of contemporary Europe: Russian speakers living in Latvia. Since the fall of the USSR in 1991, Latvia's Russian speakers have balanced between Russia and Europe as well as a socialist past, a capitalist and liberal present, and an illiberal regime rising in the Russian Federation. Kevin M. F. Platt describes how members of this population have defined themselves through art, literature, cultural institutions, film, and music—and how others have sought to define them.

At the end of the Cold War, many anticipated that societies globally could agree on the meaning of past history and a just politics in the present. The view from the borders of Europe demonstrates the contradictions pertaining to terms like empire, state socialism, liberalism, and nation that have made it impossible to achieve a consensus. In refocusing the examination of state socialism's aftermath around questions of empire and postcolonialism, Border Conditions helps us understand the distinctions between Russian and Western worldviews driving military confrontation to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Northern Illinois University Press
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781501773716

Book preview

Border Conditions

Russian-Speaking Latvians between World Orders

Kevin M. F. Platt

Northern Illinois University Press

an imprint of

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

To Kasia, who keeps me centered

Contents

Preface: The Borders of Histories

Acknowledgments

Note on Translation and Transliteration

1. Border Conditions

2. Empire and the Gift of Culture

3. Hegemonies with(out) Dominance

4. Nostalgia, Retro, and Trauma

5. Performative Translation and Lyric Cosmopolitanism

Afterword: Borderlines

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Preface

The Borders of Histories

The theorist who attempts to define what a border is is in danger of going round in circles.

—Étienne Balibar, What Is a Border?, 1993

The photograph used on this book’s cover shows a view of the Dakota kafejnīca, located by the highway that leads out of Riga in the direction of Daugavpils. The establishment offers a standard menu of Latvian greasy spoon classics stemming from the local version of Soviet cuisine, ramified by the global frozen foods industry: battered and fried meat, French fries, salads involving potatoes and/or meat, drenched in mayonnaise. The road stop’s main attraction is not the food but the large collection of artifacts on display inside and across the grounds, composed chiefly (but not only) of Soviet aviation and military equipment and memorabilia, including several complete airplanes, US and Soviet military vehicles, a plethora of weapons, artillery shells, medals and pins, model airplanes, and more.¹ Inside and outside the restaurant, a nearly overwhelming number of such items have been carefully arranged into an assembly halfway between history museum and art installation. Either way, there are no curatorial explanations. One afternoon in the summer of 2016, Yuri, the museum-installation-restaurant’s owner, a retired airplane mechanic, regaled me with the story of the acquisition of his prize possession: the cockpit of an Aeroflot AN-24 jumbo jet, shown in the cover photo, for which he paid a completely nominal sum as the plane was being decommissioned and scrapped, and which he claimed, installed, and then lovingly restored, with the help of former work buddies at the airport and a friend with a flatbed.

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger explains how a single artwork, such as Van Gogh’s painting of peasant shoes, can articulate a whole human world.² Although Yuri’s collection of objects may rise to the level of artwork, the reality it articulates is one of shards and fragments that cannot come together. It is, instead, a monument to the waves of ideological conflicts and imperial wars that have washed over and broken apart territories and populations in Eastern Europe for centuries. No singular world is available here, but rather an uneasy aesthetic balance between images and remainders of many competing ones. This book is about cultural projects—poetry performances, lending libraries, public monuments, pop music festivals, documentary films—among Russian-speaking Latvians like Yuri, located in and around Riga. It is also about the lingering traces and remains of the history of Russian and Soviet hegemony, social and economic life under state socialism, and past wars of conquest and emancipation in this territory—and about what people like Yuri do with them in the present era of national sovereignty, market capitalism, frozen conflicts, and bloody new wars at the borders of former Soviet space. Even when it is not explicitly referenced, as it is in Yuri’s assembly of artifacts, this history persistently crops up in cultural life here, for the Russian and Russophone population of Latvia, numbering some half a million people, is itself a legacy of this history. My topic is what Russian and Russophone Latvians are making of these legacies and of themselves, as well as what others are making of them, in this post-Soviet postcolony.

