Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins 9004507795, 9789004507791

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1. Popular Biopolitics: A Theoretical Outline
Chapter 2. Estonia: Bare Life between Geo- and Biopolitics
Chapter 3. The Screen and the Street: Two Face(t)s of Ukrainian Popular Biopolitics
Chapter 4. Pastorate and ``Somatic Sovereignty'' in Russian Popular Biopolitics
Populations, Popular Biopolitics, Populism: Concluding Thoughts
Index

Citation preview

Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins

Global Populisms Edited by Amy Skonieczny (San Francisco State University) Amentahru Wahlrab (The University of Texas at Tyler)

Editorial Board Roland Benedikter (EURAC Research, Center for Advanced Studies) Lenka Buštíková (Arizona State University) Angelos Chryssogelos (London Metropolitan University) Benjamin De Cleen (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) Carlos de la Torre (University of Florida) Emmy Eklundh (Cardiff University) Federico Finchelstein (The New School for Social Research) Chris Hudson (RMIT University) Paul James (Western Sydney University) Erin Kristin Jenne (Central European University) David MacDonald (University of Guelph) Jennifer McCoy (Georgia State University) Cynthia Miller-Idriss (American University) Benjamin Moffitt (Australian Catholic University) Dirk Nabers (Kiel University) Danielle Resnick (International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)) Matthew Rhodes-Purdy (Clemson University) Larbi Sadiki (Qatar University) Colin Snider (The University of Texas at Tyler) Manfred Steger (University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa) Frank Stengel (Kiel University) Kurt Weyland (The University of Texas at Austin)

Volume 2 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/gpop

Popular Biopolitics and Populism at Europe’s Eastern Margins By

Andrey Makarychev

Cover illustration: ‘Consciousness’ by Ayurzana Ochirbold, Terelj, Mongolia. Photo by Deglee Ganzorig on Unsplash. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Makarychev, A. S. (Andreĭ Stanislavovich), author. Title: Popular biopolitics and populism at Europe’s eastern margins / Andrey Makarychev. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2022. | Series: Global populisms, 2666-2280 ; volume 2 | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Andrey Makarychev helps you to better understand populism as a phenomenon deeply rooted in mass culture. Unlike many other studies, the book discusses populism from a biopolitical perspective and turns your attention to the grounding of populist narratives in the issues of corporeality, sexuality, health conditions, bodily life and religious lifestyles. The three countries compared - Estonia, Ukraine and Russia - all share post-Soviet experiences that offer a broad spectrum of populist discourses. References to cultural and media products, artworks, theatrical performances and literature distinguish this work from more traditional accounts of populism and its connections with biopower”– Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2022000880 | ISBN 9789004507791 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004513792 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Populism–Europe, Eastern. | Political culture–Europe, Eastern. | Biopolitics–Europe, Eastern. | Europe, Eastern–Politics and government–1989Classification: LCC JN96.A91 M35 2022 | DDC 320.56/620947–dc23/eng/20220215 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022000880

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 2666-2280 ISBN 978-90-04-50779-1 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-51379-2 (e-book) Copyright 2022 by Andrey Makarychev. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau and V&R unipress. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

To my parents, with lucid sorrow and endless gratitude

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Contents Acknowledgements

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Introduction Biopolitics in Search of a Hegemony 1 1 Popular Biopolitics: A Theoretical Outline 19 1.1 Biopolitics: A Short Introduction 19 1.2 Performativity and Popular Biopolitics 21 1.3 Popular Biopolitics and/of Populism 26 1.4 Liberalism and Its Disavowal: A Biopolitical Reading 31 1.5 Bare Lives between Biopolitics and Ideology 38 1.6 The Regional Focus of the Book 40 1.7 Methodological Note 44 2 Estonia: Bare Life between Geo- and Biopolitics 60 2.1 The Popular Biopolitics of Bare Life: Two Dominant Discourses 2.1.1 The Ruptured Life in Occupation 62 2.1.2 After the Empire: Post-colonial Lives 68 2.2 Biopolitical Dislocations 75 2.2.1 Russia as an External Other 76 2.2.2 The West as a “Close” (but Still) Other 80 2.2.3 Ruptured Memories: Choosing the Lesser Evil 84 2.2.4 Pristine Life 88 2.3 Contemporary Reverberations: The Reactualization of the Biopolitical Contexts 91 2.3.1 After 1991: Suturing in the Soviet 92 2.3.2 The Bronze Soldier Conflict 97 2.3.3 The Annexation of Crimea and the War in Donbas 99 2.3.4 The Retrospective Biopolitics of the Refugee Crisis 102 2.3.5 100 Years of Independence: Celebrating Diversity 103

62

3 The Screen and the Street: Two Face(t)s of Ukrainian Popular Biopolitics 115 3.1 From Comedian to President: A Cultural Genealogy of the New(est) Ukrainian Populism 117 3.1.1 The Popular Geo- and Biopolitics of the Medialized Populism 119 3.1.2 Technology of Populism: A Ukrainian Know-How 123

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3.1.3 3.1.4 3.1.5 3.1.6 3.1.7 3.1.8

3.2

Trans-ideological Emptiness 124 The People, an Empty Signifier 126 Un-securitizing Russia 127 Playing with Ukraine’s Multiple Geographies 128 Debunking the West 129 “Servant of the People” and Zelensky’s Presidency: Deciphering the Script 131 The Geo-/Biopolitical Construction of Sovereignty in Insecure Times 135

4 Pastorate and “Somatic Sovereignty” in Russian Popular Biopolitics 149 4.1 Night Wolves’ Performative Imperialism 152 4.1.1 The Popular Geo-/Biopolitics and “Somatic Sovereignty” 154 4.1.2 Patriotic Pastorate: The Stalinist–Orthodox Potpourri 158 4.1.3 The Biopolitics of Life and the Thanatopolitics of Death 162 4.2 Iben Thranholm’s Biopolitical Interfaces 164 4.3 The Popular Biopolitics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Russian Hegemonic Populism 168 4.4 Russian Illiberal Populism: An Afterword 177 Populations, Popular Biopolitics, Populism: Concluding Thoughts Index

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Acknowledgements This book is a product of multiple inspirational encounters and conversations, both professional and personal, which contributed to my research with new ideas and experiences of inquiry and communication. The Johan Skytte Institute of Political Studies at the University of Tartu has created the best possible conditions for making this book happen. My special thanks to Olga Bogdanova, deputy director of the Institute, for her constant support and encouragement of my spontaneous initiatives, as well as for infusing an element of semiotic gaze into my reading of biopolitics. The research project “Populist Rebellion against Modernity” (POPREBEL1) became a fascinating cross-disciplinary scholarly platform that expanded my academic horizons and enriched me with a variety of new approaches to populism studies in different countries of Central and Eastern Europe. I have profited a lot from the opportunities that this project gave to me, and am thankful for colleagues of different disciplinary backgrounds researching populism. Another project I have been involved in – “Rethinking Regional Studies: the Baltic–Black Sea Connection”2 – was highly instrumental in and supportive of my academic inquiries, in particular with colleagues from Kyiv, Odessa, Lviv and Mariupol whose expertise and first-hand knowledge were helpful for their in-depth understandings of today’s Ukrainian society, culture and politics. Teaching and discussing biopolitics in Ukrainian universities gave me a perfect chance to test my hypotheses and get a highly valuable insiders’ feedback. The project “Academic Responses to Hybrid Threats” (WARN)3 furthered my opportunities to communicate closely with colleagues from Ukraine and became a source of additional experiences of discussing populism and biopolitics in the context of security studies. The project “Sources of Legitimation of Authoritarian Regimes” hosted and administered by the University of Oslo made me part of a research group of Russia experts studying different aspects of evolution and transformation of Putin’s regime. I am grateful to Pal Kolsto and Helge Blakkisrud for integrating my research on biopolitics and biopower into a broader conceptualization of Russian politics.

1 https://populism-europe.com/poprebel/ 2 https://bbsr.at.ua/ 3 https://warn-erasmus.eu/

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My studies in biopolitics were boosted by the plethora of excellent communicative spaces provided by academic workshops and research seminars where I have participated either as a co-organizer or as a speaker. In particular, our partnership with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem ended up with a conference named “Freedom and Unfreedom in Illiberal Times” and hosted by the University of Tartu in October 2021; it brought together a group of international experts working on different dimensions of illiberal biopolitics in times of crises. My contacts with the U4 university consortium opened new research pathways in the realm of comparative analysis of liberal and illiberal regimes, with useful projections onto biopolitics. I extend my sincere gratitude to Christoph Eichhorn who in times of my writing of this book was not only the German Ambassador to Estonia, but also a perfect interlocutor and a genuine friend of the inhabitants of the Lossi 36 building in Tartu where the Johan Skytte Institute is located. It is with his kind assistance that we have managed to host a series of events in 2019, opening up academic debate on biopolitics to Estonian and Russian artists and performers. The current German Ambassador to Estonia Christiane Hohmann was equally helpful in continuing this tradition and supporting other academic initiatives that expanded my professional horizons. I keep particular memories of the workshop “Performative Transformations” that allowed me and my colleagues to get in touch with Flo Kaasaru, Sasha Kremenets and other artists whose works and talks positively impacted on my studies. I also appreciate my conversations with Estonian artists Kristina Norman and Evi Pärn who gave me important cultural clues for my academic theorizing of biopolitics. Many parts of this book have been integrated into my research-based lectures and classes, for which I am thankful to the universities of Bordeaux (Caroline Dufy), Coimbra (Sandra Fernandes), Bratislava (Aliaksei Kazharski), Paris-Sud (Adrienne Fauve) and Lublin (Julita Rybczynska). The course “The Essential of Biopolitics” taught at the University of Tartu starting from 2020 became a space for regular interface with highly motivated groups of students with different backgrounds and of different nationalities, which gave me a perfect chance to polish my arguments in a multidisciplinary environment. Intense communication with international students at the summer schools in Tbilisi (July 2019) and Prague (September 2021) organized by the European Institute of Advanced International Studies, Nice (Marie-France Perdigon) gave me an additional sense of the topicality of my research for a broader international audience and helped me to discover new elements in biopolitics, mass culture and populism. My more recent engagements with colleagues from Airlangga University (Indonesia) were particularly helpful for discussing biopolitics in the unfortunate context of COVID-19.

Acknowledgements

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The writing of this book was paralleled by my other publication activities that in one way or another were related to biopolitical research. Co-authorship with Alexandra Yatsyk, Tatiana Romashko, Anna Kuznetsova, Maria Goes, and Sergey Medvedev were ideal experiences of sharing and exchanging ideas, and building professional networks. Moreover, my 2020 guest-edited special issue of the journal Populism became a stimulating intellectual playground to compare different national perspectives on populist politics with experts on Central and Eastern Europe. While finalizing the book during the pandemic lockdown, I enjoyed the privilege of speaking at a series of webinars organized by Columbia University (Elisabeth Wischnick), PONARS (Marlene Laruelle) and Narva Media Club (Marina Koreshkova and Sergei Tsvetkov). My special thanks to George Spenser Terry who generously helped me with polishing my non-native English, and Boris Varga who spent a lot of his time to assist with formatting the manuscript. Andrey Makarychev Tartu, October 2021

Introduction Biopolitics in Search of a Hegemony

The field of post-Soviet studies is saturated with research grounded in the traditional categories of institutions, identity politics, ethno-nationalism, and sovereignty. The extant literature is instrumental for the application of different political theories to study former Soviet republics. For example, liberal institutionalism is mostly focused on agent-driven factors triggering transformations within post-communist regimes; it emphasizes the role of soft mechanisms of norm projection through democracy promotion, policy transfer practices, contagion and dissemination, and creation of incentives to change. This approach is helpful for understanding the impediments for change – the oligarchic structure of political process, top-down policy making, as well as the phenomenon of illiberal civil society wherein religious congregations and conservative groups play key roles. Studies in social constructivism are identityfocused and explain how the ruling regimes resort to moralizing discourses of patriotism and national unity. From the viewpoint of media and communication studies, a major object of analysis is post-Soviet countries’ heavy investment of resources in a broad spectrum of communication strategies, from nation branding to confronting misinformation and propaganda. Postcolonial perspectives are mostly interested in the self-reproduction of relations of inequality and dependency through encounters of imperial centers and liminal/stigmatized subalterns submitted to different forms of external rule. In this frame, “Easterness” is a cultural and civilizational phenomenon, a European variant of Orientalism that may be a source of social conservatism and violence. In the meantime, academic debates are marked by a multiplicity of interpretations of the idea of the post-Soviet. It might be a synonym of political dependency (with a lucid allusion to the Russian sphere of influence) and backwardness, or be used in a more neutral way denoting ‘facticity’ of belonging to a group of former Soviet republics. Historical connotations embedded in the concept of the post-Soviet might refer to traumatic experiences of the past (Holodomor in Ukraine, Soviet occupation and deportations in the Baltic states), or they might contain celebratory notes of the successful regaining of independence. In this light, post-Soviet studies are instrumental in understanding the multiple hybridities inherent to political regimes in this part of the world. Institutionally, most of them are mixtures of procedurally democratic yet substantially illiberal features based on archaic social, economic, and

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_002

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Introduction

cultural practices. Ideologically, they fit into the idea of the end of ‘grand narratives’ with the ensuing fluidity and uncertainty of political identifications. (Geo-)culturally, most of post-Soviet countries share in-between identities of liminal subjects located at the intersection of different civilizational, societal, religious, or linguistic spaces and flows. Competing external influences (particularly meaningful for small countries), the high volatility of political processes, multiple political U-turns, and relatively vague political loyalties also contribute to this post-Soviet hybridity. In this book I intend to go further and look for novel and alternative concepts that generate new knowledge and ideas and elucidate new facets of post-Soviet transformative trajectories. Biopolitics is one of these concepts that has a Western academic legacy yet may be adjusted to post-Soviet political milieus as a cognitive instrument that sheds light on those discourses and practices that otherwise remain either invisible or underconceptualized. This volume proposes an innovative contribution to the ongoing vibrant academic debate on biopolitics through a critical engagement with the key concepts of sovereignty, bare life, inclusion, and exclusion, amongst others. The book is designed as an experimental extension of the concept of popular biopolitics to a non-Western region, and – more specifically – as a meeting point of biopolitics/biopower and the realm of post-Soviet studies. It looks at three countries – Estonia, Ukraine, and Russia – from the vantage point of a biopolitical analysis of their transformations after the fall of the Soviet Union. Being a sequel to my co-authored book “Critical Biopolitics of the post-Soviet: from Populations to Nations,” this volume introduces the novel concept of popular biopolitics and relates it to the phenomenon of populism as a pivotal element of political landscapes in the cases of Estonia, Ukraine, and Russia. The recent upsurge of Western biopolitical scholarship in the early 21st century is to a large extent rooted in the experiences of deep racial divides, mass-scale terrorism, and the influx of refugees. In most of non-EU post-Soviet countries, these issues are not at the top of their political agendas. What fuels biopolitics in the post-Soviet space is the ongoing process of nation (re)building/(re)emerging and the ensuing national self-assertion, which makes the idea of the collective national body attractive and well pronounced. But it is exactly at this juncture that major biopolitical issues crop up: how is the nation conceptualized, imagined, and represented? Are all people (the ‘population’, in Foucauldian terms) consensually considered equally belonging to the national self? For instance, some Ukrainians do not see the residents of eastern regions under Russian control as fully belonging to the Ukrainian nation. In Georgia, Muslims often feel ostracized as ‘internal others’ by religious fundamentalists

Introduction

3

who claim that the full-fledged and authentic Georgian identity is feasible only on the basis of the Orthodox faith. In Latvia and Estonia, a significant part of local Russophones build their identities on linguistic and cultural bordering and self-detachment from the mainstream nationhood. Another specificity of the so called post-Soviet space is its in-between position at the intersection of Russia’s neoimperial biopolitics and EU’s biopolitical project. The former is explicitly conservative, the latter is ostensibly liberal (although, of course, the liberal – conservative divide is a major driving force for political battles within some individual member states, such as Poland). This collision of dissimilar biopolitical projects contributes to the politicization of issues of sexual identities, family policies, educational practices, and religion in most post-Soviet countries. One of the usual criticisms of biopolitics is the alleged vastness of the concept along with its potential projection into almost all spheres of human sociality. The persistence of this critical argument in academic literature forces scholars of biopolitics to more rigorously define the term. Accordingly, the first chapter of this book explains how the terms biopolitics and popular biopolitics will be used to enrich the field of populism studies. The chapter starts with a theoretical engagement with the existent scholarship on biopolitics, opening it up to the concepts of performativity and interdiscursivity that lay ground for the introduction of popular biopolitics as the core concept of the book. This chapter discusses how popular biopolitics resonates in the current discussions on liberalism, postliberalism, and illiberalism, and how it may be helpful in unpacking the cultural foundations of the phenomenon of populism. In one interpretation, biopolitics is referred to as a concept that explains various impacts “of the physiology of the body on political conduct” (Paltrinieri 2017). In other words, to understand politics, one needs to have some knowledge in biology, since, according to this argument, political behavior is shaped by human instincts for power and domination by sexualities and gender hierarchies. We consider this view excessively linear and unilateral and see more sense in looking at biopolitics from the viewpoint of structural interconnections between two reciprocal processes. One is the inclusion of such aspects of human lives as family relations, health care, reproductive behavior, and sexual preferences into the sphere of political calculations and agendas. Another is the “diffusion of power relationships in each and every aspect of” (Deleixhe 2019, 649) individual and collective lives. Along these lines, biopolitics implies the saturation of political discourses with bodily and corporeal arguments that are reconceptualized from matters of biology to identity issues and the simultaneous projection of power into the most intimate spheres of people’s lives. The biopolitical interventions are meant “to rationally catego-

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Introduction

rize, influence, control, and direct the somatic (physical/biological) character of human existence in the name of nurturing that somatic realm” (Haskaj 2018, 1156). The inevitable result of the administration of human bodies is differentiation of lives as objects of political management. The ideas of pastoral power (Foucault 2007) and somatic sovereignty are illustrative of this interpretation of biopolitics. In this book, these concepts are mainly applied to Russia to illustrate the autocratic devolution of Putin’s regime. Along Foucauldian lines, pastoral power, with its explicitly religious roots, is a hybrid phenomenon; it contains techniques of individualization that makes it compatible with governmentality, yet in the meantime, it also embraces a totalitarian potential that is dominant in the specific Russian case. Other countries with a strong presence of pastoral power – such as Poland or Georgia – illustrate this ambiguity too; yet in the context of Estonia, one of the least religious countries in Europe, this concept seems to be less meaningful. As for somatic sovereignty, this concept implies a regime of national belonging grounded in the symbolic linkages between bodies and territories. Again, as in the case of pastoral power, the concept of somatic sovereignty might be placed in many different contexts. In Russia, it may signify an “organic”, naturalized version of sovereignty, while in the Ukrainian context, it may signal popular resistance to Russia-inflicted violence in Donbas and Crimea. Biopolitics may be understood also from the vantage point of the mutually constitutive nature of discourses on life and politics. In this vein, biopolitics denotes a particular type of relations of gravitation between individual and collective lives of human beings, in all their physicality on the one hand, and issues of public politics, including various forms of control and regulations on the other. Thus, biopolitics embraces the whole gamut of interconnections between human lives and the political sphere, as well as between different categorizations of human bodies and understandings of politics and power. Biopolitics is to be seen as an inherently intertextual and intersubjective concept that requires a constant dialogue and communication between multiple conceptualizations of life and politics. Therefore, it is central for biopolitical research to understand how the life-related issues of corporeality, sexuality, or healthcare change the domain of politics, and how political interventions transform, diversify, and reshuffle the extant conceptions of life in all its diversity. Scholarly engagement with biopolitics thus requires addressing two mutually constitutive questions: why do discourses about life necessitate correlative references to politics? And, why would political agendas and debates appeal to a set of rather intimate and highly sensitive issues that otherwise could be detached from the political realm?

Introduction

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Each country to be studied in this book has its own specificity when it comes to the biopolitical functioning of the state and its impact upon the political process. In Russia, the constant interventions of the state in the sphere of private lives – by defining what is a “normal family,” “normal adoption,” “normal education” – make politics more and more repressive and autocratic. Correspondingly, the Russian bios (politically qualified life) is constructed along the lines of loyalty to the state and service to the nation. In Ukraine (as well as previously in Georgia), Russia-supported separatism has made the state face the biopolitical challenges exemplified by masses of internally displaced persons, issues of citizenship, and measures to reach the populations of break-away territories. All this drastically changed Ukrainian political landscape and exposed a highly securitized and in the meantime vulnerable vision of bios. In Estonia, the EU refugee crisis of 2015 has created a fertile ground for the rapid growth of local right-wing populism that has significantly transformed the Estonian political market. In parallel to that, Estonian populist politicians launched a campaign to conservatively redefine the institution of marriage and lambast the local LGBTQ community. Despite this variety of biopolitical interventions and instruments, they all transform political agendas and change the functions of the state and the policies of the government. Unlike those scholars who deem that “life itself and politics become each other” (Chang 2012, 216), I argue that biopolitics might be understood as a name of the terrain where political concepts are resignified and infused with meanings implicitly or explicitly related to the bodily and corporeal life. A good example is the concept of sovereignty that reappeared in the post-Soviet political scene not as the Schmittian model of the will-based and unaccountable decisionism and the distinction between friends and enemies, but rather as a set of biopolitical practices of caretaking and control, which sustains the argument of the biopolitical nature of national sovereignty. In other words, as their main political function, public authorities are supposed to protect people’s lives, which corresponds with societal demands. As the Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito (2015) argued, the major “source of political legitimacy today seems to be the preservation and implementation of life.” This approach reconceptualizes sovereignty as belonging “to the vocabulary of biopolitics” (Luisetti 2011, 49), and as “a territorialized technology of (b)ordering bodies” (Nayar 2014, 133). In this vein, some authors speak about “a biopolitical reprogramming of sovereignty” (Jaeger 2010, 53). In other words, “sovereign power has the means and authority to draw lines or to distinguish between different types of subjectivities. It has power to determine and allocate someone a place inside or outside of community and, therefore, to grant

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Introduction

or deprive that person of their political rights…Sovereign power, as a power which makes the decision as to who counts as a subject and who does not, is precisely this line-drawing politics that includes, excludes or places beings in-between, in the zone of indistinction” (Zevnik 2009, 84–85). As seen from this perspective, the biopolitical landscapes in all three countries to be studied in this book differ from each other. In the Russian biopolitical context, the Putin-centric national sovereignty transforms into a neoimperial concept of the Russian world with its heavy emphasis on “protecting” Russophone minorities in neighbouring countries. Estonia and Ukraine are targets of this biopolitical projection, with its clear securitization effects. By the same token, both Ukraine and Estonia – each country in its own way – face the challenge of integrating not only Russian-speaking but also politically pro-Russian groups of population into their national collective bodies through overcoming the extant – though often invisible – lines of distinction. Liberalism and illiberalism are another example of a biopolitical resignification of political notions. The French political philosopher Michel Foucault tried to explicate biopower as a part of the liberal order (Foucault 2010), while his Italian colleague Giorgio Agamben not less convincingly unpacked the totalitarian potential of biopower (Agamben 2005). Agamben’s focus on the illiberal momentum is different from the liberal reading of biopolitics stipulating that “the police are not a punishing mechanism attempting to create docile citizens, but a liberal mechanism designed to protect” (Johnson 2014, 13) against threats. This explains a collision between Foucault’s interpretation maintaining “that the incorporation of the biological into relations of power supersedes and disperses the spectacular domination of a singular sovereign” (Hopkins 2019, 955) and Agamben’s conflation of biopolitics with sovereign power. Biopolitics as understood by Agamben may conceptualize political power as oppressive and violent force, a type of material or physical possession that should be protected for the sake of ‘national survival,’ yet biopolitics as understood by Foucault may also unveil multiple facets of freedom and democracy as key components of the liberal rule. In the meantime, on the outset biopolitics was not conceived as a liberal form of power – what Foucault tried to do is to inscribe biopolitics into the hegemonic liberal order. Yet relations of biopolitics and liberalism remain tricky and controversial. On the one hand, within the logic of liberalism biopower as a “productive force” gets more space to function. The concept of “liberal life” is based on the ”principled individualism that combines the blessings of liberty with the burdens of personal responsibility” (Galston 2020, 16). On the other hand, biopolitics “does not deal with individual bodies at all… either as a bearer of rights and liberties or as a body that requires train-

Introduction

7

ing” (MacLellan 2018, 922). Liberalism therefore is not “merely understood as a political attempt to limit the power of the State by recourse to individual rights. Instead, it is defined as a new way of governing that tries to develop, discipline and control individual liberties” (Renault 2006, 162). Foucault’s vision of biopolitics is grounded in “a gradual increase in the complexity of power… resulting in the coexistence of its various forms” (Lafferson 2017, 30). More specifically, the “disciplines of the body” and “regulations of the population” constitute two major poles around which the organization of power over life is deployed (Ott, Bean and Marin 2016, 348). In this light, the cleavage between biopolitics and anatomopolitics (understood by Foucault as disciplinary instruments applied to individual human bodies) can be reinterpreted as a distinction between the normalization of collective bodies and the reclaiming of individual bodies. Therefore, anatomopolitics might be regarded as a powerful source of liberal practices and attitudes grounded in the individual possession of physical bodies as opposed to the view of human bodies as a public resource. This seems to be tantamount to “affirmative biopolitics … based upon a politics of life (biopotenza, in Esposito’s terms) as opposed to a politics over life” (Campbell 2006). In other words, from a biopolitical perspective, the liberal/illiberal divide corresponds to distinctions between individual and collective bodies. Foucault approached population mostly through a technical (numerical or statistical) lens and payed less attention to individual bodies. Arguably, liberalism is a more pertinent reference point for anatomopolitics, a concept that implies and leaves much room for the values of the individual body as opposed to collective corporeality that is always punitive and oppressive. Anatomopolitics may take different forms of resistance and contestation. Some of them reinterpret Agamben’s idea of bare life in a positive sense, and make individual – and often literally naked – bodies loci of radical disagreement and protest (actionist artists Piotr Pavlensky and Katrin Nenasheva in Russia, the Pussy Riot band, or the FEMEN group in Ukraine serve as good examples of that). Within this cultural frame, the body in all its nakedness symbolizes freedom and challenges biopower as it is operated or hijacked by the state. However, many authors recognize the totalitarian potential of biopolitics. “The old liberal subject of the Hobbesian body politic dissolves into the flesh of the world. Life is no longer conceived in terms of individual bodies, but as a world flesh. All living things must be included in the unity of life” (Watson 2012). Historical references are constitutive for this reasoning: “Nazism clarifies the ways that death is sought to secure life within liberal political orders… Both forms of political thought, however, anchor their concepts in a sacrificial relation where we give up some biological aspect of humanity in the

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name of health and security” (Barkan 2012, 87). In a different interpretation, biopower in many respects reminds the “unconditional right a father possesses over the lives and, if he so desires, the deaths of his sons” (Cisney 2008, 171). Thus, “the nation and its citizens become a whole, whose welfare passes to the state, invoking the inauguration of what Foucault calls the modern biopolitical state… (B)iology continued to serve as a social weapon, providing a set of tools and arguments that allow either the direct control of populations (through sterilisation or biological warfare, for example) or their indirect control by reinforcing particular visions of the proper social order” (Grinceri 2017, 7–8). In this book, along Agamben’s lines, I treat liberalism and illiberalism not as “di-chotomies” but as “di-polarities” (Agamben 2004, 612) in the sense that they are the two poles of a larger biopolitical spectrum. On its liberal flank one finds managerial, administrative, and technical practices of governmentality while the opposite flank is marked by the prevalence of totalizing practices of surveillance, control, bans, and restrictions. The space in-between these two poles is full of hybrid biopolitical practices shifting from one position to another. As an example, political concerns may shift “from law and legislation to the classification, regulation, and management of biological existence; from the juridical preoccupation with sovereignty to the security and welfare of populations” (Jaeger 2010, 52). This corresponds to the Foucauldian explanation of how European disciplinary institutions were gradually replacing the repertoire of direct coercive methods of control with more nuanced and “soft” tools of surveillance. Yet in many post-Soviet countries, the trajectory looks dissimilar; their ruling regimes tend to substitute politico-ideological instruments with the explicit and mass scale application of brutal force against their opponents and dissenters. Russia under Vladimir Putin, Belarus under Aliaksandr Lukashenka, Ukraine under Viktor Yanukovich, as well regimes in Central Asia illustrate this trend. The illiberalism of these regimes boils down to flexing physical muscles, repressing demonstrators and protestors, and making harm to their physical bodies. This type of authoritarian populism might be discussed through a concept of ‘carceral state’ devoid of explicit ideological features and grounded in corporeal understanding of politics as a battlefield between ‘strong’ and well-armed bodies of the police and the ‘weak’ and armless bodies of the opposition. The dominance of this vision reduces political struggles to the issues of survival, escape, incarceration, or release from jail. In this space of biopolitical violence, there is very little, if any, room for political debates on matters of essence, which fully suits the power holders. Another shift was identified by some scholars as a reduction of liberal rights and freedoms to a biological layer (Campbell 2006). Some authors assume that

Introduction

9

“life is increasingly viewed through the lens of biomedical logics” (Krupar and Ehlers 2021, 5), which decreases the appeal of “higher Causes” (political and ideological projects) and puts in the limelight “life purely immanent to itself” (Huang 2011, 57). The COVID-19 pandemic is intensely discussed through this lens. The multiplicity of concepts mentioned above explains the strong interest in political functioning of language shown by the two major figures in the realm of biopower – Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. For both, the linkages between human bodies and language are constitutive. Biopolitical concepts are not simply facts of life – they are embedded in discourses, narratives, and imageries. The focus on the linguistic dimension is important for approaching the field of biopolitics as a semiotic space of meaning-making. Those meanings might come from everywhere, and not necessarily from the established academic knowledge. They might be inspired, in particular, by vernacular texts and poetic interpretations that discuss the “metaphysical sphere of relations with God” along with “human and heavenly spheres” (Campbell 2006, 238). This focus on discourses, narratives, and visuals is helpful for studying the appearance of new biopolitical discourses, including those having an explicit or implicit populist profile. This so far understudied intersection of biopolitics and populism is of particular interest for this book. It is through the prism of biopolitical theorizing that this book looks at populism, an inherently Western concept that is not often projected into non-Western contexts. It is a part of the current debate on democratic backsliding or a global crisis (‘dedemocratization’, ‘de-consolidation’) of liberal democracy. Populism can also be deployed within the controversy of post-truth, focusing on the manipulative tools and techniques of power – from political storytelling about nativism and traditionalism to susceptibility to conspiracy theories. Part of the posttruth debate as well, populism produces a combination of victimization and a spirit of strength, which makes it a divisive force in enhancing social and political cleavages in the affected societies rather than assuaging them. The riddle of populism as a (bio)political concept lies in its inherent proclivity of transcending traditional lines of distinctions between ideologies, regimes, and political positionalities. Indeed, populism can have a left- or right-wing background, can exist within democratic and non-democratic settings, and be a source of both pro-establishment and anti-elite discourses. It may come in authoritarian, totalitarian, and democratic versions (Selg and Ventsel 2020, 187) and be sustained by figures from social margins or from technocratic decision-making circles.

