Biopolitical conservatism in Europe and beyond: the cases of identity-making projects in Poland and Russia

ABSTRACT

In this article, I compare Polish and Russian national identity projects as they are being developed by the Kremlin and the ruling PiS (Law and Justice) party after 2012 and 2015, correspondingly. I raise a question about nodal points of Poland’s and Russia’s collective identities and their institutional references as ‘illiberal democracies’ to the European normative order. I argue, that despite the existing differences between the two national projects, they are similar in opposing themselves to the EU liberal paradigm and emphasizing the traditional and religious values as the key principles in family planning, gender and sexual issues, migrants and workforce policy. In other words, I understand both national projects as illiberal biopolitical conservatisms, which imply concepts of separation and defence from the ‘liberal West’ in their discursive core.

KEYWORDS:

• Biopolitics
• identity-making
• Russia
• Poland
• conservatism

Introduction

Neither Poland nor Russia were mentioned in Fareed Zakaria’s list of illiberal democracies (Zakaria 1997). Indeed, in the 1990s one could hardly imagine that a decade later these two countries would make deeply conservative U-turns away from liberal transition. From the 1980s onward Poland was strongly committed to liberal democracy both domestically and internationally. Yet since the PiS (Law and Justice) party came to power in 2015, Poland started pursuing a conservative agenda, which immediately led to conflicts with major EU member states, including Germany and France. The examples of such tensions were the Polish government’s refusal to follow the EU’s common refugee policy (Janoś 2019), the police and security services law allowing digital surveillance on citizens without court orders, the so called “small media law” that let PiS control public media, or the adoption of the ‘Holocaust law,’ which criminalized references to Poles as Nazis collaborationists (McAuley 2018). Similarly, the Polish government’s initiative to transform the judiciary was seen by the official Brussels as a threat to the rule of law (Nixon 2018). Since the founding Treaty of Rome in 1958, Poland became the first EU member state against whom the EU initiated formal investigation on the basis of the Article 7, aimed to define whether Poland, as represented by PiS, was violating the basic principles of the EU rules and values (Santora 2018).

Against the background of Polish experience of de-communization in the 1990s, Russia’s post-Soviet transition was less systemic, mostly due to a strong economic and political inertia of the Soviet elites who kept not only their social positions, but also the principles of the old governance grounded in corruption, clientelism and coercion. Russia’s post-Soviet ruling class did not go through deep transformations, and the modest liberal changes of early 1990s came to a halt by the middle of the 1990s (Zaslavskaya 2004). Seen from this perspective, the authoritarian trends in Russia’s domestic policy that became dominant under Putin’s presidency are not fully unpredictable and unexpected. The same goes for the aggressive Russian imperialism in the ‘near abroad’ manifested by the Russian-Georgian war of 2008, the annexation of Crimea and the military involvement in Eastern Ukraine starting from 2014. Russia’s attempt to reassert itself internationally was conducive to the growing marginalization of Moscow within the EU’s normative order, which, however, does not automatically augur a new Cold War (Shekhovtsov 2016).

In this article, I compare Russian and Polish national identity projects as developed by the Putin’s government and the ruling PiS party after 2012 and 2015, correspondingly. I particularly focus on a biopolitical dimension of these projects, as a set of controlling mechanisms applied by different power holders (first of all, the state and the church) to protect and take care of the population through a plethora of bodily practices of control and surveillance (Foucault 2009, 377–78). Biopolitical instruments include inciting and constraining human bodies through family planning and demographic policies, patterns of consumption, sexuality and reproductive behaviour, health care, etc. Within biopolitical reasoning, human life is part of political calculations and mechanisms of execution of power under the aegis of providing security to the population. National identity-making necessarily implies disciplinary practices of supervising and regulating human lives and bodies as preconditions for assembling population into a single collective body (Puumala 2013). It is in this context that biopolitics might be instrumental to study mechanisms of national consolidation and power aggregation.

I venture to single out nodal points of Poland’s and Russia’s collective identities and their institutional underpinnings as ‘illiberal democracies’, and discuss them against the backdrop of the European normative order. I argue that despite the existing differences between the two state-produced national projects, they are similar in positioning themselves in opposition to the EU’s liberal paradigm and emphasizing traditional and religious values as key principles for family planning, gender- and sexual issues, education, state–church relations, migrant/refugee policy, and other areas. In other words, I understand both projects as grounded in illiberal premises of biopolitical conservatism (Makarychev and Yatsyk 2017b), which implies distancing from and protecting against the ‘liberal West’ for the sake of societal and ontological security. As applied to the whole populations, this defensive rhetoric can contain a great deal of both totalization (when it comes to domestic issues) and marginalization (when it comes to positioning vis-à-vis EU’s normative order). The radicalization of the far-right and nationalist forces in Poland and strengthening of militarist discourse in Russia are eloquent examples of these interconnected trends.

In this article, I also examine two types of biopolitical discourses. The first one is incorporated into a set of policies related to family, gender- and sexual issues applied by governments of Poland and Russia as measures of social control and discipline. My key reference points at this juncture are state programmes and legal acts, as well as expert discourses and media coverage.¹ The other type of biopolitical discourse is artistic and media representations of the nations as parts and parcels of securitized identity-building. I analyse Polish and Russian myth-making based on the cases of the ‘Smolensk tragedy’ (2010) and the ‘Holocaust Law’ controversy (2018) in Poland, and the ‘Immortal Regiment’ project (since 2012), a documentary ‘Blockade Blood. Genetics’ (dir. By E. Lukjanova 2017), and the appearance of the ‘Party of the Dead’ in Russia.