Yet the scope of this book’s arguments extends beyond Latvia and its Russian-speaking population. My central claim is that from this peripheral, constrained, and particular vantage point we may gain critical insight regarding globally shared legacies of empire, subjugation, socialism, and capitalism, and what these legacies mean for the competing world orders that interlock and clash in Eastern Europe in the present. Riga, at the mobile, fuzzy border between Europe and non-Europe, has for centuries been a site of intersection between rival empires centered on Moscow and on Western capitals and more recently between the liberal capitalist and state socialist global orders. As anyone who studies or has experienced the former state socialist societies of Europe will attest, they display in an acute form the contestation of history that is, in general, characteristic of the present moment everywhere—from the demontage of monuments to Civil War generals in the US to continuing debate over legacies of empire in the Global South. In Eastern Europe, the rifts between competing accounts of the past more and more frequently serve as justifications for social, political, geopolitical, and military conflict, as we have seen in the most extreme and tragic form in the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, which was ironically and cynically legitimated with claims of historical and civilizational unity and imperial right. Both within the societies of Eastern Europe and at their borders, the fissures between competing historical visions are especially visible and available for interrogation. While there are many places where the fragmentation of history is palpable, Latvia’s legacy of polarity reversals between rival empires, hegemonies, and world systems presents seemingly intractable conflicts, but also special opportunities for critical intervention.

I must, however, offer a disclaimer near the beginning of things. The vantage from Latvia does not make possible a privileged account of history that could resolve the conflicts, end the wars, heal the rifts, and arrive at a corrected or proposed consensus view of the past or a surefire proposal for a future world of peace. I suspect that no vantage can accomplish this task at the moment. Rather than answering questions about the past, my approach in this book is to allow the past to ask questions of us.

In 1997, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht published an innovative history of the year 1926, in which he eschewed both narrative history as such and the task of offering an account of the past from which we might gain anything of substantial utility in the present. As he explained in his postscript to that volume, After Learning from History, in the wake of poststructuralist critique and of the spectacular collapse of state socialism in Europe, the most costly failure of all intellectual experiments ever undertaken, historical narrative had been revealed as either fiction or refraction of ideology.³ Learning from history, long the pragmatic justification for historiography as genre and as scholarly discipline, had been rendered a quaint, discredited conceit of past eras. The aspiration to relate truths about the past that could tell us something about the present and even the future was founded on metaphysics, yet the collapse of Marxist-Leninist futurology had dispelled the last great historico-metaphysical framework.

Gumbrecht’s stance is a variation on the common postmodern sensibilities of Western intellectual and public life of the 1990s—a skeptical counterpart to Francis Fukuyama’s influential, now multiply critiqued thesis concerning the end of history. Rather than viewing the collapse of state socialism as the downfall of metaphysical history, Fukuyama saw it as a potent confirmation of certainty concerning history’s course. This was a metaphysical framework disguised as a fait accompli. The end of Cold War ideological contestation with the seeming triumph of free markets and democratic politics meant not only that the processes of history, in Hegel’s sense of progress derived dialectically from conflict, had come to their conclusion, but also that humanity could at last unite in a consensus view of global history as leading to this shared terminus, and could now get on with the more workaday business of managing the world and the future in the absence of grand conflicts.

Yet that never happened. Critiques of Fukuyama, beginning with those by thinkers as varied as Jacques Derrida and Samuel Huntington in the 1990s, dismissed his vision of history for its obvious alignment with a triumphal conception of Western liberal capitalist hegemony. Far from being the reflection of a global consensus, they said, his historical metaphysics was just the pablum of an aspiring global hegemon. In a practical correlate to critiques of the partiality of that view of history, if such a new world order, headquartered in Washington, Brussels, New York, and London, ever was in the offing, it emphatically failed to materialize. Following 9/11, failed wars in the Middle East and Afghanistan, loss of optimism concerning democratic politics in much of the world (and even in the new Europe), the shift of the world’s economic center of gravity toward China and India, and a bloody new assertion of civilizational difference and an alternative hegemony from the Russian Federation, that vision appears to have been simply a fever dream.