10

Introduction

Populism is a non-linear phenomenon; it is propelled and enhanced by a particular type of events that require a new look at ‘the people’ and the idea of sovereignty. This explains an interpretation of populism as a performative phenomenon that is part of the global economy of entertainment and affection; its cultural and emotional components are commodified through practices of media consumerism. The populist “society of the spectacle” requires publicity (as opposed to technocratic decision making behind closed doors of corporate institutions, parliaments, or governmental agencies), which allows populist discourses and imageries to replicate and reproduce themselves in a variety of discursive forms. The unpacking of populism from a biopolitical perspective implies an engagement with scholarly debates on sovereignty. Two interconnected concepts – sovereign power and biopower – are central in this respect, regardless of how the liaison between them is established in one school of thought or another. The debate between the Foucauldian detachment of the biopolitical realm from the sphere of sovereign power and Agamben’s theorizing of sovereignty as embedded in biopolitical instruments of power is well known. It not only pits the two philosophies of power against each other but also forms a vast space where instruments of sovereignty and biopower compete, overlap, and intermingle with each other. Within this context, the phenomenon of biopolitical populism might be interpreted as expansion of law into the sphere of life. Examples are policies of populist parties in power aimed at giving legal definitions to family and marriage, banning or restricting abortion, or preventing immigration. Against this backdrop, populism can be approached as a political phenomenon aimed to rethink and reinforce sovereignty through its reinterpretation as an inherently biopolitical construct. The subjectivities of populist actors are grounded in the ability to foster ‘people’s sovereignty’ as opposed to a sovereignty of the elite. Populism is a particular mode of projection of national sovereignty onto people’s bodies, which, for example, in the specific case of Russia was conducive to the narrative of “sexual sovereignty.” Apparently, there are “no guarantees that the body politics of popular sovereignty will be democratic. Nothing prevents the analogical substantiation of the oppressed from being just another form of domination” (Woodard-Lehman 2011, 24). The mass-scale intrusion of the broad set of bodily and corporeal issues into political discourses creates fertile ground for different manifestations of populism. Of course, concerns about biopolitical issues (family relations, health and medicine, or sexual identities) have always been integrated into political agendas, yet the specificity of contemporary populism is the constitutive centrality of these issues for populist self-identification. It is typical, for example,

Introduction

11

that an Estonian party named EKRE defines its political mission as advocacy for a ‘normal family’ and genetic interpretation of identity, rather than through economic, financial, or institutional characteristics. For the populist discursive style appropriated by some political leaders, it is usual to extend politics to different forms of regulating human behavior – from recommendations on nutrition and alimentation (Alyaksandr Lukashenka in Belarus) to protecting children from ‘sexualization’ (Andrzej Duda in Poland). In this respect, in the “populist mobilization of the collective flesh,” the people are a corporeal category (Fidotta, Neves and Serpe 2020). The infusion of biopolitical meanings into the sphere of sovereignty has led to the differential “treatment of segments of the population … thus intensifying the fragmentation of citizenship already pre-formed by social distinctions of race, ethnicity, gender, class, and region” (Ong 2005, 85). Of particular interest is the constitutive ability of sovereign power to produce bare life, which implies a reconceptualization of the people and the nation: “Modern sovereignty brings forth, even if implicitly, the homo sacer or the sacred man – a human being who is reduced to bare-life, no longer protected by any legal and civil rights” (Zannettino 2012, 6). Therefore, “exclusion is a necessary part of the reproductive mechanism of sovereign power” (Richter 2018), which sharpens attention to “forms of agency available to individuals and peoples that have been rendered homo sacer by a politics of ‘inclusive exclusion” (Bignall and Svirsky 2012, 5). Populism quite aptly capitalizes on these differentiations and fragmentations within societies through promoting different forms of “naturalising the political,” including the idea of “utility of bodies” (Zannettino 2012, 8), which is linked to – and produces – nationalist and racialized biopolitics (Duarte 2005) that expand populist agendas through constructing a discursive chain that integrates into one political logic traditionalism, conservatism, ethnic identity, nationalism, nativism, race, and sexuality. Populism also capitalizes on the essentializing and reductionist elements in the biopolitical thinking: “Race and sexuality are both apparatuses deployed for the management of population by categorising, disciplining, and regulating its constituent subjects” (Repo 2013, 2). It is exactly this reductionism that populism heavily explores as a political tool and a power technique that blurs the lines between experts and non-experts and educated and non-educated citizens and allows for an appeal to everyone’s experiences, perceptions, and attitudes to bodies, sexualities, and corporeal practices. This type of reduction often comes at a price of intentionally disregarding what political scientists seem to be professionally proud of – the expertise in distinguishing democracies from non-democracies. Some of biopolitical thinkers transcend this distinction by, for example, plac-

12

Introduction

ing the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz and the US detention center in Guantanamo in a single analytical frame. These discursive transgressions might be approached through Agamben’s lens that unveils interconnections between democracy and totalitarianism, two political forms that not only cannot be neatly distinguished from one another but also have a ‘hidden connection’ between them. It is not incidental that populism became particularly prominent in countries whose democratic features were compromised by totalizing trends in politics and/in society. Populism explores the inscription of life “in the structure of liberal democratic politics” (Vrasti 2011, 7) with its both individualizing and totalizing effects, and further shifts political debate from the issues of democracy and liberalism to the safety of human bodies, along with regimes of care and belonging. These introductory remarks explain why I do not start approaching populism with specific actors, be it parties or political leaders who are conventionally known as populists. Instead, I start with popular culture as a major generator of populist meanings and then look at how cultural arguments are translated, interpreted, rearticulated, appropriated, hijacked, instrumentalized, and converted into political claims by populist power contenders and holders. This process of translation necessarily implies a strong performative component in the sense of multiple iterations of and references to cultural forms and practices. In line with this approach, such power holders as, for example, Berlusconi or Trump could be viewed as operators of cultural phantasies (Pine 2020), including myths, conspiratorial storylines, and other forms of imagination. The importance of popular culture as a source of inspiration for the populist discursive style is particularly salient due to the populist disdain to rationalist type of knowledge. The relativization of knowledge, or its deficit – in such cases as the COVID-19 pandemic – creates additional spaces for non-academic and non-scientific narratives as constitutive bases for populist mythologies, presuppositions, superstitions, and fantasies, as opposed to the Foucauldian world where power relations are determined and conditioned by knowledge. Populism challenges the liberal idea of self-regulated and “self-governing life” (Milbank 2008, 136) grounded in the mutually constitutive nexus between human freedom and rationality. Against this backdrop, popular culture can be approached as an “assemblage of techniques and technologies of affective event amplification through which the cultural and corporeal logics of intervention come to resonate emotionally” (Carter and MacCormack 2006, 242). Not incidentally, many populist leaders call for “fighting” over their ideas in the domain of popular culture (YouTube 2019). Therefore, images produced or

Introduction

13

appropriated by populists “can teach as much as a treaty, a scientific paper, or book knowledge” (Ramel 2018, 364). In this respect, populism represents a specific form of a biopolitical utopia, another effort at normalizing human bodies through prescriptive, stimulating, or restrictive interventions (Byers and Stapleton 2015, 1–12). In a similar interpretation, populism turns “into a simulacrum, i.e., something whose reality is judged by its representation rather than the other way around… Its strategies are improvised rather than doctrinal; the object populism names is shifting” (Rajagopal 2020). From a cultural perspective, one may claim that populism embodies the “rapid and repetitive generation of sameness as it reproduces itself across every boundary that it encounters through the mechanisms of transgression, analogy, and contagion. If populism contains this drive to homogeneity and sameness within the body politic, then media populism extends that into the realm of representation, both at the level of technology and fantasy” (Ghosh 2020). In the meantime, of course, there is an endless variety of national variations of biopolitical dynamics that fosters and boosts populist discourses, and this is exactly what the three country-based chapters aim to tackle. The second chapter of the book is about Estonia, one of the three Baltic states that share this post-Soviet legacy and in the meantime is a part of the trans-Atlantic West. In Estonia, popular biopolitical landscapes are discussed as related to different manifestations of ‘bare life,’ a concept that comes from political philosophy yet has strong imprints in the literature, cinema, and other genres of modern culture. The chapter describes the conflicted relationship with migration, immigration, and re-settlement in Estonia and seeks to claim that issues pertaining to biopolitical agendas might be deployed in both liberal and illiberal political contexts. Next in Chapter Three comes Ukraine, a country that went through numerous (bio)political upheavals and remains divided over key issues concerning national belonging. The chapter exposes Ukraine’s conflicted relations with the West: the desire to belong to the liberal core and an aversion to the hesitance of Western institutions to accept Ukraine. The existing and emerging cleavages in the Ukrainian biopolitical community are grounded in different interpretations of security, inclusion, and exclusion, as well as different symbolization of life and death performatively manifested in mass culture and in political activism. The chapter on Russia, which is the next object of research, is heavily focused on how the sovereign power exemplified by the Kremlin uses popular biopolitics in solidifying its centrality to the Russian political scene. The Russian case is also illuminating of how biopower may be inscribed into

14

Introduction

state-sponsored entertainment industry with an obvious ‘patriotic’ tilt, and how medicalized knowledge may be utilized as a tool aimed at strengthening a regime’s legitimacy. The Russian case is also meant to illustrate a critique of liberalism that comes not from the critical thinking of left-wing democratic circles but from an authoritarian populist regime that blends masculinity, religion, and Stalinism. This rhetoric, however, paradoxically finds some consonance with European populist discourses that are largely grounded in the logic of pastoral power. All these cases cover popular/niche culture, but they do it differently. The Estonian chapter makes many references to art and popular culture, the Russian chapter deals with (bio)politicized cultural products of a bike gang, and the Ukrainian chapter centers on a President – a former comedian. These case studies are connected by the discursive method, contestation of the body (in a broad sense), performativity, and intertextuality. All three case studies document the contested nature of sovereignty issues, efforts to rewrite and reconceptualize relationships between the majority and minority, and continuous efforts to reinterpret the past. These similarities can be used as a framework that allow the book to draw general lessons from all three cases, showing how discourses around identity evolve into populism. The concluding chapter juxtaposes and compares these three cases, and on this basis, it engages in an empirically informed discussion on the linkage between popular biopolitics and populism. It reiterates that popular biopolitics is the main conceptual framework for this analysis. As the overarching argument, this frame is effective and operational for studying populism, a phenomenon that is deeply rooted in both textual and visual products of contemporary mass culture that appeal to the people as the national body and generate political debates along the lines of biopolitical belonging and bordering. I argue that the optics offered by popular biopolitics is instrumental in identifying and unpacking certain facets of populist discourses and imageries that otherwise could have remained unnoticed, understudied, or misunderstood, including the drawing of the lines of political division through the references to what might be dubbed biopolitical normalization of the population. In the book, I develop this argument into a (re)definition of biopopulism as a discursive practice that draws an important divide between authentic and fully-fledged “people,” on the one hand, and groups that are not consensually considered as legitimately belonging to the national political community-inthe-making on the other. Biopopulism could underlie the revitalization of nationalism in forms of “biopolitical sovereignty” with the advent of “biocracy,” a state ruled and governed by the imperatives of biopower. Such power is aimed at fundamentally controlling human lives, replacing the self-interested

Introduction

15

liberal subject with the so-called “biohuman.” The biopoliticization of populism might take radical forms of exclusion, denial of belonging, and even de-humanization, leading to consequences not only for the three selected countries, but in a much broader sense, for the current debate on the new global order and its political subjects.

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Chapter 1

Popular Biopolitics: A Theoretical Outline In this chapter I briefly outline the current state of academic debate on biopolitics, introduce the novel concept of popular biopolitics, explain its relevance for populism studies, and discuss how the three country-based case studies contribute to unpacking, developing and contextualizing the biopolitical scholarship. This framing chater explains how the subsequent cases illustrate popular biopolitics and its connections to various versions of post-Soviet populism.

1.1

Biopolitics: A Short Introduction

Generally, biopolitics shows us “transformations in the logic of power” (Mavelli, 2017, p. 496), yet it may do so differently. One of the original interpretations of biopolitics was grounded in the ontological assumption that political behavior is biologically conditioned. Until now, some biopolitical scholars believe that at a certain point “political order begins to mirror the biological order by turning not to law … but to extra-legal forms of legitimacy and to violence” (DeCaroli, 2017, p. 210). This logic equates politics with a biological necessity to survive, and consequently, biopolitics denotes a set of governance tools and techniques that “rely on data collection and analysis precisely because the target of power is an aggregated body, a population, that requires efforts to organize and sustain it” (Ettlinger, 2011, p. 546). In this vein, the ontological crux of biopolitics ought to be understood as policy practices, strategies, and rationalities that justify various mechanisms and tools of control over human bodies (Takacs, 2017, pp. 8–9), which necessarily implies biopolitical othering: “distinction between noble and non-noble is not a social, educational, or class issue, but rather an opposition of pure and impure, and therefore an ontological issue” (Forti, 2006, p. 20). Along the lines of Foucauldian scholarship, these presumptions may be considered excessively reductionist and essentialist. Arguably, life “is not an ontological category, but an expression of changing regimes of practices that are historical and political in formation. Life can be expressed, thought, constituted, and secured in many different ways. Discourses on life are subject to revision on account of our capacities for political engagement with the problematic of life and what distinguishes it” (Reid, 2012, p. 155). Due to

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_003

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the resultant variability of the conceptualizations of biopolitics, this analysis does not presume a pre-existing knowledge of what the biopolitical field is. It rather assumes that it is biopolitics itself that needs to be conceptualized, contextualized and categorized. Following the logic of “plastic ontology [that] suggests that material life is itself defined as perpetually transforming and changing” (Mercier, 2019, p. 117), one may argue that the so-called “biopolitical turn” in social sciences is not about explaining the sphere of politics through the physical and bodily characteristics of the population but mainly about explicating the process of subjectification or transformation of human bodies into “embodied subjects” (Binkley, 2018, p. 100) central for political calculations and actions. This elucidates the centrality of the question of “how populations are produced” (McCormack & Salmenniemi, 2016, p. 9), shaped, and reinvented through different regimes of biopolitical belonging (McVeigh, 2013). Indeed, in the absence of a meaningful biopolitical component academic analysis of “the people” remains cognitively limited and usually boils down to electoral statistics, language, or ethnicity (Pikulicka-Wilczewska & Sakwa, 2016). A biopolitical approach allows to look beyond these traditional objects of political inquiry and discern novel dimensions to – and triggers of – the mechanisms of power. The biopolitical knowledge, as it is produced by and discussed in academic literature, revolves around two big questions: how sovereign power governs human bodies and how human beings themselves bear responsibility for their lives, including health, stamina, nutrition, sports and leisure, etc. It is at their intersection that a politically highly relevant question crops up – how to find a proper balance between policies of protection and care, on the one side, and control and domination, on the other. The biopolitical scholarship offers multiple perspectives in this regard. For Michel Foucault, biopower is a set of incentivizing tools and techniques of governing (and thus disciplining and surveilling) human bodies through enticing the population to take care and responsibility for their lives. For Giorgio Agamben, biopolitics is about sovereign power’s production of what he calls ‘bare lives’ and the ensuing encamping as a permanent ‘state of exception’. From a practical perspectives, states have to choose between the ‘bare life’ theories of Giorgio Agamben or the ‘social care’ theories of Michel Foucault; Agamben argues that states will provide minimal social security and maximum disciplinary powers while Foucault presumes that if a population becomes aware of its power, it can radically transform a state through the everyday administration of social care so people can better take control of life or death issues (Brennan, 2020).

Popular Biopolitics: A Theoretical Outline

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This book’s contribution to the extant biopolitical scholarship consists of three steps. First, I propose the idea of biopolitical performativity as a general frame of analysis of cultural manifestations and exposures of the key categories of biopolitics, and as a springboard to further theorizing. Second, I introduce and discuss the core concept of the book – popular biopolitics, coined by analogy with the existing notion of popular geopolitics, and open its cognitive potential. Third, I establish a link between the various conceptualizations of popular biopolitics and the phenomenon of populism that I use as a key reference point in the three country-based case studies.

1.2

Performativity and Popular Biopolitics

As one can infer from the discussion above, biopolitics may be viewed as a means of stabilizing relations of power through control and regulations over human bodies and creating biopolitical communities as social groups cemented by shared attitudes to the bodily life. In this way, biopolitics implies the power to define what ‘good life’ is as well as to differentiate it from the negative otherness. Yet, there is another side of the argument; biopolitics may be disruptive and may dislocate extant hierarchies of power relations. It is in this context that performativity can be approached. The British linguist J. L. Austin has differentiated performative speech acts – as action-oriented and containing relations of power (Edkins, 1999, p. 15) – from constative that simply make statements, either true or false. “The performative does not describe something that exists outside of and prior to language, as it is claimed the constative does. Instead, it produces or transforms a situation, and it involves notions of force” (Edkins, 1999, p. 76). Performativity therefore requires an “expressive self” (Ostiguy, 2017, p. 74) whose subjectivity is established or transformed through image production and discourse making. One may argue that “biopolitical theorizing is often performative” (Bell, 2015), and the other way around – that performative participation is “unescapably biopolitical… [since it] seeks to create transgressive possibilities, where different people might come together to create different ways of living within and against entanglements of power” (Grove & Pugh, 2015, p. 8). In this respect, the country-based case studies in this book unveil a variety of performativities that unfold in the field of memory politics (Estonia), the commercial media industry (Ukraine), and a state-patronized neoimperialism (Russia). Performativity, as applied to research on biopolitics, seems to be a good vantage point for a critique of the ‘agency-centric approach’ that in the con-

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text of a biopolitical research has many limitations, since “the ‘who’ of power and hegemony is … indeterminable – power cannot be owned, appropriated, or seized” (Dittmer & Gray, 2010, p. 1665). In this regard, biopolitics “produces subjectivities” (Murtola, 2014, p. 845), but the whole phenomenon of biopolitics can’t be reduced to specific holders of biopolitical resources. Therefore, no subjectivity ‘belongs’ to the realm of biopolitics: subjectivity is never a starting point (as was taken for granted by most traditional Western philosophies), but always the result of, on the one hand, categorizations that precede the level of the individual being, and, on the other hand, the ritual repetition of these categories. (Vlieghe, 2014, p. 1022) The idea of performativity challenges the understanding of biopolitical practices as being attached to a specific type of actorship or regime; from the performative perspective, they are always a matter of political acceptance or rejection, legitimation, and delegitimation. It is from here that the argument of multiple epistemologies of biopolitics comes from, leaving much room for different forms of biopolitical discourses and imageries to unfold (Vogelmann, 2018): there is no obvious agent, no clear location of action or illocution or responsibility, no Sovereign subject who speaks. The network is diffuse; its power is transitive, perlocutionary; its effects performative. (Murray, 2016, p. 487) Arguably, as a performative phenomenon biopolitics manifests itself through narratives and storylines, rather than through substantive and politically coherent strategies. This approach is rooted in the concept of performativity and, more specifically, in its interpretation by Judith Butler and her multiple followers. In borrowing the idea of performativity from Butler’s philosophy of power, I approach identities as “cultural fictions” (McKinlay, 2010, p. 235) that “can never be securely pinned down. They must be seen as fundamentally contingent, stabilized only through the performative acts that attempt, unsteadily, to fix them as integral markings of our existence” (Segal, 2008, p. 381). Guy Debord’s ‘society of the spectacle’ seems to be a good match to this theorizing. Since political identities emerge “as neither foundational grounds nor fully expressed products” (Youngblood Jackson, 2004, p. 675), they are recurrently re-signified through rituals of repetition and reiteration (Nelson, 1999, p. 338). In this analysis, the author assumes that to qualify as performative, a social

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action (a speech act, a political of cultural gesture) should be “repeated,” “reenacted,” and “re-experienced” within the already established set of meanings (Stoller, 2010, p. 102). To add some semiotic perspective to this argument, one may argue that “every sign can be cited, and consequently it can break with every given context, and engender infinitely new contexts” (Lloyd, 2007, p. 131). This presupposes that performative actions require publicity (as opposed to technocratic decision-making behind the closed doors of corporate institutions, parliaments, or governmental agencies), that they should be replicable and reproducible in a variety of discursive forms, and that they should engender a certain narrative of resistance to – and subversion of – the dominant discourses of power, either domestically (Estonia, Ukraine) or internationally (Russia). “Reiteration is compulsory, but agency lies in the possibility of resignification, i.e., the reworking of the discourse through which subject effects are produced” (Laffey, 2000). Thus, biopolitics creates political relations that entail “repertoires of embodied, symbolically mediated performances” (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014, p. 36), involving ‘actors, audiences, stages, scripts, and mise-en-scene” (Arato & Cohen, 2017, p. 286). Of paramount importance is that “discourses are performative to the extent that they co-produce what they name and “claim to represent” (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014, p. 389): they directly appeal to the people, skipping normal/regular institutional practices, and in the meantime they resignify the concept of the people in opposition to a variety of newly invented internal and/or external ‘others’. In other words, as seen from the performative lens, “the people do not exist independently of the claims to represent the people” (Thomassen, 2019, p. 331). In this vein indeed “the definition/naming of the ‘people’ is a performative operation” (Robinson & Milne, 2017, p. 404) that is inherent to populist subjectivity. It is from this vantage point that the idea of popular biopolitics might be introduced and explained. What lies on the surface is that popular biopolitics may express and manifest itself through linguistic metaphors (Binkley, 2018) as parts of political conceptualizations; thus, “metaphors enable us to think about states in terms of their bodies, motives, and health” (Drulák, 2006, p. 502). Yet of course, popular biopolitics is not only about the saturation of popular music, cinema, or theater with multiple allusions to and cultural parallels with the corporeal life. Drawing on the concept of “popular nationalism” (Koch, 2013, p. 47), I approach popular biopolitics as an epistemic instrument that allows us to peer into an endless variety of cultural practices in one way or another related to the political existence/functioning of human bodies and their inclusion into the discourses on power. In this respect, popular biopolitics ought to be seen as a specific source of political relations grounded in

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the power of cultural producers, performers and authors to fill the space of “biopolitical aesthetics” (Whitehall, 2013) between signified and signifiers with context-relevant meanings. Usually, art works individualize biopolitical experiences and make them closer to what Foucault dubbed anatomopolitics – physical characteristics of particular bodies as key elements of individual strategies of life enhancement. Yet in the meantime, when touching upon the issues of national belonging, they reveal strong biopolitical characteristics through making generalizations applicable to the entire collective body of a certain group, the entire nation (Ukraine, Estonia) or an empire (Russia). The cognitive crux of popular biopolitics is an extension, deepening and more specific re-focusing of our earlier co-authored studies on critical biopolitics. Two disciplines are particularly inspiratory in setting the academic scene for popular biopolitics. First, the idea echoes the sub-discipline of popular geopolitics (Makarychev & Yatsyk, 2014) that focuses on vernacular, nonprofessional and often under-conceptualized discourses and imageries of territories, centers, borders and other elements of the spatial order (Harby 2017). Popular geopolitics and popular biopolitics can be seen as mutually translatable concepts: for example, zombie cinema, which may be discussed as an inherent part of popular geopolitics (Saunders, 2012), may in the meantime be approached from the perspective of popular biopolitics which is instrumental to culturally represent “not just a biopolitics of life or a necropolitics of death, but rather of the grey areas in between” (Fishel & Wilcox, 2017, p. 336). Popular culture gives much food for thought about the geo-/bio-political interlacing; “not only that some random elements of the Third Reich’s politics seem to have survived the ‘downfall’ in the genre of fantasy books, films, and games: rather an analysis of deep structure, narrative logic, rhetoric, and topology in Tolkien’s works reveals in terms of geo- and biopolitics an almost frightening coherence” (Weber, 2005, p. 229). I shall come back to this point when discussing the research agenda of popular biopolitics. By analogy, in discussions about all concepts related to “people” (populism, democracy, etc.) there should be some space for popular biopolitics as a concept denoting the plethora of grass-roots, non-elite (often anti-elite) narratives, symbols and cultural images pertaining to the biological existence of human beings as producers of populist representations related to nationhood and people’s subjectivity. In a similar context, the idea of “popular geoeconomics” was recently discussed as well (Smith 2016). These “popular” narratives might appeal to ordinary citizens who might be ignorant of high politics or misinformed (Christiano, 2015) but who produce and consume a wide range of biopolitically-framed narratives.

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Second, popular biopolitics is one of the possible ways to shift attention from political discourses to the semiotic sphere of imageries and cultural products that constitute a fertile ground for debates on such biopolitically heavy loaded concepts as nationalism, conservatism, and sovereignty. In this respect, this book builds upon our previous research in cultural semiotics that might serve as a source of inspiration for popular biopolitics. In particular, the media play a key role in producing “a new visual language” of biopolitical narrative (Meek, 2015, p. 112), which I discuss in more details in chapters on Russia and Ukraine. Popular biopolitics makes it possible to discern the assemblage of performative – in a wider sense – representations of corporeality and bodily politics that in their totality are conducive to the reformulation of the idea of the ‘people’. In conceptualizing popular biopolitics, one may agree “that ‘the popular’ is a site where ‘the political’ happens – and that ‘the political,’ even in the most narrow sense of the term (i.e., governmental and electoral politics), is deeply invested in ‘the popular’ – the sphere where the (re)definition of the people comes from, with the debate on “who does – and doesn’t – get to count as a person, as a citizen, as someone who belongs, as someone whose life matters, as someone worthy of the state’s protection and of society’s favor” (Rodman, 2016, p. 389). To develop this argument, I argue that popular biopolitics encompasses the sphere where political concepts circulate as verbalized and visualized signs, images and performances: “the agents of biopolitics … are engaged in the production of a performance” (Blencowe, 2010, p. 127). Concomitantly, “there is no identity outside ritual performance. It is only through the enactment of such roles that something like a ‘we’ might come into being. It is only by the performing of these categorizations that they become real and produce our identities” (Vlieghe, 2014, p. 1022). Having said this, popular biopolitics can be defined as an epistemic category that tracks and interprets the whole spectrum of interactive and nonhierarchical relationships between political and academic concepts, on the one hand, and artistic/performative/medialized imageries and literary discourses on the other. Therefore, objects of popular biopolitics – images, performances and representations – ought to be distinguished from academic and political concepts as objects of scholarly discourse on biopower. This distinction makes possible to approach these two categories as signifieds and signifiers, correspondingly. Hence, I am primarily interested to find out how biopolitical concepts developed in the academia and then used in political narratives might be culturally represented through images, symbols, or metaphors. It is this cultural translation – from scholarly and political ideas

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to artistic and aesthetic spheres – that is central in this volume, as it allows us to treat artistic and performative works as spaces where academic concepts interact, interlace, and intertwine with imageries and representations, thus (per)forming intertextual assemblages generative of political momenta.

1.3

Popular Biopolitics and/of Populism

One of the questions to be tackled in this book is how helpful popular biopolitics may be for a better understanding of the phenomenon of populism that has become one of the catchwords in many countries all across Europe. To start untangling this issue, one needs to critically engage with the variety of approaches to populism existing in the academic scholarship. Unlike many other researchers, I do not deem it feasible to define populism as always an anti-elite movement, since many populist leaders are high-ranked politicians, including heads of states. Neither I sign up to an interpretation of populism as an anti-pluralist phenomenon (Müller, 2017, p. 3); as empirical analysis will demonstrate, discourses that might be qualified as nourishing populism may come in a variety of versions and thus may pluralize the political space. Some of the distinctions we have encountered in the literature – such as between “real populists” and “branded populists” (Müller, 2017, p. 10), or between populism and liberalism, look problematic: apart from the fact that ideologically liberal actors might perform populist style and rhetoric, one may also see that even the Eurosceptic populist logic widely spread in many European countries accepts a division of functions between the supranational liberalism (exemplified by Brussels) and the national level (incarnating the spirit of national patriotism). I also disagree that populism – allegedly – “exists only in representative systems” (Müller, 2017, p. 101); many authoritarian leaders with questionable or non-existent political legitimacy demonstrate high concentration of populist rhetoric in their discourses and use it as a central element of their rule. Putin’s Russia acts as one of such examples. The reading of populism central for this book is based on four pillars. First, the author is sympathetic with approaching populism as a type of political language-in-action, a discursive style and a system of rhetorical tools adjusted to the media logic and disseminated through various genres of popular arts (Hidalgo-Tenorio et al., 2019, p. 3). Therefore, equating populism with specific political actors (for example, parties) looks less essential than identifying the populist toolkit. Being a discursive style of communication, populism can be studied as (re)presented by a variety of actors – from political parties to cultural producers – who use the word ‘people’ and its derivatives in different

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connotations (Salgado et al., 2019, p. 9). Accordingly, “mainstream politicians may adopt a populist political style, while maintaining a non-populist agenda” (Ekström et al., 2018). Second, populism may be treated as a reactive form of grassroots democracy – or “a permanent shadow of modern representative democracy” (Müller, 2017, p. 11) – that lays claims for articulating key political notions, including sovereignty and people (Stockemer, 2019, p. 124), both legitimized through a belief in the existence of some kind of ‘majority’, as opposed to a more liberal understanding of society as composed of various minorities whose rights are to be duly protected. In the mainstream literature, populism is often discussed as a series of direct appeals to the people’s ‘majority’ skipping the existing bureaucratic institutions, regardless of whether a populist leader (or a party) is in opposition or in the government. This ontologization of majority is accompanied by extra-legal arguments that, unlike liberalism, do not necessarily deploy law at the center of populist discourses. In its stead, populism prefers to legitimize itself through much less definable categories such as justice, spiritual roots, and historic rights. This type of “conversational democracy” is almost non-existent within the framework of technocratic post-politics with its faceless institutions and invisible policy practices. In the meantime, while directly appealing to the population/electorate/citizenry, populist discourses re-signify the people, or – in a radical version – “re-establish” the people under the conditions of what Agamben would have dubbed “ademy”, or “absence of a demos or people that defines democracy” and has to be represented (Agamben, 2014, p. 72). Thus, populism not only addresses the people as the key reference point of its performative rhetoric, but – what is even more important – constructs the people through these very appeals. Third, populism ought to be treated not as an ideology (Zizek, 2019), but as a means of radical re-politicization of post-political milieus that is effectuated under the aegis of “non-political politics” (Hauser, 2019). This approach builds on Foucault’s characterization of politics as “no more or less than that which is born with resistance to governmentality” (Cadman, 2010, p. 547), and implies a redefinition of the very idea of the nation, its identity, borders, security, and relations with outsiders. What might be dubbed post-national transformations – with their dangers of ‘dissolution’ of national identity in a supranational and cosmopolitan institutional space, menaces to the national cultural cohesion as results of immigrant-friendly policies, and territorial deconsolidation of societies – have become major sources of insecurity all across Europe. Each of these sources might be approached from a biopolitical perspective and all of them constitute fertile grounds for populism.

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Fourth, populism represents a particular case of a broader phenomenon of totalization immanent to all type of norm-based discourses seeking to construct “the self-contained whole” and achieve “its own self-sufficient totality” (Monticelli, 2008, p. 13). As soon as identity is expressed through a valuebased lens, “the drive to completion” (Monticelli, 2008, p. 35) becomes a key structural characteristic of totalizing discourses, including populist ones. This explains why they necessitate as a condition of their political existence relations of radical othering: in populist discourses there must always be an object of anger and room for accusatory rhetoric, often formulated in the language of self-inflicted exclusion and marginalization (Bufacchi, 2020). The totalizing potential of populism is a point of contention in the literature. For example, some authors propose to make a difference between populism as an allegedly reformist movement that mostly operates within the liberal system of representative government (for example, in Estonia) and “cases in which a leader or party seeks their own advantage or that of a group against the common welfare should be treated as deviations – such leaders are not populists but tyrants, a corrupt form of leadership” (Vergara, 2020, p. 236). This attempt to purify populism from its dictatorial manifestations deserves attention, yet does not, in the author’s opinion, disprove the totalizing potential of populist discourses and imageries. Based on these presumptions, one may argue that populism is “about form… [It] is a mode of delivery, a ‘way of being’ in public…a style, a mode of relation… There are no populist beliefs… [P]opulism in its praxis actually redefines the borders of what is sayable… [and] some terrains are more fertile for populism than others… Its components encompass manners, demeanors, ways of speaking and dressing, vocabulary, and tastes displayed in public” (Ostiguy, 2020, pp. 30–31). As a performative and communicative style, populism is always a matter of degree, and it can be appropriated by any group or individuals who position themselves within the political sphere. Populism therefore can be more or less radical and can trespass ideologies (being conservative or liberal, nationalist or cosmopolitan). Against this background, the nexus between populism and biopolitics, which has already produced the concept of biopopulism (Antal, 2017), becomes crucial. The biopolitical heart of populism “is a construction of the good life derived retrospectively from a romanticized conception of life as it has been lived” (Taggart, 2004, p. 278), yet this construction remains dependent on whether the people is interpreted as “plebs, demos or nation” (Brubaker, 2020, p. 10). On the one hand, the people “becomes a biological population that must be managed, regulated, and controlled” (Bird & Lynch, 2019, p. 302); yet on the other hand, population is itself construed by biopol-

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itics: there is no ‘population’ in the modern sense before biopolitics” (Kelly, 2010, p. 4). The biopolitical “construction” of the people might follow one of two scenarios. One is an integrative re-conceptualization of the people as a single and distinct community of co-citizens and the ensuing re-establishment of an inclusive regime of belonging meant to overcome the existing exclusionary narratives and annul practices of domestic othering. Another variant is the admittance of a higher value of life of “our people” (usually the majority) over “others” (different minorities), and the concomitant devaluation of their lifestyles. For this type of populism, the most crucial is the divide between authentic and fully-fledged “people”, on the one hand, and those groups that are not consensually considered as legitimately belonging to the national political community-in-the-making, and therefore often viewed as aliens, outsiders and strangers, if not the ‘fifth column’, on the other. For instance, Russian legislation that qualifies Russian citizens cooperating with international partners as “foreign agents” is very much telling in this regard. Against this backdrop, populism might be seen as a biopolitical technology implying the (re)construction and (re)institution of ‘people’ through hierarchization of different forms of life and the ensuing lines of distinctions. Biopoliticization of populism might take radical forms of exclusion, denial of belonging and dehumanization, as it was, for example, the case of the Jobbik anti-Roma and anti-Semitic electoral poster of 2010 that represented a mosquito embedded in a stop sign against the background of the colors of the Hungarian national flag (Wodak, 2015, p. 76). Agamben’s contribution to the debate consists in drawing a distinction between the concepts of the nation (as inherently exclusive) and the people (Agamben, 2000, p. 35). Politicized appeals to “the people” tend to refer to the whole of the citizenry as a unitary body politic…[But] what we call people was actually not a unitary subject but rather a dialectical oscillation between two opposite poles: on the one hand, the People as a whole and as an integral body politic and, on the other hand, the people as a subset and as fragmentary multiplicity of needy and excluded bodies. (Agamben, 2000, p. 41) This “fundamental split”, corresponding, in Agamben’s vocabulary, to the gap between “naked life” and “political existence”, is important for a biopolitical understanding of today’s populism as a trans-ideological and performative phenomenon that can be differently used by diverse political groups intended to biopolitically “produce a people without fracture” (Agamben, 2000, p. 44).

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This implies an inevitable distancing from – if not riddance of – those who are considered as “unassimilable elements” sentenced to “bare life” and whose marginalization/ostracizing is supposed “to heal the original biopolitical fracture” (Agamben, 2000, p. 44) with populist recipes. The complex interconnections and linkages between biopolitics and populism ought to be generally understood against the broad backdrop of transfigurations within the realm of liberal democracy. The idea of biopolitics implies an approach to relations of power that focuses on populations as communities constituted through local and externally imposed policies of biopolitical inclusion and exclusion, and divisions between “ours” and “aliens”. From this angle it becomes understandable that in certain contexts the biopolitical logic underlies the revitalization of nationalism and implies what might be dubbed “biopolitical sovereignty”. This explains why contemporary biopolitics represents one of the most disturbing aspects of right-wing populism, national conservatism, and neo-fascism. For instance in Austria, the political in performances of local right wing populists “ranges from forms of banal nationalism and a deeply conservative view of Heimat to a disconcertingly chauvinistic view of gender roles and the family as well as ambiguous language and visuals that may well be read as coded allusions to National Socialism” (Rheindorf & Wodak, 2019). Seen from this perspective, populist biopolitics can be approached as a “degeneration of democratic biopolitics. It is a repressive and paternalistic form of democratic biopolitics, i.e., when members of the community and not the state engage in biopolitics that limits freedom and normalizes others. Populist biopolitics occurs both online and offline when members of the community shame each other for supposedly irrational and unsolidaristic behavior such as, for example, leaving the house or meeting with friends during the COVID-19 crisis, encapsulated in #staythefuckathome. Populist biopolitics also occurs in more formal political discourse when the state is pressured to enact stricter regulations on the population… Populist biopolitics’ community deliberation and enforcement of the “right thing” is very dangerous, as the history of the stigmatization of people living with HIV shows” (Schubert, 2020). Key questions to discuss at this juncture are: what forms of life and lifestyles are differentiated in populist discourses and practices, and how this differentiation is represented and publicized in popular genres of cultural production? My contribution to the debate on populism and biopolitics consists in looking beyond different modalities of elite discourse produced by power holders and their contenders, and focusing on cultural / artistic / performative milieus that are primary objects of study in a field of academic knowledge that may be termed popular biopolitics. One may agree that “what is popular for one

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is populist for somebody else” (Stavrakakis, 2014, p. 505). In other words, populism is a symptom and a trigger of broader cultural transfigurations requiring further research; metaphorically speaking, I am interested not in a stone thrown into the water, but in the waves that the stone leaves, from the surface to the deep bottom of the basin. In the remaining sections of this chapter I am going to relate the theoretical background presented above to the three country-based case studies of former Soviet countries – Estonia, Ukraine and Russia – and use the popular biopolitics – populism nexus for unpacking and explicating sone critical junctures in their political trajectories. There are two clusters of biopolitical inquiry that seem to serve as common threads for the case study analysis. One is related to the biopolitical dimension of the ongoing – and to a large extent based on the Foucauldian academic legacy – debate on liberalism and illiberalism which is one of the starting points from where one can excavate the genealogies of the contemporary populism. Another line of inquiry is grounded in the epistemiology of bare life, a metaphor that became a concept in Agemben’s versioon of biopolitics. My aim is not to simply apply the existing concepts to the empirical research, but to critically look beyond the established theories of Foucault and Agamben, and thus open them to less conventional interpretations.

