In many languages in many countries, journalists and filmmakers, parliaments and diplomats saturate media with reports and depictions of betrayals, failures of trust, and tests of authenticity—and also with reports of techniques, designed by professionals and experts, to distinguish good contacts from bad, to judge communications as transparent or opaque. Moreover, in contradiction to the many famous claims about exceptional Russian obfuscation and mystery, people in Russia have just as frequently as anyone else rallied to the value of transparent clarity. When Russian Decembrists renounced monarchy in 1825, they also championed plain speaking, rejecting the Francophone registers of the Russian aristocratic courts.5 Early Soviets called back to those Decembrist aesthetics when they removed extra alphabet letters, trimming the “Language of Lenin” down to spare, modular forms thought best to manifest both clarity and modernity to foster new thought and action.6
By the 1960s, intellectuals vexed by Soviet versions of rationalism had turned toward opacity and ambiguity.7 Soft focus translucence marked films beloved by the intelligentsia, such as Tarkovsky’s 1979 Stalker. Based on a science fiction novel by the Strugatsky brothers, the story unfolds in The Zone, a space polluted and warped by an extraterrestrial visitation. The authorities have fenced it off from all but the most daring poachers of alien technological artifacts. Adventurers hire these Stalkers to seek a room where, it is said, one’s secret wishes are divined and fulfilled.
Filmed several years before Blade Runner (1982) depicted a half-decayed, half-shiny-chrome future Los Angeles, Stalker’s marshy, wet, and rusted industrial landscape projected late Soviet perceptions of ecological ruin, the corroded metal and crumbled concrete that increasingly threaded through day-to-day life, but were still largely absent from film or television (as they were then in mainstream U.S. productions). However, the worst dangers of The Zone were not its earthly ruins but its cracks in space-time, which zig across the landscape, shifting location unexpectedly. Matter that contacts such a crack is consumed: your arm is sheared right off, hair just singed if you are lucky (a possibility that is clearer in the book). The Stalker finds safe paths by testing all that seems most transparent; his simple technology for intuition is to appropriate the metal lug nuts discarded by the aliens. He throws one; silence means that way is fatal, while the sound of metal hitting ground indicates open passage. Inside The Zone one can never move along a straight path, for space there is just like time, each step as opaque as tomorrow; upon finding the enchanted space, the adventurers discover that they cannot read even their own desires.8 Only the Stalker accepts the knowledge that seemingly transparent paths nonetheless require extra senses—even just to listen, not only to look—before moving on.
Some argue that the thematic and formal opacity in the film signal elitism (see Faraday 2000,164–67). Tarkovsky was certainly steeped in 1960s elite intellectual Soviet debates about sincerity and opacity,9 and in his autobiography he expresses disdain for Eisenstein-style film montage as too fast, too limiting of interpretation, too obvious (1986, 21). It was better, he thought, to leave some things unsaid, out of respect for viewers’ intellectual and emotional intelligence.
As these brief examples suggest, by the time of glasnost’ in the late 1980s, the Soviet Union had passed through several cycles wherein claims to clear, transparent, open communication alternated with romantic or postmodern rejections of its possibility. Soon afterward, however, many responded to 1990s advertising and electoral campaigns as harbingers of mystifying reenchantment, political dramaturgy as thaumaturgy. Victor Pelevin hit this note in 1996 with the hilarious blockbuster Generation P, a novel depicting a world flooded by PR and commercials for foreign cigarettes and soda. The protagonist is a translator of Uzbek and Kirghiz poetry who finds his profession suddenly erased; “the new era had no use for him” (Pelevin 1999, 5). He takes a gig for a new advertising firm, conjuring jingles during Castaneda-inspired, Ouija-board sessions with the spirit of Che Guevara that marry hallucinogens to structural linguistics. He never does find clarity, ascending instead a vertical maze of occult esoterica to couple with an ancient masked goddess.
Anthropologists, historians, and literary scholars of Russia have creatively analyzed all these themes, devoting special attention to the virtuosity and humanity, for many, of the unsaid and the half-said in Soviet times (Boym 1994; Pesmen 2000; Oushakine 2000) and the social play of ambiguity and irony (Yurchak 2005; see also Lipovetsky 2010; Nadkarni 2007), complicating images of the USSR as a place where poets and tricksters only perished, as if all free thinkers were whisked away merely for hinting at a double meaning. As Yurchak stresses, by the time of late socialism, many people easily went about their lives, neither chafing against government slogans nor animating them with soul, but standing indifferent to them—or having fun with them, repurposing Lenin’s words in bricolage that sometimes (not always) provided subversive means to “signify on” official signs (Gates 1988), but that more significantly also marked out fields of social allegiance.10
One Moscow friend gives me an example from her teen years, around 1983, of righteous uses of opacity. After a demonstration against Soviet military force in Afghanistan, she had been taken in for a beseda (a “chat,” a euphemism for “interrogation”). She recalls feeling, “internally compelled to answer all the questions honestly,” until she realized, after comparing notes with friends, that one should refuse to answer at all, if not for one’s own sake, then for that of others in custody.11 The morality of deliberate opacity subverts dominant strands of European, Christian, Bolshevik, and modernist incitements to speak, to speak sincerely—and to speak as an individual;12 in her case, speaking truth to power would betray others. Such truthful speaking can be a cynical act, insincerely aimed. To refuse transparency along one channel—in sincere words to these people in this place—affirms other ongoing channels. For many people, and not only in Russia, this is how the “sense of trust” emerges over time, not through individually sincere expressions of referential fact. To eschew semantic transparency was less a manifestation of what has been called “a culture of dissimulation”13 and more a socially alert tactic that left room for others to navigate discursive situations otherwise out of their control. For those in such situations, American-style outrage when communication shifts, to work differently within bureaucratic corridors than outside them seems silly.14 The American NGOs that came in the late 1990s to teach Russians communication skills in lessons bundling transparency with capitalism and democracy quickly came to seem not only meddling, but naïve (see also Larson 2013; Cohen 2015a).
Many foreign consultants entered Russian spaces in the 1990s with little in the way of language or historical training, unaware of the debt that global scholarship on communication owes, in fact, to robust theories developed both in Russia and by Russian-speaking émigrés. Like Pelevin’s hero, many urban Russians had earned degrees in philology and read semiotic and literary theory (Vladimir Propp, Roman Jakobson, Mikhail Bakhtin, Yuri Lotman) and structural and post-structural theories of language in French (Ferdinand de Saussure, Jacques Derrida) and other languages. My own training in linguistic anthropology engages much of the same scholarship, and I often randomly encountered people who enjoyed speaking about concrete situations of communication in ways amenable to it (asking who addresses whom, in what social relation, for whose interests, and to which ends?) We shared ground to frame discussions about whether “democracy” always aligns with “transparency,” or whether “sincerity” (as a matter of referential truth calibrated to an individual speaking voice), is really the deepest, or best, measure of morality or for true communication, and whether it is not best to refuse the squeamishness that categories like sincerity can call into being.15
MANY RAYS, MANY RUSSIAS
Pelevin’s hero survives the dissolution of Soviet hierarchies of expertise. The order of labor by which a translator could eat by poetry alone ends, so he aims his semiotic energies elsewhere, taking precarious contracts to craft advertising jingles and political slogans. I conceived of fieldwork for this book in 1997, a summer when my friends in Russia