Just as surely, Gumbrecht’s counterproposal that the world might finally stop learning from history also missed the mark. Instead, since the 1990s, sparring about the past has everywhere become one of the most important focal points of public debate, resources for political mobilization, and, in extreme moments, casus belli. There is at present no shortage of voices attempting to chart future trajectories out of histories of nation, race, empire, and ideological position. While some of those who make these new investments in history are no doubt constructivist skeptics or cynical postmodern manipulators, the word on the street is often a battle of alternate metaphysical frames—most commonly in the shape of well-worn national histories in the key of Herder and Hegel or ideological ones in the key of Marx or Smith. Rather than fading away in light of its inconsequentiality, the past has returned with the urgency of its contestation, partiality, global incoherence, and evident centrality to the matter of managing the world—or, more precisely, of laying claim to its riches with a semblance of legitimacy.

I am writing this preface in Ventspils, in the Courland region of Latvia. The city’s main square, where the Lenin monument stood until it was toppled in 1991, is now the site of an ultramodern concert hall. That reconfiguration of the cityscape clearly expresses Latvian society’s rejection of Russian domination and of the state socialist social order that was violently imposed here in the second half of the twentieth century. For many, the symbolic reordering of urban space resonates with ever more intense anxiety concerning the Russian Federation, with its increasingly strident and violent claims to a sphere of influence that could extend to this very square. The renovated city center also features an enormous fountain in the shape of a ship’s masts. The fountain commemorates the Frigate Wallfisch that, as a plaque proudly explains, sailed in 1651 to one of the two colonies briefly held by the Duchy of Courland, Gambia’s Kunta Kinteh Island (St. Andrews Island at the time). On a recent evening, I visited the grocery store in the main Ventspils shopping center. Such malls, seemingly airdropped into every city in Eastern Europe over the three decades since the fall of state socialism, present the standard face of global consumer culture. Yet this one is named the Tobago Shopping Center, commemorating the Duchy’s other short-lived colonial possession. While I was locking up my bicycle, a member of the Curonians motorcycle club was revving up his Harley as his girlfriend climbed on board—his leather jacket emblazoned with crossed swords and a Teutonic cross, memorializing the German nobility, descendants of crusaders, who ruled over Courland. Gambia in place of Lenin. Malls together with Tobago. Crusaders on Harleys.

Somehow, the sincere celebration of Courland’s cameo role in European colonialism coexists with the more dominant mainstream Latvian historical discourse concerning emancipation from Russian imperial domination and Soviet occupation (notwithstanding the fact that the Latvian (proto)nation was the subaltern population not only in the Russian Empire and Soviet Union but also in Courland, a Baltic German feudal state).⁴ Contradictory configurations of history, both within and among Eastern European societies, are ubiquitous. To those just mentioned, one might add more striking and well-known examples: ostentatious Victory Day parades in Moscow celebrating the heroism of Soviet (increasingly imagined as Russian) men and women in the defeat of Nazism, in competition with the many memorials across Eastern Europe, including a number here in Latvia, to victims of the Soviet regime during the war years and the decades thereafter; Russian state rhetoric concerning ancient claims to Crimea as the site of Vladimir the Great’s baptism and the Christianization of Rus’, in a standoff with Ukrainian anticommunist (or anti-Russian?) legislation that initiated not only the toppling of all remaining monuments to Lenin but also the removal of Rosa Luxemburg’s name from all toponyms;⁵ and the cynical, horrible ironies of Russia’s 2022 war in Ukraine, presented to Russians as a defensive operation against a neo-Nazi regime and far-right nationalism, yet which appears in Western eyes as a reenactment of World War II in which Russia has taken the role of the fascist Third Reich. Deeper encounters with these and other examples will follow in the pages to come.