1.4

Liberalism and Its Disavowal: A Biopolitical Reading

For Foucault, liberalism was not an ideology, but rather “a general style of thought, analysis, and imagination” (Wallenstein, 2013, p. 28). In a more specific Foucauldian version, the governance of population is “inherently tied to the liberal subject” (Richter, 2018) “distinguished by its faith in the ability to correlate the political development of humanity with knowledge of its biological properties and capacities” (Evans & Reid, 2014, pp. 53–54). Biopolitics is therefore associated with liberal technologies of responsibilization and caretaking, and considered as a more productive/benevolent form of power relations in comparison to sovereignty. Foucault was epistemically constructing a world where sovereign power could have been detached from the forces that mold and shape life. He ascribed to sovereignty murderous characteristics and imagined biopolitics as a realm for positive policies for the betterment and enhancement of life. It is from here that “biopolitical governmentality” comes as a concept intentionally detached from the negative connotations of biopower. The Foucauldian interpretation of biopolitics offers a perspective of transformation “from a technology of power that drives out, excludes, banishes, marginalizes, and represses, to a fundamentally positive power that

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fashions, observes, knows, and multiplies itself on the basis of its own effects” (Kakoliris, 2020), or from “simple discipline … to responsibility” (Sotiris, 2020). However, the key controversy embedded in the Foucauldian reading of biopolitics is his attempt to inscribe collective forms of care taking or administration of human lives into the liberal political milieu with its focus on individual rights and responsibilities. As a result, either liberalism becomes a system of control and surveiilance over human bodies and private affairs, or biopolitics becomes a source of societal totalization, through statistical governance or political ideologies (such as nationalism, for instance). Therefore, what is underdeveloped in the Foucauldian scholarship is the totalitarian potential embedded in biopolitics. Most of the authors developing Foucauldian interpretation of biopolitics do not deny the possibility of its totalitarian devolution, yet simply deem that this was not Foucault’s topic, which transforms the discussion about liberalism and its denials into a matter of selectively “paying attention” to different parts of the political reality (Blencowe, 2012, p. 111). It is only within the Foucauldian mythology of liberalism that biopolitics might exist as a depoliticized universe of self-governed human bodies enjoying lives purified from violence, coercion, suffering, and murders. Beyond the realm of the Foucauldian theorizing, biopolitics loses its liberal authenticity due to inevitable mergers with the dark side of the human existence, which paves the way to what might be dubbed “hybrid biopolitics,” contaminated with necro- and thanato-political considerations. Therefore, the liberal philosophy of biopolitics, being explicitly universalistic, does not seriously consider its ‘negative other’, since it presumes that all potential others have been already or will be immanently incorporated in it. The only meaningful line of distinction is drawn to differentiate the biopolitical instrumentality from sovereign power, yet even this boundary is ostensibly blurred by constructing an imaginable triangle linking biopower, disciplinary power and sovereign authority into one political universe meant to integrate medicine, religion, nationalism, racism, and many other elements. Liberal biopolitics therefore tends to aggregate different practices and forms of life and to constantly expand and multiply its normative basis. This integrative nature of liberal biopolitics duly matches the geopolitical background of global liberalism as a doctrine with almost limitless intentions to intervene and interfere. For Roberto Esposito the crisis of liberal democracy has a lot to do with the breaking down of the borders between the political and the biological. Questions of life and death, of sexuality and public health, of migration and security, have been forced upon and become fundamental to all political agendas. In turn, the political horizon … has broadened and

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deformed. It is as if the entire modern lexicon that had framed politics for over three centuries had been shattered by the force of these events, lost its significance, and was thus no longer capable of representation. Since then … the semantics of democracy have increasingly encountered complications… How can the democratic lexicon of the formal equality between autonomous political subjects – as pure, logical atoms who are periodically called upon make a voluntary and rational selection concerning the governance of society – be employed when what counts more is the ethnic, sexual, and religious differences of human groups defined by the characteristics of their bodies, their age, their sex? (Esposito, 2019, p. 558) Esposito claimed that it is the new body-focused biopolitical agenda that undermined the hegemony of the liberal discourse. This argument requires some qualification, since, as we have known from Foucault, (neo)liberalism on the outset was deeply biopolitical, and for Agamben biopower has much deeper historical roots. Therefore, Esposito’s claim has to be reformulated: what liberalism – as both doctrine and policy practice(s) – has been unprepared and unready for is not biopolitics as such, but, firstly, the meaningful change of the biopolitical agenda from policies of care-taking (exposed by Foucault) to measures of surveillance, control and regulation stemming from a gradual securitization of the biopolitical agenda: “the primary function of the state has shifted …to that of protecting its population from the putative threat posed by refugees, asylum seekers, economic migrants, guest workers, disease carriers, and terrorists. The nature of this shift is essentially biopolitical” (Abbinnett, 2018, p. 12). As has been argued, the liberal interpretations of biopolitics fall short to address its most controversial questions: how and why biopolitical liberalism can co-exist and reconcile with its illiberal denial. This controversy leads to the issue of biopower under illiberal regimes that build collective identities and communities through biopolitical “normalization” and the concomitant commitments to protect and take care of people’s lives and bodies, both individual and collective (nations or empires). With all due cognizance of – and respect to – Foucault’s legacy in this realm, it has its apparent limitations that have been critically problematized by Giorgio Agamben who gave “ontological force to Foucault’s epistemic analysis of biopower” (M. Rose, 2013, p. 9). Another strong challenge to the liberal hegemony was an obvious trend towards differentiating human lives between “ours” (that is to say legitimately belonging to the authentic political community) and “aliens” or “strangers” who are not considered as properly belonging to the community due to a dif-

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ferent origin, insufficient cultural integration, or linguistic distinctions. Eventually the liberal “state withdraws, either partially or completely, the rights of those who come with nothing but their status as human beings” (Abbinnett, 2018, p. 12). From a biopolitical perspective, this withdrawal can be conceptualized through the prism of a conflict between the unattainable universality of human life and the policies of life categorization via various mechanisms that differentiate between the “valued” and “devalued” life (Anderson, 2012, p. 30). The liberal idea(l) of biopolitical universality, with the human being proclaimed as “the measure of all things”, articulated from the ancient Greek philosophy to the Enlightenment and then transformed into the postnational/post-sovereign ideas of human security and responsibility to protect, ostensibly collides with the ubiquitous practices of biopolitical particularization and partitioning, manifested in dividing human beings into groups and categories with different appreciation of life and inevitable partitions between “our lives” and “alien lives”, as well as between “correct forms of live” and “incorrect ones”. Moreover, the liberal biopolitical vocabulary was hijacked by illiberal parties, groups and governments, who learned to speak the language of care, protection, and human rights, but in completely dissimilar modes and contexts. A good example of illiberal biopolitics is the doctrine of the Russian world aimed at legitimizing the Kremlin’s claim to ‘protect’ and take care of Russian compatriots living abroad; structurally similar to it are policies of the official Warsaw and Budapest meant to patronize Polish and Hungarian minorities living beyond national borders. In all these cases illiberal biopolitics is grounded in populist performativity that, as the annexation of Crimea made clear, might have strong geopolitical effects. The failure of liberalism to properly address these challenges is one of major explanations of the rise of illiberal – including populist – groups and constituencies. This trend seems to be consistent and compatible with the polemic claim that the logic of the camp (“the reduction of the human to the bodily is what fascist and liberal democratic societies share”) (Sudlow, 2014) “is common to liberal and totalitarian states alike” (Ross, 2012, p. 430), and ultimately assume that “the march towards a totalitarian society seems inevitable” (Giroux, 2008, p. 606). Totalitarian impulses of biopolitics have been emphasized by authors who equated biopower with “rejection of freedom in the name of the life of the body” (Dorahy, 2018, p. 660), which under the conditions of COVID-19 appears to sound like a new edition of the populist logic. By the same token, the biopolitical totalization has as one of its effects the concept of “carceral turn”, denoting “the turn to punishment associated with contemporary neoliberalism [and] representing the latest and

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most perfect expression of the saturation of society by biopower, since in the present this logic appears to be at once globally projected (in the far-flung and invisible gulag of the US empire) and at the same time miniaturized into the substance of everyday life (for example, in the pervasive medicalization of deviant identities and experiences)” (De Lissovoy, 2013, p. 745). In this type of reasoning, biopolitics features as undifferentiated and ahistorical meta-philosophical platform that “declares a war against any race that does not adjust to the imposed norms of that desirable population. In other words, biopolitics ‘makes live’ those populations that are ‘better adjusted’ to this ‘productive profile’, and lets die those who are not adjusted and do not promote the ideals of productive work, economic development, and modernization” (Rivera Santana, 2018, p. 234). Eventually, “far from representing a lapse into irrational barbarity, Nazism is the final realization of one of the possibilities inherent in the very project of modernity, or even the Enlightenment itself” (Macey, 2009, p. 193). However, the search for illiberal practices within the liberal (bio)political milieus often leads to the undue identification of liberalism and illiberalism. In explaining “what happens in the camp as a potential of liberal law, rather than as a degradation of liberal protection (Macey, 2009, p. 429)”, Agamben “marks out extreme situations not as anomalous, but as if they had general significance” (Macey, 2009, p. 428). From a liberal perspective, this makes Agamben himself part of the problem, since it is exactly this radical argument of which many tyrants and dictators are supportive. Agamben’s structural resemblance and compatibility with totalitarian discourses can be to a large extent explained by his self-fastening in the sovereignty-centric paradigm, which finds its ostensible manifestation in the approach to bare life as a direct product of the sovereign power. Yet, this linkage might be deconstructed by looking at the society beyond sovereignty and thus acknowledging the status of bare life as an inherent condition of vulnerability of human existence with human bodies being always affected by physical illness, psychological depression, societal deprivation, domestic violence, economic dispossession, aging, etc. A good example of a similarly ideological usage of biopolitical vocabulary can be found in Julian Reid’s writing. He ascertains that “liberalism has always been fascist and every liberal state and society in essence fascist… liberalism has to be comprehended not as exceptional to but coextensive with the very form of fascism it claimed to have ‘conquered’ by the end of World War II” (Reid, n.d.). Yet literally on the same page he comes up with a more balanced statement: “Fascism is a phenomenon that has to be addressed as a necessary element of all forms of power relations… Unless one believes in the possibility

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and desirability of living in a post – political world, fascism is a phenomenon one has to recognize as constitutive of political practice… we undertake a risk, even, of becoming fascist, in order to be and act as political subjects… Fascism is a necessary outcome, and effect, of being political. Fascism is in us every bit, at least, as much as life is in us”. This example shows how illiberal-minded authors might manipulate biopolitical meanings, accusing liberalism of fascist inclinations, and then admitting that fascism may rise within any form of political regime. This type of biopolitical philosophizing mutated into the ideologically pronounced disregard of a qualitative difference between liberal and illiberal regimes in matters of biopolitical control and regulation. To a certain extent this claim stems from the structurally similar endeavors of Foucauldian scholars to deny the very idea of “negative biopolitics” and thus incorporate ostensibly illiberal practices into a universalized vision of biopolitics. However, the major problem with Agamben’s version of biopolitics is that it not only posits a “fundamental and ever-fluid threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism” (Minca, 2006, p. 401), but “renders meaningless any attempts to dissociate democracy from totalitarianism” (Villamizar, 2014, p. 89). Thus, discussing Agamben’s concept of the camp, Claudio Minca made a robust claim: “The striking similarity between these cartographies of ‘schengenized’ Europe punctuated by endless detention enclosures and those marking the Nazi archipelago of camps in the early 1940s is disturbing to say the least” (Minca, 2015b, p. 76). In his opinion, “not only all totalitarian regimes but also many Western liberal democracies constantly ‘improve’ the biosocial sphere” (Minca, 2015b, p. 76). He accuses Western governments of trying to craft “a perfected social and biological national body. This results in policies in some cases explicitly aiming at producing a ‘new man’, as it was the case with the Nazis” (Minca, 2015b, p. 77). More specifically, he supposed that “Nazis were explicit about having been inspired by the US colonial model” (Minca, 2015b, p. 78). “Liberal democracy represents an even more subtly pernicious form of biopolitical control sharing many affinities with totalitarian biopolitical regimes” (Sinnerbrink, 2005, p. 253), claimed another like-minded author. The equalization of totalitarian governments (exemplified in this book by Russia) with liberal democracies (such as Estonia) is far from being politically innocent. It is not only based on one of the endless number of similarities between the structurally dissimilar regimes (for example, both dictatorial and democratic regimes might produce weaponry that kills human beings, wage wars, or introduce the state of emergency). What is even more far-reaching is that the juxtaposition of different forms of power – liberal and illiberal – in one category of biopolitical machines challenges the overarching post-1991

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narrative and contributes to its deconstruction through constitutive references to the Schmittian understanding of politics and sovereignty. This is what makes Agamben’s logic structurally correlative with the populist discourses aimed at (mis)representing the EU as a Western analog to the Soviet imperialism. In Estonia, for instance, this is one of major points in the political agenda promoted by the right-wing populist party EKRE. Moreover, Agamben’s reasoning in many respects is consonant with proponents of illiberal democracy: “In the democratic era, the biopolitical task was to control population and enhance productivity” (Grumley, 2015, p. 242), yet then – presumably in a post-democratic time – the camp became a major metaphor to illustrate the functions of control and surveillance acquired by the state. The resemblance with populist discursive style is striking in the multiple reiterations of totalizing commonality of the camp problematique which, allegedly, concerns “all of us”, pervades “our societies”, “our own cities”, “our own countries”, “our own freedom and order”. This exercise in rhetorical identity construction affectively ends with the following proclamation: we all have much to learn from Giorgio Agamben, but we should learn fast… If biopolitics increasingly penetrates all of our bodies, relegating to a realm of indistinction the threshold between our political being and our bare life, we should not forget being and our bare life, we should not forget that it also needs our bodies for its very reproduction, and very often our consensus… The ghost of the Camp today roams our cities, our class rooms and our consciences… we are all, potentially, hominem sacri’. (Minca, 2005, p. 411) This pathetic narrative, more emotional than academic, essentializes its object by presuming that there is a “true sovereign power” that produces the “permanent” state of biopolitical exception (Minca, 2005, p. 410). For the sake of a metaphorical condensation, Minca not only placed in one category “stateless people” and refugees, but also apparently extended the concept of the camp to all cases of “the militarization of everyday spaces [and] the colonization of individual and collective bodies via biosecurity interventions” (Minca, 2015b, p. 81). This narrative is also based on such evidently simplified and over-generalized statements as “in the camp everything is possible” (Agamben, 2000, p. 50), or its “inhabitants have been stripped of any political status” (Minca, 2005, p. 406), or the allegedly “unlimited faculty to suspend the norm” (Minca, 2005, p. 408). It would be an obvious overstatement to think that after the Guantanamo prison for detainees suspected of terrorist “the realm of bare life begins to coincide with the political realm” (Minca, 2005, p. 408),

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as if other forms and manifestations of politics magically lose their validity or importance all across the globe. This discussion leads to a number of questions related to the following chapters of the book. One is related to the illiberal transformation of fragile democracies such as Russia in the 1990s, and the role of biopolitical discourses and practices in these changes. A concommitatnt question is the ability of illiberal regimes – again, with Russia as an example – to adjust to the global neoliberalism without liberalizing its political system. Another highly topical for this book question is the appearance of totalizing practices within a predominantly liberal political environment in countries deeply integrated with the trans-Atlantic West, with Estonia being a good example of that.

1.5

Bare Lives between Biopolitics and Ideology

Agamben and his followers started their harsh criticism of biopolitical liberalism with fairly arguing “that Foucault is unable to provide an explanation of killing in biopolitics” (Tagma, 2009, p. 415), and thus raising a justifiable question of how and why the liberal norms of freedom, responsibility and care tolerate – or even in some cases are transformed into – the power of controlling and even taking lives. Based on this presumption, Agamben coined the metaphor of “bare life” as a radical expression of inequality and exclusion sanctioned by the sovereign power. Being a hybrid concept – both bio- and thanatopolitical – bare life connotes unprotected form of life existing beyond legal or political institutions in all its physical vulnerability and exposures to multiple “natural” dangers, which echoes Judith Butler’s idea of “precarious life.” In the Estonia chapter, I will dwell upon this argument in more detail. Agamben’s bare life (Agamben 1998) might be interpreted as “a degraded, naked, non-sacred and depoliticized form of life that is liable to sovereign appropriation and decision at any time, ever vulnerable to incarceration, murder and legal abandonment” (Burke, 2012, p. 104). Arguably, bare lives are not those facing the firing squad armed by the sovereign, but lives whose destruction cannot be condemned. Bareness is the property of bodies that can be left to the amusements of the camp guard, or can be entrusted to technology and its experiments, or subordinated to the results-driven imperatives of private security companies… Bare life … is defined in three ways: by its unintelligibility, by the fact that existence is reduced to a state of survival, and by an unlimited exposure to injury

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and murder, which in this case do not count as crimes. (Ferrarese, 2018, pp. 127–128) Apart from de-contextualizing bare life and thus making it ubiquitous and inescapable, Agamben tends to mythologize the sovereign power, imagining it as unitary and indivisible supreme authority producing bare life. The metaphor of “bare life” is far from being “nothing more than biological life” (Mayblin et al., 2020, p. 4); in its radical form the idea of bare life matches a typical totalitarian situation in which victims and perpetrators may easily swap roles, and the boundaries between the two are to remain inherently indefinable. Importantly, bare life may be produced by both sovereign power and the power of governmentality (Tosa, 2009). It is only through this lens that one may explain Agamben’s insistence that everyone can find herself under the conditions of bare life. The conclusion that Agamben makes from his conceptualization of bare life and camp is following: “Before extermination camps are reopened in Europe (something that is already starting to happen), it is necessary that the nation-states find a courage to question the very principle of the inscription of nativity as we as the trinity of state-nation-territory that is founded on that principle” (Agamben, 2000, p. 34). Agamben’s ontologization of the camp (Milbank, 2008, p. 135), with the concomitant proclamation of “all of us” as potential or real victims of the metaphysical sovereign power, made the concept of bare life static and ahistorical (Lemke, 2011, p. 62). As Thomas Lemke put it, “even if all subjects are hominem sacri, they are so in very different ways” (Lemke, 2005, p. 7), which necessitates – instead of overarching generalizations – a greater attention to be paid to country-specific practices of bare life. Polemics on this inflammable issue have intensified with the COVID-19 crisis and Agamben’s straightforward disproval of emergency measures undertaken even in the most affected countries such as his native Italy. Agamben posited that the reaction of societies to the pandemic revealed the unfortunate societal acceptance of self-submission to the status of bare lives and the ensuing approval of the state of exception, which in his interpretation was motivated by the primordial concerns about people’s physical survival. Agamben’s reaction to the global state of alert in early 2020 is illustrative of a thin line between academic conceptualizations of biopolitics and ideologically charged invectives and biased storytelling. To sum up, the concepts of camp and bare life were universalized by Agamben and his followers as a trans-historical paradigm of modernity equally applicable to the entire spectrum of power regimes. This over-generalization intentionally blurs the line between the camp and the non-camp, as well as between human insecurity and security, or un-freedom and freedom. What

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can be inferred from this discussion is that Agamben’s and Esposito’s works were cornerstones in a transformation of biopolitics from a scholarly concept into an ideological project with strong anti-liberal, anti-capitalist, and – by and large – anti-Western connotations. Its proponents lambast liberal capitalism for producing poverty and inequality and advocate for new liberatory practices of human existence and humans’ connections with nature. All this shows how slim the boundary is between philosophical engagement with biopolitics and its ideological interpretation. Biopolitical narratives can be idelogically appropriated and politically instrumentalized, which justifies the tackling of biopolitics as a tool for critique of ideology (Geisler & Klugbauer, 2014, p. 75) rather than an ideological framer. Without denying the suppressive and totalizing sides of biopolitics, we acknowledge that “there is space for liberal biopolitics as a diffusive form of politics markedly dissimilar to the repressive politics often associated with the authoritarian State apparatus” (Newman & Giardina, 2014, p. 420).

1.6

The Regional Focus of the Book

Geographically, this book focuses on Eastern Europe, one of the “fractured regions” that, in terms of social constructivism, is always “in between: neither civilized nor wholly barbaric, neither orderly nor entirely chaotic, neither cultured nor in the state of nature… Neither familiar nor exotic, or both familiar and exotic… Eastern Europe is being in constant transition… The position of Eastern Europe is ultimately an unstable or porous one. It is not standing firmly on the ground; it is a lack of constancy… What is particular about Eastern Europe is that it can sneak in, infiltrate unnoticed, destabilize from within” (Sushytska, 2010, p. 61). The region’s normative credentials do not seem to generate a positive momentum among the liberally minded Westerners: “the post-Communist space appears to be at the frontier of the growing backlash against liberal democracy… The region has also seen a wave of virulent anti-LGBT legislation and campaigns, rollbacks against domestic violence and reproductive freedom laws, and the broad embrace of traditional morality and the necessary role of official religious institutions as a spiritual dimension of public life” (Cooley, 2019, p. 609). Many voices in Eastern and Central Europe tend to distinguish themselves from the “modern Western belief in the Enlightenment, modernity and civilization and assert that European history has shown that modern society did not become the place of freedom and safety it promised to be” (van den Eeden, 2015, p. 163). All of this generated a reputation of this region as more susceptible to the “organic version of pop-

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ulism” (Mackert, 2018, pp. 94–95), different from Western or Nordic Europe; “Eastern Europe emerges as a warning of a creeping return of the retrospective ‘self’ as the region’s core states demonstrate an apparent disregard for the settled parameters of the European normative order, in which the ‘othering’ of authoritarianism along with the self-reflexivity and acknowledgement of the co-responsibility for the Holocaust in Europe have been the central animating forces behind the European integration project and the construction of the European identity” (Mälksoo, 2019, p. 375). What makes the cases of most of post-socialist/post-communist populist discourses and imaginaries particularly prone to biopolitical contextualization is their constitutive references to malign experiences of historical ordeals, which might include submission to foreign powers, occupation, and deportations (Estonia), mass famine, and ecological disasters (Holodomor and Chernobyl in Ukraine). Narratives of suffering, grievances, and losses constitute a fertile ground for a particular type of populist necropolitics with its constitutive references to the victims of historical injustices – oppressions, repressions and the immanent geopolitical (territorial) and biopolitical threats. The ensuing Baltic, Central, and East European states’ ontological insecurity grows out of a rather cautious attitude to the “never again” lexeme that characterized the dominant discourse in Germany and the entire EU after the fall of the Berlin wall: memories about historical injustices are constitutive for most of the countries in the region. Indeed, Central, Eastern, and Baltic Europe’s regional peculiarity is manifested in two respects. The first one is related to the complicated nexus between territories and identities: Poland was one of those former Soviet satellites that had proudly re-signified themselves from Eastern to Central Europe while Estonia’s escape from its Soviet past has driven it from a Baltic identity to the aspiration of acceptance in the Nordic ‘club’. Identity games, the “perpetual quest for self-determination … together with the region’s counterfeit sense of inferiority against the powerful, the prosperous, and the advanced” (Kajet Journal Staff, n.d.) are complemented by institutional gaps; membership of Baltic and Central European states in the EU and NATO has drawn an invisible but quite sensitive line between them and such “new Eastern European” countries as Ukraine who remained in an institutional vacuum with no fast perspectives of repeating the Europeanization/Westernization trajectory of its western neighbors. To that, one should add an increasingly meaningful security imbalance boiling down to Russia’s military preponderance all across its western borders, which creates a sense of constant threat for most of its neighbors.

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These complex interconnections between identity, security, and institutional affiliations make geopolitical landscapes at Europe’s eastern margins a source of multiple imbalances and discrepancies that are further complicated by the biopolitical momentum exemplified by the continuous politicization of broad spectrum of body-related issues (immigration, sexuality and reproductive behavior, family issues, school education, retirement, and so forth). A lucid illustration of the bio-/geo-political nexus is the concept of Intermarium in Central, Eastern, and Baltic Europe. As a geopolitical imagery aimed at aligning in a single bloc countries located in-between Russia and the EU and distrustful to both of them, the Intermarium discourse is nourished, supported, and promoted by national conservative forces whose biopolitical agenda is largely grounded in right-wing national populism with its biopolitical enunciations targeting liberal feminism and praising patriarchal masculinity, along with some traces of xenophobia and racism (Repo, 2016, pp. 114–115). A second specificity of the countries chosen for case studies lies in their legacies of the past re-actualized through at least two types of conceptualizations. From one perspective, the transitory trajectories of each of them can be characterized as post-communist, which denotes a rejection of their Soviet or/and socialist pasts and the concomitant proletarian Marxist-Leninist ideology. From another perspective, their transitions can be dubbed post-colonial in the sense of repudiating imperial impositions and resisting the submission to foreign powers, either from the West or from the East. The interlacing of post-communist/post-socialist and post-colonial legacies creates a particular cultural and political milieu for developing hegemonic narratives deeply grounded in the principled distinction between the totalitarian past and the dominant structures of the liberal international order. It is this distinction that validated and substantiated the narrative of “return to Europe” after decades of colonial submission. With all complexity and variance, the bulk of Poles, Estonians, and Ukrainians do see the distinctions between the Russian world and Europeanization, between NATO and the Russia-patronized security structures, as well as between the Nazi concentration camps and the refugee centers in today’s Europe. For countries that have gone through experiences of colonization, the nation state is not “conceived as a sort of a camp” (Minca, 2015b, p. 78) but as an indispensable warrant of the preservation of national biopolitical communities. In the post-Soviet world, “fascist and communist ideologies [are] concrete experiences rather than abstract political ideas” (van den Eeden, 2010, p. 154). Against this backdrop, Agamben’s discourse aimed at blurring this distinction has only a limited purchase in Central, Eastern, and Baltic Europe. Regionally bounded practices of biopower in societies that experienced decades of totalitarian rule can challenge the claim

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of universality of biopolitics. In particular, political debates in Estonia, Poland, and Ukraine contest Agamben’s ideologically speculative presupposition that “there is no return from the camp to classical politics” (Ross, 2012, p. 423). The exceptional measures introduced during the COVID-19 pandemic, of course, added new issues in the debate, but did not destroy the commitment of these countries towards procedural democracy. In this context, the idea of biopolitical regionalism might be reinterpreted as a frame that allows us to conceptualize spaces, borders, and territories not as purely geographic units but rather as biopolitical constructs embedded in the hegemonic understandings of bodily life and corporeality. Biopolitical regionalism can help us understand the specificity of countries with a high level of geo- and biopolitical insecurities, as well as spatial splits within national communities (eastern and western Ukraine, ‘Poland A’ and ‘Poland B,’ or a particular role played by the predominantly Russophone Ida-Virumaa county in Estonia). Similarly, relations between neighboring countries might also be viewed from a biopolitical vantage point with issues of citizenship and passportization being important elements of relations between Russia and Ukraine, Romania and Moldova, or Ukraine and Poland. The cognitive prism of popular biopolitics appears to be a useful tool allowing for a more nuanced look at the varieties of experiences of transcending the Soviet – and Communist, in a wider sense – legacies in countries that after the fall of the USSR (re)gained their independence. Popular biopolitics is one of the possible instruments opening new perspectives and pathways to study identities of post-socialist/post-communist nations three decades after the fall of the Soviet Union. In this respect, our vision of popular biopolitics shares a lot with post-colonial studies in placing a strong emphasis on explaining the remaining traces of domination after the breakdown of empires and on approaching the ensuing relations of hierarchy and power as corporeal and thus grounded in the (bio)politically qualified issues of life and death, physical suffering, mourning, and practices of bodily submission. Countries chosen for this analysis are very illustrative in this regard. Estonian discursive landscapes include both a pro-integrationist narrative bent on “Estonia for everyone”, and a language- and ethn0-centric narrative that accepts non-Estonian identities only in assimilated forms. Russia’s populism also heavily relies on social conservatism and ‘pastoral power’ that, however, takes imperial forms and serves as a background for projection of Russia’s power beyond national borders. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenski, being a incarnation of a populist type of leadership, develops a discourse on Ukraine as home to all its citizens regardless of linguistic, ethnic, or cultural identities.

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Biopolitics therefore always comes in different versions and interpretations, which – apart from some complicating effects – can be advantageous for outlining alternative and unconventional understandings of post-Soviet transformations. The countries chosen for analysis in this book are differently positioned between what might be metaphorically dubbed Foucauldian and Agambenian ‘worlds’, with the former grounded in such liberal presumptions as the productive nature of power and the pivotal role of governmentality and the latter built upon a different set of arguments – the merger of sovereignty and biopower and the resulting inevitability of various forms of ‘bare life.’ In this spectral continuum, Russia seems to share a lot with Agamben’s vision of sovereignty-centered biopolitics which manipulatively capitalizes on demands for care-taking and establishes geopolitical regimes of inclusion an exclusion in the neighbouring areas. In doing so, the Kremlin intentionally blurs lines of distinction between geopolitical aggression and biopolitical protection, which its policies towards Ukraine and Georgia vindicate. Institutionally and security-wise a part of the Foucauldian liberal ‘world’ of governmentality and responsibilization, Estonia looks more biopolitically embedded in the Agambenian intersection of sovereignty and bare life, which produces multiple practices of domestic bordering, othering, and soft (and often invisible) exclusion. As for Ukraine, this country’s biopolitical trajectory in the past decade might be characterized as an attempt to break free of Agamben’s world of a permanent state of exception and ontological insecurity to the normative world of Foucault with its liberal underpinnings and productive power.

1.7

Methodological Note

The concept of biopolitics ought to be treated not as a static idea grounded in certain ideological premises but rather as an academic instrument that allows to perceive the social world in variations, shades and degrees. The biopolitical frame contains a significant potential for changing observer’s analytical optics, vacillating between geopolitical theorizing and the intricacies of body politic with the ensuing process of constructing the population within and beyond national jurisdiction. This requires research instruments to tackle the dynamics of biopoliticization as a discursive process, rather than adhere to finite fixation(s) of meanings related to the life-politics nexus. In other words, as the primary target, this books studies discourses and imageries, not policy outcomes. I am not looking at how narratives shape politics and do not map the effects of cultural frames on what might be dubbed practical biopolitics.

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Emblematic in this respect is Agamben’s confession that “every time I want to write about the body, the writing ends up being about language” (Vlieghe, 2014, p. 1026). As a general note, the concept of discourse is to be used as a broad system of signification that refers “to the way that texts constitute the social world… ‘text’ [refers] to specific artefacts of writing, speech or other representations from which we can infer broader elements of context, culture, politics and conflict. Foucault called the collection of these texts an episteme… Discourse analysis [implies] interpretive activity of analysing the meanings, histories, contradictions and patterns in texts or series of texts” (Stone Tatum, 2018, p. 346). The process of discursive “constitution of every identity, practice or regime involves a moment of political exclusion, and thus the exercise of power, so that every relatively settled set of social relations involves some form of hierarchy. Against this backdrop, there are at least three related ways of complexifying this picture of a social practice – subordination, domination and oppression” (Howarth et al., 2016, p. 101). More specifically, critical discourse analysis “focuses primarily on social problems and political issues rather than the mere study of discourse structures outside their social and political contexts. This critical analysis of social problems is usually multidisciplinary. Rather than merely describe discourse structures, it tries to explain them in terms of properties of social interaction and especially social structure. Critical discourse analysis focuses on the ways discourse structures enact, confirm, legitimate, reproduce, or challenge relations of power abuse (dominance) in society” (Van Dijk, 2015, p. 468). More concretely, my research methodology has been greatly inspired by the political philosophy of Ernesto Laclau and its multiple projections into the field of political and social research (Stengel, 2019). Laclau defined discourse as “a kind of link between social elements where each of the elements, considered in isolation, is not necessarily linked to the other… there is no ‘natural’ or ‘necessary’ relationship between elements that precedes the act of linking itself. Therefore, linking them involves some kind of intervention. This intervention is exactly what we call hegemony” (Hansen & Sonnichsen, 2014, pp. 256–257). Discourses are therefore “seen as always incomplete attempts to fix meanings within a particular structure of relations” (Carpentier et al., 2019, p. 5). I am also sympathetic with Laclau’s approach to politics as a discursive field constituted by various “equivalential chains” linking fragmented speech acts or articulations with each other, to form “a system of signification” (Laclau, 2007, p. 70). This approach means that political agendas are constructed as chains of nodal/quilting points that tend to expand and include new arguments and demands. This proliferation, or spill-over of nodal points, implies discursive struggle for meanings attached to them and interconnections between them.

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Laclau looks at politics as a domain of aggregated “signifying chains” or as “a bunch of peripheral signifiers are connected through discursive chains to more central signifiers… The signifier … called the nodal point related to many if not all the moments in this network” (Jacobs, 2019, p. 303). Therefore, the shift “from the discursive to the political … [implies] that linking objects without a necessary relation to each other involves power and exclusions” (Hansen, 2014, p. 289). In other words, “political concepts are nothing but the names of different sites where the struggle for hegemony takes place” (Norris, 2006, p. 114). Another important methodological point of reference is multimodal analysis that can be useful in two interrelated aspects – in understanding the mechanisms of representation and communication (Ledin & Machin, 2020, p. 14). Multimodal analysis “indicates that different semiotic modes (for instance, language and image) are combined and integrated in a given instance of discourse or kind of discourse… As a field of study, multimodality therefore focuses on the common properties of, and differences between, these different semiotic modes, and on the ways in which they are integrated in multimodal texts and communicative events. In doing so it borrows concepts and methods from linguistic discourse analysis but also takes inspiration from other relevant disciplines, such as art and design theory” (van Leeuwen, 2015, p. 447). From this viewpoint, narratives are not produced by a single author, and involve “participative modes in which different people can contribute to a story and stories are not owned by any of their tellers” (de Fina & Johnstone, 2015, p. 161). One more important methodological concept is the idea of positionality that pays particular attention to the power relations entailed in research (Amoureux & Steele, 2015). “Positionality refers to placement within a set of relations and practices that implicate identification and ‘performativity’ or action. It combines a reference to social position (as a set of effectivities; as outcome) and social positioning (as a set of practices, actions and meanings; as process)” (Anthias, 2002, pp. 501–502). Arguably, “there is an assumption in the discourse on positionality that power relations emerge solely from a complex structure in which we are all positioned differently” (Moser, 2008, p. 385). “Facets of the self” such as institutional affiliation and social identity are articulated as ‘positions’, and “may influence the “data” collected and thus the information that becomes coded as ‘knowledge’” (G. Rose, 1997, p. 308). “Positionality involves power relations, both in the sense that some positions tend to be more influential than others and in the sense that emphasizing the situated nature of all knowledge challenges the power of those who claim objectivity” (Sheppard, 2002, p. 318).

