These early tourist impressions were later tempered in village buildings with no indoor plumbing (with outhouses like those of my country relatives), and during the hardest days of the early 1990s by searches for food in grocery stores or for supplies in hospitals, where a lack of cotton, gloves, and antiseptics meant taking care of people at home instead (as we had done for my mother in the 1970s, when the hospital would not nurse her after an operation). I was not blind to the rough state of mailboxes in the high-rise entryways. However, I have come to prickle when I hear contrasts between some specific Russian bit of trouble and an American ideal of plenty, or a dream of luxury, color, and variety that many of us did not live. Compare Urals plumbing to Michigan water pipes, if you will, but look not only at contrasts, or even similarities, but also for connections. To avoid standing upon the sands of covert comparison to American ideals, as if they exemplify a neutral standard, this book keeps contrasts and comparisons specific, and when I do incorporate American places and patterns, it is in ways that attempt symmetry and acknowledge influence.
FIELDWORK
This books draws from several decades of ethnographic and archival research in Russia from 1988, the year before the Berlin Wall fell and three years before the USSR would deconstruct itself, through 2017, one hundred years after the Russian Revolution. I write at a time when Americans are acutely unsure about how to interpret anyone, how to intuit the intentions of their own leaders, not to mention those of other states. This moment would be different had government encouraged Americans to learn multiple languages; perhaps we would be more brave about tuning in to foreign channels and attempting our own translations. Outside academe, the very fact that I study Russian is an anomaly, either exotic or suspect. All this in mind, Throughout the book, whenever possible, I provide the time and place of observations from my fieldnotes; in some cases, doing so would violate standard ethnographic ethical practice, and so I deliberately leave time and place unstated.
In 1988, after six years of formal Russian study, I spent a summer in Leningrad. In 1990 and 1991, my several monthlong trips included family home stays and research affiliations to survey the archives. In August 1991 I began my first long, two-year sojourn in Moscow; I arrived in time to witness the attempted coup that catalyzed the dismantling of the USSR. I visited many times throughout the 1990s and carried out another long-term field project in 2002–2003 and 2005 at the Russian State Theatrical Academy, living with students in the dorm, documenting interactions in classrooms and rehearsals, as well as backstage and in the hallways.16 I keep in touch with that cohort and with a few other cohorts, and return about once a year. Over the decades, I have lived in Moscow, Tver’, Perm’, and Kungur and have visited other cities and villages. I have lived with Roma and with other Russians, in cities and in villages, with friends and with families of friends, in cottages and dachas, and in apartments and dormitories.
Over time I accumulated many observations by accident, for example, by translating pro bono for a British lawyer observing a court trial or wandering around Moscow talking to strangers during the 1991 coup attempt. Ethnographers study encounters among beings who are not made to sit naked in a lab—and while we might influence, we cannot control, what will happen in any situation. Some people try, and it is our job to understand how, not to try to control situations ourselves. To capture variation across such situations, this book thus draws from events that reached beyond the bounds of research sites or moments of interviewing.
There are nevertheless ethical reasons that anthropologists endeavor, in writing and in note taking, to separate “research” from “life” and to report only on the former. For such reasons, I have waited many years to write about certain encounters that did not at the time fall under the umbrella of research. I still take care to write in ways that do not identify anyone. For similar reasons, I draw from films, radio, and books. For one thing, because such media are not produced for me, they offer coordinates from which to triangulate examples that are more ethnographic, situations in which I was present and possibly affected what might have been said or done. For another thing, such media also offer surrogate examples, to shield actual people from censure or embarrassment while demonstrating the ubiquity of certain themes. In addition, many of my interlocutors’ livelihoods involve creating and curating photos, plays, films, or radio broadcasts, which makes it all the more important that I show Anglophone readers a few landmarks in the Russian mediascape that serve as common points for their work, as well as for the play of laughter and debate.
The fact is, however, that I came to know many people in spaces where being an anthropologist, or even a being foreigner, was subsumed under other, joint work. My friends include people with whom I spent hours on a song chorus, guitar riff, or recording level or on deciding a camera angle or a costume choice. I spent time with people seeking perfection of this karate technique or that roller derby rule or this beading skill. Some of us collaborated on stage plays, translations, films, musical concerts, and recordings. In 1992, between research grants, I helped proof the English edition of a telephone directory. On film sets (one on which Romani consultants were working, one in a Urals prison), I played tiny roles as an extra actor. In Perm’ I collaborated on an anthology of Russian rock to benefit a children’s oncology center. In Moscow I acted and directed for an expat theatrical ensemble. Throughout, when not “doing fieldwork”—when not out at 4:00 A.M. at a wedding table, taping an interview, or writing up notes—I might be arguing with a musician about phrasing, running a sound check in a blues club, buying a fish for New Year’s, or weeding around cucumbers. Such joint projects make it difficult to ignore interests and relationships that research parameters can otherwise eclipse.
Over time both research and other collaborations can transcend original contexts and points of contact; after an interview, the interviewee and I might set out to undo a bureaucratic knot. Meeting someone in the metro for afternoon tea might involve a detour for an hour to stand in line to get on a waiting list for a sofa (that was in Soviet times—now it might mean a detour to compare new appliances). A ride from the train station could include turning down a side road to stop by the dentist or to drop off a little gift (or by 2014 to visit a new cat café). Such detours brought me to witness interactional struggles for attention and solutions to awkward requests as they arose, especially ways to make or avoid contact that interviews alone never can (Briggs 1986).
American military and soft power have framed many encounters overseas. I attribute some of people’s willingness to collaborate with me to my American passport, my access to dollars during a period of extreme ruble devaluation, and their own early optimism about changes promised by Western business and markets, but friends also recognize that I try to avoid measuring by American ideals. Three decades of birthdays and New Year’s eves, weddings, and funerals—with fireworks, herring, and vodka—and the relaxing labors of preparing ordinary dinners and companionable walks on errands have turned some of us into friends. As we become friends, we try to smooth channels: I decode the American “service smile”; they socialize me to serve politely at table. When we are together, we sometimes amplify each other’s familiar channels, so no one is homesick: in Moscow we saw Alice Cooper; near Detroit we turned up the volume for AuktsYon.
Some places in Moscow are set up to cater to tourists’ preferences or to seek foreign influence. The Russian State Theatrical Academy, even as an elite institution that accepts foreign students, is not one of them. There, I was accorded no authority to define encounters or determine the manner of my own participation. For example, I had planned to participate in acting lessons, to compare them to prior years of