‘Biopolitical protection’, human security and marginality: the conceptual premises

In the academic literature there is an ample scope of works on biopolitics and biopower in Western and non-Western countries, especially when it comes to gender and family issues, citizenship policies, migration and workforce (McCormack and Salmenniemi 2016; Brännström 2015; Blencowe 2013; Reeves 2016; Turunen 2018; Płotka 2018; Ładykowski 2018), human security (Kaldor 2011; Newman 2010), and critical border studies (Parker and Vaughan-Williams 2012; Paasi 2012; Parsons and Salter 2008). In this article, I intend to combine the ideas of protection, security and borders under the umbrella of a wider biopolitical approach, as exemplified by Polish and Russian national identity narratives of the last decade.

The concept of human security incorporates three important dimensions, according to Mary Kaldor. First, it is human-centred vs the state-centred framework, which prioritizes human rights discourse rather than a rhetoric of state threats. Second, human security is not only about physical survival but also about social and cultural rights, and ‘freedom from fear’. Third, the concept implies that the relations between states are regulated by a law paradigm rather than a war paradigm (Kaldor 2011, 445–46). In other words, the idea of human security is conceptualized as a ‘right of people to live in freedom and dignity, free from fear and want’ (Shani 2017, 276).

Yet as some critical voices are pointing out, the states’ humanitarian rhetoric, which tends to focus on the individual protection from physical violence (Gasper and Gómez 2015) – regardless of whether it comes from external or internal threats – might contribute to consolidating the existing regime of power (Gasper and Gómez 2015). There are many examples of using such terms as ‘democracy’, ‘modernization’, ‘soft power’, etc., which were born within the western liberal paradigm and applied in illiberal discourses in a reversed manner. Russia is among those countries that actively resort to resignification of liberal concepts, filling them with their own meanings (Makarychev and Yatsyk 2017a). The Kremlin’s misleading wording of Russia’s ‘humanitarian’ mission to Donbas in 2014 is a very illustrative example of this distorted meaning (McCoy 2014).

Seen from this perspective, the recent European challenges, including Brexit, also might be interpreted as a retreat from the (neo)liberal project of globalization and a rejection of cosmopolitan conception of human security ‘in favor of the search for communitarian narratives of ontological security in the reassertion of “national” sovereignty and civilisational identities’ (Shani 2017, 276). According to the scholar, ‘individuals may find ontological security by belonging to communities which deny the right of others to freedom or dignity, whether on the grounds of culture, gender, sexuality, race or religion. Ontological security may, therefore, be found in reinforcing or strengthening the boundary between “self” and “other” or “friend” and “enemy”’ (Shani 2017, 277). Understood in a biopolitical terms, it is a reversed Foucauldian understanding of biopolitics, which mostly implies its affirmative role in fostering population in a liberal environment (Foucault 2009). Instead, illiberal states use the rhetoric of ‘protecting’ and ‘taking care’ of individuals and their bodies as actually parts of an aggregated national body (Puumala 2013). Thus, the idea of ontological security as a way to avoid an existential anxiety is deeply grounded incorporeality and the concept of zoe and bare life (Agamben 1998) as physical survival.

Both Polish and Russian conservative projects deploy corporeality and security as basic elements of national identities, whether it concerns the ‘displaced Easternness’ (Ballinger 2017) in the case of Poland, or the loss of Empire, as reflected in Russian public discourses (Oushackine 2009; Makarychev and Yatsyk 2017a). Both discourses simultaneously deny and accept the EU liberal paradigm as their significant Other and a major external reference point (Lisiakiewicz 2018). As Ballinger notes, the imperial ambitions of Russia in 2014 and the European refugee crisis have generated the language of eastern and western alliances and ‘Europe’s symbolic compass (North/South, West/East)’ (Ballinger 2017, 46), whereas the Brexit has awakened a fear of a ‘displaced Eastern Europe’, whose easternness was ‘supposedly diffused and internalized’ into the EU (Ballinger 2017, 46). Poland became one of the hotbeds of such dynamics, thus reactualizing its post-colonial narrative (Snochowska-Gonzalez 2012) by right-wing, nationalistic and conservative exposures that brought into fore old-time Russophobia and Euro-skepticism (Ballinger 2017, 56). Moreover, as the case of historical borderland ‘Kresy’ demonstrates, Poland itself had occupied the position of colonizer towards its eastern neighbours (Ładykowski 2015).

The concept of margins discussed by Noel Parker might be useful for understanding these binary relations of acceptance and denial that do not fit in the centre–periphery dichotomy. According to Parker, margins ‘focus … on the possibility that what lies on the edge has autonomous, active effects beyond its marginal space, including what is central in the space where it is marginal’ (qtd. in (Ballinger 2017, 58)). Unlike ‘peripheries’, ‘margins’ care less about territorial matters and are less dependent on relations with the ‘core’, thus developing their own capacity to produce meanings. Understood within this framework, regardless of their geographical position, government discourses of Poland and Russia might be considered as marginal in relations with the EU-promoted liberal paradigm. For Mikulova, current Polish conservatism could be easily explained by looking deeper into the transformation of this country’s political system that in 1998–2004 underwent ‘Potemkin Europeanisation’, with a kind of ‘camouflage effect’ (Mikulova 2013). Lewis uses the concept of the ‘border trouble’ to describe Polish ‘in/out’ narrative on current nationhood. As he noted, the narrative closely refers to the condition of ‘ambivalent peripheries, prosthetic to the west and phantomized to the east’ (Lewis 2019, 524)

‘Our bodies’: family policies

In this section, I address family policies in Poland and Russia as they have been developing in the hegemonic discourses of both countries. Despite the institutional differences between them, the biopolitical focus on protecting children as part of the collective national body is central in both national narratives addressing external threats. The rhetoric of security, whether it refers to personal security of orphans or unborn fetuses, is widely used by the authorities, although, as the present analysis demonstrates, it mostly takes populist forms.