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The discursive perspective on biopolitics implies that its content is always context-dependent and influenced by the cognitive and intellectual positionalities (G. Rose, 1997) in which the linkages between life and power/politics are discursively produced. Foucault himself used some biopolitically loaded categories – such as population, discipline, and control – interchangeably, with many shifts and variations in his vocabulary: What was previously called ‘regulatory power’ he now calls ‘security’… Regulatory power, as we have seen, was associated with an extension of control over new domains: the population, productive processes, biological life. In 1976, this process … is described in terms of the state’s maximization, optimization, extraction, possession of the biological. But when Foucault returns to key elements of regulatory power, now renamed ‘security’, this emphasis on control and possession is gone… In this context, the figure of ‘population’ emerges in a very different light from that found at the end of Society Must Be Defended. (Collier, 2009, pp. 86–87) Given this plasticity and flexibility of the biopolitical glossary, Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s “thousand plateaus”, a powerful metaphor that points to the propensity of discourses to develop and expand in any direction, seems to give a proper sense of direction in this inquiry into what might be dubbed “biopolitical assemblages” (Koopman & Matza, 2013, p. 821) that repudiate linearity and acknowledge the transformative nature of concepts. The endless number of plateaus form a rhizome that “ceaselessly establishes connections between semiotic chains, organizations of power, and circumstances relative to the arts, sciences, and social struggles. A semiotic chain is like a tuber agglomerating very diverse acts, not only linguistic, but also perceptive, mimetic, gestural, and cognitive” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 381). “There are no points or positions in a rhizome, such as those found in a structure, tree, or root. There are only lines” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 382), Deleuze and Guattari claim. The rhizome is “acentered, nonhierarchical, nonsignifying system without a General” defined only by the intensity of circulated concepts that avoid “any orientation toward a culmination point or external end” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 384). Metaphorically it resembles a “stream without beginning or end that undermines its banks” (Deleuze & Guattari, 2004, p. 387). The biopolitical semiosphere viewed as a “thousand plateaus” implies multiple shifts from philosophy to ideology, from academic work to policy advocacy, and from one academic discipline to another. Something similar to this optics is discernible in an approach to Foucauldian scholarship as a com-

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bination of different spaces – “the space of archeology”, “the space of clinical medicine”, “the space of literature” (P. Johnson, 2008), and many others. The interpretation of the biopolitical knowledge through the lens of “thousand plateaus” is justified by the compatibility of the Foucauldian and Deleuzian approaches, already well recorded in the extant philosophical literature (Bignall, 2008). This facilitates the thinking of biopolitics as an archipelago of different logics articulated through narratives and represented by imageries with uncertain borderlines between academic and political discourses, and unclear divisions and partitions within the ideological milieu of biopolitics. The rhizomatic flavor is well sensed in post-structuralist analysis that treats discursive networks as spider webs: “a bunch of peripheral signifiers are connected through discursive chains to more central signifiers, and these chains eventually all run to the heart of the network. The signifier occupying that heart, often called the nodal point, relates to many if not all the moments in this network. Every discourse has one or several such nodal points, which together define how this discourse is organized and which meanings it articulates” (Jacobs, 2019, p. 303). From a policy perspective, the thousand plateaus metaphor might be read as an explanation of the coexistence and mutual transformations of multiple biopolitical agendas. They embrace, depending on the conditions and circumstances, anti-immigration policies, the COVID-19 crisis management, racial basis in foreign policies of some former colonizing states, or anti-doping policies of international sports organizations. The “thousand plateaus” metaphor can be unboxed through the concept of intertextuality that appears to be instrumental for discussing the inherent multiplicity of meanings related to biopolitics and its “new political grammar” (Lemke, 2011, p. 64) through which biopolitics is discursively produced. Intertextuality implies the propensity of discourses to engage in dialogues with each other and synthesize new knowledge on this basis. Texts contain elements of other texts – as references, citations, allusions, or reiterations. Intertextuality is one of the possible ways to overcome the rigidities of traditional political science approaches to human bodies by means of looking at societies beyond the elite-based institutions, financial flows and legal dispositions. Even a cursory outlook at the most ardent issues of contemporary politics – immigration, multi-culturalism and diversity, inclusion and exclusion – shows the width of spaces for interaction and intertwining of issues of live and death, caretaking and territorial control, as well as politics and arts. Intertextuality implies the interlacing of the biopolitical and the linguistic “turns in social sciences” (Casarino, 2012, p. 96). Intertextual analysis focuses on the contexts and on interactions between texts (Bjatia, 2017) that leave traces in each other, thus creating double- or triple-

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voiced discourses (Hodges, 2015, p. 47) – between biopolitics and geopolitics and between biopolitics and necropolitics. The reader can find more empirical material confirming this theory in the case study chapters.

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Villamizar, P. (2014). Potentiality, Sovereignty and Bare Life: A Critical Reading of Giorgio Agamben. Ideas y Valores, 63 (156), 79–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.15446/ ideasyvalores.v63n156.38326 Vlieghe, J. (2014). Foucault, Butler and corporeal experience: Taking social critique beyond phenomenology and judgement. Philosophy and Social Criticism, 40 (10), 1019–1035. https://doi.org/10.1177/0191453714552209 Vogelmann, F. (2018). Biopolitics as a Critical Diagnosis. In B. Best, W. Bonefeld, & C. O’Kane (Eds.), The SAGE Handbook of Frankfurt School Critical Theory (Vol. 3, pp. 1419–1435). SAGE Publications Ltd. Wallenstein, S.-O. (2013). Introduction: Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality. In J. Nilsson & S.-O. Wallenstein (Eds.), Foucault, Biopolitics, and Governmentality (pp. 7–35). Sodertorn Philosophical Studies 14. Weber, N. (2005). Geo- and Biopolitics of Middle-earth: A German Reading of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. New Literary History, 36 (2), 227–246. Wedderburn, A. (2019). Cartooning the Camp: Aesthetic Interruption and the Limits of Political Possibility. Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 47 (2), 169–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829818799884 Whitehall, G. (2013). The biopolitical aesthetic: Toward a post-biopolitical subject. Critical Studies on Security, 1 (2), 189–203. https://doi.org/10.1080/21624887.2013.824656 Wodak, R. (2015). The Politics of Fear: What Right-Wing Populist Discourses Mean (1st ed.). SAGE Publications Ltd. Youngblood Jackson, A. (2004). Performativity Identified. Qualitative Inquiry, 10 (5), 673–690. https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800403257673 Zizek, S. (2019, June). Zizek: Only a pan-European left can defeat ‘populism’. Russia Today. https://www.rt.com/op-ed/460890-zizek-eu-elections-left/?fbclid =IwAR3tJ78ZM_OVFr4xIvQ9SUY2nppH3NZewU3aNw808f9JSb7IXrBIJV5Z5ao

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Estonia: Bare Life between Geo- and Biopolitics Some of the most inspiring examples of biopolitical concepts transformed into and unpacked through cultural images comes from contemporary Estonian art. Thus, Giorgio Agamben’s essay The Last Judgment was a key reference point for an international exhibition Beyond at Kumu Art Museum in Tallinn (Nukk, 2011, pp. 9–12). Another example was the Performance STL-is by Ruslan Stepanov and Artjom Astrov at the SAAL Festival in 2019, a performative story about the victimized exclusion and the inside/outside identity games for which Foucault served as a conceptual frame: Classicism, the beginning of professional dance education and the era worshipped by admirers of beautiful male bodies, also marks the beginning of the regular state for Foucault. It was a period when old social hierarchies based on honour and shame were being replaced by a modern society functioning through guilt and a sense of responsibility. By “regular state” Foucault means… when the laws of the heart and those of the state mean the same thing… Foucault speaks of the body of a soldier. A body that is obedient. I believe it is also a good way to describe a dancer. But how do we achieve bodily obedience? To do this, we must first make an operation that originates from Descartes in the 17th century: separate the body from the mind: “I think, therefore I am…” To think of the body as something to possess… to think of it as a distant object. And then you can do anything with the body – subordinate it, torture it, train it, shape it, cut it, massage it and drill it, drill it, drill it. (Stepanov & Astrov, 2019) These artistic performances caught our attention as spaces where academic and political concepts interact, intersect, interlace, and intertwine with imageries and narratives representing human bodies (Beausoleil, 2014, pp. 111–133). This makes biopolitics itself an object of creative art and a visualized and communicative practice of debating the vulnerability and the finitude of “bare life.” For example, the Estonian artist Flo Kasearu in an art project named “Biopolitics” “examined discussions in Estonia around the notion of DNR (also known as no code or allow natural death), which is a legal order written either in the hospital or on a legal form to withhold cardiopulmonary resuscitation in respect of the wishes of a patient in case their heart

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_004

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were to stop or they were to stop breathing” (Kasearu, 2017). The artist juxtaposed this phenomenon with another recent one – the so-called Death Cafe, in which people come together to drink tea, eat cake, and discuss death. The Estonian case also makes an important contribution to the mutually constitutive inter-relations of geo- and biopolitics. In the Estonian “geographies of the biopolitics of terror” (Minca, 2005, pp. 405–412), geographic units and their names connote not only territorial possessions with the corresponding lines of demarcation and bordering but also signify commemorative trajectories of human losses and tragedies with necropolitical representation of death (Kattago, 2009, p. 152) and “performative materialization of Russianness” (Kaiser, 2012a, p. 531) in post-imperial contexts. A perfect example of close interlacing of biopolitical and geopolitical imageries comes from the Estonian artist Tanja Muravskaja’s project titled “Positions” that features a dozen of half-naked young human bodies loosely wrapped in the Estonian flag. The human chain in the photo composition can be interpreted as an artistic version of the glaring bareness of unprotected life with political institutions – and the state in general exemplified by national flags – playing only marginal and mostly symbolic role of identity markers. Muravskaja echoed Agamben’s “bare life” as a metaphor for vulnerability and “precarious life,” but in the meantime also reinterpreted it as a symbol of equality of human bodies as bare lives rather than as citizens or residents of a certain country, holders of certain passports or representatives of certain ethnic or linguistic groups. This chapter consists of three interrelated parts. It starts with identifying and unpacking two major platforms within Estonian popular biopolitics – the Estonian national discourse aimed at overcoming the experience of subjugation to the Soviet power and the Russophone post-imperial discourse largely built on the reverberations of the Russian World doctrine in Estonia. Then, four types of dislocations within these structurally dominant discourses are discussed; in other words, I identify counter-discourses that question the uniformity and challenge the consistency of the Estonian national narrative and that one of local Russian-speakers. More specifically, I engage with the complex representations of Russia and the West in different cultural narratives and imageries with controversial memories of WWII and with an alternative search for what we dub ‘pristine life’ as an important element of Estonian national culture. The chapter concludes with a discussion on how specific political events and their dynamics (such as the regaining of independence, the Bronze Soldier incident, the refugee crisis, and the centenary anniversary of Estonian statehood) re-actualize biopolitical narratives and infuse new meanings in them.

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The Popular Biopolitics of Bare Life: Two Dominant Discourses

In discussing the two dominant discursive formations that define the biopolitical crux of Estonian internal dynamics, I engage with various contexts in which the concept of bare life resonates in Estonian popular biopolitics. Bare life, being a product of the mélange of bio- and necropolitics, denotes “a relationship of violence [that produces] a desubjectified subject” (Cadman, 2009, p. 152) lacking a social status and facing the struggle for physical survival. Bare life is tantamount to “a degraded, naked, non-sacred, and depoliticised form of life that is liable to sovereign appropriation and decision at any time, ever vulnerable to incarceration, murder, and legal abandonment” (A. Burke, 2012, p. 104). The destruction of bare lives cannot be condemned within the existing normative regime: “Bareness is the property of bodies that can be left to the amusements of the camp guard, or can be entrusted to technology and its experiments” (Ferrarese, 2018, p. 127). Bare life exposes the vulnerabilities of “state-occupied body, the inhabitant of nowhere, stripped of political identity, nationhood, and basic human rights … a body whose very biological rhythms are regulated and controlled by” an external sovereign power (Enns, 2004). The innovative approach presented in this chapter is grounded in interpreting bare life as an inherently performative phenomenon. In line with this assumption, I am mostly interested in how narratives and imageries of bare life are performed, reproduced, replicated, and reiterated. More specifically, I seek to uncover how the different conceptualizations of bare life in Estonian popular biopolitics intertextually intermingle and interlace with a variety of geopolitical interpretations of Estonian identity, history, and security. The chapter aims to show the broad spectrum of biopolitical arguments ranging from sustaining and validating the hegemonic discourses to their semantic resignification and contestation. 2.1.1 The Ruptured Life in Occupation In Agamben’s biopolitics, the concepts of camp, bare life, and sovereignty are tightly interconnected; “The camp exists, potentially at least, wherever there are states. It is built into the logic of political sovereignty. It is permanently possible in the spaces of exception which states constantly create. Whether or not people in these spaces are actually killed does not depend on any legal protection (which is either nonexistent or ineffective), but entirely on the whims or ethics of the agents of the state who are exercising its sovereign power” (Robinson, 2011). However, as I have already mentioned, Agamben was rightly criticized for “mystifying the social reality of the camps by abstracting them from their concrete historical context” (Elliott, 2011, p. 265).

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The main argument in this section is that the Estonian experiences of bare life ruptured by war and occupation require a thorough rereading of the concept of the camp universalized by Agamben as a trans-historical paradigm of modernity equally applicable to the entire spectrum of political regimes. Some proponents of biopolitical approaches deem that “there is little real difference between the essentializing and homogenizing tendencies of contemporary biopolitics and good old-fashioned Bolshevism” (Dorahy, 2018, p. 661) or make another dubious claim – “While the West talks about human rights, the sacredness of life and the rule of law, it puts refugees and enemies in a place which is, formally speaking, indistinguishable from Dachau” (Kurelić, 2009, p. 149). It is noteworthy that these declarative statements are structurally consonant with Estonian (and not only) populist discourses, accusatory of Western liberal normativity. Both academic and political (populist) versions of this overgeneralized illiberalism intentionally blur the lines between the camp and the non-camp, as well as between human insecurity and security, or unfreedom and freedom. It is from this perspective of specific experiences, evidence, and testimonies of oppressed people in such countries as Estonia that Agamben’s super-extended version of the camp might be legitimately criticized from the vantage points of those Estonians who went through the real conditions of bare life and for whom the above distinctions were constitutive. Cultural trauma narratives can be approached from a biopolitical perspective (Dietrich, 2016) “because they make the biological lives and deaths of human populations the basis of membership in a society” (Meek, 2015, p. 3). Popular biopolitics is also instrumental in viewing geopolitical concepts as closely tied to issues of biopower and in the meantime as re-signified through representing spaces, territories, and borders as bodily and corporeal phenomena. Popular biopolitics offers a helpful frame that may not only embed geopolitically loaded concepts of occupation and deportations (Aldis, 2020), but also reconceptualize and resignify them from a biopolitical perspective. The name-by-name enumeration of all victims of Communist rule in Estonia, a visualized biopolitical account of the tyranny (Estonia’s Victims of Communism 1940–1991, n.d.), serves as a nodal point in Estonian national memory politics. Highly illustrative in this regard was an exhibition “A ‘Liberator’ Has Come” co-organized by Estonian Institute of National Memory and National Library of Estonia in 2020; the biopolitical part of its narrative explicitly points to the fatal lack of international protective mechanisms that could have saved lives of the peaceful population of Estonia invaded by German and then Soviet troops. WWII brought upon the local residents waves of multiple murders and rapes committed by the Red Army under the condition of lawlessness and impunity. The Soviet Army has also been accused of damaging environ-

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ment and of systematic poaching (Eesti Mälu Instituut & National Library of Estonia, n.d.). An installation titled “Wagon of Tears,” commemorating the victims of the June deportation of 1941 and set up in Tallinn’s Freedom Square in 2020, serves as another performative remembrance of the victims of the Soviet regime; its biopolitical element is represented by blue balloons symbolizing the tears of the deportees, while its spatial and geopolitical dimensions were exemplified by contouring the installation in the form of the former border of the Soviet Union, with railroad lines that led to camps in Siberia and points of deportation (Lovi, 2020). Biopolitical displacements and ruptures – the Soviet and the Nazi occupations, mass deportations of Estonians to Siberia and migration to the West – are major factors shaping contemporary Estonian political debates. Estonian artist Kristina Norman ontologized the concept of camp through a performative imitation of the prison cell that from a historical abstraction turns into a material reification of the practices of human incarceration in her video installation “0.8 square meters.” The staged imprisonment played by ordinary people was meant to artistically chart a boundary between freedom and unfreedom yet simultaneously to remind people about reality of biopolitical oppression (Norman, 2012). In the same vein, the KGB Prison Cell in Tallinn recreates the atmosphere of Soviet-era bare life illustrated by a video installation by the Estonian artist Madli Luuk; someone’s hand draws on the screen one picture after another using sand as a material that symbolizes vulnerability and fluidity of “precarious life” that in each moment might change its shape. The experience of bare life is a central point in Estonian memoir literature about the times of the Soviet occupation – “Before we can lather up, the men must take turns standing up on a stool. A full-lipped woman in a white coat, about 30–35 years old, grabs each man’s genitals, twisting right and left, and asks each one the same question: “Do you have crotch lice?” Most of the Estonian men speak very little Russian and cannot answer the woman’s question. This makes her angry. She summons the bathhouse observer, who once again calls us fascist” (Haamer, 2007, p. 58), an American Estonian author recalls. Another highly illustrative representation of bare life is “Echoes from the Cells of Patarei,” a performance in the old prison in Tallinn turned into an exhibition area and a lieu de memoir commemorating of the victims of the Communist regime. As a material object, Patarei is an intrinsic part of Estonian spatial landscapes of memory about the Soviet occupation (Eesti Mälu Instituut, n.d.). In the meantime, this is also a necro-/biopolitical space of personified remembrance about individual bare lives of prisoners whose names and short stories are exposed inside the cells. The dance performance staged

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on 22 and 23 August, 2019 added an even stronger necro-/biopolitical dimension to the signification of the Patarei prison through artistic techniques of depersonified memorialization representing mourning and sorrow that, along the lines of Agamben’s idea of “non-language” (Agamben, 1999, p. 38), cannot be but mute and wordless and exist as a pure expression of the inherently unsayable and the incomprehensible (Agamben, 1999, p. 11). The meanings of the performance can be understood only as an indispensable extension of the Patarei exhibition, as a poetic validation of another Agamben’s assumption that the genuine testimony has very little “to do with the acquisition of facts” (Agamben, 1999, p. 12), and that “the truth is irreducible to the real elements that constitute it” (Agamben, 1999, p. 17). While facts about occupation have received their legal qualification long time ago, “the law doesn’t exhaust the question” (Agamben, 1999, p. 17), and this is exactly what makes the genre of popular bio-/necropolitics a powerful emotional investor and producer of affective discourses and imageries of memory and mourning. Geopolitical and biopolitical narratives of the occupation are interlaced in “Pobeda 1946. A Car Called Victory,” a novel by Ilmar Taska that unveils the inner life in Estonia occupied by the Soviet Union. The plot tells a story about an Estonian family whose life was destroyed by the Soviet occupiers. From a geopolitical perspective, the text is replete with multiple references to the expectations of the English Fleet to dock in Tallinn and liberate the country, to Churchill’s speech about the iron curtain, followed by the gradual realization of futility of the hopes for the Western help that boosted traumatic and victimized narrative of abandonment. In the novel, the biopolitical perspective reinforces the geopolitical othering of the Soviet Russia as an alien country that “had brought freedom to spit, urinate, and throw rubbish anywhere you please” (Taska, 2018, p. 16). Russia is associated with crowds of immigrants and “drunk sailors,” “a horde of absolute newcomers” who “had wanted to relocate the entire nation to Siberia” (Taska, 2018, pp. 16–17). The ensuing attitudes to colonizers are explicitly articulated in corporeal terms; “instead of cologne, a bouquet of garlic, two-day-old sweat and sperm wafted toward” (Taska, 2018, p. 18) the main heroine from the newcomers who settled in Estonia after the occupation. The geopolitical domination at a certain point boiled down to the thanatopolitical power to kill: “He was the one who decides who died and who lived” (Taska, 2018, p. 26), an NKVD operative thinks of himself. Occupation is experienced as the production of bare life: “How replaceable we all are” (Taska, 2018, p. 37), the heroine confessed to herself after having faced her son’s emotional affection with the Soviet operative who intentionally lured him with his new Pobeda car. The constant feeling of foreign infiltration into the Estonian national body, includ-

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ing language and family life, reduced the human existence to “a pack of stray dogs” (Taska, 2018, p. 53) “with no yesterday and no tomorrow” (Taska, 2018, p. 88). The thanato-/biopolitical crux of occupation was articulated by a highlevel security officer: “not all minds are suitable for the new society; we have to get rid of dissidents. We have to clear the ground for new settlers” (Taska, 2018, p. 124). The biopolitical occupying machine, as all totalitarian systems, deprived human beings of their dignity and treated them as a workforce: “he might become a good worker” (Taska, 2018, p. 56), the NKVD operative thinks of the six-year-old son of a jailed and repressed Estonian “enemy of the people.” The future is equally marked in biopolitical colors; “In his mind he saw … girls with big bellies. Their daughters with even bigger ones. Their grandchildren would one day live in an ideal society where everyone had an identity code stamped on their skin, a personal number in a register, where all telephone numbers and addresses were mapped; where microphones and cameras tracked their every movement” (Taska, 2018, p. 57). People were “mollusks without a face… the army of worker bees feeding a queen bee” (Taska, 2018, p. 183). The flip side of this occupying biopower is a necropolitical killing apparatus that materialized in a secret chamber of the prison – “a large pulverizing machine which had a powerful electric motor to finely grind up everything that was thrown into it. Up to the ceiling was a hatch from which material was cast down directly into the jaws of the pulverizer. The ground-up material descended into a concrete tub over two meters long, to which lime and water were added” (Taska, 2018, p. 223). Taska’s narrative at a certain point matches Agamben’s distinction between the life and the law; thus, contemplating about the Soviet Union, a British protagonist asks a rhetorical question: “Here the laws were different… but the people?” (Taska, 2018, p. 154). It is almost on the next page that the answer pops up, as all legal arrangements under Soviet Communism (for example, the diplomatic immunity of the staff of a foreign missions) could be easily superseded by brutal physical force. “He knew that not even he could seek justice and truth in every directive, every signed resolution. For life was moving forward on iron rails like Lenin’s armored train” (Taska, 2018, p. 158). The Soviet experience ostensibly disproves the erroneous (and legalistic) qualification of the prison as “a site remaining within the law” (Schinkel, 2010, p. 162) and shows a gloomy necropolitical underside of occupation. Another pertinent example of thanato-/biopolitical othering of the Soviet Russia is given in a memoir book by a former deportee who remembers that when the Soviet repressions started, “I saw a Russian soldier playing an accordion. Two of the soldiers [were] dancing… They laugh. We run. We know

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that someone is being tortured” (Taagen, 2013, p. 7). Russians are portrayed as being predisposed to irreducible distinction with Europeans: “See those Russians stealing, but the British are more cultured and return the stolen goods,” a woman remarked, observing a group of prisoners in the Germany-occupied territory. On a different occasion, his father mentioned “that the filthy rooms had been occupied by Russians who, apparently, intentionally created the filth and dirt. When the Russian army occupied Estonia in the fall of 1940, he adds, many of the soldiers had never seen a toilet and would wash their face in one” (Taagen, 2013, p. 167). The bare life made all hierarchies fluid and precarious. First, the Estonian family had at its disposal a Russian prisoner who was assigned to work for them, and then Estonians themselves, having received the refugee status, had to solicit for a similar job with their German hosts (Taagen, 2013, p. 85). Therefore, the war is perceived not only as a geopolitical calamity but rather as a thanato-/biopolitical catastrophe that exterminated and displaced millions of people (“We are dead. All of us” (Lehtmets & Hoile, 1994, p. 93), an Estonian prisoner of the Soviet labour camp says to his mates in a documentary book about these times), making physical survival and bodily existence the most primordial issues. Two thanato-/biopolitical machines, the Soviet and the German, needed male bodies to kill each other, and these machines left almost no choice to ordinary people who were doomed to remain under the conditions of bare life but also speechless for many decades afterwards. The Foucauldian dichotomy – sovereign power that takes lives versus biopolitics that improves lives – does not seem to be applicable here. Instead, one may observe biopoliticization of sovereignty as a killing machine, which opens space for Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of biopolitics with its key categories of homo sacer and camp, not as universally extended categories, but as time- and country-specific and historically embedded notions. Historical narratives of the war-time occupation and post-war deportations are actualized through discourses of Estonia’s biopolitical losses. Eva Sepping’s short documentary “Last Estonian” features an elderly ethnic Estonian who does not speak his native language because he spent almost all his life in Russia, probably being deported decades ago and then having chosen to stay in the Soviet Russia. The film reflects the widely shared sorrow in Estonian society about ethnic Estonians who were dispersed all across the former Soviet Union and the lost the sense of belonging to the newly revived Estonian nation. When it comes to the dominant attitudes to contemporary Russia as the successor of the Soviet Union and the most problematic of Estonia’s neighbors, the hegemonic discourse differentiates between the Kremlin and the Russian people. The geo-/biopolitical complexity of dealing with the Russia state was

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nicely caught by Eva Sepping in her video installation ironically entitled “I am happy that people are so beautiful and kind” (Sepping, 2015). It exhibits a visual story of an Estonian musical group that travelled to Russia and was covered by a TV channel. The irony is that Estonian songs and dances are accompanied by alarmingly securitized running headline news at the bottom of the screen: “Moscow threatens to impose military dominance in the Baltic Sea,” “The Kremlin is actively spying in Nordic countries,” and “Russian military air jet breached Estonian airspace.” The hybrid coexistence of the two realities – geopolitical conflicts and a space for cultural expressions – might be read differently: either as a sarcastic portrayal of an amusement in times of trouble or as an attempt to represent a shaky balance between hard/military and soft/cultural/communicative powers. 2.1.2 After the Empire: Post-colonial Lives After the fall of the Soviet regime and the end of the occupation, the concept of bare life was performatively appropriated by the representatives of former colonizers and their descendants who have aggregated themselves in a community of Russophone – but not necessarily ethnically Russian – Estonians. Biopolitically, it has established and discursively constructed itself as an abandoned and disenfranchised community of losses, deprivations, and rejection from the side of Estonian majority. Now representative of the Soviet occupation, Estonian Russophones after 1991 not simply lost their privileged position and status but turned into postimperial subalterns. In this context, subalternity could be understood as “a position without identity… Subalternity is where social lines of mobility, being elsewhere, do not permit the formation of a recognizable basis of action” (Chakravorty Spivak, 2005, p. 476). The “post-colonial homo sacer” who faces double exclusion (Lee et al., 2014, p. 655) therefore might be conceptualized in biopolitical terms (Kaiser, 2012b, p. 1059) as another type of mostly selfinflicted and politicized by Russia bare life. This conceptual framing helps us explain the trajectory of a significant part of Estonian Russophones who have started building their biopolitical positionality on the widely spread feeling of abandonment which might be understood as “a relational process [making human beings] exposed and threatened on the threshold of life and law, outside and inside” (Ek, 2006, p. 366). As ethnological research showed, the issue of integration took an explicitly biopolitical turn starting from Estonia’s regaining of independence; as a Russianspeaker confessed, “We, non-Estonians, are accused of eating the Estonians’ pasture bare, being lazier at work, polluting nature, and so on” (Reinvelt, 2002, p. 85). In the local media, the Russophone Estonian residents were sometimes

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described as “a dangerous mob … [whose] hearts beat more in the rhythm of Russia” (Reinvelt, 2002, p. 89). In the Estonian official discourse, the Russophone minority is explicitly referred to as a potential security issue (Kuczyński, 2018). Literary narratives can vividly articulate the miscomprehension of such attitudes on the side of the Russophones, which translated into a specific type of populist narrative grounded in the subalternity of a significant part of Estonain Russian-speakers, and politically instrumentalized by the Center Party (Keskerakind). In the “Mercenary of Our Time” Kalle Klanford narrates on behalf of a Russian living nowadays in Estonia: “How could she comprehend that in this land she would suddenly and inadvertently become a part of someone’s big project aimed at depriving [Estonians] of their incomprehensible and strange language they talk to each other? Gradually she started understanding that something is wrong here, that she is watched as someone who overstayed at a party. She started noticing that some conversations would discontinue in her appearance. Why all of them didn’t get that she has nothing to do with all that” (Klandorf, 2017). A well-documented genealogy of the “compatriot policy” (Pigman, 2019) in Estonia is found in a book by the Russophone journalist Andrey Babin who published a compendium of his essays from mid-1980s till the present. The book unveiled the deeply Soviet roots of the Russian World doctrine that functions as a major communicative platform that the official Moscow offers to the Russian speakers living beyond Russia’s borders. Babin re-actualized such Soviet-era clichés as “ideological diversions,” suspicion and mistrust to the West (Babin, 2016, p. 63), and “information warfare” (Babin, 2016, p. 66), looking at them from today’s perspective. The typical late Soviet narrative – that later transformed into the Russian world discourse – included anti-religious sentiments (Babin, 2016, p. 68) and the portrayal of the revolutionary Communism as a phenomenon rooted in Estonian history and shared by elderly ethnic Estonians (Babin, 2016, p. 78). Particularly revealing was Babin’s interview with a convinced Estonian communist who himself was sentenced to five years in the GULAG (Babin, 2016, p. 80) but still did not repudiate his Soviet ideological identity of which he seems to be proud. Other materials republished in the book covered participation of ethnic Estonians in the mass deportation of their own compatriots (Babin, 2016, p. 107) after WWII, which is in line with the current Russian official discourse. Babin covered the new realities of the end of the 1980s – beginning of the 1990s with a mix of lamentations about “the loss of the spiritual and the dominance of the material,” and regretted about the disrupted economic contacts with Russia. Using a unique material – letters from readers to Russian-

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language Estonian newspapers – he unveiled the logic of anti-Estonian feelings among Russian-speakers grounded at that time in the ideology of proletarian internationalism, which evidently led its zealots to dub fighters for Estonian independence “bourgeois nationalists eager to get rid of revolutionary communists” (Babin, 2016, p. 100). This argument transformed into claims that it was “under Estonian blue-white-black flag that Estonian SS soldiers killed our fathers and grandfathers” – an argument that gradually evolved into a performative anti-fascist rhetoric (Babin, 2016, p. 121) typical for the Russian world discourse. By the same token, interviews with Russians living in Estonia at that time gave a clear idea of their disorientation and miscomprehension of the changing reality: “I was fighting four years in the Great Patriotic War… liberating Baltics from the enemy, demining Narva, and now they say that I am an occupant. How this could be?” (Babin, 2016, p. 133). In another piece of evidence, a letter sent to the newspaper rhetorically asked: “I live in Estonia several decades, know the economy and the people. Until recently I’ve had many friends among Estonians. There was space, jobs, bread, and fuel for all of us. What happened?” (Babin, 2016, p. 156). It is on these grounds that a phenomenon of “non-Soviet people” (Babin, 2016, p. 223) has emerged – a biopolitical community of survival who felt themselves being expelled from their convenient “normal” imperial lives and pushed out of the drastically transformed society. They overwhelmingly perceived the new post-imperial society as unfair to the former colonizers; thus, referring to the first prime minister of the independent Estonia in the early 1990s, Babin says: “In Laar’s view, the people are only those who were clenching fists and swallowed tears while observing the Red Army marching across Estonia. Others who went to [the Communist] meetings, or “spectacles under the red banners,” are considered lumpen, marginal, NKVD agents, or migrants from Pechory1” (Babin, 2016, p. 709). Similarly, the comprehension of new realities was slow, painful, and gradual. It started with the due understanding of the full-fledged status of the border with Russia, and the separation of Narva and Ivangorod as two different cities (Babin, 2016, p. 288). The rediscovery of the true history of deportations and the “forest brothers,” along with dissidents’ resistance to Soviet rule (Babin, 2016, p. 513), came later. Even with this understanding of the new reality, the Russian World discourse remained deeply imperial; after the Bronze Night event in 2007, Babin wrote in Postimees: “Russians are a large nation with thousands of years of statehood. Estonians are a small people almost

1 A neighboring Russian region across the border.

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with no experience of state building. This is what it is. For centuries, Estonians were adapting to live with Russians in one empire, tsarist and communist, and can proudly claim that this is what preserved their peoplehood” (Babin, 2016, p. 485). This cultural imperialism does not constrain itself within national boundaries and makes global claims: “Russians have its peculiar mission – to save humankind” (Babin, 2016, p. 486). The Russian World constituted a frame that was used for interpreting all major political events in the post-Soviet space: for example, Babin discussed the 2008 war between Russia and Georgia from pro-Ossetian positions, as an allegedly legitimate response to Georgia’s attempts to hurt and challenge Russia. In reactualizing these events from a more contemporary perspective, Babin noted: “Some ask – which neighbor of an aggressive Russia is next? Could it be Estonia? My response would be the same as in 2008: don’t touch ours – and we won’t touch you” (Babin, 2016, p. 522). The emphasis on physical and muscular force explained the author’s sympathies to Vladimir Putin and the head of Chechnya Ramzan Kadyrov (Babin, 2016, p. 693), and a lucid moral support for the idea of Novorossiya in eastern Ukraine (Babin, 2016, p. 710). Evidently within this discourse, Narva is portrayed as a “deeply Russian city that makes one think about irrationality of the border that divides it from the neighboring Ivangorod” (Babin, 2016, p. 555). Again, the Russophone version of populism, politically supported by the Center Party, is largy grounded in this vernacular narartives. The documentary “Survive and Succeed” – created with the support from the “Russian World” Foundation – developed these storylines further on, focusing on Russian educational traditions in Estonia that date back to the beginning of the 20 century. The narrative of the film claimed that “Estonians were simply fascinated by the quality of education provided in Russian language.” However, the story of Russian education at some point transformed into the glorification of Soviet times when, as the narrative of the film ascertained, “there were no restrictions regarding the Estonian language, and many elite disciplines were taught in Estonian… Soviet power was administered by ethnically Estonian officials, and they were well paid.” Unsurprisingly, the projection of this logic onto today’s Estonia led the authors to conclude that the contemporary integration policy pursued by the Estonian government is meant to assimilate and “transform Russians into Estonians” (Беседин, 2016). A particular genre of popular biopolitics comprises video materials that are helpful to visualize the imageries of the Russian world adopts in Estonia. The genre of self-made visual essays and stories based on randomly taken interviews with “people from the street” complement texts with visualized images, duly reflecting the authentic language and gestures of the filmed Estonian Rus-