In all these cases, contemporary societies are intently learning from history, or being instructed to do so. To be precise, history teaches them the meaning, for their local scenes of political life, of nation, empire, colonial subjugation, socialism, liberalism, capitalism, fascism, and communism. Conflict over these meanings illustrates the unsettled nature of the relationships among historical and ideological master terms and local scenes. This is not to deny that many voices here and elsewhere have sought to articulate a theory and practice of their coherent global interrelationship. Contestation over history in Eastern Europe, however, renders plain the incomplete and partial nature of those solutions. These are former borderlands, or, alternately, formerly occupied territories, of the USSR: a state founded on internationalist class solidarity that promoted global anti-imperialism and came more and more to resemble the empire on the ashes of which it was founded (and that bequeathed this resemblance to its own successor state). In these intensely local conflicts and debates, one confronts the global impossibility of reconciling those who saw the USSR as an agent of emancipation, either from capitalist empire or from Nazi Germany, with those who saw it as a prison house of captive nations, or reconciling those who saw it as fulfilling the promise of European enlightenment with those who saw it as its distorted image. This is not to say that these matters emerge with any clarity from this geography: largely, as we shall see in the chapters that follow, they are occluded by a latticework of incoherence and conflict that fuels contemporary memory wars and wars of occupation. Here, as elsewhere, people learn from history, but the lessons are incomplete, incompatible, and ridden with error.

Propelled by the incoherence of global discourse concerning the past, such lessons move their pupils to feel, act, and, too frequently, take up arms in the name of one or another partial account of history. And as with the case of the choice to replace a monument to Lenin with one to Courland’s fifteen minutes of imperial fame, these partial accounts often appear patently incoherent or self-contradictory in and of themselves. This presents an opening for critical analysis. Since the 1990s, in parallel to the rise of the politics of history and memory, the academic subfield dedicated to its study has emerged, distributed across academic disciplines from history proper to cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, and political science. My method in this book benefits from important work in this subfield, yet does not entirely coincide with it. In many ways, history and memory studies is the disciplinary formation that draws most intently on the theoretical critiques of historiography that undergird Gumbrecht’s dismissal of learning from history. Commonly, work in this mode deploys the toolbox of continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, critical theory, and semiotics to critique and dismantle politically potent historical discourses, revealing them as ideological fantasies or self-interested yet compelling fictions.

Surprisingly or not, the discipline of history proper, although it has cautiously and selectively absorbed these same critical instruments at the level of its analytical procedures, has continued to strive for complete, disinterested knowledge and explanation of the past throughout the decades over which history and memory studies has come into its own. With few exceptions, historians—the theoretically inclined just as surely as those dismissive of theory—avoid directing such instruments at the roots of their own discipline. The resulting disciplinary firewall between the constructivist skepticism characteristic of history and memory studies and the stubborn foundational theoretical naivete of history proper serves to sidestep the most urgent problems history poses for the present. It allows scholars of history and memory, often with reference to the authority of historians’ disinterested accounts, to critique turbocharged public historical discourse as a form of false consciousness. Historians, on the other hand, are left either to generate confident knowledge of the past, ramified by ever more sophisticated analytical procedures, in proud academic isolation, or to offer theoretically naive yet factually rich narratives for the bestseller lists. It is easy to critique the fallen history of others. It is much harder to write history, while accepting that one is oneself among the fallen. My approach works to bridge this gap, but not in order to articulate a method with greater purchase on the problem of history than either of these seemingly authoritative positions. Instead, I seek to come to terms with the fundamental similarity of the epistemological position of scholars and historians to that of public intellectuals, politicians, novelists, and constructors of monuments. The urgent yet perhaps insurmountable challenge that connects all is that of making sense of the past from within a shared condition of partial knowledge of history and of totality’s persistent absence.

For the disciplinary division between history and history and memory (and the redundancy of this formulation points to the problematic nature of the distinction) is neither arbitrary nor subject to a simple resolution. It is tempting, of course, to imagine an intervention that might lead from history and memory’s criticism of local, ideologically charged historical discourses back (or up) to the articulation of a global critical history—a nuanced and balanced consensus view offered up to right-minded people everywhere. Yet particularity and totality are not so easily brought together, unless one is willing to align with one or another hegemon or one or another aspiration to a novel historical metaphysics. Rather than seeking to unmask historical distortions and to correct knowledge in order to overcome incoherence and division, in this book I study the structure of incoherence and division, past and present. In a world of warring accounts of the past—and in particular at the interface between histories of nation and empire, on one side, and histories of political suasions and ideologies, on the other—the best I can offer in response is a clear view of the fissures and insufficiencies that lie between these accounts. My method is that of negative dialectics.