Poland: programme ‘500+’ and anti-abortion law

In 2016 PiS introduced the so-called ‘500+’ programme that pledged to provide 500 PLN per month (approximately 110 EUR) to families with more than one child under the age of 18. Low-income residents of rural areas are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of this programme and they also happen to form the main group of electoral support for PiS. The Polish ruling party’s nationalist position was clearly conveyed by PiS MP Krystyna Pawłowicz, who proposed to exclude all foreigners living in Poland as potential recipients of the aforementioned social welfare allowance. ‘The aim was to improve the demographic situation of Poland, not in other nations,’ she said (Nałęcz 2018). Yet as of 2019, the survey by Polish FOR think tank found that, after 3 years of implementation, the ‘500 +’ programme has not had a significant impact on the birth rate, which was its main goal (Magda et al. 2019).

Another PiS’ protective initiative was meant to impose certain restrictions on the adoption of Polish children by foreigners. In early 2017 the party introduced a law to reduce the scope of adoptions. As a result, the number of adoptions decreased by more than a half in 2017 (RadioPoland 2018). The total number of adoptions is also declining, which means that more children continue to live in orphanages rather than families (RadioMaria 2018).

Yet it is the so-called anti-abortion law that seems to be the most conservative and notorious legislative initiative proposed by PiS in 2016. Since 1993, Poland’s abortion legislation has been considered one of the strictest in the EU. At present, it allows termination of pregnancy only in cases potentially posing serious health risks for mothers, or being result of rape or incest, or when the fetus is severely and untreatably damaged (RadioPoland 2017). The proposed bill would totally ban abortions and introduce criminal penalty of up to 5 years in prison for both women and their doctors regardless of the circumstances (Domonoske 2016).

These legislative initiatives were supported by the Polish President Andrzej Duda, Prime Minister Beata Szydło, Senate Speaker Stanisław Karczewski and Science Minister Jarosław Gowin (RadioPoland 2017). It generated a nationwide wave of protests across the country. The adverse public reaction forced the Polish authorities to withdraw the draft law (Lempart 2018). In March 2018, 100,000 signatures against the proposed law were collected by the NGO activists (Wiadomości 2018). However, in March 2018 the Polish Bishops’ Conference issued a communiqué, again requesting the PiS to restart the process of putting the anti-abortion bill into practice. As Polish media reported, even though the anti-abortion law was never enacted, some doctors in Poland began to avoid performing abortions (Rogaska 2019). According to Płotka, the Polish government’s discourse is not consistent and includes also a bio-liberal wing. However, the arguments of this faction are more general than those of bio-conservatives since they demand major changes of Polish economy, politics and education, while the bio-conservatives propose more coherent narrative of fighting against the moral dangers (Płotka 2018).

Shibata demonstrated in his research, that the biopolitical discourse of ‘defence’ of the Polish nation, struggling against the ‘sick’ Western influence, was already articulated in 2005–2007 by the League of Polish Families (Liga Polskich Rodzin, LPR), the radical right-wing movement established in 2001. It is homosexuals, ‘pedophiles-murderers,’ ‘killers of Polish Christian children’, who were named by the movement the main ‘evil’ of the Polish society. In the LPR’s view, Poland, ‘which is not yet wholly dominated by the “deviants”,’ has to play its messianic role for leading the European nations in ousting homosexuals who threaten the European values (Shibata 2009, 267). Yet the idea of ontological security and Poland’s messianism as based on anti-LGBT rhetoric is constantly stressed by the conservative PiS campaign during its 2019 bid for the European parliamentary election. As its leader Jarosław Kaczyński mentioned at the party convention in March 2019, the LGBT movement is a threat to Polish children, identity and state, ‘a threat to civilization, not just for Poland but for the entire Europe, for the entire civilization that is based on Christianity’ (Santora 2019).