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sophones. An excerpt from a video that features a drunk Russian youngster in Tallinn serves as an illuminating illustration of the attitudes of a part of Russophone community towards the Estonian state: I don’t like Estonia… First of all, I don’t like this country because there is no job here… [Prime minister] Ansip is a smelly bastard … I have nothing against Estonians, but Ansip a year ago said that Estonians should stand against Russians. But this is not true. In reality he is guilty of everything… We have nothing here, like canned sprats. (Kanal 2, n.d.) Of course, this was an example of a radical rejection of Estonian mainstream politics among a certain part of Russian speakers. There are many other forms in which the feelings of marginalization are expressed. The Estonian documentary “The Hearts of Sirgala” (Eesti Filmi Instituut, n.d.) (directors Anna Terentjeva and Galina Zahharenko) is a visualized story about a small town rebuilt after the war and devastated nowadays. It starts with the old Soviet-era chronicle featuring workers who were enthusiastically reconstructing buildings and then shows the contemporary depopulated space with only a few elderly Russophone residents left. The story continues with a local community activist, a middle-aged Russian-speaking woman who spends her time and efforts in renovating old abandoned buildings and transforming them into homes for a small local community of single or homeless people whose lives are not duly protected and not taken care of: There is a different life, a normal life. When was the last time you took shower or ate a decent food? Human beings can’t live like that… Each person is responsible for his life. Are you in agreement with your life? Rhetorically, she asks this to a man with a seeming record of alcohol or drug use problems whom she tries to persuade him to volunteer for refurnishing the building. The project ultimately receives sponsorship from a Norwegian religious fund whose representatives are set to visit Estonia and inspect how the finances were spent. Russophone video blogging in Estonia is another genre replete with multiple visual stories about other small deserted towns that were forming an industrial base of the Soviet economy, yet nowadays lost their economic importance and therefore were almost deserted by outmigration and poor financial conditions for residence. For the Russophone video bloggers, Estonia is “our country,” and their visualized discourses might be divided into those marked with

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nostalgic regret, exploratory interest, and deconstructive re-inscription of the bygone Soviet era. Nostalgic regret represents a type of documentary imagery of ‘ghost cities’ emptied from people, boring, and hollow spaces with depressive atmosphere and useless material remnants of the Soviet epoch (Мы Из Эстонии, 2017). In this narrative, laborious people are portrayed as victims of changes that happened beyond their control, which translates into an overt idealization of the Soviet lifestyle. Nostalgic regret is a fertile ground for making politically explicit parallels – for example, dubbing Kiviõli “Estonian Donbas” (Rou, 2019), a symbol of a geographic periphery and economic marginality. For the series of videos produced by “We are from Estonia” family of bloggers typical is the story about Sirgala, an industrial township built from scratch during Soviet times, where nowadays the innumerous remaining pensioners are surviving in this godforsaken place, thus embodying “what has happened to a country that formerly belonged to the Soviet Union” (Kaldre TV, 2019). Sirgala is inhabited by retired people living their dispensable lives and the noire-style aesthetics full of unnecessary things, needless remnants of the old times, waste, and garbage. “In some windows you can still see curtains… there might be some residents left… Anyone can freely enter the abandoned buildings and see all the devastation inside… People were living and working here, but then new times came and everything collapsed… There were so many books during the Soviet times, nowadays all became futile” in this semi-dead and forlorn place detached from the Estonian mainstream. The nearby Sompa is a former minors’ place: “it was a good settlement with Russians and all other ethnic groups, and everybody were employed and happy. When Estonia gained its independence, for some reasons mines were not needed any more, they were closed, and people started leaving out. Those who remained have nothing to do here – no sports, no cultural activities on the ground. The only local school was vandalized and burned down… It is a village forgotten by everybody” (Мы Из Эстонии, 2017) and inhabited of a handful of bare lives, the blogger narrated. As for exploratory interest in the abandoned architecture of past times, this narrative is well represented in the videos by a blogger nicknamed Yulich. Her investigative style seems to match the stories of abandoned places in an English-language video blogs, including those about Estonia (Atlas Obscura, 2019). In one of them, she also narrates about Sirgala (Хоботов, 2019) where a small local community lives an archaic life with neither regular electricity nor proper facilities. Moreover, local voices are unheard or non-existent: “Nothing happens here… In the library, the only references to this place are related to the Soviet-time mines.” It is the technical and material details that

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mostly matter for Yulich; the post-industrial landscape of devastation consists of dilapidated buildings keeping memories about the Soviet past with its labour force of the Soviet industrialization (Sirgala: заброшенный шахтёрский посёлок в Ида-Вирумаа., 2019). The place resembles a post-human milieu with bushes on the warped roofs of the untrodden buildings, open doors to uninhabited apartments, silence, and heaps of garbage, the desolated personal belongings of escaped owners, and even school papers from the old times that have been simply thrown away in the backyard when the school locked down as a material symbol of an already non-existing epoch. Vivikonna, a former part of the city of Kohtla-Järve built after WWII by German war prisoners, is another object of the blogger’s attention; it is represented as a neglected and deprived village whose memories “kind of disappeared, and time is petrified… There I saw things that I remember from my childhood… Now the nature takes all this back” (Viivikonna: город-призрак в Эстонии, 2019) from people who don’t need them any longer. Each sign of the presence of human beings here is surprising and even threatening. “I’ve heard sounds of music nearby, but didn’t dare to drop in… Most of all I was afraid of bumping into a cadaver,” Yulich commented. Ironic re-inscription can be well illustrated by the video blogger Sasha Tamm who in his three series about Sillamäe gives an example of a trickster-style narrative about the material past that is bent on an interlacing of glorification and irony. He intentionally uses contemporary colloquial language, replete with slang to describe the past, always balancing between an ironic reconstruction and re-inscription of the storylines about the Soviet lifestyles into contemporary Estonian reality. Tamm ridicules – without explicitly admitting that he is doing so – the habits of the Soviet time; “standing here in front of the former factory gates, I can’t even imagine how many workers were detained for bringing samogon (strong self-made alcohol) in their pockets;” (Силламяэ, часть1…, 2019) “here is a kindergarten where kids were educated in the spirit of the Soviet industrialization;” “from here, you could go all the way down through the Lenin boulevard to your factory, and this is already sufficient to energize you for working three time slots in a row, if needed, and get ready to meet the arrival of the bright communist future” (Силламяэ часть 3… Конец., 2019). In a different episode, he continued, “Here the Soviet demonstrations took place, led by milkmaids and welders… Here is a house build in Soviet times with a crooked roof; I can imagine a foreman who was aware of that but kept building, hoping to steal a bit more in the process of construction… Here you could buy and drink your alcoholic beverages with your lads and enjoy life… After an overdose you could jump into the river, and the physically fit rescuers with good muscles, male and female, would immediately rush to help

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and save you… Here is an Orthodox Church – you can get inside and do a wild modish prayer.” In the meantime, a 24-hour-open kindergarten that functioned here in the Soviet time or a teachers’ house conveniently located in close vicinity to school – all these details of the Soviet life were seriously praised by Sasha Tamm. In his imagery, Sillamäe is a city of miracles and romantic traction with peculiar monumental architecture and innovative housing by Soviet standards. Its biopolitical detachment from the Estonian mainstream does not imply relations of temporal othering – on the contrary, the Soviet past is integrated into the contemporary worldview of the author and the version of the Russian World he represents.

2.2

Biopolitical Dislocations

In the previous section, I have shown how popular biopolitics contributes to the construction of two hegemonic discourses and imageries, first for those constitutive of Estonian national identity and second for the attempts of selfidentification by Estonian Russophone community. These two highly visible discourses are indispensable elements of any political development within Estonia since 1991, and they define the structure of the Estonian popular biopolitics as well. In the political market, both discourses – of Estonian cultural and linguistic nationalism and the subalternity of the Russophone community – are promoted and supported by parties whose thetoric might be qualified as populist (EKRE and Center Party, correspondingly). Being politically on opposite sides of the spectrum, these biopolitical discourses, however, share a sense of deprivation, grief, and mourning, dating back to the differently interpreted history of the WWII and Soviet rule. In this section, we look at the space between these two positions as being replete with narratives and cultural representations with different degrees of hybridity. All of them, in one way or another, are built on a sense of mutual gravitation developed between biopolitical and geopolitical frames of reference and are illustrative of the role of popular biopolitics as a cultural and political force challenging the binaries and opening up the space for inclusive interpretations of Estonian national belonging. In the rest of the chapter, I shall develop this approach further through unpacking a series of discursive dislocations that popular biopolitics brings to the fore.

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2.2.1 Russia as an External Other The first type of dislocation concerns the role of Russia that in the two hegemonic discourses introduced above is well fixed: Russia is an encroacher for the Estonian national discourse and a protector for the Russophone community that is “regarded and treated by political elites with suspicion because of their instrumentalization by Russia, adversely affecting their prospects of integration” (Pigman, 2019, p. 31). However, a closer scrutiny at the cultural landscapes of Estonian popular biopolitics gives a much more diverse panorama of different representations of Russia with various metaphors, connotations, and significations. The scope of these alternative biopolitical imageries include the de-humanization of Russian occupiers as being physically/corporeally different from the locals, the portrayal of Russian intervention as a natural catastrophe, or an invasion of non-humans, and the representation of Russia either through Oriental topographies or as a pure material/physical reality bereft of meaningful normative components. What unites all these types of dislocation is an aesthetic detour from hegemonic representations of Russia as a source of immanent political threat to the largely depoliticized domains of nature, wild life, spatiality, and geography leaving little room for attributing to Russia any identifiable social, cultural, or political characteristics. This, however, does not preclude narrators from accepting those people from Russia who wish to become parts of the Estonian community through professional activities and cultural/linguistic integration. In “The Past as Blue Mountains. Ivan Orav’s Memoirs,” Andrus Kivirähk (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 33) metaphorically depicted the invasion of Soviet soldiers into Estonia in 1918 as a natural catastrophe: “they came in such numbers that border posts collapsed, and fish in the Peipsi Lake disappeared. Day and night, Russian planes ejected paratroopers who were falling wherever they could, often to wheat fields destroying the harvest” (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 39). The story is told on behalf of a fictitious protagonist Ivan Orav who is supposed to represent an incarnation of Estonian national spirit. Thus, he is convinced that before the foreign invaders, Estonia was a prosperous, free, and laborious country; however, the way he describes these qualities are an evident mockery. The first Estonian national government that had to deal and negotiate with Russia is depicted as a group of strange personalities who eventually decided to “accommodate Russian soldiers” (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 33). Ultimately Estonia was “rife with bastards and degenerates of all kinds, people with canine heads… Train to Paldiski was full of beings whose bodies were covered with black fur, they were cutting glass with their nails and chewing it as if it were waffles” (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 43). Other Russians “were picking raw chestnuts and stuffed their bags with them” (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 54). The later

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Soviet occupation – embodied by the figure of the Communist chief Andrei Zhdanov – was an epitome of pure and groundless violence; the occupiers released all the criminals from the jails, and in the meantime sent many locals to Siberia. The protagonist of the novel Orav himself was deported to Russia and found it a country of supernatural miracles: to catch a fish as a snack for vodka, his Russian fellow simply put his hand into the water and then wished the whole lake be filled with vodka, which immediately was materialized (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 74). Similarly, those who denounce the Soviet occupation brought to Estonia feature in Kivirähk’s imagery as parasitic insects who at certain point started multiplying (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 63). Orav and his fellows escaped from the Soviets in the forest and learned how to become invisible for enemies, up to the full conflation with the nature (he refers to “soil brothers,” “swamp brothers,” “stone brothers,” “tree brothers,” and others who transformed into half-humans/half-plants) (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 81). The crisis and the collapse of the Soviet system were also described in a metaphorically imaginative way: “everything was about to become ash. Iron tractors were melting down and disappearing in the sewage system… Castles, temples and mausoleums were collapsing in the middle of the day… Rivers were stuck with silt, forests in the Urals disaggregated into a sand… Awful people somewhere from the Amur River came to Moscow: with flippers instead of legs, they laid eggs instead of giving birth to children; all of them were party members. To look even scarier, huge dogs in coats were turning out their guts in public” (Кивиряхк, 2012, p. 143). Gorbachev was travelling all across the country and decimated the monsters. Ultimately all local Communist bosses self-annihilated, and Russians started leaving Estonia. In Estonian memoir literature, it is not rare that the occupiers were cursed as “wild animals” (Jurison, 2016, p. 61). From academic literature, we also know about arguments “for including at least some forms of nonhuman life, such as animals, in the purview of biopower” (Hannah, 2011, p. 1044), which in the case of Estonian popular biopolitics is meant to draw a biopolitical border between humans and non-humans who pretend to be humans but expose their unhuman nature. This performative dehumanization of Russian and Soviet Communists and their domestic collaborators might be seen as a depoliticizing move since it not only portrays perpetrators and intruders as complete aliens and strangers but deploys them beyond the politically qualified sphere by denying their human-like characteristics. In this respect, one may agree that “while the enemy as ferum (wild beast) must be captured or killed, the enemy as a parasite or infective agent requires instead a methodical, aseptic, and cold disinfection” (Forti, 2006, p. 13).

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This type of aesthetic depoliticization highlights new facets of the previously discussed nexus of geopolitics and biopolitics. In the project “Siberian Childhood” (SLED, n.d.-a), the art group SLED has re-visualized geopolitical imagery as a signifier of bio-/necropolitical displacements. The exhibition devoted to the 70 year anniversary of the largest deportation was installed in 16 railway stations all across Estonia from which the forceful displacement of thousands of Estonians eastwards to Siberia commenced (SLED, n.d.-b). The project’s biopolitical salience lies in its resignification of the geography of human tragedies; territories and landscapes were given a biopolitical meaning by infusing stories of people’s trauma and mourning into the names of stations marked on the map (ERR News, 2019). In this context, the reference to children conforms with an approach to childhood as “a zone of particular intensity within the wider field of biopolitics” (Ryan, 2014). Within this aesthetically minimalist cartographic representation Russia featured as an enormous expanse devouring Estonian lives, a metaphysical reality that can be signified only in territorial categories and that lacks ostensible cultural characteristics that would require some kind of inter-subjective engagement. “A Monument to My Grandmother,” a short documentary by Avi Taavet, an artist from the SLED group, continued this spatial depoliticization of Russia. The author of the film travelled thousands of kilometers eastwards to a faraway village in Siberia to find a place where her deported grandmother had been buried decades ago (Зыбина, 2019). The geopolitics of memory in this film is again biopolitically resignified: Russia, as seen through the eyes of the film-maker, is visualized as a de-memorialized place that doesn’t evoke any emotions, feelings, or sentiments; a huge, backward, and gloomy periphery rather than a social or cultural space of its own. The film implicitly deconstructs Russian political subjectivity through featuring this country as merely a geographic space, a huge margin populated by people who look more like victims than conquerors, and do not care much about anything political at all, including memory politics. Russia is represented by a series of Oriental topographies bereft of direct state-related connotations; care of the memory of perished relatives is performed as an explicitly private affair, an act of respect, and a pure biopolitical memory that leaves little space to politically explicit narratives. An even more positive re-signification of Russia might be found in the book “Stolen Childhood,” a collection of short memoirs of deported Estonians, which recreates a complex picture of the post-war mass displacements, in which sorrow trumps hate, and an incomprehension of the motives of the Soviet authorities goes hand-in-hand with good memories about local people in Siberia who, by and large, treated the displaced Estonians with some

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decency and understanding (Vesilind, 2014, p. 22). Thus, the deportees called their job assignments a “slave market” (Vesilind, 2014, p. 40); yet according to their testimonials, “the teachers were nice” (Vesilind, 2014, p. 23), and there was some kind of solidarity with other repressed groups, including Volga Germans, Crimean Tatars, Moldovans, Carpathians, and officers from the Vlasov Army (Vesilind, 2014, p. 42). Paradoxically, some Estonian prisoners, after being released from the forced-labor camps, settled nearby with their families instead of returning back to Estonia (Kultas-Ilinsky, 2008). When we look at Russophone cultural narratives, some of them detach Russia from the negative memories of the Soviet Union and are meant to resignify Russian-speaking Estonians as loyal citizens or residents capable and willing to integrate into the Estonian and European cultural mainstream (Русский Мир, 2018). The Russian Museum in Tallinn is basically about Russia’s cultural role of developing and promoting education in Estonia that was accepted as beneficial by Estonian society. Importantly, the exposition covers the period from 1715 until 1944 when the Soviet occupation started (Сморжевских-Смирнова & Янес, n.d.), which can be understood as an attempt to delink the negatively marked Soviet period from Russian cultural influence through schooling and education. Russian-language literary narratives draw a more complex picture. Andrei Ivanov’s novel “Argonavt” is a good example of the sophisticated genealogy of – and a roadmap to – the worldview of a typical Russophone Estonian who clearly understands his ontologically marginal status in this country: “we were a typical family of Soviet vampires, useless blood-suckers, sluggards, spongers who ought to be drowned as kitties, but we were taken care of, given documents… and not flushed in the toilet with all the shit” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 46), ironically he narrates about his pedigree. One of Ivanov’s protagonists is sympathetic with Estonian Russophiles who confess that they “feel themselves in Estonia like a fish in the coast” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 67), are disappointed with the market reforms, deny Estonia’s political and cultural belonging to Europe, and see no good future for the Estonian state. “People are leaving from here, losing faith in finding a job even having learned the Estonian language” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 235). These remarks seem to be part of the global existential melancholia Ivanov reflects upon: “The iron curtain is down. Borders are open. Same boredom remains” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 79). However, this Estonia-skepticism does not necessarily make local Russophones pro-Russian. One of Ivanov’s heroes admits – without explaining – that he is “afraid of Russia” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 39). Another says, “Each time I meet a Russian in Estonia who supports the annexation of Crimea, I am trying to guess by his age whether he has served in the Soviet army or not, and most

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of them did” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 269). On a different occasion, Ivanov refers to a Russian “doodle, a frequenter of the Impressum Club2 who speaks in favor of Russians’ rights and mumbles something in Peskov3’s style” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 284). Ivanov ridicules a pro-Russian activist living in Tallinn and speaking the language of political sloganeering (Ivanov, 2018, p. 323). In a more radical way, he speaks about Russian fascism nourished by “a multi-million army of fanatics… inflated by imperial ideas… and calling upon a new Stalin” (Ivanov, 2018, p. 302). However, Europe, in their imagery, builds a wall protecting “the white world” from Russia and the Orient. Europe is depicted as depriving Estonia of its authenticity and immersed in domestic troubles largely associated with excessive hospitality towards non-Europeans. This liminal in-betweenness of Estonian Russophones is constitutive for Ivanov’s literary mindset, ending up in an immanence of perpetual non-belonging accompanied by aimless mobility across borders and spaces. The Russophone version of Estonian populism, exemplified by the Center Party and its voters, for years explores these feelings and gives them political visibility. 2.2.2 The West as a “Close” (but Still) Other Another type of discursive dislocation embedded in popular biopolitics is produced by multiple stories of Estonian migrants and refugees who at the end of the Second World War were moving to the West escaping from atrocities yet could hardly meet a decent regime of care beyond their motherland. These narratives of deprivation, mistreatment, misery, and hunger expose the biopolitical conditions of refugees’ existence, accompanied by the constant fear of repatriation back to the Soviet Estonia under Moscow’s pressure. In these narratives, Western countries are ambiguously portrayed as saviors of many Estonian lives and also as reluctant hosts who accepted Estonian refugees under rigid conditions, including age limit and children’s commitment to work. The memoir literature contains much evidence of disappointment and disillusionment with the West that did not run a risk of confronting the Soviet Union over the occupied Baltic States: “Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were chess pieces in a game the big powers played with the lives of over ten million people. Where were the champions of liberty?” (Resen, 2013). In the book “Sailing to Freedom,” the life of Estonians under the Soviet occupation was described in categories of animal existence – “we were like so many

2 A pro-Kremlin discussion club in Tallinn. 3 Putin’s press secretary.

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ants who had built their hill in the middle of a busy highway” (Veedam & Wall, 1953, p. 16), or as sardines trying to migrate from the Estonian shore to Scandinavia. An Estonian family who escaped from their occupied country to the United States in a small boat was certain that “a prison in Sweden might not be very pleasant, but it’s certainly better than citizenship in the U.S.S.R.” (Veedam & Wall, 1953, p. 42). The resolve to get as far as possible from Soviet reach found its perfect verbal metaphor: “I’d rather be eaten by an octopus than by Father Stalin” (Veedam & Wall, 1953, p. 129). The desperate biopolitical escape was a months-long journey from existential unfreedom to the free world exemplified by the United States, and included a series of mixed or hybrid unfreedoms, such as for example, a ban to leave ashore in Madeira, harsh interrogation by border authorities in England, and the constant threat of deportation back to the Soviet Estonia by the Allies. In the documentary “Escape,” Eva Sepping told a story about a young Estonian family who fled their motherland after the Soviet troops entered Estonia in 1944. Again, their cartographic trajectory – from Estonia to Germany and then to the US – may be re-signified from a biopolitical perspective as a story of abandoned people who were moving to the West hiding from the war machine, yet faces a harsh reality: in Germany they were met with “free cabbage soup” and a liter of milk and deployed in a “transit camp” where they “learned how masters treated their guests and how fellow countrymen enjoyed their power position as agents” (Viires, n.d.). As the main protagonist recalls, the camp director told her: “You need not have taken such a long journey”. The Estonian-Dutch artist Helga Merits’ documentary “Coming Home Soon” is an equally tragic story of about four thousand Estonian refugees in a small German town Geislingen where they were transported in the end of the Second World War. This is an almost forgotten episode of the post-war biopolitical displacements of abandoned people who were not welcome in Germany and were under the complete sway of the occupation authorities who negotiated the number of the people allowed in the settlement and pushed the refugees to find new places and jobs for themselves elsewhere. In Germany, the Estonian community of escapees was placed under strained conditions with no sufficient food, water, and electricity. The Church offered help only to place children in orphanages. In a confession of one of the refugees, “we lost our identity, we were outsiders. We didn’t have proper social life, and integration was out of question.” An insider’s evidence of the biopolitics of migration is a series of illustrations by Arnold Sepp and Endel Koks Mis teha – siin ta on and published as a book “Refugee Life in Pictures.” The bare life of the refugee camp inhabitants in Geislingen is depicted here with all bare clarity: “dangerous and exhausting

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jobs, inadequate food, and cold and bleak barracks for living quarters… Native Germans did not feel hospitable toward the refugees from the East… The camp residents had very few rights” (Merivoo-Parro & Jurisson, 2014, p. 17) and were always under the pressure of “screening procedures” (such as the search for SS tattoos), interrogations, and repatriation pressures aimed at making life in the camps so unappealing that the displaced persons would want to return to their occupied homeland. Verbal remarks in the drawings of injections and medical checks betray the biopolitical gist of the refugee physical existence: Finally, he was given injections three times against possible complications caused by the injections… They started to weight him. With clothes and without. With boots and without… Before eating and after eating. While eating. The results of the weighting were sent to an international commission for scientific analysis… A special apparatus was brought to study his kidney, spleen, the pores of his body and soul. When displaced person’s heart was x-rayed, it was so full of black thoughts that the machine’s rays could not penetrate them, and broke down. (MerivooParro & Jurisson, 2014, p. 99) In these historical narratives, Europe exposes its ambiguity as both protector and inspector, a close relative that however remains Estonia’s Other. A similar ambiguity is also seen in contemporary literary discourses. In Rein Raud’s novel, an Estonian protagonist says, “we envy the Finns… Their border guards could ask us to show cash that we have with us. Just for nothing, to make us remember who we are” (Merivoo-Parro & Jurisson, 2014, p. 53). In an intersubjective exchange of hidden thoughts, an Estonian protagonist deems that most Europeans are “awfully naïve, as all people on the other side of the iron curtain… How can’t they understand that people who, in their view, support and defend the system of evil, were not born with evil in their souls, and keep living, knowing that they and others are fulfilling their duties…” As a symmetrical riposte, his Finnish vis-à-vis reciprocated, “How naïve are they, as all living on the other side… How they can seriously think that [something] ineffective, totally corrupt, and initially built on irrational and inhumane foundation economy might be reformed from inside? You can’t be a bit free” (MerivooParro & Jurisson, 2014, p. 58). In a different scene, an Estonian who left the Soviet Union and settled in Scandinavia saw around himself “good-looking ladies in hats with a bunch of bananas and a slogan “Welcome to freedom”… [Then his hosts] took him to McDonald’s and offered a hamburger” (MerivooParro & Jurisson, 2014, p. 89). Mixed feelings towards their Northern neighbors were verbalized in a different way as well: “tears are welling up when I see how

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many our indigenous Estonian manors are now in the possession of Finns and Swedes… They need only lawns to sunbathe… For them, we are one big summer house… None of them knows how to sharpen scythe… All the summer they lay their bellies up” (Kivirähk, 2006b, p. 174). Trying to dissuade their son and his fiancée from travelling to Africa, protagonists of another Kivirähk’s novel say, “Africa is a terrible country. There are Negroes living there. My uncle who before Russians came escaped to Brazil wrote that in their house they have a black family. The uncle had a cat. Once he noticed that the Negroes are chewing something. It was his cat!” (Kivirähk, 2006, p. 175). A particular deconstruction of the West can be found in Andrei Ivanov’s novels. Ivanov who is one of the top Russian-language authors in Estonia, in most of his books depicts nomadic people – often with Russian cultural and linguistic backgrounds – as stateless and rootless individuals facing the harsh reality in Europe and ultimately collapsing, both physically and psychologically. Thus, in “Hanuman’s Travel to Lolland” he described attempts of an ethnically Russian protagonist to get settled in Denmark along with an army of refugees, asylum seekers, and illegal immigrants from all over the world. The journey to Europe becomes a series of escapes from detention centers and camps replete with all kind of misery and misbehavior. Denmark – and the West in general – is represented as a cultural milieu that is reluctant to fully admit others and equipped with ubiquitous system of control and surveillance. The hero hates the society that always “classifies,” “typologizes,” and “tames” him and his mates; “They will see that you smoke illegal stuff even if it was a year ago. They will find out through your urinal test that your visa has expired” (Ivanov, 2011, p. 19). This feeling of hatred towards the West forges a sense of trans-Oriental solidarity among the nomads: “We are not Finns, right? You are Slavic. I am Hindu. We are victims of the European civilization” (Ivanov, 2011, p. 26). Yet this negative togetherness, based on cultural detachment from the Western civilization, cannot be stable; “Who are these eternal refugees? An excess of nature disregarded and neglected by societies of different countries? Something dissected from the perfect form of the wonderful world? … Almost all the dirt of the world concentrated here, within these walls, among outcasts, thieves, drug users, fugitive terrorists, crocks who pretend to be refugees and escaped to this country in search of a sweet life, yet ended up in this smelly shed” (Ivanov, 2011, p. 54). Ivanov’s narration of the camp and bare life in this novel is structurally similar to Agamben’s conceptualizations we have discussed earlier. In both cases, the camp is universalized as a metaphor for permanent displacement and escapement that exists in parallel to the “normal” world of affluence and wellbeing. Ivanov intentionally describes the camp in physiological categories,

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portraying it as a zone of idiocy, mental and corporeal deviations, unfulfilled desires, sexual perversions, cacophony, and disorder. Being – unlike Agamben – a novelist, Ivanov told his camp story on behalf of an insider, someone who internalizes the daily atmosphere of the camp, reducing human existence to bodily instincts and satisfaction of elementary needs. The picture he draws might be to a large extent applicable to and extrapolated into Ivanov’s vision of Estonian biopolitics. For his protagonist, Estonia is part of the ‘global East’ from where people run away in search of a better life. Deportation back to Estonia is seen as the darkest option for him and the end of plans for the future. In the meantime, he understands that his fellow escapees are a gang of criminals and adventurists from the most troublesome countries in the world, and their integration into European societies is beyond question. Russia, in its turn, is only in the margins of the protagonist’s worldview – thus, he made up a story of a non-existent romance with a girl in St. Petersburg whom he allegedly wished to see again yet immediately admitted that the story is fake – Russia as a destination point of his never-ending journey is not an option at all. This complex mind-set is, largely, typical for the biopolitical vision dominant among Estonian Russophone community that might be equally sceptical of both Russia and Europe. Ivanov’s prose might be read as an inverted version of the indispensable ingredient of the Estonian mainstream discourse of forceful outmigration of ethnic Estonians during the Second World War. Ivanov’s protagonists are Russophone escapees from the contemporary Estonia who left the country in search of a better life in countries whose borders Estonians fleeing from the Soviet occupation were crossing several decades ago. Plots of “Argonavt” and “Hanuman’s Travel to Lolland”, densely populated by stateless refugees, are structurally reminiscent of – and symmetrical to – numerous life stories of Estonians who experienced all the misery and deprivation being stationed in temporary camps in Germany, Sweden and Finland, and ultimately bound to farther destinations in the US, Canada and Australia. These are the two sides of the phenomenon of displaced people well described in the memoir literature about Estonians pushed away from their country by war (Taagen, 2013), and today’s nomads searching for a better life without properly qualifying it. 2.2.3 Ruptured Memories: Choosing the Lesser Evil A particular sphere of Estonian popular biopolitics that produces a peculiar type of dislocation is memory politics squeezed between different forms of biopolitical othering and thus vacillating between the two historical perpetrators alternating each other.

