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Abstract
Post-Soviet Russia is experiencing social and cultural adjustments that are connected to longstanding Russian issues of national identity and the nation’s place in the world. Public opinion research conducted in Russia shows how anti-Americanism is used as a means of defining national identity and how it has change over time.
Notes
1. “All these problems arose at the very beginning of 1920s, and were the main ones in all the political disputes of the decade.”—Levada, Yu. 1989. “Stalinskie al’ternativy. “ Omyslit’ kul’t Stalina. Moscow: Progress, p. 452.
2. Gudkov, L. 2002. “Otnoshenie k SShA v Rossii i problema antiamerikanisma.” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia: ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeni, no. 2, pp. 32–48. (= “‘Ich hasse, also bin ich’. Zur Funktion der Amerika-Bilder und des Antiamerikanismus in Russland,” 2002. Osteuropa. 52. Jg., no. 8, pp. 997–1014). On different versions of anti-Americanism, see: Dubin, B. 2002. “Antiamerikanism v evropeiskoi kul’ture posle Vtoroi mirovoi voiny.” Monitoring obshchestvennogo mneniia: ekonomicheskie i sotsial’nye peremeni, no. 3, pp. 44–50 (= http://polit.ru/article/2002/05/22/479400), as well as the proceedings of the Conference on Anti-Americanism (Naples, April 2002): “L’antiamericanismo in Italia e in Europa nel secondo dopoguerra.” A cura di Pietro Graverie e Gaetano Quagliariello. Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino, 2004.
3. As [legendary humorist] M. Zhvanetskii put it, to feel like we are truly human, we “need a whole lot of trouble.” “Willpower, honesty, integrity—we’ve got all that. But we show none of it. It’s not time yet…. It’s still too soon…. These are the kinds of sledgehammers you don’t want to use to crack nuts.… Now what about mutual assistance? Team spirit? We’ve got that! But we need a whole lot of trouble first. But it’s nowhere! Why bother, really? Pick up a hitchhiker? Get into a fight? Nah. No glory in that! Going on recon with a real buddy, that’s another matter. But not with some other guy. So how do you size them all up? Where do you go? You need a recon mission. You need someone shooting at you. Sitting in a swamp at night, no soap, no rockets—that’s where you learn who’s good and who’s bad…. And there’s kindness too, enough to go around. But toward those wounded in battle. Not toward some guys under their Zhigulis [a Soviet-era car], tinkering with them on the side of the road; but in the steppes near the Kurgan [a mountain overlooking Stalingrad], there I would be dressing your wounds and all that. Pulling people out. And here is where your own, where strangers, drag—fuzzy, blurry. Now, if everybody got blown up by a landmine—. But we can only dream!” M. Zhvanetskii. Voennaia kost’, vol. 2. http://odesskiy.com/zhvanetskiy-tom-2/voennaja-kost.html
4. Anti-Western rhetoric and specifically anti-Americanism have soared at times of internal crises of the political regimes in Russia and the USSR, times of failure, stalled development, the crisis of totalitarianism (as in the mid-1930s, the late 1940s to early 1950s, during the struggle against cosmopolitanism and “groveling before the West”), after the Cuban [missile] crisis and the new anti-American campaign in the early 1960s, up to the most recent period, phases of “new flirting with the West” in the late 1980s and the Gaidar reforms, until a new aggravation of the situation with the weakening of Putin’s authoritarianism in 2011–12. See Gudkov, L. October 2000–March 2001. “La retorica del ‘nemico’ nell’ arte e nella litteratura totalitarie sovietiche.” I viaggi di Erodoto. Trimestrate di cultura storica, vol. 25, no. 43/44, pp. 30–39; Obraz vraga. 2005. Moscow: OGI, pp. 7–80. (Natsiia i kul’tura: novye issledovaniia: Rossiia-Russia); Gudkova, V. “Mnogikh etim vozdukhom i proskvozilo….” Sovetskie p’esy na antiamerikanskuiu temu. 1946–54.} 2009. NLO, no. 95, pp. 187–216.