Russia: the Dima Yakovlev bill and the case of Julia Savinovskikh

Starting from Putin’s third presidency, Russia has been clearly demonstrating a biopolitical U-turn in its domestic and international policies. Numerous biopolitical measures aimed at regulation and controlling everyday lives and corporeal practices related to nutrition, sexual behaviour, gender roles, family attitudes, education, etc., were introduced and thus became parts of the hegemonic political discourse (Makarychev and Yatsyk 2018b). One such measure was the so-called Dima Yakovlev bill, which was adopted in 2013, and which banned the adoption of Russian children by the American families. It marked a turning point in maturation of Russian biopolitical conservatism. The legislation was named after Dima Yakovlev, one of 20 Russian children adopted by the American families, who tragically died in the United States (which is a tiny percentage against the backdrop of other 60,000 successful cases of adoption). His death, however, was used as the justification for the bill that aimed at ‘protecting’ Russian children from external threats, despite the fact that in most cases American families often adopt sick orphans, who are in need of costly medical care, which is unavailable in Russia (Boitsova 2013). It is assumed, though, that the law was a response to the Magnitsky Act, passed by the US Congress in 2012 to sanction the Russian government officials responsible for human rights violations (Martynov 2017). The conveyed biopolitical message – ‘the bodies of our children in exchange for political and economic privileges of Russian authorities’ – became clearer in 2018, when several Russian MPs, including Elena Mizulina, the author of conservative Concept of Family Policy (2013), admitted a possible annulment of the Dima Yakovlev law. Some commentators suggest that this change in attitude should be understood in the context of the Russian government’s bargaining with the Trump administration to lift US sanctions against Russia (Martynov 2017). If true, this implies that children became resources in Russian foreign policy calculus. The relevant statistical data in 2012–2015 demonstrate negative trends: the number of sick children adopted inside the country decreased by 400, and the number of foreign foster parents diminished by a third, from 2,400 in 2012 to 746 in 2015. The total number of children living in Russian orphanages and requiring expensive medical treatment by the end of 2015 reached 60,000 (Martynov 2017).

The case of Julia Savinovskikh from Yekaterinburg is another illustrative example of such a ‘reversed’ hegemonic rhetoric on securitization of human bodies. A biological mother of three and two adopted children, she was found by a Russian court as being unfit for parenting after she had undergone breast removal. The two adopted children came from an orphanage for mentally disabled children and Julia managed to rehabilitate them. Before the operation, in 2017, Julia started a blog in which she pretended to be a transgender individual to psychologically prepare for the surgery. This was enough for the regional court in Yekaterinburg in 2018 to declare her ‘a male.’ Based on this, the court deemed her marriage to be a ‘same-sex union,’ which conflicted with the family law and Russia’s culture and mentality. The court further reasoned that the same-sex parenting could negatively affect the adopted children, resulting in its verdict denying her adoption rights (RadioLiberty 2018). The two adopted children were forcefully taken away from Julia and brought back to the orphanage (EchoMsk 2017). In 2018, after unsuccessful attempts to return the children and suffering from the persecution by local authorities, Julia left Russia and asked for political asylum in Europe. Seen from the Russian conservative viewpoint, however, Julia’s bodily behaviour was inappropriately abnormal, even if she has not formally violated any laws.

The draft Concept of Family Policy published in summer 2013 and authored by the abovementioned Elena Mizulina, not only legalized state interventions in the private lives, but also allowed the interference of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC) in family matters, including participation of priests in local commissions on juvenile delinquency and inclusion of priests’ expertise in acts of legislation (Mizulina 2013). The draft also proposed a model of the ‘normal family’ with recommended number of children and forms of households.

Similar to Poland, there were voices in the State Duma lobbying for a ban on abortion as well (Podrabinek 2013). Yet in contrast with Poland, the ROC’s influence on Russian society is not as significant. With regard to the juvenile justice, in particular, ROC’s position can be extremely conservative. From its viewpoint, the state has no right to take children away from their families, even in cases of parental abuse. Children are viewed as ‘family property’ (Baunov 2013), and the state has no moral right to interfere, with the whole idea of juvenile justice being attributed to the effects of Western-driven liberalism.

Necropolitical myth-making and nation-building

In this section, I address Polish and Russian national myth-making, which I consider largely focused on issues of corporeality. Foucault understood biopolitics as management of and control over life for the sake of the well-being of the whole nation (Foucault 2003). Yet – in contrast to Foucault – some authors proposed a concept of necropolitics that refers to a ‘paradigmatical principle of rule that differentiates among, and capitalizes on, the imposition of various forms of death’ (Gržinić and Tatlić 2014, 2). In other words, necropolitics is about ‘space of death and mourning’ (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003) as loci for important political discourses and policy practices. Necropolitics inscribes physical death into the order of power (Mbembé and Meintjes 2003, 12), with memory about the dead becoming a battlefield for national identity. In particular, Polish ‘martyrological messianism’ (Zubrzycki 2016) and Russian cult of the WWII Victory Day become pivotal elements in ontological securitization of national identities in the two countries under consideration.

Poland: memory politics based on martyrological messianism

In April 2010, 96 representatives of Polish political and military establishment, including then-President Lech Kaczyński, perished in the air crash near the Russian city of Smolensk. The mass death of the very top of the Polish elite shocked the society and was perceived by Kaczyński’s twin brother Jarosław as a basis for creating a new national myth. Lech Kaczyński, who was not a popular politician before his tragic death, was declared a national hero and buried in the crypt of the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków among Polish kings (Stefan Batory, Zygmunt III Waza, Jan III Sobieski), military noblesse (Tadeusz Kościuszko, Józef Piłsudski, Władysław Sikorski), and the founding founders of Polish national ethos (Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki). This decision provoked mass protests and harsh criticism by the leftist and centrist media, who considered outrageous to equate an ordinary political figure – even tragically killed – with historical leaders of the nation (Szeligowska 2014, 492–94). Yet members and supporters of the PiS party, run by Jarosław Kaczyński, as well as most of representatives of the Polish Catholic Church approved the extravagant choice of burial place for Lech Kaczyński.