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In her novel “When the Doves Disappear,” Estonian-Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen depicts biopolitical othering through different life strategies of Estonians who found themselves in a geopolitical imbroglio between the German invaders and the Soviet occupiers. The Germans, the heroine recalls, “were very clean people, and the officers were so easygoing… The Germans gave the children candy” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 46). In another confession, “my cousin had always considered the German gentry superior, admired the bicycles imported from Berlin, gone crazy over their video-telephones. He even arranged his sentences sometimes in German word order” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 43). The corporeal and the geopolitical were tightly knit together in Oksanen’s narration: “the Germans were the only ones who could save us from the Bolshevik terror” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 123); therefore “if the Germans withdrew, the next trains would take Estonians straight to Siberia” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 190). In the geopolitical imagination of one of the novel’s heroes, Germany could open to him “the whole Empire… Men from Baltische Öl and the Goldfeld Company would arrive, so would the Einsatzgruppe Russland-Nord” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 157). For refugees escaping the Soviet Army, the strategy of survival was geographically bound; the goal of many Estonians was to move “farther from Narva and the Soviet border” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 216). Siberia can serve as a perfect metaphor of the bio-/geo-political interdiscursive nexus. However, it is the existence of the reverse side of the story – the “sadism of the Hitlerists” and “the thieving fascist conquerors” (Oksanen, 2015, pp. 86–87) – that dislocates Estonian memory politics. The biopolitical gist of fascism immediately exposes itself when it comes to issues of sexuality and reproduction; “The Reichsfuhrer just wants the best possible fertility; he’s worried about the degeneration of the race” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 113), a German officer says, then ominously adding, “Only fifty to seventy percent of Estonians possessed the racial characteristics and general health to qualify for the Waffen-SS” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 140). In this light, the discussions about “Reich’s liberation” of Estonia are developing in parallel with “possible relocations” of Baltic Jews and Estonians “beyond Peipsi or to Karelia” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 135). In the words of a German police officer, “it would be wise to investigate how much damage was done to Estland under conditions in which there were no restrictions on Jews, and how much the treachery peculiar to the Jews has advanced in such a social environment. The criminalization of anti-Semitism in 1933 was doubtless the result of Jewish machinations, from which we can deduce that the government is very weak or the Estonian race of particularly low intelligence” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 130). Oksanen’s description of the post-war Soviet Estonia was marked by apparent biopolitical references: to get a normal food, one had to make “acquain-

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tances at the combine who could get frankfurters before they were even sold to the shops, where they added water to increase the weight. It was useless to dream of fricadelle soup until he had a friend at the meat combine – the ground meat at the grocer’s was adulterated, sometimes with rats” (Oksanen, 2015, pp. 163–164). Russians settled in Estonia were viewed by the locals as people “spending the day among the shady shrubbery, unwrapping the newspaper from their boiled eggs, and chomping on their onion tops” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 264). The worldview of Estonians who preferred to collaborate with the Soviet regime is marked by explicitly biopolitical tones as well. One of them contemplates of an “Estonian cannibalism” (“without the liberation brought by the Soviet Union the Estonians would have eaten themselves into extinction”) (Oksanen, 2015, p. 105), while another one sees voluntary informants as “biological degenerates” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 246). The Soviet deportation camps were referred to as places that awaken “animal instincts” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 169), matching the German camps as spaces of “bare life”: “they saw a line of trembling, naked prisoners, white and dry as leather. Their hands tried to cover their genitals. Judging by the wheezing and jerking, the prisoner who was shot was not dead yet, but his teeth were already gone… [Edgar] was quite certain that the Unterscharfuhrer had an erection” (Oksanen, 2015, p. 193). In her bestseller “Purge,” Oksanen gave an eloquent description of the geopolitical fractures triggering deeply biopolitical effects: during the Soviet occupation the catchphrases – We’re fighting for Stalin’s great cause and we will liquidate illiteracy – provoked endless amusement… The biggest joke of all was the officers’ wives, prancing around in fringed nightgowns in the villages, at the dances, in the streets. And what about those Red Army soldiers, peeling boiled potatoes with their fingernails like they did not know how to use a knife? Who could take a bunch like them seriously? But then people started disappearing… (T)he land groaned under a flood of sorrow, and someone was added to the family of the dead in every grave dug in Estonian soil… and every part of the country cried out for help to Jesus, Germany, and the old gods… The Germans marched into the country, chased the smoke from the burning houses out of the sky, made it blue again, made the earth turn black, the clouds white… (T)he Germans were polite; it was a wonderful feeling; people were playing harmonicas… [And then] the Russians had spread out across the country again. (Oksanen, 2008, pp. 128–129)

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It is exactly these ruptures that blur “the distinction between victims and perpetrators in such a way as to destabilize any Estonian national identity based on the notion of a shared righteous victimhood… (T)he suffering of Estonians is shown not to translate automatically into noble resistance, but is rather shown to undermine their solidarity with each other in the struggle for individual survival… [This] undermined contemporary Estonian nationalist narratives of heroic Estonian resistance and victimhood, which blot out any consideration of Estonian culpability, not least in relation to the Holocaust, but also in terms of their accommodation with the Soviet regime” (Clarke, 2015, p. 232). Similar motives can be found in other literary narratives. In the book titled “If I Could Paint the Moon Black,” Nancy Burke, using the oral history approach, told a story of an Estonian girl who along with her relatives went through all the ordeals and cruelties of submission to the external forces of oppression. Perhaps paradoxically, the heroine admits that with all cognizance of the crimes committed by the Nazi regime against the Jews, Roma, and the homosexuals, they would prefer Germany over Russia, and they felt themselves more protected in the German exile than under the Soviet sway that is associated with “cattle cars” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 11). The language for the German soldiers retreating from the battlefield was remarkably distinct; they “were very worried about civilian casualties” and “were so grateful for our kindness” (N. Burke, 2014, pp. 68–69). The heroine’s family “relied on their German occupiers to guide them to safety” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 70). Ultimately, “Hitler had ordered the Germans to evacuate Estonia… The Germans took Baltic Germans, their own people who had lived in Estonia for generations, and others” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 81). Having received the status of war refugees, the heroine noted that “the kindness that greeted us was overwhelming” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 82). Crucial for the novel’s narrative was an incidental encounter of the Estonian family with an elderly German couple to whom they expressed their gratitude: “The Russians invaded us. Your army liberated us from Stalin’s takeover.” Then, the German interlocutors responded by pointing to the Nazi mass murders of physically impaired compatriots for the sake of “national purification,” and added, “Don’t let yourself be weak in Hitler’s Germany.” This short talk made the Estonian family realize “that the German leaders were as bad, if not worse, that the Soviet leaders” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 88). Yet even the comprehension of the crimes committed by the Nazis did not make the heroine and her relatives feel less safe in Germany; hearing German language – “not Russian words” – was a “relief” for them (N. Burke, 2014, p. 112). “Yes, we preferred the Germans to the Russians. Not for political reasons, but because our existence as educated people made us Soviet targets” (N. Burke, 2014, p. 138). One may find

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similar confessions in other pieces of literary memoirs about these times: “To most of the Estonian people, since we were of the Aryan race, the Germans and the Nazi government were friendly as long as one was not a Jew” (Meiusi, 2016, p. 93). Choosing one of the occupiers over another always entails traumatic experiences. In the documentary “The Class of 1943,” Helga Merits narrated a visualized story of her Estonian father who served in the German army during the Second World War and who kept living in the UK for many years under the threat of punishment. It was only when he turned 80 that he decided to start talking about the pains of the past: “If you are in between two evils, you never make right decisions. There are so many misunderstandings about that… And who said that this won’t happen again?” Based on the film narrative, the war was perceived not as an ideological or geopolitical calamity, but rather as a thanatopolitical catastrophe that exterminated and displaced millions of Europeans, making physical survival and bodily existence the most primordial issues. Again – as in other documentaries mentioned earlier – the map is resignified as a bearer of these thanatopolitical displacements. Here is a short illustrative dialogue between one of war witnesses and a film crew: – I don’t remember the details where exactly happened what… – We’ll show you the map. – Please don’t. The film’s plot neither stigmatizes nor blames or shames people who served with the German troops; it rather exposes sorrow, compassion, and mourning in an attempt to comprehend the tragedy of a human existence in inhuman times. 2.2.4 Pristine Life The idea of pristine life detours the contemporary Estonian (bio)political debate on nationalism and sovereignty from finding an accommodation between Estonian national self and the Russophone others to the ancient imagery and the mythology of a return to the nature. The back-to-nature doctrine resonates in Estonian culture as absolutely positive and inspiring, exemplified, for instance, by the protagonist of an Estonian documentary “Fred Jussi” (Viilup, 2020), a retired man who prefers to spend most of his life in woods, more identifying himself with nature than with societal or political institutions, explaining his lifestyle as an escape “to the world with no concepts.” Yet other narratives of pristine life are overtly meant to fill this alleged conceptual void with meanings. Ruuben Kaalep, one of representatives for Estonian ethnic nationalism and a member of EKRE party, referred to the idea

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of forest as a counter-balance to the people’s tiredness of politics and politicians that ought to be “eliminated.” Instead, he offers an extra-political return to the pristine life: “Europeans are afraid of the forest, but here forest is in our hearts, we have special connections with nature… The forest is inside of us … with shamanic wisdom and the souls of our forest hunters” (Kaalep, 2017). “Estonians are among the most ancient people of Europe that were violently Christianized,” Kaalep said, and imagined a “new Baltic men” who nowadays might “save Europe” due to his authenticity and loyalty to paganism, for which “forests with bears” serves as a proper metaphors of Estonia being “one of the last white places in the world… I feel connection with the blood of my ancestors through identity and genetics … The Frog of the North4 has not gone, it is somewhere sleeping and waiting for its reincarnation.” The nativist interpretation of the ideas of Estonian authenticity and purity as opposite to the contemporary civilization made this type of discourse an object of literary deconstructions and dislocations. In one of his biopolitically explicit novels “The Man Who Knew Snakish,” Andrus Kivirähk narrated a phantasmagoric story of ancestral people living in the woods among animals, insects, and reptiles, feeling themselves organic parts of the nature, and venerating pagan rituals. The main biopolitical border in this universe lies between the pristine world of the forest dwellers and the village that exemplifies a space touched by modernization and, therefore, debunking the wood as an inferior and underdeveloped space. The main hero Leemet is one of the forest men who from the childhood knows ancient spells and mystic rites, can talk with animals and serpents, and is proud to befriend them as his best interlocutors and helpers. For him, the forest means the hotbed of the utmost power that is challenged by the village organized on different principles. The villagers have been Christianized, and thus for them, the top authority is the Pope who lives far away in Rome and spreads his power through heavily armored knights, known as “iron men.” Here is a remark by one of the villagers: I understood that the God to whom foreigners submit themselves is omnipotent, and if we wish to attain something, we should stick with him and forget all our stupid superstitions… I am ashamed to realize that we still live as children, while other peoples have already grown adult… Instead of talking to serpents you need to kill them. (Kivirähk, 2014, p. 178)

4 A symbol of paganism in Estonian mythology.

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These two biopolitical worlds – of savagery and civilization, backwardness and enlightenment – look irreconcilable in Kivirähk’s literary imaginary. In one world, you need to know how to catch wind and communicate with animals as your peers, and you must pray and obey to God in the other. Europe and Christianity in this dichotomy are represented as external spaces of moral deviations exemplified by gay culture and practices of castration of singers in the Church, and remains a source of biopolitical submission: “if you learn Latin, a knight can make you his servant” (Kivirähk, 2014, p. 195), a villager said to Leemet. Yet the world of antediluvian rituals ultimately turns out to be satanic and murderous, requiring sacrifice of physical bodies and lives for the sake of moral purification. Leemet ultimately – though reluctantly – disobeys the forest traditions and burns the holy grove upon the request of his fiancée who represented a modern lifestyle: “I hate convictions; I only want to feel good.” This free-thinking did not remain unpunished: Leemet’s fiancée was murdered by wild wolves in an act of revenge for disobedience to traditions. He himself wanted to keep a balance between rejecting the idea of the Christian God and refusing to observe the dysfunctional rites of the forest that he hated as much as religion. In a direct war between the two worlds the forest triumphed, and Leemet seemed to justify the mass murder of forest people who dared to capture the crown of the serpentine king as the symbol of the ultimate power: “Why did they come here, why didn’t they stay in their village? Since they arranged a new world for themselves, they would be better off to leave the past behind. But they couldn’t do that, they were seduced by the crown of the serpents’ king, the language of birds, and other woodsy secrets. They could not release themselves from the past, it appealed to them with no reason. Yet when they had to face something pristine, they didn’t know what to do with this stuff” (Kivirähk, 2014, p. 332). By destroying the woodland sanctuary, Leemet discovered within himself “a passion to kill,” which he later materialized in his personal war with the invasion of “iron men.” Pure violence thus crowned his search for a balance and harmony: “We went to fight. We attacked everyone, we were killing, stinging, beating, and crushing. We lost human appearance, we were live cadavers” (Kivirähk, 2014, p. 358) defending the “old world” against the “contemporaneity.” The latter came with foreign knights who were welcomed by the selfvictimized village people eager to be part of “a modern world” of Christianity, progress, and muscular force. In his another novel titled “November,” Kivirähk again looked back at Estonian history and imagined “real Estonians” as a biopolitical community phantasmatically existing at the threshold of human and non-human life. The

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heroes not only built their everyday routine on pagan superstitions but regularly practiced old rituals from pristine times, allowing themselves to turn into animals when needed. Always balancing between life and death, they perceived freedom as tantamount to the unlimited eating and drinking, claiming in the meantime that they are the owners of the genuine Estonian nationhood and masters of their destinies. It is the adherence to the antiquated mystique of pristine life that distinguished the bearers of “Estonian authenticity” from the landlords and other proxies of the German colonizers who “assassinated Kalevipoeg from behind” and “kicked out our gods and substituted them with their own” (Kivirähk, 2008, p. 150). Yet this type of retrogressive identity is liminal in the sense that it synthesizes the immersion in the cult of parochial traditions with an ironic borrowing of some elements of Christianity that otherwise are attributed to foreign oppressors: the werewolves after transforming into a human appearance might go to the Church, say “Amen” to wood goblins, demand from the embodied plague to “swear on the Bible” not to kill the whole village, and ultimately come to conclude that “all gods are useful – Jesus, Kalevipoeg, and the Old Devil” (Kivirähk, 2008, p. 151). Therefore, we have seen that in Estonian popular biopolitics what we have dubbed ‘pristine life’ is an interdiscursive meeting point of various cultural narratives. The idea of ‘pristine life’ can be inscribed into the mainstream national discourse of authenticity and environmentalism, or can be mythologized and politically appropriated by populist imageries that tend to produce discourses “about an ancestral past that can legitimize violence and oppression…(M)yths of ancestry are obviously crucial to the logic of state racism” (Holmes, 2019). Arguably, “Estonian nationality and culture were created at the high point of colonialism … and modernization, when progress, the idea of development and Europe-centrism were central ideas, as was the consideration of European culture and the European social model as being universal and the most advanced” (Hennoste, 2011, p. 13). Therefore, it was the search for originality and authenticity that pushed Estonian national populists “back into the 13th century, at best, to the time before overt colonialism” (Hennoste, 2011, p. 10), as a gesture of disdain to adaptation to the European cultural mainstream.

2.3

Contemporary Reverberations: The Reactualization of the Biopolitical Contexts

Discursive dislocations we are going to discuss in the remaining part of the chapter are most visible in the contexts of specific political situations or events

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that actualize certain discourses and imageries embedded in the fabric of popular biopolitics. More concretely, I single out five situational re-actualizations that are of utmost importance for this analysis – the regaining of Estonian independence in 1991, the Bronze Soldier conflict in 2007, the reverberations of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2004, the refugee crisis of 2015, and the celebration of the centenary anniversary of Estonian statehood in 2018. 2.3.1 After 1991: Suturing in the Soviet The struggle for independence has boosted what the former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves dubbed “positive nationalism” (Seljamaa, 2014, p. 32) as a fusion of political liberalism and the specific Estonian post-colonial condition (Saar, 2018, p. 472). The aesthetics of “positive nationalism” embraced the Singing Revolution (Spinosa & Bearhart, n.d.), and historically, it has been meant to achieve international recognition and equality. The “positive nationalism” distinguished itself from the “ancient tribal hatred” of the time of the Balkan wars and the subsequent nationalist / populist turn in Eastern/Central Europe (23rd Open Society Forum: Prof. Timothy Snyder and Former President of Estonia, Toomas Hendrik Llves, 2019). It was within the Estonian art community that the negation of nationalism started circulating. Thus, Katerina Gregos, commenting on the art exhibition “The State Is Not a Work of Art,” posited that nation cannot be properly defined, its criteria are blurred, and alternative forms of belonging beyond national jurisdictions pop up (Gregos, 2018). Performatively, therefore, an ethnic or linguistic nation is a non-existent entity that evades representation. Each image of visualization of the nation looks deficient and incomplete. This is a starting point for challenging and deconstructing the contrasting notions of “majority” and “minority” (Pärn, 2019) through performative acts worth of a biopolitical reading. The “positive nationalism” discourse envisaged drawing a line between the independent statehood and the period of occupation and deportations, yet in the domain of Estonian popular biopolitics, the Soviet memories often constitute and determine national identity. In this context, the concept of suture might be a useful tool to look at how the symbolic negation of an external(ized) – in terms of temporality or geography – object constructs relations of engagement with the negated memory or space. Consequently, and paradoxically, suture denotes the impossibility to define the Estonian national collective self beyond the constitutive references to the Soviet epoch, whether they are marked by positive or negative connotations. Here is how Tanel Rander articulated the biopolitical and post-colonial crux of suture: “Our minds

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and desires were in the West, while our bodies remained attached to the East” (Rander, 2019, p. 77). This suturing in the Soviet past resonates with academic voices who contested the total rejection of the colonial legacy. Thus, Olaf Mertelsmann claimed that historically “Russification was part of the unification and modernization process of the Empire… and was mainly directed against the Baltic German elite… Russification opened new opportunities for education and career… There was obviously no real danger of losing national identity by being russified.” Then, he posited that Estonians benefited from an antiGerman policy of the Provisional Government in St. Petersburg, and that “inside Estonia, there were sympathies for the Bolsheviks… At the beginning of independence, there were hopes of entering the huge Russian market… Estonians were happy that the Baltic Germans left their country, and they did not sense the Soviet danger” (Mertelsmann, 2005, pp. 44–45). What the narrative of suture targets at and undermines is the very idea of centrality of political delineation of the Soviet experience from independent Estonia as an indispensable bordering condition for the existence of the authentic Estonian national identity decontaminated from the oppressive past. In “Estonian Funeral,” Kivirähk resumed the ironic deconstruction of the conservative mindset stuck with a metaphysical cult of antiquities, and its conflict with the new generation motivated by the opening up to the world. The old generation is sure that “Estonian cucumber is hundred times better than an orange,” and that the greatest value is “to feel with bare feet the holy soil” (Kivirähk, 2006b, p. 176). The following fragment is a good description of the nature of the problem Kivirähk wishes to expose: We tend to endlessly reiterate the same words. Deportation. War. Escapes in the boats. Wooden brothers. And what is beneath all this stuff is a colossal and solid heritage, a story about our incredibly laborious people that is bound to survive all the challenges, to surmount all the hurdles, and resurrect, in spite of all the oppression… We have overloaded our memory with an incalculable number of nightmares, can’t get rid of them, and pray for them on an altar, one wing of which is our infernal sufferings, and another is our celestial love for hard work. (Kivirähk, 2006, p. 195) The critical and self-reflective representation of Estonian post-colonial identity might generate a fair amount of anti-populist self-irony. This is an excerpt from a performance shown in August 2019 during the annual theater festival held in Tallinn:

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A popular politician in Estonia is expecting the Russians to collectively apologise to the Estonian people. I cannot imagine how it should work. Perhaps setting up a microphone in the Viru Keskus shopping centre, so that the Russians could step up to the microphone, one by one, and say: “Izvinite…” And if you happen to be in Viru Keskus at the time, you, as an Estonian, can go and accept these apologies (if you do). Anyway, this politician is expecting Russians to apologise for everything that they have done in Estonia, not only in the last 100 years, but 1000 years… I am a lecturer at the university; I have to check the facts… Indeed, in 1030 A.D., one of them, Prince Yaroslav the Wise of the Rurikovich dynasty came here, made a nuisance of himself, and founded the City of Tartu. But he shouldn’t have to. Perhaps we would’ve made a better city ourselves… 600 years later a Swede established a university in Estonia, active in that very city to this day. The Swedes too should apologise to us… Another thing that we are dependent on is independence… In physics, there is no such thing as independence. (Stepanov & Astrov, 2019) The end of the 1980s was a particular time where lines of distinction were blurred and uncertain. In “The Mercenary of Our Time” by Kalle Klandorf, the protagonist – a professional killer – works for those Soviet officers who wished to prevent the USSR from disintegrating and for those staged violent attacks against state authorities, finally then cooperating with the new Estonian authorities. Being an ethnic Estonian, he remained alien to his Russian bosses (“I don’t believe you celebrate our holidays” (Klandorf, 2017, p. 100), a Soviet officer told him). The language that surrounded him was full of antiRussian utterances (“thieves, prostitutes, and other Russian elite” (Klandorf, 2017, p. 128); “monkeys with such a mug may understand only Russian” (Klandorf, 2017, p. 131), among many others). However, issues of identity turned complicated. Thus, commenting on the Soviets’ provocative intention to blow up a monument to Konstantin Päts, the first Estonian President in pre-war times, the protagonist engaged in an illuminating conversation with his KGB boss: In history classes we have been taught that he was a dictator and a fascist. “Are you kidding us? Päts was the first President of Estonia and an outstanding Estonian politician.” “But then why do we blow up his monument?” “It’s politics. Today we, the Communists, blow up his monument. And tomorrow you, Estonians, would say that Päts was connected to Communists.”

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“All right, I don’t care who he was. To blow up for 4 thousand roubles something is not a problem.” (Klandorf, 2017, p. 101) In his novel “The Death of an Ideal Phrase,” Rein Raud has cogently represented a broad spectrum of discourses in the late Soviet Union, where ethnic distinctions were not necessarily decisive. The maturation of the spirit of independence was perceived as “a tacit war without frontlines whose loci moved from one point to another; there were arteries – or mycelia – instead of entrenchments; there were myriads of little fronts coming through office rooms, family albums, or an individual human being who could be a diligent Soviet public servant from nine to five, and in the evening, while watching Finnish news, turn into an ardent fighter for ideals” (Raud, 2018, p. 20). This bricolage was a fertile ground for a ubiquitous mistrust; “everyone could be on the other side of the frontline” (Raud, 2018, p. 21). Those Estonians who served in KGB were “not that paranoid as their comrades from Moscow who saw CIA’s hand behind, figuratively speaking, each improperly attired pioneer tie” (Raud, 2018, p. 27). However, they still believed that “for the sake of a great balance they might need to break fingers of some poor fellows … as a hard sacrifice that discharges them from the highest responsibility” (Raud, 2018, p. 28). Against this backdrop, Raud unpacked the logic of those in Estonia who kept perceiving Russia as an irremovable double of Estonian national identity: “Don’t annoy a dormant bear. This is what smart people say in the West, real experts in Sovietology with budgets exceeding all Estonian economy: all the keys are in Moscow. Particularly nowadays, when the gigantic straight jacket is collapsing, no stark moves are needed” (Raud, 2018, p. 19), one of his protagonists says. The boundary between the past of the occupation and the present of the independence might be blurred when it comes to musical culture too. Here is an opinion of an Estonian art practitioner: Our punk culture politicized itself as an anti-Soviet movement, although – let us be honest – it had nothing to do with advancing Estonian national aspirations. Instead, punk artists tried to protest against the decrease in democratic freedoms and creative opportunities… Until Gorbachev turned up, the Estonian Artists’ Association was not fighting for any Estonian national interests, but wished to maintain a certain status quo… Artists back then were financially secure and had no need to fight… I am much more bored now than I was back in the 1980s…Western art brutally said that everything was international, everything was based on lies etc. In ordinary people, this causes schizophrenia. (Komissarov, 2010)

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Against this backdrop, it is not surprising that the imaginary return of the Soviet past is a recurrent topic in Estonian literature. Thus, one of the heroes of Andrus Kivirähk’s novel “At the Edge of the World: Images of Good People’s Lives” met a former enthusiast of Estonian independence who, however, at certain point became nostalgic about the Soviet times: It was good back then… Each year I with my wife spent vacation in Crimea… my father-in-law worked in a construction store, and we’ve had all we need for construction… We were all equals! Drinking together and hanging out together. Stomachs and fridges were full, no problems with money… It was a happy time… What for do I need freedom? I have never eaten as good as under Russians: I ate smoked sausages each day, and even fed my dog. (Kivirähk, 2016, pp. 276–277) In the “Blue Wagon,” Kivirähk imagined a nostalgic drinking party with friends sharing their Soviet stories and ironically deconstructing them through performative mockery and black humor by pretending to be a dead Brezhnev, sarcastically declaiming antiquated Communist slogans for the Victory Day, or mockingly toasting the October Revolution. However, the carnival of jokes was not completely detached from reality. In the words of one of the lads, “We have stepped to Europe with one leg, while the second one is still standing in Russia.” The conversation betrayed a peculiar mixture of banal nationalism and post-imperial clichés and stereotypes embedded in each of the drinking pals: one fellow dubbed Americans “stupid people,” while another called foreigners residing in Estonia “a crowd of monkeys… They make me nervous. Each time I listen to how they talk and then watch news on TV, I start thinking, were Stalin alive, he would tackle all this mess.” In the most stunning scene, the group of pals, having changed clothes into Soviet military uniforms in the presence of a neighbor who incidentally appeared, imitated Soviet officers who broke in with a search order: the neighbor failed to understand the joke and took the hoax for reality. “One day they indeed can return, why not? They even don’t need to come, they are always here, just waiting for a signal” (Kivirähk, 2006a), he confessed afterwards. The 2019 exhibition “Back in Time: Life in the Soviet Estonia” at the Baltic Station in Tallinn (Snurnikova, 2019) lucidly illustrated the core controversy of Estonian post-colonial suture. While it embraced limited forms of integration with the colonizing culture, particularly when it came to the everyday routine, the post-colonial gaze nonetheless ridicules and ironically deconstructs the Soviet imperial domination as times of savagery and wilderness, which corroborated an argument of the widely spread feelings of superiority of the

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colonized Baltic nations over the colonizers (Annus, 2012, p. 25). Crucial in this respect is that suture makes possible two important discursive operations – it allows to critically – if not ironically – reassess the Estonian national self and to resignify the external(ized) object of otherness. 2.3.2 The Bronze Soldier Conflict If suture implies constitutive references to the object of negation that needs to remain external to the suturing subject, the concept of hybridity is much less concerned with the outside and is mainly focusing on dislocations that are internal/domestic for the speaking subject and the identity it artistically represents. The Bronze Soldier incident of 2007 is a good example of that. The relocation of the Soviet military statue from Tallinn downtown to a military cemetery might be seen as provoked by public activities of radical groups from both Russophone and Estonian nationalists: “as life in Estonia became increasingly similar to life in Western Europe… (t)his development was not acceptable to the ethnic radicals in both camps, as they felt that the authenticity of their respective identities was being compromised … by cosmopolitan consumer mass culture” (Ehala, 2017, p. 139). However, the most interesting for this analysis is not the removal of the Soviet-era monument and the consequent violent protests of the local Russophones, but the way these events have been symbolized and performed. The Estonian artist Kristina Norman gave multiple examples of hybrid interventions into the controversies of Estonian memory politics. In the aftermath of the Bronze Soldier incident in Tallinn, she released a video performance in which she talked with Russian elderly women and offered them to buy figurines of the Bronze Soldier (Ladõnskaja et al., 2008), which might be interpreted as an exercise in testing the indispensability of the monument for their everyday lives and finding out its material value as opposed to memorial significance. In her another performance “After War,” Norman made a “golden copy” of the Bronze Soldier, thus having subtly undermined the seriousness with which we take the question of national identity… The ‘gold’ is fake; in fact, the materials it is made of is less durable, lighter and more humble than bronze. Is this the Golden Calf of the Soviet Empire meant to replace the truth with blissful oblivion? Isn’t the artist also questioning the attitudes of Russians who don’t even notice that the material is wrong? Russians who have also lost something by focusing on a piece of metal? Who worship misinterpreted

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symbols of the past and would, perhaps, be better off if they tried to live in the present instead?. (A. Narusyte, personal communication, 2008) In her words, she addressed the audience from an ambiguous, ‘third’ position… [based on] my mixed RussianEstonian background and my declared in-between political position… The Russian side stated that, as somebody who does not fully belong to the community, I had no right to touch upon the Bronze Soldier because I could not possibly understand the sacral nature of the entire issue. The Estonian side labeled me a Kremlin’s henchman, declaring that as a halfRussian, I cannot be expected to be loyal to the Estonian state. While claiming my right to transgress the Estonian-Russian dichotomy, I found myself in a minority, representing a collective that has yet to be imagined: a political subjectivity that is yet to come. (Norman, 2018) A visual exemplification of the symbolic construction of the Estonian national majority can be found in the Victory Monument erected at the Freedom Square in Tallinn in 2008, a year after the Bronze Soldier removal, which many interpreted as an indirect architectural follow-up to the purification of the urban cultural landscapes from the Soviet symbols (Kaljundi, 2009). The government-supported project of commemorating the victory in the War of Independence, with a huge cross at the top, was criticized by the authoritative voices within the Estonian art community as a terrifying “fetish for illusory objects” boosted by “the nostalgically tuned conservative spirit that still floats above every village” (Krull, 2008). In the opinion of an Estonian professor of sociology, “pseudo-nationalism, briefly introduced into politics again, requires for its survival an opposing side, ‘non-Estonians’ as well as ‘not sufficiently patriotic Estonians’… There is still an inexplicably strong understanding in Estonia that equates democracy with the dictatorship of the majority currently in power” (Lagerspetz, 2008). In a similarly critical opinion, “the Soviet authorities used five-pointed stars, sickles and hammers, and the Republic of Estonia erects the Victory Monument with a freedom cross… Everything huge with larger-than-life proportions psychologically causes repression and awe in a negative sense” (Karro-Kalberg, 2008). Given these diverse contexts, the Bronze Soldier removal can be seen as a performative act of consolidation of Estonian national identity that implied symbolic distancing from the architectural remnants of the Soviet past. By the same token, it also solidified the Russian world zealots in Estonia who felt themselves offended and sidelined. Public protests against the relocation of

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the monument by some local Russophone groups have sharpened the debate on national belonging and non-belonging, inclusion and exclusion with strong biopolitical meanings behind these concepts. However, for a broader picture, two more points need to be taken into account. First, the consolidation of Estonian national majority on the basis of anti-Soviet memory politics appears to be only partial and incomplete due to the fact that Estonian historical topographies still include numerous places directly referring to the Soviet period in general and the Great Patriotic War in particular, such as a monument to the “Soviet liberators” in Viljandi, a plaque in Tartu commemorating Soviet troops, or a pedestal with Soviet military tank in the suburbs of Narva. In most cases, these memorials are perceived quite neutrally, simply as relics of the past, but in other cases – such as streets in the city of Narva still bearing the names of local communists – they spark political debate. Second, the Russophone populist discourse is also gradually decomposing and looks unconsolidated. It appears to be split between the pro-Russian/Russiacentric narrative that derives its legitimacy from the Bronze Soldier conflict and those voices – including a new generation of local bilingual artists and performers – who advocate for a new hybridity that blurs dividing lines constructed earlier on the basis of language or ethnicity. These appeals to a more inclusive regime of belonging often resonates with discursive transformations within Estonian national discourse towards a greater openness, tolerance, and acknowledgement of multiple cultural and historical foundations for diversity and pluralism within society. 2.3.3 The Annexation of Crimea and the War in Donbas Russia’s interference into Ukrainian domestic politics in 2014 has strongly resonated in Estonian political debate. As it was the case of 2020 anti-regime protests in Belarus, Estonia – along with other Baltic states – was a frontrunner in formulating a firm response to the annexation of Crimea and the Russiainspired military conflict in eastern Ukraine on behalf of the European Union. In the meantime, Estonia has approached the experience of the infiltration of the “little green man” into Ukraine as an important foreign policy reference point, and also as a lesson for Estonia itself. The reaction to the 2014 event in Russian-Ukrainian relations took in Estonia two different cultural forms, synthetizing geopolitical and biopolitical narratives and imageries. First, since Russia’s annexation of Crimea, Narva became a security flashpoint in military and strategic analysis (Ведлер, 2016). Based on analogies with eastern Ukraine in spring 2014, alarmist scenario planning envisioned that Russia might incite acts of disobedience among Russophone Estonians provoking disorder with the infiltration of “little green men” from Russia

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(Mackinnon, 2015). Estonian authorities were aware that “the main reason of Crimea’s reincorporation into Russia was inaction of Ukrainian authorities when it comes to regional development. From this perspective, Ida-Virumaa is similar to Crimea… Some say that it is sufficient to make local people cross the bridge and have a look at dilapidated Ivangorod to convince them not to think about Russia… But we need to create internal magnets within Estonia, rather than persuade people by the claim that our neighbors live worse” (Денисов, 2016). In this context, Narva was reimagined through the lens of such concepts as “meeting/connecting point,” “bridge,” or “hybrid space” with performative arts and cultural practices meant to contribute to the transformation in attitudes to this city from peripheralization to cultural governance as a set of tools for fostering social integration and inclusion. This turn is particularly important, since before 2014 cultural representations of Narva remained relatively scarce. Like the other towns of the Ida-Virumaa County, Narva had to deal with the legacy of Soviet industrialization, and struggle with the prospect of marginalization and transformation into a ‘hollow/empty land.’ The official Estonian discourse avoids exceptionalizing Narva: “I have not noticed any sharpness with the ‘Russian question’ in the Estonian society… When I have visited Narva, I’ve met with many people striving to act. And the language is of secondary importance for that, particularly when I see how good Russian school graduates speak Estonian,”5 the Estonian President assumed. It is these attitudes to Narva like an ordinary Estonian city that stand behind and explain a new cultural policy of the central government towards Narva that became especially prominent after the eruption of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict. There were many attempts to rebrand Narva along the lines of developing transportation projects, spa tourism, sport facilities, or environmental tourism. Important were new political practices; for example, the Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid move her office to Narva for one month in the fall 2018. As a part of the centenary celebration of Estonian independence, she awarded state medals in Narva in 2018. Yet the most successful were cultural projects with clear political effects and meanings. Perhaps, one of the first steps in the direction of more closely integrating Narva into the Estonian polity was a 2016 photo and video exhibition “How Narva remained with Estonia” dedicated to the 1993 referendum on autonomy in this city. Initially, the exhibit was shown in Tallinn’s Museum of Occupation and then in Narva’s city museum. The context of the exposition was implicitly related to the occupation of Crimea and 5 https://www.arvamusfestival.ee/ru/prezident-kersti-kaljulajd-ja-veru-v-nashih-russkih/

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the ensuing debate about the Russian World doctrine. In the words of Katri Raik by that time, the rector of Estonian Security Academy, Narva’s desire for a greater autonomy can be compared with similar trends towards disintegration in Georgia, Moldova, and Ukraine, yet the lesson of the 1993 referendum – which was ultimately annulled by the Estonian government – is that “here in Estonia, we solved all the issues without bloodshed, and nowadays we should be grateful for that to both Russians and Estonians” (Райк, 2017). Parallels with Transnistria are particularly strong in Estonian debates on the Narva referendum (Открытка, 2016). In 2016, Narva hosted an annual Opinions Festival (Фестиваль мнений в Нарве: лиха беда начало, 2016), an open playground to address and discuss societal challenges. Since 2016, an important locus for new cultural practices was formed around Narva Art Residency (Narva Art Residency, n.d.) that started inviting young international artists to spend some time in the city with a reputation of a small borderland place “in the middle of nowhere,” strong nostalgia about the Soviet past, but an equally strong demand for translating historical memories into the present. Another salient cultural point in Narva is the territory of the Krenholm manufactory. As an industrial project, Krenholm is technically dead, but some of its parts can be rejuvenated through art practices. Recently, Krenholm inspired a number of artists who came here to imagine it to be a liminal space between past and future, Europe and Russia. A second type of cultural reaction to the 2014 events in Ukraine was exemplified to the more focused attention to the state of Russian society in general and its thanatopolitical dimension in particular. Perhaps the best expression of this refocusing was an exhibition “Paint It Black” by the Estonian artist Art Allmägi in Tartu in 2017. It represented figures of soldiers painted in black color who ceremonially burry their fallen comrades-in-arm. The exposition directly referred to the February 2014 incursion of armed soldiers without insignia into the Crimean peninsula and the 2015 new Russian law that classified the cause of death of all soldiers: Hiding somebody’s death is difficult, but the reasons and details can easily be suppressed. According to official explanations, soldiers who die in a foreign country are often there on vacation, unbeknownst to their relatives. Despite visible bullet holes, autopsy papers state heart attacks as the cause of death. Human beings are turned into a resource that can be sent to wherever to do whatever. (Allmägi, 2017) The combination of these two cultural trends demonstrates how one event that happened beyond Estonia’s borders may differently reverberate at the

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intersection of geopolitics (Russia is the only of Estonia’s neighbors that is widely perceived as a source of an imminent threat) and biopolitics (local Russophones need a better regime of governance, care, and integration into the Estonian mainstream). The geopolitical othering of Russia, in the meantime, might be read from thanatopolitical and necropolitical perspectives – as a country that not only disrespects sovereignty of its neighbors, but also uses its soldiers as cannon fodder. 2.3.4 The Retrospective Biopolitics of the Refugee Crisis Speaking from the perspective of “positive nationalism,” the former President Toomas Hendrik Ilves invited Estonians to adopt the identity of refugees or migrants, referring to the 70,000 refugees that fled the country during World War II and to the hundreds of thousands of Eastern Europeans who have moved to Western Europe in recent decades. In this context, sympathy for refugees was encouraged by the allusions to the discrimination and negative stereotyping faced by East Europeans abroad. Ilves condemned prejudices against asylum seekers who are often equated with generalized ‘Syrian terrorists’, and assured that those who ‘have escaped the war will not threaten Estonian security’ (Ojala et al., 2019, p. 173). This discourse appears to be in harmony with cultural interpretations of immigrants nowadays seeking refuge in Estonia as a mirror image of Estonians themselves who in the aftermath of WWII were escaping the Soviet Unionoccupied country, looking for shelter and protection in Western and Nordic Europe as well as all across the West. Kristina Norman’s documentary “Common Grounds” (Norman, 2013) is a good example of this narrative. In another Norman’s video installation “Bring back my fire gods” an opera singer Sofia Jernberg “appeared as a Someone who due to her African origin looks unusual for the Estonian context but whose singing nevertheless sounds as familiar as one’s mother’s voice, be it an Estonian or a Russian mother… Especially for this work, Estonian composer Märt-Matis Lill transformed the folk song into a piece of contemporary polyphonic music where both languages can at times be heard at once. The song is a testimony of close historical ties between the two cultures – the Estonian and the Russian.” Through Jernberg’s signing Norman invited “to acknowledge our own strangeness” (Norman, 2018) as an ontological condition of our existence. Yet this narrative of hybridity is challenged by the national populist discourse that had been boosted by the refugee crisis. Here is a quotation from Kristiina Ojuland, a former Estonian Foreign Minister:

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People are afraid of everything related to immigrants – we all have seen what is going on in Europe, from sexual harassment in Germany to explosions in Belgium. Refugees are the real threat, and they are already in Estonia. All those conversations about seven accepted refugees is a political farce. For example, the Tallinn district of Mustamäe is full of black people and Arabs. The fact is that they are here and threaten security of our women and children. As for Russian tanks, they are not in Estonia, and I don’t think we have to fear them. (Тальвик, 2016) Other right-wing Estonian politicians – such as, for example, EKRE’s member Jaak Maddison – were reported to reproduce a neo-Nazi-like rhetoric of ethnic hatred (Tambur, 2019). The biopolitical dimension of right-wing attacks against immigrants was nicely revealed by Anna-Stina Treumund in her photographic piece “I hate immigrants and fags” (which is part of her series of art works “Looser”, 2011), in which she positioned an apparently homophobic young lady against the backdrop of the Victory Monument in Tallinn.6 By so doing she achieved a strong effect of a biopolitical re-signification of architectural landscape, clearly relating the semantics of the cross with right wing nationalism, a gesture that has only risen in topicality with the growth of antirefugee sentiments and the ensuing progression to power of the Euro-skeptic and populist EKRE party in 2019. 2.3.5 100 Years of Independence: Celebrating Diversity In Estonian mainstream discourses that becomes increasingly diverse and rich in meanings, the ‘old’ binary rigidities are put into question and reconsidered. For example, many authoritative ethnic Estonians have claimed that citizenship is more a matter of convenience than a political instrument, and language in many contexts becomes a non-issue. The former Interior Minister Katri Raik mentioned that she “does not feel anything special or political when speaking Russian; language is a means of communication” (Raik, 2018), while the Estonian President Kersti Kaljulaid claimed that language is of secondary importance and does not define the belonging to a certain community in the same vein. The centenary anniversary of Estonian independence was marked by a series of cultural events celebrated in 2018 and meant to represent the Estonian nation through images of ordinary people from different generations and backgrounds. Examples are two photo exhibitions: “Estonia through 100 pairs

6 Collection of the Tartu Kunstimuseum.

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of eyes” by Kaire van der Toorn-Guthan, and “The History of a Hundred” by Kaupo Kikkas. (‘A Photo Exhibition by Kaupo Kikkas “The Story of One Hundred” Was Opened at the Airport’, 2018). Both artists came up with an idea of making 100 portraits of 100 Estonians as a visualized memory of the nationhood spanning the last century (Hübscher, 2018). The Estonian collective self in both cases was represented beyond issues of race, ethnicity, or social status with cultural and political celebrities sharing the space of the exposition with ordinary people. These facial visualizations made the idea of the nation an epitome of a living body, a common and inherently inclusive space for all ages, genders, professions, and social roles. The “Estonia through 100 pairs of eyes” exhibition was opened in Tartu on February 2, 2018, the day when the Tartu Peace Treaty between Estonia and the Soviet Russia was signed in 1918, which alluded to the geopolitical part of the story, yet this allusive geopolitics was counter-balanced by an explicitly biopolitical representation of the corporeality of the nation imagined through faces of ordinary people from different generations, from those who are close to their centenary anniversaries to newborn children. An appeal for inclusive hybridity is central in a theater spectacle “My Estonian Grandmother” that exposes the existential nature of the biopolitical belonging as denoting a space beyond political institutions, including the government, the legal system, and the institution of citizenship. The protagonist of this theatrical piece is a young woman living in Russia, who unsuccessfully struggles for obtaining Estonian citizenship on the basis of her grandparents’ Estonian citizenship. However, the fact that her grandfather was serving in the Soviet CheKa, and the family lived all the time in Russia and speak no Estonian, prevented her from being legally accepted as belonging to Estonian national community. Nevertheless, the regime of biopolitical belonging to Estonia (“I love this country and feel at home here”) appears to be stronger than bureaucratic formalities banning her from obtaining the formal citizenship. This spectacle can be juxtaposed with Eva Sepping’s documentary film “The Place of Dream” (Sepping & Muravskaja, 2011), a story about a young man from the Russian city of Tver’ with Estonian roots in his family, who intends to rediscover his Estonian identity and wishes to study at the University of Tartu in spite of disproval from his tough-minded ethnically Russian father. The idea of biopolitical belonging was central to his motivation: “I don’t want to live any longer in Russia. Here I don’t feel at home, I don’t understand people around me. I am a free person, and this is why I wish to leave to Estonia – a peaceful country with order and discipline.” Having moved to Tartu, the protagonist learned quickly Estonian and became part of to the university milieu, which

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matches to a model story of social cultural and professional integration central for Estonian mainstream discourse. The calls for hybridity resonate with the earlier art works by the Estonian artist Evi Pärn who had visualized the idea of linguistic democracy in an art piece portraying the playfully sexualized touch of two tongues representing the interlacing of Russian and Estonian languages as ascertaining the equality of human beings («Современное искусство Эстонии. Поиск идентичности» лекция Эви Пярн в музее «Гараж» 7.11.16, 2017). Pärn seems to distinguish language as a cultural and communicative tool from divisive (geo)political issues (Пярн, 2016) and implicitly claims that there are matters more important than struggle for linguistic or any other superiority. In another video installation, Pärn tells a story of her grandmother who was Estonian but lived her entire life in Georgia: “She could never learn Estonian back, but she discovered talent in playing piano one day without learning musical grammar” (Пярн, n.d.). This metaphor de-emphasizes the centrality of language in identity construction and validates cultural hybridity as a social norm in societies that went through multiple historical turbulences.

… Our journey through the Estonian cultural landscapes gave us an illuminating perspective on how popular biopolitics might be instrumental in both constructing and overcoming the binary structure of Estonian political debate divided – under a heavy influence of geopolitical factors – into the national discourse and the Russian world narrative. Borrowing from the literature on post-colonial biopolitics one may claim that, on the one hand, Estonia is an object of western Orientalizing discourses in the sense of being often portrayed and perceived as belonging to the ‘post-Soviet world’. Yet on the other hand, Estonia itself produces discourses of othering and exotization of external and internal identities (Erbsen, 2020). It is in this sense that both the Soviet heritage and the “nationalist resistance to it” might be Orientalized (Saar, 2018, p. 467), which leaves space for “self-promoted sense of interiority in relations to … the imagined West” and the acceptance of a status of “quasi-voluntary periphery” (Saar, 2018, p. 479). The concept of self-colonization can be helpful at this juncture: “Estonian society tried to catch up with Europe at all cost… [and] people who considered themselves to be colonized start looking up to the colonizers from below. And they see the uncultivated nature, lowness, and non-existence of their own culture compared to the colonizing culture” (Hennoste, 2011).

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This insightful comment might be helpful for understanding the nature and the contours of the dividing lines existing within the Estonian society. The problem cannot be confined to the very existence of a majority and a minority as such; it goes deeper to the fact that both Estonian national majority and the Russophone minority build their identities on indispensable references to the past. It is primordially important that Estonian national majority still bears memories of being a colonized and disenfranchised minority under the Soviet occupation, while the bulk of Russian-speaking minority can’t rid itself of remembrances of having represented the dominant majority a few decades ago. This change of role identities still matters for Estonia, which explicates the endurance of the majority-minority split. However, as this chapter illustrates with the help of popular biopolitics, neither majority nor minority discourses and imageries are stable constructs, and the collision between them is neither linear nor unidimensional. These constructs are event-driven, and their configurations are situational and timespecific. Thus, the Bronze Soldier conflict engendered both a new rupture between ethnic Estonians and Russophones, and simultaneously new forms of cultural deconstruction of language-based divisions and partitions. In the same vein, the 2014 Russian de-facto intervention into Ukraine has produced a new policy towards the city of Narva with a strong cultural component at its core and in the meantime triggered an artistic perception of the Russian military as a killing machine threatening its neighbors without taking responsibility for its soldiers. Popular biopolitics is helpful and instrumental for looking at the constellations of these and many other discourses and imageries through the prism of human lives and bodies, either protected and taken care of, or sacrificed and abandoned. Finally, popular biopolitics provides an important terrain for engaging with the ongoing debate on Estonian national populism that has been on the rise since the 2019 parliamentary election and exemplified by EKRE, the right-wing party that in a matter of a few years has managed to triple its vote and become part of the government in 2019–2021. Most of EKRE’s political program – the language-centric construction of national identity and the constitutive role of collective memories about occupation and deportation – has been integral parts of Estonian national discourse much prior to 2019. What EKRE has added to these points is an ostensible disapproval of the Western project of liberal hegemony with its strong biopolitical content; Estonian populists has challenged this liberal emphasis on the rights of sexual minorities and openness toward immigration with a strong focus on what is known as “traditional family values” and cultural homogeneity.

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Yet on the other side, popular biopolitics produces cultural discourses that challenge the local version of populism and expose its archaic, parochial and retrospective nature. In Estonia the best example for that would be Andrus Kivirahk’s ironic deconstruction of populist versions of national identity as being in disharmony with values of liberal emancipation. It is at this point that popular biopolitics produces geopolitical effects in the form of what might be dubbed “de-Europeanization” of Estonian foreign policy (Raik and Rikmann 2021).

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estonian-radical-mep-calls-for-a-final-solution-against-immigrants-in-europe/?fbcl id=IwAR2wIgxb3lvftIhz1Cs9XSgLeCOaqQzUOOGGcXgCXIdjjjjSQSCANdufxHc Taska, I. (2018). Pobeda 1946. A Car Called Victory. Norvik Press. Veedam, V., & Wall, C. (1953). Sailing to Freedom. Phoenix House. Vesilind, A. (2014). Stolen Childhoods: Stories of Estonian Children Deported to Siberia. Lakeshore Press. Viilup, K. (2020, January 20). Dokfilm ‘Fred Jüssi. Olemise ilu’ kogus avanädalavahetusel üle 9600 kinokülastuse. ERR. https://kultuur.err.ee/1025963/dokfilm-fred -jussi-olemise-ilu-kogus-avanadalavahetusel-ule-9600-kinokulastuse Viires, K. (n.d.). Escape [Documentary]. https://vimeo.com/106802993 Viivikonna: Город-призрак в Эстонии. (2019, August 22). https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=GbaELDoOUls&ab_channel=%D0%AE%D0%BB%D0%B8%D1%87 Беседин, О. (2016, April 13). Фильм: Выжить и состояться. http://www.venekool .eu/?page_id=831 Ведлер, С. (2016, September 14). Докладная правительству: Эстония теряет ИдаВирумаа. DELFI. http://rus.delfi.ee/daily/estonia/dokladnaya-pravitelstvu -estoniya-teryaet-ida-virumaa?id=75617019 Денисов, Р. (2016, May 27). Родион Денисов: Руины Ида-Вирумаа не украшают. ERR. https://rus.err.ee/229754/rodion-denisov-ruiny-ida-virumaa-ne-ukrashajut Зыбина, Е. (2019, April 29). В Тарту представят фильм о художнице, отправившейся в Сибирь ставить памятник бабушке. ERR. https://rus.err.ee/934614/v-tartu -predstavjat-film-o-hudozhnice-otpravivshejsja-v-sibir-stavit-pamjatnik-babushke Кивиряхк, А. (2012). Былое как голубые горы. Воспоминания Ивана Орава. Aleksandra. https://www.livelib.ru/book/1000961465-byloe-kak-golubye-gory-vosp ominaniya-ivana-orava-andrus-kiviryahk Мы Из Эстонии. (2017, February 27). Настоящая Эстония брошенные дома почему уезжают люди [Documentary]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W_kLcc YACdI&t=14s&ab_channel=%D0%9C%D0%AB%D0%98%D0%97%D0%AD%D0 %A1%D0%A2%D0%9E%D0%9D%D0%98%D0%98 Мы Из Эстонии. (2017, March 6). Настоящая Эстония города призраки почему уезжают люди 2 [Documentary]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2q2hohoF -Q&ab_channel=%D0%9C%D0%AB%D0%98%D0%97%D0%AD%D0%A1%D0 %A2%D0%9E%D0%9D%D0%98%D0%98 Открытка. (2016, May 13). Как Нарва не стала эстонским Приднестровьем [Documentary]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekGNM9TxKOo&t=2s&ab_channel =%D0%9E%D1%82%D0%BA%D1%80%D1%8B%D1%82%D0%BA%D0%B0 Пярн, Э. (n.d.). Grandmother’s Story [Documentary]. https://eviparn.wixsite.com/ parnevi/video Пярн, Э. (2016). Ruumimängud – Loojalsus ja ühiskond. http://2016.saal.ee/event/502/ ?lng=en

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Райк, К. (2017, January 18). Катри Райк: Нарва – Эстонский город!Я рада, что знаю русский [Video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfM27esZrSk&ab_channel= OriginalTV Русский Мир. (2018, January 5). [Documentary]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Grcq73PwzzM&ab_channel=ARUTV Силламяэ часть 3… Конец. (2019, November 10). [Documentary]. https://www .youtube.com/watch?v=0CsZte3mzE8&ab_channel=%D0%A1%D0%B0%D1%88 %D0%B0%D0%A2%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC Силламяэ, часть1… (2019, September 8). [Documentary]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=OCGr1fGq3bs&ab_channel=%D0%A1%D0%B0%D1%88%D0%B0%D0 %A2%D0%B0%D0%BC%D0%BC Сморжевских-Смирнова, М., & Янес, З. (n.d.). Историческая выставка «УРОК – ПЕРЕМЕНА: русское образование в Таллине 1715–1944». ТАЛЛИННСКИЙ ГОРОДСКОЙ МУЗЕЙ. https://linnamuuseum.ee/ru/vene-muuseum-ru/istoricheskaja -vystavka-urok-peremena-russkoje-obrazovanije-v-talline-1715-1944/ «Современное искусство Эстонии. Поиск идентичности» лекция Эви Пярн в музее «Гараж» 7.11.16. (2017, February 12). [Lecture]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= C8PjrRH_0cQ&ab_channel=saintuser Тальвик, А. (2016, April 4). Кристийна Оюланд: Русские танки – Это не то, чего жителям Эстонии надо бояться. Baltnews. https://baltnews.ee/voice_of_the_people/ 20160404/1014648199.html Фестиваль мнений в Нарве: Лиха беда начало. (2016, May 23). https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=MH4PZGTELQU&t=354s&ab_channel=TvoiVecher Хоботов, А. (2019, November 29). ‘Глобус Эстонии’: Заброшенный шахтерский поселок-призрак Сиргала. ERR. https://rus.err.ee/1007597/globus-jestonii -zabroshennyj-shahterskij-poselok-prizrak-sirgala

Chapter 3

The Screen and the Street: Two Face(t)s of Ukrainian Popular Biopolitics Ukraine’s major biopolitical challenge stems from the pressing necessity to transition “from population to nation” and thus consolidate a plurality of groups and communities who live in one state yet whose lives are drastically dissimilar. The biopolitical concern with a variety of people-centric regimes of care and belonging is of a primordial importance in a situation of a geographic anchoring in a certain territorial milieu with its conflictual interaction with the neighboring hard power holder. Of particular importance are a plethora of issues pertaining to the contours and shapes of the Ukrainian national biopolitical community and actualized against the backdrop of the war in Donbas and the annexation of Crimea. Consequently, the focus on a nation-(re)building perspective, rather than on geopolitics, gives us a wider purview and leeway for biopolitical inquiry on the productive functions of power, including resettlement policies, medical assistance, education, etc. All of these elements may be approached from a biopolitical viewpoint as policy tools aimed at putting people at the limelight of policy practices and giving priority to humanitarian approaches over demands for territorial reunification. Of particular salience in this regard is the biopolitical dimension of the changing borderland identity in Ukraine, in which the core issue is humanitarian consequences of the ongoing military conflict (multiple casualties of the war and internally displaced people) that deploy new practices of protecting and taking care of population and saving people’s lives at the center of public scrutiny. Such an approach is connotative with two traditions of biopolitical analysis rooted in the academic legacies of Michel Foucault (who theorized the whole plethora of issues related to administering human lives through positive techniques of governance) and Giorgio Agamben (who introduced the idea of ‘bare life’ that seems to be particularly applicable to studying security conflicts and situations of physical survival). In the existing literature, there were some attempts to apply Agamben’s conceptualization of “the state of exception” to breakaway territories, along with the Foucauldian idea of “heterotopian places.” A key question at this juncture is how the concept of Ukraine as a territorial/geopolitical borderland can be read biopolitically,

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_005

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especially under the conditions of impossibility to draw geographic borders that would be consensually accepted and perceived as fair and just. Ukraine’s specificity amongst other country-based case studies lies in the fact that this is the only country waging a de facto war on its territory, which unveils the possibility of strong security connotations within Ukraine’s popular biopolitics. From a biopolitical perspective, security is more a problem “of the protection and betterment of a population’s essential life processes in an indeterminate world, rather than a geopolitical matter” (Samimian-Darash & Henner-Shapira, 2016, p. 331). In other words, “whereas the geopolitics of security began to revolve around the space of territory, the biopolitics of security began to revolve around the ‘space’ of species or population” (Dillon, 2007, p. 46). The undisputable salience of security for Ukrainian popular biopolitics puts the concept of sovereignty in the center of public debate. The case of Ukraine perfectly confirms that there is nothing ‘natural’ or inevitable about sovereign power; “sovereignty is a process [whose] practices are progressively re-articulated” (Jabko & Luhman, 2019, p. 1041) and performed. Therefore, “sovereignty must be understood as an effect of the attempts of particular actors to exert effective control over symbolic representation” (Loh & Heiskanen, 2020) of national identity and its regime of belonging. Arguably, “sovereignty as a tentative and always emergent form of authority… is always relational, incomplete, and partial… shaped by multiple overlapping and shifting claims” (Stepputat, 2015, p. 131). From the viewpoint of popular biopolitics, one may see sovereignty as a performative bio-/geopolitical “technology of (b)ordering bodies” (Nayar, 2014, p. 133). Border zones should be understood not as fixed territorial lines but rather “as extended spaces of biopolitical management that are located at the margins of states” (Topak, 2014, p. 818) – an approach fully applicable to the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east. The performative rearticulation of sovereignty and borders always raises the issue of different categorization of human beings through the prism of the distinction between bios (politically integrated population) and zoe (bare lives, or “maladjusted populations”) (Evans, 2010, p. 419), which for Ukraine exposes its particular specificity due to the biopolitical effects of the war such as internally displaced persons, the Russian passportization of Donbas, and different attitudes in the Ukrainian society to those who live in the seceded/occupied territories. This chapter juxtaposes two different yet interconnected facets of Ukrainian popular biopolitics. One is the sitcom “Servant of the People” that gave political birth to Volodymyr Zelensky’s presidency in 2019. Another is a series of protests against Zelensky’s first policy moves that were considered by a sig-

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nificant part of the population as excessively conciliatory and beneficial to Russia and detrimental to Ukrainian national interests. These two dimensions of the Ukrainian political scene demonstrate the extent of disagreements and conflicts within society and their biopolitical background.

3.1

From Comedian to President: A Cultural Genealogy of the New(est) Ukrainian Populism

In April 2019, Ukraine became the first country in the world to elect to the office of president a comedian who played president in a popular satirical sitcom named Servant of the People (‘Sluga Naroda’). Volodymyr Zelensky defeated the incumbent Petro Poroshenko in the second round with 73,22% of the vote. Since then, Servant of the People transformed into the eponymous political party under Zelensky’s de facto leadership and won the July 2019 snap parliamentary election with more than 43 percent of the vote. Never before in Ukraine had a new head of the state such preeminence over his political opponents and such a high degree of freedom of maneuver. The political ascendance of Zelensky has dramatically altered many of the previous accounts of Ukrainian populism whose old epitomes – such as, for example, the former Prime Minister Yulia Tymoshenko (Kuzio, 2010), and some other politicians – fell victims of a new type of populist politics exemplified by the current president. This new Ukrainian populism is a direct result of commercial media and mass entertainment industry, and therefore might be considered as part and parcel of global trends. Many strongly believe that on the outset Servant of the People was designed as a political instrument aimed at bringing the comic actor to power. In particular, the Ukrainian writer Oksana Zabuzhko has dubbed Zelensky a product of manipulative media technologies of a scope greater than Brexit (Забужко, 2019). On the other hand, the roots of Zelensky’s phenomenon are inherently local. In academia, celebrity activism in politics has been largely studied as a Western phenomenon (Wheeler, 2013) related to the ideas of post-democracy (Brockington & Hensons, 2015) and even anti-democracy (Wood et al., 2016). Yet now, the seemingly most radical case of celebrity-turn-into-president occurred in a country that does not belong to the Western cultural or political core. Ostensibly, Servant of the People (both the film and the party) ought to be viewed as manifestations of post-Soviet fatigue that has differently affected countries of the region. Its crux is not a simple tiredness of transition but a widely spread societal feeling that the fruits of reforms are always delayed and the horizon of normalization is constantly moving away, which creates

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particularly fertile ground for fantastic imageries of the future that in the case of Zelensky and his TV protagonist – quite paradoxically – are short of a strong ethno-nationalist content. The case of Ukraine raises a substantial question of the origins and sources of the current cycle of populist politicking that this country experiences with the change of the post-Maidan elite exemplified by Petro Poroshenko and his government. In the context of the limited trust of people in political leadership, and geopolitical and socio-economic uncertainty, it is media that offers insight into Ukrainian people’s relationships to those in power, which might explain Zelensky’s electoral success and his populist leadership style. The new wave of populist politics in Ukraine came from a virtual media reality as a counter-elite discourse aimed at dethroning the ‘old guard’ and recruiting new people in power, with – allegedly – a different vision of politics. Accordingly, we approach the phenomenal electoral success of Zelensky as a product of mass/popular culture with a strong manipulative potential and “the power to raise subjective interpretations to a level of objectivity” (Bleiker, 2001, p. 516). Against this backdrop, I intend to find out how media is used by the proponents of populism in Ukraine, and what the artistic experience of Zelensky and his actorship as a successful comedian and TV producer can tell us about his cultural background, views, and experiences? What does this peculiar melding of pop culture and politics tell us about populism more broadly? Given the continuously changing discourse in and about Ukraine, I need to understand what meaning people invest into the unexpected rise of the comedian president, which is a way to uncover popular expectations of political processes that are hard to decipher. These questions necessitate a discussion on what academic concepts might be most helpful for understanding the nature of the new challenges his leadership brings to Ukraine. My empirical material consists in over fifty series of the sitcom’s three seasons (2015–2019) to which I also add visual and textual sources related to the presidential and parliamentary campaigns in Ukraine in 2019. Structurally, the chapter is divided into eight short parts. I start with framing the analysis in conceptual categories borrowed from the fields of political philosophy and discourse analysis, adjusted to the specific case under consideration. Then I briefly walk the readers through the plot of the analyzed sitcom. In the next section I analyze in more detail the most important quilting points of Servant of the People’s storyline: the ideological mélange and inconsistency, ostensibly vague and inconclusive portrayal of “the people,” only sporadic and incidental references to Russia, Ukraine’s geographic imagery, and critique of the West. Finally, I discuss how helpful the sitcom can be for understanding the logic of Zelensky’s populist leadership.

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3.1.1 The Popular Geo- and Biopolitics of the Medialized Populism The bulk of the extant literature on diverse varieties of populism is heavily embedded in traditional political science approaches with their predominant emphasis on studying elites versus counter-elites, institutions, and ideologies. It is only recently that alternative conceptualizations appeared that opened the domain of political studies to fruitful engagements with the adjacent disciplines of political semiotics, cultural studies, and visual analysis. This growing cross-disciplinarity is fundamental for tackling identities of new populist groups as “fluid” and constituted not by rigid ideologies or adherence to pre-given policy rationalities but rather constructed by and through performative means. Currently, a growing number of authors pay attention to meanings and communicative codes as key elements of performative semantics of populism. In particular, several studies deployed populist parties in the context of “cultural wars” with the ensuing attention to their cultural backgrounds (Almeida, 2019). Arguably, studies of cultural imaginaries look at “how a wide variety of objects and phenomena – … from Hobbits to pop music – are imagined as part of a lived cultural context, of a directly practiced communality and personal lifestyle” (Kølvraa and Forchtner, 2019). In this regard, one may speak of “aesthetic populism” as a political phenomenon that pops up at the intersection of media, entertainment, and urban arts and is more emotive than normative. Therefore, populism studies “must also include an affective and mediated mode, an aesthetic spectacle of the political that addresses the majority through a transverse (and sometimes rather simplified) discourse” (Ferrada Stoehrel, 2017). In many cases, it would be fair to say that the political elements in populist performances range “from forms of banal nationalism … to a disconcertingly chauvinistic view of gender roles and the family” (Rheindorf & Wodak, 2019). The performative components of the populist imageries may also include “an optics for reading particular dynamics in affective arrangements where the worry over decline and the longing for grandeur are especially enunciated” (Hentschel, 2019). The theoretical background proposed in this analysis of Ukrainian populism is a blend of popular geo-/biopolitics and Judith Butler’s conceptualization of performativity that was introduced in the theoretical chapter of the book. This combination seems to be mutually reinforcing and complementary for each of its two conceptual pillars, and might be instrumental for multifarious study of the Holoborod’ko-Zelensky phenomenon (Steele, 2017, p. 211), a story about a simple history teacher Vasil’ Holoborod’ko in an ordinary school in Kyiv who run for presidency upon the insistence of his pupils, gets suddenly elected, found himself at the epicenter of the deadly struggle against oligarchs and launched the total reshuffling of the government.

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Performative elements appear crucial for analysis of The Servant’s plot that features Holoborod’ko as a romantic hero who deserves respect for rejecting determinism and aesthetically validating spontaneity and emotions (Bleiker, 2009, p. 76). Similarly, he represents a Ukrainian type of trickster with “the license to disrupt or redefine,” a liminal actor, “an outsider, or as one who speaks to the centre from the periphery” with “no respect for the structural aspect of the social” (Weaver & Mora, 2016, pp. 480–481). However, the idea of performativity can be used not only for identifying different role identities played by Holoborod’ko and then projecting them onto Zelensky as the president but also for making an important distinction between illocutionary and perlocutionary aspects of what Judith Butler dubbed “performative power.” In interpreting John Austin, she posited that perlocutionary performatives are grounded in the acceptance of the existing realities. They can “only” ask certain question, “only” take part in the current practices, and intervene through re-signifying some notions. Yet the illocutionary performative, in the words of Butler, “tends to produce the phenomenon it names… Illocutions produce realities” (Butler, 2010, p. 151) with their ontological effects. As another author posits, “this means that there are no stable entities or substances prior to cultural inscription, and that cultural practices – writing, speaking, measuring, experimenting – actively produce and posit the objects, beings, genders, events, etc. to which they refer or claim to discover and/or faithfully represent” (Pawlett, 2018, p. 10). Based on this distinction, I single out three arguments, all linking to each other the spheres of geopolitics, biopolitics and mass culture, and explaining the importance of popular culture for populism studies. First, in a typically perlocutionary way, many authors in popular geo- and biopolitics are keen to know how states (governments or ruling elites through formal institutions and less formal practices) instrumentally use the resources of popular culture as soft power tools and elements of governance. Within this logic of inquiry, what matters is a state’s hegemony and its power to securitize social or political issues; “Any political analysis of the operation of dominance must take full account of the role of institutions of popular culture in the reproduction of cultural (and thus political) norms” (Sharp, 1996, p. 558). As semiotic objects, films, in particular, “circle thematically around contemporary political controversies” (Ndalianis, 2015, p. 142), reflect how governments operate, transform, and adapt the new ‘real-world’ developments to the cinematographic language and reinterpret reality. The role of popular culture might consist in “amplifying the affective intensity” of “particular ideological mantras or discursive scripts” (Carter & McCormack, 2006, p. 241). The role of the audience is basically to “consume and discuss” (Dittmer & Dodds, 2008, p. 448)

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but not necessarily to act on the basis of the consumed cultural experiences, which might be expressed through the metaphor of “homo spectator” (Kohn, 2008). For example when it comes to many post-Soviet states, one may easily claim, “by pursuing a film policy, a government can stimulate and control the cinematic construction of a nation’s image… A state has command over a variety of measures to stimulate and control the production, distribution, and screening of films” (Van Gorp, 2011, p. 243). This academic narrative not only claims the centrality of the state for cultural industry production, but also assumes that fantasies “shelter us from anxiety” and thus are meant to stabilize national/ethnic identities and power regimes (Eberle, 2019). Fantasies are often discussed as tools to achieve “an imaginary sense of completion” (Wardle, 2016) in the making of collective selves. The second argument points to what might be called a moderate illocutionary perspective, as popular culture and performing arts are discussed as essential parts of political change (Kovács, 2013). Therefore, objects of popular culture are included in the ongoing dynamics of transformation of national or ethnic identities as their organic elements. This assumption opens interesting venues for looking at political transitions through the prism of the changing cultural forms. The cultural sphere is taken here as a fully-developed participant of politics with its own agency (resources, tools, and instruments of societal impact). However, the case of Ukraine seems to be more complex and goes beyond the two above mentioned streams within popular geo-/biopolitics. That is why it is the third – and more radically illocutionary – argument that seems to be a better fit for the Holoborod’ko-Zelensky phenomenon. This argument dates back to Guy Debord’s conceptualization of the spectacle not “as a mere decoration added to the real world, [but as] the very heart of this real society’s unreality” (Debord, 2002, p. 7), and tackles “popular culture as politics” (Kangas, 2009, p. 323), as well as – on a more general note – “aesthetics as politics” (Hozić, 2017, p. 203). This approach implies that popular culture and politics are not “different ontological categories” (Kangas, 2009, p. 318); therefore, “it is namely the study of popular culture as politics that most explicitly involves treating it as a cause or an effect of political processes” (Kangas, 2009, p. 322). In other words, popular culture is not simply a mirror or a source of political cognition, but is itself a locus and a constitutive force for changes in national or ethnic identities: “growth in the production and circulation of popular culture makes world politics what it currently is” (Grayson et al., 2009, p. 156). This blurs the distinction between representations of the first (political speeches) and the second (cultural imageries) order by demonstrating the deeply performative actorship of the “real” political leaders who play roles as a matter of

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everyday political routine. In this vein, performative role ascription (Fazendeir, 2016) is an inherent part of both “real” political life and its representations in popular culture. Yet the line between “facts” and “fictions” (Daniel & Musgrave, 2017, p. 509) or reality and appearance (Zizek, 2013, p. 47) in the specific case of Ukraine is blurred by the nature of Servant of the People’s portrayal of politicians as puppets manipulated by the oligarchs, which makes Holoborod’ko the only ‘true’ representative of the people as opposed to the bulk of the political elite who are ready to change masks upon the demands of their financial sponsors. Tellingly, in one of the sitcom scenes, parliamentarians in president’s imagination are substituted by toys, whose applause are imitated by a sound track. There are at least two conceptual issues with a ‘society of the spectacle’ approach to Ukrainian populism. The first – and the most obvious – concerns the manipulative functions of products of popular geo- and biopolitics. Servant of the People engenders a peculiar cultural imagination (Musliu & Burlyuk, 2019) that privileges some elements of reality over others (Shepherd, 2017, p. 215) and serves as a tool for political marketing or political communication rather than representation (Street, 2012, p. 351). Indeed, “[t]he actors who actually create this space of appearance represent a segment of the population or the public without formally being mandated to do so. They are not elected, but they act in the name of a large collectivity or social group. They signify a particular public in the sense of darstellen, even though they do not represent (vertreten) this public” (Beveridge & Koch, 2017). In a more radical way, one may claim that the Servant of the People “undermines any claim to ‘representativeness’. This is … because the elected politician impoverishes the relationship between representative and represented by marginalizing issues of political substance in favor of irrelevant gestures and superficial appearances” (Street, 2004, p. 439). The second – and a less obvious – issue concerns the public resonance of the spectacle: “seeing politics as theater may in fact offer metaphor users a way out of political life because the metaphor gives them the illusion that it is possible to be outside the effects and obligations of their political system. By positioning themselves as spectators in a theater in which they designate others as characters called political actors and political spectators, not only can they withhold recognition, they can simply “get up and leave the play” (Fitzgerald, 2015, p. 311). In other words, recognition gained through the spectacle may be fragile and volatile and the script that transformed an actor into a political leader may be eventually rejected by the audience – as, for example, large numbers of Ukrainians rejected Zelensky’s policy towards Donbas as a tacit capitulation to Moscow.