5. To understand the extent of borrowing of American technologies (which public opinion has long since forgotten), here is a long quote from one historian: “In April 1929, the firm Albert Kahn, Inc., located in Detroit, received an order from the Soviet government for the design of the Stalingrad tractor (tank) factory. The negotiations were conducted through the Soviet firm Amtorg, the unofficial trade representation of the USSR (as well as an intelligence center). At that time there were no diplomatic relations between the USSR and the USA. The USA was the USSR’s main enemy. The plants that Kahn was to design were essentially military. The situation looked very ambiguous. In conditions of economic crisis, Kahn was keenly interested in orders from the USSR, but was also interested in the maximum confidentiality of his cooperation with his Soviet partners. The Kahn firm, between 1929 and 1932, designed 521 facilities (according to other sources, 571). The foremost of these were tractor (that is, tank) factories in Stalingrad, Chelyabinsk, Kharkov; auto factories in Chelyabinsk, Moscow, Stalingrad, Nizhny Novgorod, Samara; forges in Chelyabinsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kolomna, Liubertsy, Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Stalingrad; machine-tool factories in Kaluga, Novosibirsk, Verkhniaia Salda; a rolling mill in Moscow; foundries in Chelyabinsk, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkov, Kolomna, Lyubertsy, Magnitogorsk, Sormovo, and Stalingrad; mechanical workshops in Chelyabinsk, Lyubertsy, Podolsk, Stalingrad, Sverdlovsk; steel plants and rolling mills in Kamenskoe (since 1936, Dneprodzerzhinsk), Kolomna, Kuznetsk, Magnitogorsk, Nizhny Tagil, Verkhny Tagil, Sormovo; a Leningrad aluminum plant; Ural asbestos factory, and many others…. Kahn designed (and, most likely, equipped) a significant portion of the facilities of the first and subsequent five-year plans…. Such programs presupposed a sharp decline in the standard of living of the population of the USSR and the preferential use of forced labor, of which Kahn, unlike Ernst May and his colleagues, could not have been unaware…. The structures for the Stalingrad tractor plant were manufactured in the United States, transported to the USSR, and installed within six months. The next order was the huge plan for the Chelyabinsk tractor plant. In February 1930, a contract was signed with the Kahn firm, which had become the chief consultant to the Soviet government on industrial construction. Kahn was offered a proposal for a package of orders for construction of industrial enterprises at the price of two billion dollars. This sum is equivalent to approximately 220 billion dollars in 2004. The Kahn Bureau [in Moscow], which existed until 1932, bore the Russian name Gosproektstroi. Twenty-five American and about 2,500 Soviet employees worked there. At that time it was the largest architectural bureau in the world. Some 4,000 Soviet architects, engineers, and technicians worked at Gosproektstroi.” Khmel’nitskii, D. [translator from German into Russian]. Wolters, R. 2014. Nemetskii arkhitektor v stalinskom SSSR. Novosibirsk: Svin’in i cynov’ia, pp. 17–22.
6. Since what the authorities do is not subject to society’s evaluation, no practical criteria are applicable and what the authorities do is perceived by public opinion only in symbolic terms: in the international arena. Thus, the greatest successes that public opinion ascribes to Putin are not the solution of practical problems in the economy or social policy, not the fight against corruption, crime, or terrorism, not the achievement of social justice, but in foreign policy: the restoration of Russia’s prestige in the world. See Obshchestvennoe mnenie 2014. 2014. Moscow: Levada Center, p. 89, Table 9.2.9.
7. From the materials of focus groups conducted by the Levada Center on January 28, 2015: “I have known since childhood, since kindergarten, that America is hostile to us and wants to harm us….” This “since childhood” could be taken as a cliché or a conventional turn of phrase, but such an interpretation would be mistaken for the researcher. The respondent (a woman aged 55) quite precisely indicates the time of her socialized imprinting, the attachment of a collective stereotype, transmitted in affective forms by all institutional channels in the mid-1960s or a bit later.
8. February 2015, moderator A. Levinson.
9. It only decreased slightly during the 2012–13 mass protests.
10. The enemy must become the embodiment of metaphysical evil, “the enemy of all,” not just of Russians, of Russia.
11. Protests today are at the lowest level; criticism of the government, accusations against it of corruption and abuses of power have declined markedly; the causal relationship between inflation, declining incomes, and government policy has been practically broken. Polls record a very rare situation for the paternalistic mind: differences between one’s approval of the authorities and consumer pessimism. See http://www.levada.ru/2015/07/07/protestnyj-potentsial-i-vospriyatie-vlasti; http://www.levada.ru/2015/09/15/protestnyj-potentsial-avgust-2015.
12. The events in Ukraine are perceived in this context as an illustration of hostile US actions that caused the Maidan, inciting the new Ukrainian leadership to oppose Russia’s policies. Cause and effect here are inverted, as in any mythological consciousness.
13. According to the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ version at that time, the collapse of Yugoslavia and the ethnic conflicts on its territory were provoked by the United States. This was attributed to Iu. Kvitsinskii, former deputy minister and ambassador, later the deputy to the State Duma from the Communist Party of the Russian Federation.
14. Obshchestvennoe mnenie—2009. Ezhegodnik. 2009. Moscow: Levada Center, tables 18.36 and 18.39, pp. 158–59.
15. The slogans of the protest movement were shared by a large part of the population (at the peak of the protests, they were supported by about half the population, 45–55 percent, mainly residents of big cities), so for some time the efforts of the Kremlin propagandists did not succeed. And only when Putin’s political strategists and propagandists tied together “liberalism,” human rights, tolerance, and democracy with pedophilia and homosexual themes; and criticism of corruption in the upper echelons of power, violation of the rights of citizens, election fraud, and so forth, with same-sex marriage, abuse of adopted children in the United States, the degradation of Christian morality in Europe, and so forth, did anti-Western, anti-American propaganda became really effective.