Theodor Adorno’s formulation of this term arose out of a similar moment of impasse, conditioned by the global historical and geopolitical divide between a capitalist order built on the perpetuation of inequality despite its slogan of liberalism and a socialist world in which the path from necessity to freedom had led, for many, to captivity. In response to schools of thought that analyzed conflicting political, social, and philosophical positions in order to transcend them via a dialectical moment of synthesis, underwritten by one or another renovated metaphysical system, Adorno applied the dialectical principle as a means to realize the inadequacy of all available positions, as well as of each subsequent synthetic moment: Dialectics is the consistent sense of nonidentity. It does not begin by taking a standpoint. My thought is driven to it by its own inevitable insufficiency, by my guilt of what I am thinking.⁶ Yet this is not ideological or moral relativism—his method is driven by unceasing critique that leads to the realization not that one position is as good as any other (Adorno described relativism as the law of the market—I will come to this later), but rather that because all available positions lack a grasp of totality, we can only continue the study of the available fragments. His is an open-ended dialectics that eschews transcendent conclusions, and instead patiently contemplates negation. In procedural terms, this entails, at each juncture, a turn back into the social and historical givens and the failure of conceptual schemes to grasp them fully or to yield a glimpse of the social and historical totality: What the system used to procure for the details can be sought in the details only, without advance assurance to the thought: whether it is there, or what it is. Not until then would the steadily misused word of ‘truth as concreteness’ come into its own. It compels our thinking to abide with minutiae. We are not to philosophize about concrete things; we are to philosophize, rather, out of these things.⁷ In the chapters that follow, negative dialectics underwrites the essayistic form of arguments that frequently do not end with conclusions. Instead, standard questions and alternatives are posed and critiqued in order to clear a path to other questions. Instead of helping us to learn from history, Adorno’s method allows us to see how distant we are from knowledge and to attend to some of the urgent questions that history offers up in the present.

The concrete details that were Adorno’s locations of inquiry were often works of art, literature, and music. My approach is likewise oriented on works of culture—on art, monumental and otherwise, poetry, music, and film. Yet I envision my purview broadly, to encompass diffuse and varied cultural projects undertaken in the intertidal zone of epochs, imperial formations, institutions, ideological camps, and hegemonic forces that is present-day Latvia. These are not exactly the great works of art with which Adorno was concerned—Culture with a Capital C.—although some of the people and projects I examine are oriented toward a conception of institutionally sanctioned high culture, including monumental bronze memorial sculpture in chapter 2 and cutting-edge poetry in chapter 5. My attention also extends to popular and mass culture—the pop song festivals and TV historical documentaries that I analyze in chapter 4, for instance. Further, as I discuss in chapter 3, the contingency of the distinction between mass and high culture is especially obvious in this region, in the wake of state socialist societies that afforded mass cultural forms the status of high culture (the socialist realist novel) and sought to make high culture the property of the masses (classical ballet).⁸

My approach to analysis is to position these diverse cultural projects within their social, cultural, and historical contexts, drawing as much on historical and social scientific scholarship as on cultural or literary inquiry. Yet I am not a social scientist, and neither is my site of analysis the cultural in quite the sense of cultural anthropologists, for whom this realm extends broadly to include all forms of social meaning-making.⁹ My more constrained focus is on intentional projects of people who set out to do Russian, Russophone Latvian, or postsocialist culture in Latvia. Yuri Lotman describes the literary text as a secondary modelling system.¹⁰ In a more expansive conception, Michael Warner describes public texts, in a Heideggerian key, as invitations to their audiences to construct worlds and social spaces that did not exist or existed only partially before (that is, to engage in poiesis).¹¹ In line with such conceptions, my study takes up self-reflexive cultural projects as sites of self-fashioning, world-making, and analytical intervention on the part of their authors, audiences, and participants in their own right. In these works, one encounters the resistance of local thought and worlds of meaning to the hegemonic orders currently on offer and alternate forms of institutional ordering, intellectual abstraction, and ideological system-making. My own undertaking is an effort to enter into this discussion as a participant observer, a translator, and a student, with cognizance of the theoretical impediments to such sojourning among the lifeworlds and texts of others and the limitations to translation from border to center or from past to present.¹²

