Discursive and material practices of space and modernization in Russia: an Introduction

Abstract

This special issue gathers scholars from diverse fields to investigate the idea and practice of space in the processes of Russian modernization. The analyses focus on post-Soviet Russia and reflect on its political, social and cultural transformations by discussing the following topics: digital geopolitics and the annexation of Crimea, mega-events and urban policies, the Sochi Winter Olympics, socio-spatial change in the post-Soviet metropolis, and scale framing of the Baltic Sea. The contributions highlight the importance of research on Russia and spatiality on the backdrop of the crisis in Ukraine. Enquiring into the Russian understanding of Russian culture and society as a unique and isolated civilization, making the connection between global and Western phenomena and their manifestation in Russia, analyzing the economic and political gain of Russia’s greatest mega-event in recent history, framing the Baltic Sea simultaneously as an arena of environmental cooperation and geopolitical competition – all these studies and methodological choices provide new analytical perspectives on the critical analysis of current world politics. Meanwhile, the studies also show how an inquisitive review of the traditional epistemology of Russian spatiality can produce new approaches to the study of Russian modernization and, thus, can enhance our understanding of Russia's recent developments. Drawing on the conceptualizations of spatiality developed in recent academic debates, the contributions integrate investigations of Russian spatiality into the global context, and in so doing illustrate the importance of including Russia – its culture, society and politics – in the study of the contemporary world and its multiple modernities.

Keywords:

• Russia
• spatiality
• modernization
• popular geopolitics
• neoliberalism
• environment

Acknowledgement

The editors would like to thank the Academy of Finland’s Center of Excellence “Choices of Russian Modernization” for generously funding the seminar. We would also like to express our gratitude to the participants in the seminar for contributing to the discussion, especially Nick Baron, Maria Engström, Anni Kangas, Nadir Kinossian, Konstantin Minyar-Beloruchev, Jonathan Oldfield, Katri Pynnöniemi, Arja Rosenholm, Veli-Pekka Tynkkynen, and Maxim Waldstein.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For an adaptation of Koselleck’s thinking to Russian intellectual history, see Mjөr (forthcoming).

2. This is Greenleaf’s (1997) formulation of the Saidian thesis.

3. With this, “spatial turn” corresponds to two other paradigmatic shifts in the arts and sciences: first, the emergence of post-structuralist approaches, which challenge naturalizing and universalizing narratives of history and identities and, instead, stress the importance of contexts and subject positions on the production of knowledge; and, second, the intrusion of the study of culture into almost every field in the humanities and social sciences (see Shapin 1998; and on the dilemma of the universality and locality/particularity of knowledge, Livingstone 2003; on the “cultural turn,” see Sewell 1999).

4. In the humanities and social sciences there is a gamut of theoretical approaches to choose from: not only the Foucaultian inquiry into the relation between space and power and Henri Levebre’s ideas about the production of space, but also the phenomenology of space, the semiotic study of space, the postcolonial readings of “imaginary geographies” inspired by Edward Said, and so on. Following Foucault, Shah (2012) asserts: “space is one of the tactics by which power legitimates … certain. social and political orders over others.”

5. This debate must be understood in relation to the state-centric understanding of the spatiality of power, which John Agnew sees as one of the fundaments of modern geopolitical imagination. This understanding assumes that the world is made up of states or territorial actors opposed to any other forms of polity. The “territorial trap,” as Agnew (1998) argues, is characteristic of International Relations theory. Although it may be claimed that the self-perception as well as the outside view of “official” Russia corresponds to the concept of the territorial trap, there is also evidence for the opposite development. In official Russian discourse, the state border no longer necessarily determines the borders of society, but Russian society is constructed beyond the state borders. Following an idea previously advanced by extreme neo-Eurasianists, the civic definition of “Russian” and “Russia” is no longer applied, but Russia, or the “Russian world” (Russki mir) is understood as a community of Russian-speakers worldwide.

6. For these, see, for instance, Smith (1999), Sorokin (1996), Kolossov (2000), Kolossov and Turovsky (2001), O’Loughlin (2001), O’Loughlin, Ó Tuathail, and Kolossov (2004, 2006), Bassin and Aksenov (2006), Mäkinen (2008).

7. Cosmism is an intellectual construct; a specific tradition of Russian thought. It combines ideas of spatial conquest, metaphysics, and religious thought. In recent civilizational debates, cosmist arguments have been used to make a distinction between Orthodox civilization, which is seen as orienting toward the divine, and Western civilization, which is seen as more earth bound and materialist (see, for instance, Laruelle 2013, 87, esp. fn.4, 96–100).

8. Arctism is a term that Laruelle applies for explaining Russia’s aspiration to “go farther north.” It is one of the elements that “gives Russia its uniqueness among nations” (Laruelle 2012, 558). According to Laruelle, the metanarrative of Arctism serves as a reinforcement of a “spatial representation of Russia in which the ‘south’ is the region from where all danger issues, while the ‘north’ is the place where the Russian people will be able to take refuge and preserve itself” (569).