In 2018, the year of the centenary anniversary of Poland’s independence, two monuments to the victims of the Smolensk catastrophe were erected on the Piłsudski Square in central Warsaw. One of them was to Lech Kaczyński and it was setup very near to the monument to Józef Piłsudski, the national hero and military leader, thus visualizing the continuity of the Polish statehood. Altogether, by 2018, 146 commemorative sites all across Poland were dedicated to Lech Kaczyński (Chyż 2018). In fact, the Smolensk tragedy was used by the conservative parts of Polish society as a pillar for reactualizing the idea of Polish messianism stemming from the nation’s experience of pain and suffering (Szeligowska 2014, 493). In the words of Cardinal Dziwisz, those Poles, who died in the air catastrophe, are perished for the Fatherland (Szeligowska 2014, 493). President Kaczyński has sacrificed his life ‘for the truth about Katyń, pointed out one media outlet (Szeligowska 2014, 498) as he was killed on the way to commemorate 22,000 victims of mass execution in 1940 in Katyń, when the best and the brightest of the Polish intellectuals and military were shot by the Stalin’s secret police (NKVD). Thus, the ‘martyrologic-patriotic race’ (Szeligowska 2014, 498) became the core narrative of the ‘real Poles’, who believe in ‘traditional yet modern’ patriotism, in ‘opposition to … not real, cosmo-Poles’ (Szeligowska 2014, 501). The Polish society has found itself deeply divided. One part shared the mourning rituals for the perished in Smolensk, which mixed Catholic liturgies, pagan torchlight marches and civic meetings with the proliferation of conspiracy theories about the catastrophe. On the opposite end were many sceptics, who did not feel they belonged to this community (Szeligowska 2014, 501). In the words of the Polish philosopher Zbigniew Mikolejko, Jarosław Kaczyński constructed a phenomenon of the ‘religion of Smolensk’, which is grounded in his personal trauma (Sieradzka 2018). As the discourse of the ‘party of mourning’ (Smith 2016) became dominant in the public realm, it monopolized the symbolic right to define the ‘true Polishness’ and ‘patriotism’. The ‘fascination with death’ (Bielik-Robson, qtd. in (Szeligowska 2014, 498)), is what constitutes the hegemonic national identity narrative in the country today.

The notorious ‘Holocaust law’, which was adopted by the Polish parliament (Sejm) in the beginning of 2018, the conflicts around the WWII Museum in Gdańsk (Gera 2017) and controversy surrounding the Polish-Ukrainian cemeteries (UNIAN 2017) represent other examples. These cases are parts of the same storyline of creating the ‘veritable Polish history’ within the Polish hegemonic conservatism, and promoting the image of Poles as a nation that constantly suffered from the permanent victimhood. Within this paradigm of martyrdom, each episode of mass violence in the past is considered a political battlefield where the dead Poles who gave their lives for the sake of the national idea play a constitutive role for the current statehood.

The Museum of the WWII in Gdańsk was initially created under the initiative of the then-Prime Minister Donald Tusk, an ideological and political opponent of PiS (Day 2018). Before its opening in 2017, It was criticized by PiS for excessively ‘cosmopolitan’ interpretation of the war and diminishing the Polish experience in it (Logemann 2017). In the words of the political publicist Piotr Semka, instead of avoiding military topics in favor of conceptualizing the war as a humanitarian catastrophe, the museum’s permanent exhibition would do a better job by emphasizing Polish martyrdom and the glory of its army, since we ‘must remind Europe that we fought Nazism on our own initiative … We are truly and deeply indebted to our grandfathers whose heroism has been forgotten in Europe’ (Logemann 2017).

This struggle for the legacy of dead heroes was also the focus of the Polish-Ukrainian tensions caused by the acts of vandalism against Polish military monuments that occurred in western Ukraine in 2017 (InterFax 2018). In response, Poland demolished the monument to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) at the cemetery of the Polish village of Hruszowice, which the Polish authorities deemed ‘unacceptable’ due to its glorification of UPA. This incident should be understood in the context of the ongoing debates in Poland about the mass execution of close to 100,000 Poles by the UPA fighters in Volhynia and Eastern Galicia in the 1940s. In its turn, the official Kyiv banned Polish historians from conducting exhumations in Ukraine. The tit-for-tat continued with the Polish authorities banning the entry of the Ukrainian officials, who publicly expressed nationalist and anti-Polish views (McLaughlin 2017).

The ‘Holocaust Law’, adopted by the Polish parliament at the beginning of 2018, could be understood in Agambenian terms as a hegemonic appropriation of the right to speak with the nation on behalf of its dead (Agamben and Heller-Roazen 1999). The law makes it illegal to accuse Poles of complicity in crimes committed by Nazi Germany, including the Holocaust. It also bans using such terms as ‘Polish death camps’ in relation to Auschwitz and other concentration camps located in the Nazi-occupied Poland. Violation of the law is punished by a fine or a jail sentence of up to 3 years. The law was harshly criticized by Israel, US and France as breaching ‘freedom of speech and academic inquiry’ (Masters 2018). In the words of the Polish President Andrzej Duda, however, the law gives an opportunity to tell the truth and prevents survivors from being gagged (Masters 2018). The adoption of such a controversial law elicited a highly negative reaction from a number of Polish and foreign intellectuals, who view it as a political monopolization of the Polish history for the sake of creating a ‘convenient’ truth (Masters 2018). Under growing international and domestic pressure, President Duda amended the law in June 2018, which criminalizes any attempts to publicly falsify the historical facts by attributing the crimes committed by the Nazi Germany during the Holocaust to Poland and Poles (Gera 2018; Grey 2018; Shore 2018).