I approach the territory of Latvia as a postsocialist postcolony, joining a number of other scholars who have combined these analytical frameworks over the past two decades and from whose work my own study benefits, as I explain in detail in chapter 1. As the above may make plain, however, my analysis is oriented not only on understanding how these two frameworks can work in tandem, but also on investigating their many misalignments, as they become visible in a particular geography and among a specific population. Despite aspirations to global relevance, histories of empire, twentieth-century ideological conflict, racial hierarchy, and national becoming are everywhere subject to local inflection and mobilization. Centered in disciplines articulated and situated in the centers of contemporary global power, the successors to the empires they study, in their most relevant epistemological mode such inquiries engage in forms of self-annihilating critique, intently sawing at the branches that support them.¹³ At present, across Eastern Europe and across the world, the one operative global system is that of the market. Yet the market is inimical to political solidarity and shared thought, both within societies and among them. To the contrary, despite all business-lounge talk of a borderless world and frictionless movements of capital, the global market thrives not only on the possibility of global exchange but also on the production of difference, which generates profits out of arbitrage, and the maintenance of borders, behind which cheap labor markets may be sequestered and profits and property may be accumulated and defended.¹⁴ Similar phenomena extend to the world of arts and letters. The past quarter century has brought influential applications of world systems analysis to the study of global literary and cultural relations, as well as important critiques of these applications. As those discussions have shown, world cultural life, as a reflection of the global capitalist system, takes the form not only of a system of equivalencies and transfers across languages and geographies, but also of the production and maintenance of inequalities and differences among diverse national and linguistic contexts and between developed centers and postcolonial and postsocialist peripheries.¹⁵

As we shall see in the chapters to come, the postsocialist postcolony is a particularly rich site for the production of difference that can be capitalized on in the present day by individuals, states, and corporations that straddle the border—the ultimate relativists, in Adorno’s sense, who trade in cultural and ideological difference, mediated by the universal signifier of the day, money. In response to such anticritical translational procedures, analysis of cultural projects and their constellations of meaning in the context of the Eastern European border zone makes possible a practice akin to what Walter Mignolo, Madina Tlostanova, and other decolonial scholars call thinking from and dwelling in the border of modernity/coloniality—in this case, the border zone of competing modernities and colonialities and their histories.¹⁶ Yet while I agree with these scholars that critical work in the border zone can bring to evidence the contradictions embedded in histories of empire and ideology, I am less certain than they that it provides the basis for a renewed epistemology or political vantage that can escape or resolve these contradictions, as I explain in greater detail in chapter 1. In my view, the perspective from the border zone provides few concrete answers or positive programs, and often cannot compete in schematic clarity and lucidity with the confident analyses that are articulated in the centers of authoritative scholarly inquiry. Yet this is precisely the point. As Adorno writes, No object is wholly known; knowledge is not supposed to prepare the phantasm of a whole. Thus the goal of a philosophical interpretation of works of art cannot be their identification with the concept, their absorption in the concept; yet it is through such interpretation that the truth of the work unfolds.¹⁷ What I seek to foreground throughout are local and partial truths (perhaps the only truths currently on offer), unresolved antagonisms, and occlusions of the border zone, as they echo back toward an absent totality, as well as our own inability to explicate them exhaustively with authoritative analysis and critique in either a postsocialist or postcolonial framework. This is an exercise in dialectics as uncovering the ontology of the wrong state of things.¹⁸

In influential essays written around the turn of the millennium, Étienne Balibar turned his attention to the destabilization of the world-configuring function of borders, given an ongoing reconfiguration of the border itself, in its fundamental meanings and operations, in light of globalization. As a result of the rising complexity and intensity of transnational political ties, economic and migratory flows, and—importantly for this book—the increase in zones of transit and transition, populations ‘awaiting’ entry or exit … individually or collectively engaged in a process of negotiation of their presence,¹⁹ borders, Balibar wrote, have become also, and perhaps predominantly, what Fichte … termed ‘inner borders,’… invisible borders, situated everywhere and nowhere.²⁰ In his call for renewed attention to borders and populations of the border, Balibar quoted the psychoanalyst André Green’s remark that you can be a citizen or you can be stateless, but it is difficult to imagine being a border.²¹ More recently, the late Chris Rumford called on scholars to shift from seeing like a state to seeing like a border.²² My book is an attempt to respond to these provocations by engaging the position of populations in what is for some a permanent transit zone where they are called on to be a border between incommensurate worlds (much less imagine being one).

