The Patriotism of Despair

The Patriotism of Despair brilliantly demonstrates that 'culture matters more than ever' during periods of societal transformation. Serguei Oushakine investigates a range of groups—nationalist activists and intellectuals, war veterans and soldiers' mothers—that form communities of loss around symbolic representations and ritual enactments of shared trauma in Russia. Based on fieldwork from 2001–2003 in the city of Bernaull in Southwestern Siberia, the book provides a rare glimpse of culture in a Russian province (most other ethnographies are based in Moscow or St. Petersburg).... The Patriotism of Despair is one of the most significant works on post-Soviet culture to date, showing how trauma is not simply limiting, but generative—of communities and of understandings of what happened, what it means, and what to do. This ambitious undertaking... engages an impressive array of evidence: analyzing interviews, recounting rituals, excavating archives, and interpreting photographs.

~Jane Zavisca, Contemporary Sociology

Drawing on return visits to Barnaul, his boyhood city, near the Chinese and Kazakh borders, he paints a profound psychological tableau of coping. His groupings are diverse: disgruntled leftists, whom he labels 'neocoms'; Chechen war veterans; and the mothers of dead soldiers. All, however, find meaning and community in narratives of tragedy.... From Oushakine's keen reading, one gets a sense of how, for a still wider circle of Russians, collapse and disorder led to alienation from the Western values that Russian reforms had tried to sell them, which then for some shaded into anti-Semitism and a crude nationalism.

~Foreign Affairs