As Zubrzycki points out, the idea of introducing a ban for telling an ‘inconvenient’ truth in Poland was not a new one. Thus, the Gross case, named after Jan Tomasz Gross’s book, describing how ethnic Poles tormented and murdered their Jewish neighbours in the small town of Jedwabne in 1941, was initiated by a group of right-wing MPs. They claim that the book violated the Articles 133 and 132A, which provide for up to 3 years of imprisonment for persons, who ‘publicly insult the Polish nation or the state’. Article 132A of the Penal Code was repealed in 2008, but Article 133 remains in force (Zubrzycki 2016, 257–58). As Zubrzycki puts it, the truth about Jedwabne undermined the martyrological narrative about the sacred Polish history and threatened its demystification and desacralization. The denial of Polish participation in the Holocaust thus became part of the hegemonic discourse (Zubrzycki 2016, 257–58).

PiS’ hegemonic production of the historical truth steadily continues. In 2018 the Polish National Foundation, a state-funded organization, launched a programme aimed at supporting Polish historians to promote a positive image of the country abroad as a ‘victim of two totalitarian systems simultaneously that fought effectively against them’ (wPolityce.pl 2018). In parallel, a number of prominent Polish scholars and activists, who study the Holocaust, including historian Adam Puławski, head of the Polish Institute of National Remembrance (Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, IPN), and professor Barbara Engelking, chair of the Auschwitz Council, were dismissed from their positions. All of them believe that the reason for this was their research showing the negative attitudes of Poles towards Jews during the WWII (Pospischil 2018). Instead, the government plans to build the new state-funded museum of ‘Memory and Identity’ in Toruń, which will be focused on more than 1,000 years of history of Christian Poland with particular emphasis on the role of the Pope John Paul II, who was ethnically Pole, and on the positive examples of Poles saving Jews from the Holocaust. Father Tadeusz Rydzyk, whose Radio Maryja is known for its anti-Semitic broadcasting (Rzeczpospolita 2018), is rumoured to be groomed as the director of this museum.

According to Lewis, PiS’ appropriation of memory using the language of ‘heroic martyrdom’ seeks to reconfigure the country’s symbolic canon in terms of symbols and borders. Cultural ‘wars’ about the WWII Museum in Gdańsk and myths of ‘lost’ eastern territories in today’s Belarus, Lithuania, and Ukraine (about so-called Kresy Wschodnie) are examples of this policy (Lewis 2019, 523). It is the idea of the ‘border trouble’, that could describe this as a ‘zero-sum game’ between ‘the “national” camp pursuing a discourse of ethnonational nostalgia’, explored by PiS, and ‘postcolonial criticism debunking those myths with an anti-nationalist counter-discourse’ (Lewis 2019, 525).

Russia: the immortal regiment, the blockade blood and the party of the dead

Among a bulk of works written about the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, there is only a handful that approaches the topic from a wider biopolitical paradigm (Bassin 2016; Makarychev and Yatsyk 2018b; Kalinina 2017; Toropova 2015; Khagi 2011). Some focus on the Stalinist times (Sandomirskaya 2012; Prozorov 2016; Healey 2015), using the concepts of biopolitics and thanatopolitics through the lens of governing people’s death to preserve the existing regime. The narrative dictating that those, who are alive, should be ready to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the whole nation – if it is required by the state – is at the core of thanatopolitical policies, and it remains an important pillar of the current Russian nation-building. It is the aestheticization of war that accompanies the growing militarism of Russia’s state discourse and mass consciousness (Makarychev and Yatsyk 2018a), as well as Russian necropolitics reinvigorated during Putin’s third and the fourth presidencies.

Until recently, not much academic attention was paid to the dead in the state-building discourse in Russia. What was particularly emphasized is the role of the Soviet (and then Russian) people, who was often represented by a generalized figure of the Red Army soldier as a liberator from the universal evil of Nazism. In fact, this Victory Day cult was always a glorifying act of military bravery rather than an act of mourning about millions of victims, including those who lost their lives due to Stalin’s repressive policies (Fedor 2017; Petrov 2015). The state’s reluctance to take the full responsibility for terror against its own people or, in the words of Alexander Etkind, the ‘warped mourning of the undead in the land of the unburied’ (Etkind 2013), suppressed necropolitics as an expression of mourning and grief for dead compatriots. As works on the Russian cultural discourses about the victims of Soviet and post-Soviet wars demonstrate, the state prefers to keep silent regarding the burial places of the perished combatants in Afghanistan in 1989–1991 (Danilova 2015), in both Chechen wars in the 1990s (Makarychev 2016), in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 (Bershidsky 2015), and in Syria in 2018 (Gostev and Coalson 2016). There are other examples of the state’s strategy of outlawing many forms of non-state activities in Russia aimed at studying the places of mass executions during the Soviet times. The dismissal of the main founders of the Museum of Political Repressions ‘Perm 36’ Tatiana Kursina and Viktor Shmyurev from their positions in 2014 and the relegation of the museum to the control of pro-Kremlin groups (Krizhevskii, Mityusheva, and Sokhareva 2014), along with the criminal case against the Karelian historian Yurii Dmitriev who has been voluntarily excavating the WWII remains of soldiers for decades, are among such examples (Yarovaya 2018).