Such an effort to locate inquiry in the being of the border has consequences for scholarly disciplines, practices, and epistemological frames. Disciplines, in particular in the humanities, often mirror political and social borders, reinforcing distinctions between conceptualizations of canonical stories, data sets, and geographies, tautologically shoring up apparent unities of geography, identity, and history and often disavowing their divergences from other places and ontologies. Such divisions work to reproduce a common incapacity to encounter totality’s absence, desensitizing us to contradiction, allowing partial views to masquerade as master accounts. Since the end of the Cold War, divisions both within the academy and beyond its walls have persistently insulated the history and legacies of Eurocentric empire from those of twentieth-century conflict between the socialist and capitalist worlds—despite the obvious fact that both of these frames of reference carry global significance. In working against such divisions, I join other scholars and movements—from border studies, to entangled and transnational histories, to the scholars of decolonial studies mentioned above. Yet, just as with my approach to the problem of history and its fragments at large, I do not propose that my own or any other renovated disciplinary or interdisciplinary method will allow us to grasp totality. In seeking to understand the diremption of an ostensible singular world, the key is a geographically and disciplinarily mobile practice oriented not on comparisons and distinctions (as in some classical conceptions of comparative literature), but rather on the breaks and fissures themselves, not on the function of the border, but on its dysfunction.

At this point, it might be asked: Why is a book about the postsocialist and postcolonial present in Latvia focused on Russian and Russophone Latvians, rather than on ethnic Latvians, the former victims of Soviet oppression? Russians and Russophones, to many in this territory and beyond it, are former occupiers and their descendants. Further, isn’t it the case that dominant Russian views toward the past and present are shaped by the geography of Moscow as metropolitan center and the potency of media regimes, discourses, and armies that it projects across Eurasia, rather than any borderland condition? Certainly, this is an accurate characterization of conceptions of history and its legacies dominant in Russia proper. Yet Russians and Russophones in Eastern Europe, whether in Ukraine or in Latvia, are a different matter. In the present-day ontology of political and cultural belonging in Europe, ethnic Latvians are relatively centered. Russian-speaking Latvians are, in contrast, bordered. They present a productive site of analysis precisely because of the ill fit of all available historical categories and narratives with their pasts and presents. As Aamir Mufti notes in an important book on global English and its histories, with the unification of Europe in the age of post–Cold War neoliberal globalization,

the concepts, practices, and logics associated with the modern state, such as notions of cultural or civilizational uniformity and the institution of territorial borders, have … been enlarged and mapped onto the [European] continent as a whole, a process most visible precisely in those border regions and countries, like Greece, where Europe comes in contact with its historically determined others… . And in neoliberal border regimes such as that of the European Union, some of the functions that have traditionally clustered at the nation-state border have come to be redistributed throughout social space. Every point in social space has become, for those who are visibly construed as aliens, a potential site of a border experience, while the ability to cross international borders continues to be distributed unequally among populations defined by class, race, ethnicity, religion, gender, or nationality and usually a shifting combination of these factors.²³

For centuries, Russians and Western observers of Russia have debated the relationship of Russian civilization to European civilization. The half million bordered Russians and Russophones of Latvia (mostly) hold European passports. But as I explain in chapter 1, not all of those passports grant the right to vote in Europe. This population has been the subject of policies of Latvian nationalization that, while understandable as a pragmatic response to the injustices of the Soviet past and the looming presence of the Russian Federation, have ironically reproduced matrices of exclusion and imperial schemes of governance, allowing distorted echoes of those injustices to carry forward in history in unexpected new forms. They constitute a social minority within Latvia yet participate in the cultural and political life of an enormous, looming regional superpower. But Russians and Russophones here are also Latvians. Many embrace a distinct European or Baltic Russian identification, orienting their biographical trajectories and cultural creation toward Latvia’s vibrant, multilingual social scene. Bordered in these and more ways in time and space—between Russia and Europe, between the socialist past and the liberal capitalist present—local Russian speakers’ work to fashion their identities and make sense of their place in geography sets in relief the inadequacy of hegemonic and theoretical explanatory frameworks, both those emanating from Moscow and those dominant in Europe. It is their attempts to make something out of this bordered life that this book seeks to comprehend.