16. But this touched a deeper level of the collective experience: trauma caused by experiences of various circumstances in which Russian society turns out to be incapable of acknowledging its past: Russians are unable to admit that the Communist system, the Soviet government, was criminal, guilty of the inhuman practice of mass destruction of its own population and citizens of other states. Recognition of the responsibility of the Soviet state is tantamount to a complete loss of Russians’ collective identity. It is precisely such duality (the recognition of the crime of mass repressions and chronic violence in everyday life, with the poverty and simultaneous greatness of the state) that is the main cause of mass frustration.
17. In April 1999, forty-four percent of respondents described relations between Russia and the USA as “friendly,” another 2 percent as “allied” (27 percent of respondents considered them at least as “unfriendly, but not hostile”; only 5 percent as “hostile”). But since June 2001, under the influence of the official narrative, opinions began to change: uncertainty and confusion arose due to the change of policy (surveys recorded a sharp increase in the number of “undecided,” that is, those those who could not determine the tone of the relationship—the option “undecided” was chosen by the largest number of respondents, 43 percent), and the number of positive statements gradually began to decline.
18. At the same time, clearly the will of citizens of other countries is not taken into account, or more precisely, is denied; they are not counted here, but are deprived of their own significance and relevance; they are subjected to the very same mechanisms of disqualification (of the passive and degraded) “majority,” which the relationship of the authorities and subjects in Russia itself. See: Gudkov, L. “Chelovek v nemoral’nom prostranstve.” BOM, 2013, nos. 3–4. pp. 161, 173.
19. Under Yeltsin, the public relationship with American advisers in the first half of the 1990s resembled the relationship with American specialists at the end of the 1920s and beginning of the 1930s, but it then (under Putin) changed to sharply negative.
20. The list of these definitions, obtained from answers to “open questions” (that is, without prompting from the interviewer), is internally structured along three axes: modernity–traditionalism, dominance–submission (social distance), like us/strangers. The standard description of representatives of the developed countries consists primarily of characteristics such as rational, cultured, energetic, freedom-loving, dignified, but strangers, in contrast to images of people close to Russians, who are described by Gemeinshaft qualities. The methodological advantages of this procedure are that, despite its unwieldiness, it allows us to identify latent (often negative) values of ethnic stereotypes, which might be hidden in answers to direct questions for reasons of decorum, political correctness, and so forth; see Sovetskii prostoi chelovek. Opyt sotsial’nogo portreta na rubezhe 90’kh. 1993. Moscow: Mirovoi okean, p. 140ff.
21. For more details, see Gudkov, L. 2014. “Ressentimentnyi natsionalizm.” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, nos. 3–4. The attitude of Russians toward Ukrainians in recent months has become distinctly unfriendly, if not hostile. The attitude of Ukrainians toward Russian is noticeably more favorable and positive, though it quickly changed to the negative. See the website of the Levada Center: http://www.levada.ru/2015/06/22/rossijsko-ukrainskie-otnosheniya-v-zerkale-obshhestvennogo-mneniya; http://www.levada.ru/2015/08/31/vospriyatie-sobytij-na-vostoke-ukrainy-i-sanktsij.
22. Such standard arguments were brought up every time to explain the mass unrest and revolts against the Communist dictatorships ruling under Moscow’s control, in June 1953 in Berlin, in 1956 in Hungary, workers’ protests in Poland in 1956 and 1970, Prague Spring, in relation to the Polish Solidarnosz movement, the events preceding the invasion of Afghanistan in that country, and so forth. Any social processes that cause open conflict among various forces in Africa, in the Middle East, and in other places were always attributed by Communist propaganda to the machinations of Western countries hostile to the USSR. Even in the spring of 1991, then head of the USSR KGB Kriuchkov stated that perestroika was a conspiracy by Western intelligence agencies—the CIA and so forth—against the Communist state. It is important that any such narrative remove the issue of the spontaneity of social movements, of social and political issues and the causes that underlie such demonstrations.
23. Seventy-three percent and 63 percent of Russian respondents said they had a “bad relationship” with the USA and the EU, respectively, in November 2014; it is noteworthy that negative attitudes toward Ukraine, as previously toward Georgia, were a bit weaker—60 percent (they are “US puppets” and the propaganda line did not consider them to be independent actors).
24. The focus is specifically on aggressiveness and hypocrisy of the USA. “The USA constantly puts pressure on Russia, forcing it to do what they want”—that is what 71 percent of Russian respondents thought (the average of responses over the past seven years). By contrast, only 15 percent said “The USA is respectful toward Russia,” again on average (July 2008–September 2013). Eighty-eight percent were certain that “the USA, the countries of the West are waging an information war against Russia,” while only 4 percent did not agree with this statement (October 2014).