Yet during Putin’s the third presidency Russia started developing a different necropolitical strategy. The dead – not as human bodies, but as their spiritual reincarnation in a national community – became integrated into wider Russian conservative discourse together with the cult of the Victory Day, symbols and rites of the Orthodox Christianity and traditional values at its core. The case of the “Immortal Regiment“ movement is a good illustration of this trend.

Initially, the idea of celebrating the WWII Victory Day by organizing a march with the portraits of relatives, who died in the Great Patriotic War, was proposed by Sergey Lapenkov, Sergey Kolotovkin and Igor Dmitriev in Tomsk in 2012. The starting point was to revitalize private memories of families about the war through a visual replica of a ‘regiment’ bringing together their ancestors, who fell in the war and thus could not celebrate the victory. This initiative was not a new one: starting from the 1950s similar commemorative marches took place in certain towns in the USSR, but Tomsk-originated endeavour has unexpectedly spilled over across the country. Starting with 6,000 participants in the first year, in 2015 the event already took place in 100 Russian cities and in at least 15 countries, including Israel, Germany, and Norway (Gabowitsch 2016, 307). In 2018 almost 10.5 million people participated in the parade in Russia (RIA 2018), including many demonstrators in more than 80 countries around the globe.

In the past 4-years President Putin also took part in the Immortal Regiment marches, thus enshrining this event into the state’s patriotic discourse on memory politics. According to the Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar’, the idea to incorporate the ‘immortal regiment’ initiative into Russia’s soft power toolkit was suggested by political technologists for the Sochi Olympics opening ceremony (qtd. In (Fedor 2017, 323)). Since 2015, when the state-supported clone of the original ‘Immortal Regiment’ was registered, the grass-roots initiative was appropriated by the state (Fedor 2017; Gabowitsch 2016, 307-309; Arkhipova 2018). In the words of the pro-Kremlin writer Roman Nosikov, the blood of the Soviet soldiers leaked on the WWII battlefields, and became a ‘seed’ for the conception of the Russian nation (qtd. in (Fedor 2017, 312)). Aleksander Adeev, director of the Institute of Economic Strategies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, went even further in politicizing the dead, having suggested that their relatives should be given a right to vote on their behalf in elections as they are physical and mental continuation of the events in the past. This ‘voting’, in his opinion, could consolidate the Russian society (Obukhov 2016).

Thus, through the phenomenon of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, the militarization of the Russian public sphere performatively conflates the dead ‘marching’ together with their living compatriots. As Arkhipova points out, the ‘Immortal Regiment’ contributes to the consolidation of the Russian nation in two ways. One refers to private memories of the war and thus presumes that pictures should portray ancestors who passed away. This concept was key for the original civic movement in Tomsk. The second version prioritizes the memory of the whole community over private stories, which does not imply personal connections with portraits of the fallen heroes (Arkhipova 2018). This unifying depersonalization is a necropolitical tool to reinvent and consolidate the nation. The concept of ‘blood’ becomes the key conjunctive element in a reimagined intragenerational and intracorporeal national community.

The recent documentary ‘The Blood of the Blockade’, released in 2017 with the financial support of the pro-Kremlin party ‘Spravedlivaya Rossija’ (Just Russia), develops this argument further. Its plot argues that there is a genetic memory about suffering in extreme situations that make survivors physically and mentally distinct and resilient to the hardship of life in the future. Residents of Leningrad, who not only survived the 900-day siege during the Great Patriotic War, but also supplied their blood to Russian soldiers, are the case in point. It is claimed that due to such inhuman conditions, the ‘blockade blood’ possesses a unique strength to make its donors unconquerable (Lukjanova 2017, 45, 11). ‘Is it due to these “blood bonds” that the Soviet nation defeated Nazism?’, the film narrator asks, and then continues: ‘Is it a coincidence that the top of the Russian elite, including President Vladimir Putin, the Metropolitan of Moscow and All Russia Kirill, the Head of Presidential Administration in 2011–2016 Sergey Ivanov, and Chief of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Sergey Naryshkin were born in Leningrad and thus carry this unique “blockade blood’? (Lukjanova 2017, 36:00–37:18). A picture of Putin marching in the column of the Immortal Regiment and embodying the nation (both the living and the dead) appears on the screen soon after this question. The final episode mentions that the Leningrad siege survivors and their relatives live in 46 countries around the globe, which supposedly can serve as a biopolitical vindication for the Russian World as a trans-national and cross-border community of people, regardless of their citizenship and language, who share genetic memory based on the blood of the unconquered.

The performative challenge to the necropolitical hegemonic discourse comes from the Russian art group Rodina [Motherland] and its leader Maxim Evstropov, who sarcastically develops the idea of bringing the dead back into the politics to the point of proposing to setup ‘Party of the Dead’ (PofD 2018). ‘We wish to politicize the death, and want to give a voice to the dead through those who are alive’, he claimed (Simakova 2018). In Evstropov’s words, necroeconomics and necropolitics are dominant in today’s Russia:

‘The [Russian – A.Y.] regime lives off the death. Oil, gas, carbon are all the products of disintegration of flash and organic life. This perception of everything just as the “necro-sources” becomes universal and is applied to human beings. They are also the “necro-sources” for the authority. It is easier for the regime to govern its citizens as already dead’ (Simakova 2018).