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of many conversations over the past decade and a half, conducted across the frontiers, border zones, and centers of Latvia, Russia, the United States, and elsewhere. I am acutely aware that my own privilege to move between these spaces and share in these conversations is not typical.

From the earliest stages of formulating my approach to the study of social contexts, institutions, and expressions of cultural life in this book, I benefited from frequent exchanges with Gabriella Safran and Bruce Grant. They were my interlocutors in a broad-ranging conversation concerning the convergences and distinctions between humanistic and cultural anthropological modes of research and analysis. They critiqued every chapter of this book—often multiple times.

My sincere thanks go to the many individuals who have read or responded to presentations of parts of this project over its long gestation period: Marjorie Mandelstam Balzer, Polina Barskova, Marijeta Bozovic, David Brandenberger, Andy Byford, Vitaly Chernetsky, Keti Chukhrov, Catherine Ciepiela, Michael David-Fox, Rossen Djagalov, Connor Doak, Alexander Etkind, Leah Feldman, Zoya Frolova, Amelia Glaser, Evgenii Gomberg, Ivars Ījabs, Janis Jakobsons, Ilya Kalinin, Artemy Kalinovsky, Mārtiņš Kaprāns, Katerina Kesa, Semyon Khanin, Dina Khapaeva, Oleg Kharkhordin, Boris Kolonitsky, Nikolay Koposov, Maya Kucherskaya, Ilya Kukulin, Dmitry Kuz’min, Eneken Laanes, Inga Lāce, Roman Leibov, Mark Lipovetsky, Eric Lohr, Artemy Magun, Maria Maofis, Viacheslav Morozov, Ainsley Morse, Maya Nadkarni, Anastasiya Osipova, Eugene Ostashevsky, Serguei Oushakine, Monica Popescu, Irina Prokhorova, Arturs Punte, Michela Romano, Maria Rubins, Lara Ryazanova-Clarke, Alexander Semyonov, Nariman Skakov, Aleksandr Skidan, Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, Henrieke Stahl, Sergej Timofejev, Sanna Turoma, Dirk Uffelmann, Michael Wachtel, Maxim Waldstein, Adrian Wanner, Matvei Yankelevich, and Aleksandr Zapol.

Among my most important interlocutors have been colleagues, past and present, at my home institution of the University of Pennsylvania and during a semester of teaching as a visitor at Harvard University, including Siarhei Biareishyk, Michael Brinley, Allison Brooks-Conrad, William W. Burke-White, Geoffrey Durham, Sam Finkelman, Kristen Ghodsee, Peter Holquist, David Kazanjian, Geordie Kenyon Sinclair, Pavel Khazanov, D. Brian Kim, Hilah Kohen, Adam Leeds, Alex Moshkin, Benjamin Nathans, Olga Nechaeva, Mitchell Orenstein, Gerald Prince, Paul Saint-Amour, Stephanie Sandler, Rudra Sil, Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon, Peter Steiner, Thomas Stevens, Helen Stuhr-Rommereim, William Mills Todd III, Eugenia Ulanova, Julia Verkholantsev, Ilya Vinitsky, Maya Vinokour, Justin Weir, Jennifer Wilson, and Valery Yakubovich.

Thanks are due as well to institutions that have provided support for the research and writing of this book. Initial work was carried out during an academic leave supported by a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2011–12. That same year, the European University at St. Petersburg provided me with administrative support and an intellectual home away from home. The University of Pennsylvania supported two subsequent periods of academic leave. In the summers of 2021 and 2022, I drafted the preface and rewrote chapter 1 while in residency at the International House of Translators and Writers in Ventspils, Latvia. Lastly, in the final stages of revision I found community and critical resistance among the scholars of the Cultures of World Socialism Working Group.

Parts of various chapters of this book have appeared in my prior publications,