It is known, he continues, that there is a typical practice of giving a voice for Putin by those dead users of the social media accounts. ‘The dead were silent all this time, but now they speak out,’ (PofD 2018), said a political campaigner for the ‘Party of the Dead’, and continued: ‘When you are voting for the Party of the Dead, you choose the future, because we are your future’ (Rodina 2017, 1, 39) ‘The dead are the majority’, ‘Russia is the country of the dead’, ‘Russia is proud of the dead’, ‘The dead don’t have Motherland ’ (PofD 2018) are among their provocative slogans. In contrast to the hegemonic necropolitical discourse that personifies the community of the dead through pictures of the fallen soldiers of the ‘Immortal Regiment’, the members of the Party of the Dead cover their faces when speaking on behalf of the dead, thus symbolizing total equality in their ‘world’. The party members deny political hierarchy, and adhere to the horizontal structural principles. The Party of the Dead, apart from their performative actions, was also involved in public politics rallying against the torture in Russian jails on 11 June 2018 in St Petersburg, protesting against the government’s plans to raise the retirement age in Tver on 1 July 2018 (PofD 2018) and many others.

Another example of the Party of the Dead’s counter-hegemonic necropolitical art is the case of Varvara Mikhailova, who in 2018 was fined 160 000 rubles (about 2,500 euros) for marching during 1 May demonstration in St. Petersburg with her artwork entitled ‘The Nine Phases of the Decomposition of the Leader’. The art piece is a poster comprised of a series of photos produced by Rodina in 2015, which display the gradual process of grass rooting through the picture of Putin. According to the court’s verdict, the poster must be demolished, which ironically means the destruction of the picture of Putin as was intended by the initial aim of the project (PofD 2018). Mikhailova’s action indirectly refers to the earlier performances by Sergey Kurekhin, who in the 1990s imagined Lenin as a mushroom (Bernstein and Yurchak 2017), and works by Pussy Riot and Petr Pavlensky (Yatsyk 2018) who creatively used human bodies as the key tool for making political statements in the language of performance art under the conditions of the shrinking space for political utterances. As the regime speaks the language of necropolitics, it is the metaphor of ‘the dead’ that might paradoxically contest its hegemony.

Conclusion

In this article, I examined national identity projects in Poland and Russia as related to conservative myth-making aimed at counter-distinguishing both national communities from the liberal emancipatory West. I characterized these projects as biopolitical discourses and interpreted them through the idea of ontological security grounded in the protection of the collective national bodies in the face of external existential threats, including the EU-promoted liberal paradigm. I demonstrated that both nation-(re)building projects imply a certain degree of isolation from the EU, and substantial rethinking of Moscow’s and Warsaw’s relations with Europe. Furthermore, the concept of conservative biopolitics offers theoretical advantages in better understanding ontological security as it is practised by illiberal regimes, be it authoritarian political system in Russia or Poland’s nationalist-populist ruling elite.

Two general trends could be mentioned in this regard. First, on the institutional level, both countries undertook far-reaching changes, including the recent reform of the judiciary system in Poland that significantly endangered its EU membership, and a number of legislative acts passed by the Russian Duma that were largely considered as driving Russia away from Western liberal democracies. Second, on the societal level both state-promoted discourses voluntarily alienate themselves from the EU liberal agenda with its principles of human rights, multiculturalism, tolerance and secular society, opting for biopolitical conservatism with its distinctly illiberal cultural background. The metaphor of the camp proposed by Giorgio Agamben seems to be a radical form of such an illiberal inversion: it transforms the idea of human security – which in its original liberal version prioritizes protection of individual lives over state security – to a state patronage over physical care of survival, which inevitably justifies coercion and violence.

Seen from this perspective, the hegemonic identity-making projects in both countries could be assessed as being exclusively oriented on ‘defending’ a set of basic values rather than inclusively open towards accepting multiple normative meanings. It is in this sense that they are external to the liberal West, although this normative externality does not automatically imply their peripheral or liminal status in relations with the EU. This is so because both Poland and Russia – in different ways – try to install themselves as harbingers of the return to a ‘real’ European identity that needs some kind of moral purification from the ‘false’ liberal permissiveness and inclusiveness, usually associated with weakness in the language of biopolitical conservatism. The major distinction between Polish and Russian protective identity-making strategies lies in different ways of boundary-drawing: whereas Poland seems to opt for fixing the national borders, appealing to the past experience of painful losses of territory and statehood, Russia appears to prefer keeping its national borders flexible, imagining itself as a potentially expansionist guardian against the alleged threats posed by the West.

Acknowledgments

This publication was prepared under the grants by the Centre for Polish Russian Dialogue and Understanding (CPRDiP) in 2017-2018 and the Polish Institute of Advanced Studies (PIASt) in 2018-2019. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the donors can not be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I analyse Russian- and Polish-language media in 2016–2018. In case of Russia, I analyse the content of Meduza, Gazeta.ru, Novaya Gazeta, Nastoyaschee Vremya, and the Dozhd’ TV channel. As a source of the Kremlin discourse, I look at the state programmes and the Kremlin’s press service materials. In case of Poland, I use a Facebook platform (‘The Notes on Poland’ group), which aggregates news from such Polish media (both pro-PiS and independent) as Gazeta Wyborcza, Rzeczpospolita, Dziennik, Do Rzeczy, PiS official website and others. As an additional source, I use 20 in-depth interviews with Polish experts, including journalists, political scientists, NGO representatives and social activists focusing on Polish domestic and foreign policies and human rights, as well as participant observations on Polish national celebrations, which I conducted in Warsaw in 2017 and 2019.