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3.1.2 Technology of Populism: A Ukrainian Know-How According to the plot of Servant of the People (Кирющенко, 2015a), an ordinary school teacher becomes an uncompromising fighter against the corrupt and dysfunctional Ukrainian elite. Having faced oligarchs’ stark resistance to reforms, he launched a full-fledged attack on them, trying to expropriate their property to replenish the country’s feeble budget and deprive them of their sources of political influence. He appoints his personal acquaintances, old friends, and classmates (including an ex-wife), who are committed to support his agenda of radical changes in governance, to key positions in the government. The team of novices faces fierce resistance from the parliament that functions as the oligarchs’ proxies and consistently undermines the President’s policies. Holoborod’ko skillfully pits one oligarch against another, gradually managing to imprison their main political confident, Prime Minister Chuiko, who is charged with bribes. Using his old connections, Chuiko did his best to overrule the sentence through cooperation with authorities and sharing with them sensitive information about oligarchs’ shadow businesses. To protect Chuiko from the possible revenge of the oligarchs, Holoborod’ko stages a faux assassination of Chuiko, who – with a changed identity – for pragmatic reasons keeps helping the President. Apart from domestic battles, Holoborod’ko conducts difficult and ultimately unsuccessful negotiations with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that he terminates due to extremely unfavorable conditions set by global creditors. This exacerbates Ukraine’s financial troubles and raises the issue of a probable impeachment. Given these complications, Holoborod’ko resigns, yet runs for president again, manages to win the popular vote, but due to electoral fraud, remains second in the race. His successor – and a former associate – brings back to power the old corrupt cadre by the request of the oligarchs. Holoborod’ko himself faces criminal charges and finally receives a sentence. Ukraine enters a period of political instability, changing six presidents in one year and a half, which provokes an economic collapse and the de facto disintegration of the country. The expanding political crisis only boosts Holoborod’ko’s popularity, and Ukraine’s foreign creditors insist on his release and return to the presidential office (Кирющенко, 2019a). Again back at the top of Ukraine’s politics, he implements fast and effective reforms, pushes the oligarchs out of the country, and makes Ukraine an economic success story (Кирющенко, 2019b). This plot, balancing dystopia against utopia, is illustrative of the phenomenon of Ukrainian populism since it culturally legitimizes the political career of a group of complete outsiders to the ruling elite, a team composed of obvious non-professionals whose major political capital is their lack of connection

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with the existing regime of power along with personal loyalty to their boss. Holoborod’ko’s ultimate success in reforming Ukraine’ is validated by his externality to the political establishment. Thus, at the beginning of his presidency he kept teaching at school, refused to use expensive cars, and had very general and naïve understanding of the functioning of Ukrainian political system. In one of the scenes, he spontaneously fired a head of municipal unit who, in the words of a local taxi driver, was corrupt and ineffective, and appointed the driver himself at his position. All this not only glorifies amateurish politics as inherently honest and morally principled but also questions the validity of professional knowledge as allegedly irrelevant, even serving to further debilitate Ukraine. Servant of the People is an acquittal of common sense and intuition as opposed to experience in governance. Particularly illustrative in this regard is the figure of the Foreign Minister Mukhin who speaks no foreign languages and used to work as an artist beforehand. Politics is understood in such ethical categories as trustworthiness, honesty, simplicity, kindness, and modesty, qualities that are set against brainwashing manipulations masterminded by the oligarchs. 3.1.3 Trans-ideological Emptiness Holoborod’ko’s political career has started with a speech act of truth. One of his students had tacitly recorded his hyper-emotional (and sometime vulgar) depiction of Ukrainian political system and posted the video online, after which it went viral, thus making the pupils think about encouraging their teacher to run for president. Since this very first episode, truth-seeking became the nodal point of the main hero’s identity with which he had to stand against the dominance of “post-truth” technologies (Кирющенко, 2017a) intensely utilized by Holoborod’ko’s competitors against him (including, for instance, presidential candidates posing as a religious mystic, a six-handed lady, and even a bee-man). Holoborod’ko’s ‘politics of truth’ is a lucid contrast to lies, conspiracies, and clandestine agreements sponsored by the shadow owners of the country – a small group of oligarchs. He himself fell victim of a fake news campaign falsely accusing him of clandestine connections with the oligarchs – a falsification that became possible due to the appearance of Holoborod’ko’s identical clone. Yet, the reverse side of this truth-seeking is the political emptiness of Holoborod’ko’s political agenda, which – paradoxically enough – appears to be a precondition for his popularity. Typical in this sense is the scene of his first press conference as the president-elect when he spontaneously refused to merely recite the text prepared by his speech writers and addressed the journalists with a simple and well received message: “I don’t know many of the

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words written for me, but I will learn. By now what I can promise is that I won’t do anything that later could be shameful.” It is this emptiness that made possible the ideological void around Holoborod’ko. On the one hand, he implements a radical market reform with a strong liberal grounding, which included austerity politics and some elements of a neoliberal shock therapy (raising the age for pension and liberalizing prices). His return to the presidency in the third season of Servant of the People was accompanied by a remark “we need a Ukrainian de Gaulle,” which – presumably – puts him at the center right part of the political spectrum. On the other hand, the sitcom contains multiple references to the leftist political semantics embedded in Holoborod’ko’s profile. Once he was referred to as “our Che Guevara” with the ensuing revolutionary allusions. In another episode, he was compared with Omar Torrijos and Jaime Roldos, two Latin American politicians who fought for their countries’ national interests against the United States but ultimately lost their lives. In other occurrences, his profile appears trans-historical and trans-political; thus, in new Ukrainian banknotes, he is portrayed in one symbolic row with key figures of Ukrainian statehood such as Bohdan Khmel’nitsky. Against this controversial background, it is only logical that political vacuum becomes an inevitable part of Holoborod’ko’s governance. In just a matter of months, if not weeks after becoming president, he fired 450,000 bureaucrats and was desperately struggling to recruit 100,000 new public officials (Кирющенко, 2017b). After a bitter conflict with the parliament, he has a dream in which he takes a gun and kills all the deputies in the Verkhovna Rada who are unwilling to cooperate in passing presidential legislation on reforms (Кирющенко, 2017c). However, as Ernesto Laclau insightfully suggested, emptiness (even if symbolic) “is a political construction… [It] does not simply mean void; on the contrary, there is emptiness because that void points to the absent fullness of the community” (Laclau, 2007). In this respect, in Servant of the People the “sense of ontological security” and “completeness” as parts of the stabilization mechanisms are paradoxically attained through the radical deconstruction of the existing political institutions and practices, turning all power-related narratives into a series of never ending proxy wars, where heroes and villains swap roles and can share a lot both in the government and even in jail where some of them meet. Servant of the People draws a picture of “pure appearance” in politics where what is said publicly is not what is meant and what is meant is preemptively masterminded by those who remain beyond the public gaze being in the meantime the key policy shapers.

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3.1.4 The People, an Empty Signifier Servant of the People is an attempt to construct a political agenda meant to unify the Ukrainian society on the basis of accepting the domestic nature of the country’s most ardent issues, legitimizing the widespread usage of the Russian language, cleansing Ukraine of its economic oligarchy, and ultimately offering an optimistic reading of the future. Rhetorically, the pivotal concept in Holoborod’ko’s worldview is people as a metaphysical subject that should make the final judgment on issues of political strategy. The problem with this approach is that Holoborod’ko regularly appeals to the people in the absence of a clear representation of people as a core biopolitical object. Paradoxically “the people” remains a vague and uncertain category in the sitcom, rather a metaphor than a biopolitical subject with identifiable characteristics. Basically, ‘the people’ is part of the plot as a source of donations that twice allowed Holoborod’ko to run for presidency, yet otherwise, “the people” is poorly represented in the show – only as a crowd protesting against austerity measures introduced by the government, as groups of ubiquitous journalists, or as specific personalities such as an oligarch’s daughter who considers herself a Ukrainian patriot yet opts for Nice, instead of Odessa, as the site for her wedding ceremony. Moreover, as a satiric metaphor of elusiveness, all the people in Ukraine disappeared overnight immediately after the EU granted the visa free regime to Ukraine in Holoborod’ko’s dreams. The next day after the highly emotional celebration of the visa-free agreement, Holoborod’ko discovered that Kyiv is empty, and all of Ukraine became a deserted and depopulated territory. After having found himself the only Ukrainian to stay in the country, he turned his presidential office into a country-style farm. In an unexpected phone call, Angela Merkel congratulated him with achieving the best environmental standards in Europe and the lowest crime rate, along with mortality level, and invited Holoborod’ko to the next G7 summit. He joyfully replied, “We can if we wish… But now the problem we are facing is potential immigrants… these savages who will be looking to settle in here.” By the same token, an important element of ‘the people’ is Holoborod’ko’s family, his parents and sister, with whom he resides during the entirety of his presidency. All of them took his unexpected accession to power as a unique chance for personal enrichment, which in many respects discredited his presidential integrity. In many specific situations, it was Holoborod’ko’s closest relatives who attacked and lambasted him first – for austerity measures, for refusal to offer lucrative jobs for his family, or for Holoborod’ko’s putative ties with the tycoons that ultimately were proven to be fake news. In the absence of universal aesthetic or artistic signifiers representing people, Holoborod’ko starts discursively constructing his own imagery, with the

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crucial distinction between “two bodies of the people” (to paraphrase the title of the famous book by Ernst Kantorowicz “The King’s Two Bodies”). Holoborod’ko draws a line between ‘Ukrainians’ proper and their pejorative naming as ‘khokhly,’ widely used among Russians. In his highly emotive speech on this subject, he implied that people who are biologically born Ukrainians gradually transform into ‘khokhly,’ which in his interpretation is tantamount to caring less about the country than about individual benefits, including acceptance of petty corruption. Therefore, Holoborod’ko discursively legitimizes ‘khokhly’ not as an offensive wording imposed by outsiders but as a non-ethnic and intrinsic characteristic of Ukrainians themselves, which continues the logic of biopolitical self-castigation typical for Zelensky’s scenic hero. 3.1.5 Un-securitizing Russia As one can learn from the literature, state involvement in popular culture (PC) “is more likely in times of conflict… During protracted conflicts, PC products can work to entrench the conflict and sustain it at different levels… Such PC products can reproduce righteous images of the self, as well as naturalize negative enemy images… [T]he state is more likely to be motivated to mobilize PC, and societal actors are more likely to produce PC with strong nationalist messages… PC confirming and conforming to the ethos of conflict is also likely to dominate large commercial productions” (Press-Barnathan, 2017, pp. 171–172). Yet in the case of Servant of the People, the logic of cultural production seems to diverge from this description, as the script of the sitcom factually ignores Ukraine’s conflict with Russia and thus intentionally refuses to emphasize selfother distinctions when it comes to security representations. Highly indicative in this regard is the almost total absence of Russia in the plot. In fact, it was only in a few instances that Russia was ever mentioned – as a country where the former president Yanukovych escaped, or in the context of an imagined secession of Sakhalin (Кирющенко, 2015b). Russia was tangentially represented by the historical figure of Ivan the Terrible who in one of Holoborod’ko’s fantasies advised him to murder all his opponents. Holoborod’ko’s sister, who wished to use her brother’s connections for starting a diplomatic career, sarcastically rejected a hypothetical appointment as Ambassador to Russia as “exile.” These only marginal appearances of Russia, the central actor for Ukraine’s insecurity (Lewis, 2019), in the sitcom look quite paradoxical. This paradox can be explained by the authors’ lack of the linguistic and semiotic tools to represent Russia as encroaching power without deviating too much from the genre of satirical sitcom. This can partly explicate the total silence in the scenario about the war in Donbas and thousands of its victims. Servant of the People

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preferred the language of self-blame (“We sack oil from our neighbors” (Кирющенко, 2015c), one of protagonists acknowledges, thus vindicating the Kremlin’s accusations against Ukraine of parasitizing on Russian energy resources) and avoidance of inflammable issues that Russophone Ukrainians could dislike. The intention to silence a Russia-focused imagery has led to an implicit normalization of Russia, reductively re-signified to just one of Ukraine’s neighbors devoid of any distinct political traits. The fact that all the protagonists of the sitcom speak Russian is another important element of the script. Ukrainian language is formally used in the episodes featuring media and the government, but basically, Russian is represented as widely spoken in everyday life. What is more, Holoborod’ko’s government is portrayed as blatantly incompetent in Ukrainian; thus, in one of the episodes, the Foreign Minister Mukhin provoked an international scandal having invited to Ukraine the head of Northern Korea because he simply confounded the Ukrainian for ‘north’ (pivnichna) and ‘southern’ (pivdenna). What is more, in reprimanding him for that, Holoborod’ko himself made the same mistake. Later on, the sense of dysfunctionality of a language-centric nationalist politics in Ukraine was clearly represented in a scene that invites the spectators to look at contemporary Ukraine from the perspective of the future when the language people speak will not matter, since technological devices could immediately translate everything for everyone. 3.1.6 Playing with Ukraine’s Multiple Geographies Holoborod’ko narrative leads him to consider all political cleavages in the society – linguistic, ethnic, cultural, or religious – as consequences of tycoons’ malign manipulations and matters of policy technologies short of any authenticity of their own. Therefore, identity cleavages and splits tearing Ukrainian society apart (Kulyk, 2018), from his standpoint, look unnatural. This argument was visualized in an episode (Кирющенко, 2017d) in which the oligarchs walked on the floor with Ukraine’s map on it, thus demonstrating their attitudes to their country as an object of subjugation and extortion of resources. “The most important thing is that East has to hate West, and vice versa, and they would call each other ‘Banderite’, ‘separatists’, etc.,” said one of them. However, at a certain point, the oligarchs might lose grip on their proxies, which is nicely illustrated by a nationalist military coup that, according to the plot, occurred at the peak of disaggregation of the Ukrainian statehood after dethroning Holoborod’ko (Кирющенко, 2019a), yet the coup itself is represented as an absurdist spectacle. Political manipulation with subnational identities reached its peak with the escalating decentralization of Ukraine to the point of state fragmenta-

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tion in the aftermath of Holoborod’ko’s imprisonment. Having resumed the presidency, he discovered that Ukraine had disintegrated into 28 separate state-like units – “Western Georgia” led by the former Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, “Slavic–Ugric–Romanian Union,” “Black Sea Confederation,” “First Ukraine,” “Legitimate Ukraine,” “That Very Ukraine”, “Union of Free Self-Sufficient Republics”, a Chinese protectorate, a Jewish republic that claimed its spiritual connection with the Jordan river, an entity that had not yet defined its name, etc. (Кирющенко, 2019c). Some of the newly created entities were under international sanctions, some were run by the “old guard” politicians, some used mineral resources (amber, for example) as their currency, yet all contested the primacy of Kyiv and declared themselves representatives of “genuine” Ukrainian nationhood., thus resembling failed-state-like feudal fragmentation. After being released from the jail and returning to his post as president, Holoborod’ko made the reintegration of the country his top priority. He reformed the judicial system, implemented long-awaited reforms in economy and finances, and further expropriated corrupt assets of the oligarchs. As a result, Ukraine drastically improved its investment climate and energy security and became an attractive place for Ukrainians who left the country due to economic hardship, which gradually led to the reunification of most of the territories. However, two exceptions remained Western (Galicia) and Eastern (Donbas) Ukraine that in spite of economic rationale still did not want to live together in one state. As one protagonist said, “they want to kill each other and did not consider each other human beings, using biological ‘proofs’ for othering and de-humanization at genetic level.” The solution came with a catastrophe in a mine in western Ukraine that left many local miners trapped underground. The local authorities in eastern Ukraine – a mining region as well – forbade to send assistance, as local authorities in the western Ukraine refused to accept any potential help, claiming that “we’ll tackle the situation with our people ourselves”. Nevertheless, a team of rescuers from Luhansk and Donetsk came by its own initiative to save the miners’ lives, which became a turning point in the East-West reconciliation and ensuing peace. 3.1.7 Debunking the West One of the most striking features of Servant of the People are attitudes to the West, a combination of self-ironic recognition of Ukraine’s subalternity and a post-colonial rhetoric of national emancipation and self-assertion. In one of the most illuminating episodes nicely reflecting this controversy, Ukrainian and Greek diplomats competed with each other over IMF subsidies (Кирющенко, 2017e) using a spectrum of instruments meant to prove their

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both attractiveness and marginality vis-a-vis global financial institutions: from a sporadic dancing competition to a voluntary and purposeful self-humiliation for the sake of invoking IMF’s sympathy. To Ukraine’s disdain, the funds were awarded to Greece, yet immediately afterwards, it was revealed that this happened only because the head of the Greek delegation had spent the night with IMF representative; consequently, the decision was revoked in Ukraine’s favor. What this story brought to the light is an explicit reduction of political decisions to sexual affairs, and the ensuing depiction of IMF officers as sexualized objects. Highly illustrative in this regard was Ukrainian Foreign Minister’s halfjoking confession to his girlfriend that “for the sake of the country,” he would himself consider going to bed with Western diplomats or creditors. This episode is representative of the duality of Holoborod’ko’s and his team’s perception of the global West. On the one hand, the plot of Servant of the People is replete with clear evidences of Ukraine’s dependence on Western benevolence; Holoborod’ko himself seems to be a determined supporter of European democracy with reforms aimed at eliminating bureaucracy, reducing tariffs, getting rid of monopolies, lowering duties, along with other steps in the direction of market and open economy. He is committed to visa free regime with the EU and appreciates Germany’s constant concerns about Ukraine’s future. Yet on the other hand, Servant of the People is rife with controversial and even pejorative – if not insulting – references to the West typical for what might be dubbed banal nationalism. Swedes were referred to as “having particular attitudes to family matters” (a hidden allusion to the lexeme “Swedish family”), and Iceland featured as a “tiny island, unlike Ukraine that is a great power, a major in Europe” (Кирющенко, 2019a). The portrayal of almost all Western actors with a certain degree of irony or even disdain constitutes a particular type of populist deconstruction of Western hegemony. In this vein, the West is portrayed as simplistic and unknowledgeable. When Zhanna Borysenko (a protagonist overtly reminiscent of Yulia Timoshenko) was elected President and her suggestive technique of manipulating Western public opinion brought its temporary fruits, Western politicians naively believed that the new government would be completely free from the old corrupt cadre (Кирющенко, 2019a), which Holoborod’ko’s team easily disproved with undeniable facts. The West, moreover, was also portrayed as an intruder in Ukrainian affairs, as illustrated by recommendations received by Holoborod’ko from the G7 summit, “Outer space is not your profile, put aside your fantasies and Napoleonic plans, this niche has been already occupied. You in Eastern Europe are expected to develop agriculture, look at Poland… Since you owe us money, you ought to coordinate all your plans with us.” Then the conversation contin-

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ues among Western representatives: “What if Ukrainians repay their debts?” – “Then we’ll need an eighth chair for them” (Кирющенко, 2019d). Again, this fictitious dialogue reveals the inherent duplicity of the attitudes to the West as an object of desire and disdain at a time. The negative representations of the Western financial assistance to Ukraine reached their apex with the portrayal of IMF as a colonizing power that wishes to twist Ukrainian government’s hands and impose such unacceptable conditions for loans as transportation to Ukraine nuclear waste materials for reprocessing and a decrease of Ukrainian agricultural production. At an imagined G7 summit, Western leaders concluded that major powers need to put an end to “one Maidan after another” and referred to Ukraine as a “failed state that threatens others,” having in mind potential economic refugees from the country and even “a new Chernobyl.” During the negotiations, the head of IMF delegation used insulting language, “We have spent more time on your country than it deserves” (Кирющенко, 2017f). In response, Holoborod’ko claimed that “we are not a poor borderland; even if we nowadays are laying down, we won’t accept being patronized,” and ended up with explicitly undiplomatic, “Go to hell”, for which the entire West accused him of using irresponsible and nationalist language. However, in a later episode, Holoborod’ko continued his disdain for IMF assuming that acceptance of its conditions would lead to “stumps instead of trees, and radioactive cavities” (Кирющенко, 2017g). These episodes are revelatory not only of Holoborod’ko’s revolt against the principle of conditionality as unfair and externally imposed upon Ukraine but also of the utopic nature of the political imagination embedded in Servant’s plot. In a not-so-distant future, it is Ukraine that would lend millions to the Western institutions, not the other way around. With the exchange rate of 50 USD for 1 UAH, the future Ukraine would need to deal with economic refugees from Western Europe. Ultimately all Europe is to start speaking fluent Ukrainian, after which Ukraine extends its jurisdiction to the Seychelles Islands and becomes United States of Ukraine. In a future triumphant Ukraine (Кирющенко, 2017h), Holoborod’ko’s family would employ an Italian handmaiden who used to previously work as deputy mayor in Pisa, a Japanese driver, and a Polish servitor who complains that for other jobs in this country he needs to learn Ukrainian; Holoborod’ko father treats the Pole brutally and wants to change him to a French or German national. 3.1.8

“Servant of the People” and Zelensky’s Presidency: Deciphering the Script In this section, I discuss in more detail the core question of how can we look at Zelensky’s presidency from the viewpoint of the above analysis of Servant

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of the People. Of course, it would be both naïve and simplistic to expect that Zelensky’s leadership would be a mere extension of Holoborod’ko’s storyline. However, we venture to presume that Servant of the People created a certain perceptional frame of popular anticipations that Zelensky would have to be consonant with. Within this frame, the line between the object of popular culture (the sitcom) and the political object (the party) is intentionally blurred, which so far allowed him to win both presidential and parliamentary campaigns and concentrate enormous power in his hands. Paradoxically, the double success of Servant of the People (both as a show and a political party), left Ukraine with a typical post-truth question of how to distinguish spectacle from reality and what might stem from this distinction. Apparently, the sphere of Zelensky’s populist gestures seems to be limited to domestic politics where he can relatively easily mimic Holoborod’ko’s style. Indeed, many of Zelensky’s first moves were almost indistinct from Holoborod’ko’s performances. Good examples were Zelensky’s public – and explicitly vulgar – ousting of a politician with criminal records, according to the media reports (Факти ICTV, 2019a); the same would go for the presidential tongue lashing given to a public servant in Odessa (НАШ, 2019) or Zelensky’s appearance at a meeting with military officers casually dressed. When it comes to the substance, several preliminary – and still very general – parallels between Servant of the People and the beginning of Zelensky’s presidency might be drawn. On two points touched upon in the analysis above, Zelensky commenced his tenure more or less in line with The Servant’s script. First, his presidency is definitely marked by trans-ideological hybridity in spite of his party’s alleged predisposition to embrace libertarian recipes (Стефанчук, 2019). Zelensky’s political machinery established its own extra-ideological lines of distinction: not between the left and the right or liberals and conservatives but rather between the disguised old elite and the fresh newcomers hungry for the much awaited changes. The team of the young reformers for whom Zelensky opened the doors to power appears to be a mix of practitioners and technocrats with no previous experience in the government and averse to ideological clichés. Second, Zelensky continues symbolically constructing the Ukrainian people on the basis of appeals to a common sense, “normality,” and domestic consolidation. As for the people itself, however, the specter of attitudes to Zelensky’s presidency ranges from stark rejection to enthusiastic approval. Exactly as in the sitcom, each practical move of the presidential team on the outset evoked harshly polarized debate. A good example is the declared intention of Zelensky to launch a new Russian-language TV channel in Ukraine; despite the intended goal of countering Kremlin’s propaganda, the idea was

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debunked by some authoritative voices as – allegedly – conducive to further Russification of Ukraine and loss of linguistic and cultural identity (Бабченко, 2019). In the meantime, other experts argued that language in Ukraine does not correlate with political views (Гуменюк, 2019), which would be quite close to one of sitcom’s main messages. Equally divisive was Zelensky’s intention to radically liberalize the land market; critics immediately responded by assuming that opening this lucrative sphere of business to foreign capital would ultimately be detrimental for the economy (Нів’євський, 2019). However, on three other points, the challenge of harsh reality seems to be too strong to make any resemblance with the sitcom probable. Thus, in foreign policy marked by unfriendly encounters with Putin’s Russia and demanding expectations from Western governments, the room for populist gestures is almost non-existent. It looks particularly unrealistic to expect that Russia would remain for the Ukrainian government, as it used to be for Holoborod’ko, a politically ordinary and neutral, if not sterile, neighbor. Of course, Zelensky’s phone calls to Vladimir Putin and the swapping of war prisoners may signal about some uncertain possibilities of very modest openings in Kyiv’s relations with Moscow. Along the same lines, Dmitro Rozumkov, the head of Servant of the People party, has criticized the sharply negative reaction from the Ukrainian delegation in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe to the resumption of Russia’s voting rights in this organization (Міланова, 2019), which many commentators perceived as a pro-Russian gesture. However, Zelensky definitely faces a challenge of re-securitizing Russia – as a country that has launched passportization of residents of break-away territories immediately after his inauguration, keeps Ukrainian citizens in prison, and is eager to transform the Sea of Azov into a de-facto ‘domestic lake.’ In response to that, Zelensky’s offered Ukrainian passports to citizens of Russia “and other countries suffering from non-democratic rule” (‘Зеленский выдаст россиянам паспорта Украины’, 2019), as well as sanctioned the detention of a Russian naval vessel by Ukrainian security authorities in July 2019 (‘Украина задержала российский танкер’, 2019), which attests to Zelensky’s readiness to toughen the tone in communicating with Russia if needed. The 2020 media laws introduced by the initiative of Ukrainian president as well as the following sanctions against media channels controlled by Putin’s protégé Viktor Medvedchuk attest to Zelensky’s clear determination to resist and combat Russian disinformation campaigns againt Ukraine and the infiltration of proRussian discourses into the Ukrainian public sphere. Equally remote from reification in reality is Holoborod’ko’s self-assertive – if not inimical – stand towards the West. Apparently, for Zelensky – as for his scenic hero – Europe is a source of material benefit rather than an ideational

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inspiration. However, Zelensky can hardly afford making populist gestures of termination negotiations with any of Ukraine’s global partners, be it the EU, IMF, or NATO. On the contrary, during his first international visits, he was clear in welcoming all of them as indispensable “strategic partners” (Winfrey et al., 2019) of Ukraine. Finally, in regional politics, Ukraine is to remain a culturally and politically divided country and not only because of clandestine oligarchic conspiracies. In reality, Zelensky has to deal not with “good miners” from the East eager to help their colleagues in the West of the country but with the Russia-supported clique in power in Luhansk and Donetsk for whom violence and coercion became indispensable conditions for their existence. Any negotiations with them would undoubtedly trigger discontent and disapproval in many parts of – and groups within – Ukraine. Against this backdrop it would be fair to presume that Servant of the People and the ensuing Zelensky’s presidency, instead of unifying the society, might turn into a divisive force.

… This analysis allows to single out the specificity of the new(est) Ukrainian populism that has legitimized itself in the 2019 elections as a self-fulfilling prophesy. The first feature that lies on the surface is the highly performative and medialized nature of Servant of the People, which both served and disserved Zelensky; the sitcom is a major source of his popularity. Conversely, it is due to his background as a comedian that his opponents consider him unprofessional and inept in governing. The legacy of the sitcom created a sort of springboard for Zelensky into the real politics yet the inevitable – and progressing – detachment of fiction from reality will undoubtedly constitute a tough test for the President and his party. Second, the genealogy of the new Ukrainian populism is deeply ironic, if not sarcastic, which distinguishes it from many other populist platforms grounded in self-glorification and veneration of national grandeur. The Servant’s explicit and emotive self-criticism was one of the sources of its success on the screens and at voting stations, yet – again – it cannot be automatically projected into the sphere of practical governance where it can meet reactions of rejection and estrangement. Third, Zelensky’s populism arose in the absence of a clear (artistic, aesthetic, or performative) representation of ‘the people,’ which made it divisive. Zelensky himself has publicly acknowledged that some of his moves would eventually drop his approval ratings, and therefore promised not to run for presidency in the next election. This attests to a significant degree of heroic

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self-sacrifice inscribed into the scenario of Zelensky’s presidency, which differs from populism in Central Europe and the Baltic states. Fourth, the new Ukrainian populism has arisen in a highly complicated security milieu defined by the annexation of Crimea and the Russia-led warby-proxies in Donbas. Presumably, this hyper-securitized foreign environment should have created a perfect fertile ground for a populist consolidation of national identity as threatened by the external interference. Many other national forms of populism in Europe have been consistently constructing securitized perceptions of much milder external factors such as, in particular, EU policies, or the refugee crisis. Yet, as the Ukrainian case shows, performative populism can also be deconstructive – The Servant deployed in an ironic context the issue of immigrants, accepted the intrinsic roots of all major domestic troubles, and relegated Russia to the category of just one of Ukraine’s neighbors. Paradoxically, this intentional self-detachment from the external and concentration on the internal might hypothetically give an effect beyond Ukraine’s borders, particularly in Russia. With Zelensky in power, the Kremlin has a hard time to keep reproducing its narrative of “Ukrainian fascists” and might face an even stronger challenge to prevent the Zelensky scenario from provoking sympathy among Russians themselves.

3.2

The Geo-/Biopolitical Construction of Sovereignty in Insecure Times

The harsh political reality that President Zelensky had to face as soon as he began implementing his political strategy of conflict de-escalation turned out to be radically different from the optimism of the sitcom script. Already in the first months of his presidency, several thousand Ukrainians across the country went to streets protesting against his policies of negotiation and possible compromise with Russia. Particularly sharp and numerous were protests against Zelensky’s conciliation with the so-called Steinmeier formula of conflict resolution in Donbas that presupposed recognition of the separatist leaders in Donetsk and Luhansk as negotiating parties, launch of electoral process in the uncontrollable territories before their demilitarization, and treatment of Russia as a guarantor of the agreement as opposed to a party in conflict. This section is based on dozens of visuals that covered the anti-capitulation protests erupted in Ukraine in autumn 2019. These public actions were filmed and made publicly available by journalists, video bloggers, participants, and individual users. They contain the overall coverage of the events, and random interviews with protesters and demonstrators accompanied by authors’ com-

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ments, both neutral and partisan, both in Ukrainian and Russian languages. The value of these materials consists in highlighting insider perspectives and looking at protest actions from the vantage points of ordinary Ukrainians, which fully corresponds to the genre of popular biopolitics, particularly when it comes to issues of life and death, care and protection, and intricacies of national belonging. These multiple actions of street protests exhibited a different facet of Ukrainian political performativity, with its own aesthetics of protest and resistance and a spirit of war-laden nationalism well captured by multiple video materials about these events. Anti-capitulation meetings took place in central parts of the largest Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv’s Maidan with crowds of people marching with Ukrainian flags and other markers of national identity; some of them have visually identified themselves as belonging to the protest community by paining red stripes on their faces or wearing masks mocking Putin as the incarnation of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine. The aesthetics of the protest activism included playing patriotic music from pop-up scenes and tribunes and repeatedly reiterative slogans (“Glory to Ukraine!,” “Glory to Heroes!,” “Ukraine above All!”, etc.). People in military uniforms, being also part of the scenery, embodied the message of physical force; “We, the volunteers, have not yet unpacked our ammunition,” “We have defeated the Red devil (USSR), and will kick out the Green one” (an allusion to Zelensky’s surname which derives from “green”). Hidden allusions and direct warning signals were indispensable parts of the politics of performative protest. Prospects of a “new Maidan” were a recurrent topic in protestors’ speeches, accompanied by provocative bawls “Vova, Get Out!” (A pejorative name of Zelensky) and comparisons between Zelensky and the former President Viktor Yanukovich, all aimed at de-legitimating the former. Other performative rituals included minutes of silence in commemoration of and respect paid for the heroes fallen during the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ and the war in Donbas. Of particular importance were protests in the regions bordering on separatist territories where appeals to unity within Ukraine were clearly articulated. “We don’t believe that there will be peace in case of the detachment of Ukrainian troops from the current dividing line. We shall lose everything, and we will return to the 2014 situation… We do not want to be a grey zone“ (About the World, 2019). These appeals might be translated in a biopolitical language as statements of loyalty and belonging to the regime of care and protection established in Ukraine, and as resistance to a perspective of becoming homines sacri, abandoned and unprotected “human mass” that might be sacrificed for the sake of appeasement with Russia.

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Starting from the early autumn 2019, Zelensky’s hegemonic discourse that we have described in the previous section has been challenged by two types of dislocation: by a gap between “war recognizers” and “spectacle observers”, and between Ukrainian national community-in the-making and its “domestic others.” Let us start with the first cleavage. “Spectacle observers,” in the opinion of protesters, are those who “elected Zelensky and keep thinking that now we have a president who is a European and that is it” (Shurlo, 2019). “People who liked Zelensky as a comedian and voted for him thought this is just a business, but it is not anymore” (Звукорежиссер с Днепра, n.d.), a participant of a protest action said on camera. “People made a mistake” (Depo.ua, 2019) by choosing Zelensky, another activist added. In a more radical interpretation, “Zelensky was elected by the biomass who are nostalgic of the USSR” (Страна.ua, 2019b). These opinions lay ground for biopolitical othering within Ukrainian society. The “war recognizers” call upon their compatriots to realistically admit the fact that “we lose our people every day” at the frontline, and that Zelensky’s policy of reconciling and accommodating with Russia would lead to a civil war in Ukraine (Новости Харькова, 2019), since many people will inevitably start asking, “For what we have been fighting?” (Espreso.TV, 2019a), in 2014 and onwards. Through expressing concerns about the loss of sovereignty, “war recognizers” claim their moral right to represent the fighting nation ready for suffering and new sacrifices: “We need to keep battling and ultimately win this war,” as opposed to capitulation, which implies the eventual acceptance of new victims. For this group, “peace is different from capitulation” (Klymenko Time, 2019b), and their narratives are replete with references to the malign legacy of what they dub the Soviet colonization of Ukraine: “We don’t want to be sent to Siberia again for singing our songs.” A ban on returning fire with artillery introduced by Zelensky as part of negotiations with the Kremlin “is a loss of sovereignty” (Украина 21 век, 2019), protestors deem, and then straightforwardly admit, “Should there be a war, let it be.” In the words of another activist, “The war can finish only when the aggressor is defeated, otherwise we lose our country… No one among the military speaks about truce … Should the dead guys be able to speak; they would say the same… We shall stay on our land till the ultimate victory” (Newsone, 2019). “The Ukrainian nation, do you think we have been defeated? We want victory over Russia – this is the voice of the people” (Страна.ua, 2019a), organizers of an anti-capitulation rally in Kyiv chanted. They were supported by those who declared, “We need a peace that would return our lands, our people, and our sovereignty” (Союз Блогеров, 2019). For them, “Ukraine above all” is not a mere slogan, but “a principle of life” (Cletto, 2019). “Should Ukraine concede, the Russian world

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will advance to Mariupol, Mikolaev, and Odessa” (Shipovnik UA, 2019), they warned. In this narrative of popular biopolitics, Zelensky and his supporters are portrayed as pacifists and, metaphorically speaking, bystanders: “We are again divided; those who voted for Zelensky don’t care about war at all, they care about having fun and about their stomachs” (Украина 21 век, 2019). Against this background, “war recognizers” say, in case of Zelensky’s capitulation “we the volunteers, the Right Sector, and others will return to the previous positions” (Espreso.TV, 2019b) and keep withstanding.” “We are the Ukrainian nation… Vova, do you see us?” (ТV Фокус, 2019a), they chanted, thus demanding a visual recognition of themselves as the core of Ukrainian patriotic community with its own sense of pastorate. Demands for Ukraine’s sovereignty were accompanied by direct references to the idea of sobornost’ (Klymenko Time, 2019b), a form of communal spiritual unity that also strongly – though completely differently – resonates in the Russian imperial/patriotic discourse. The second gap articulated and performed through the protests appears to be even more pronounced and divisive. As Zelensky admitted, “we are ready for a dialogue with the people of Donbas but not with separatist leaders” (‘President: We’re Ready for Dialogue with Population of Donbas, Not with “DPR”, “LPR” Leaders’, 2020), thus drawing a line between the biopolitics of population and the geopolitical motives that brought separatists to power with direct help from Russia. Yet protestors’ attitudes to this line vacillate between the acceptance of Donbas’ residents as full-fledged Ukrainians and their implicit exclusion. However, many voices remained uncertain and confused: “We don’t know what we shall do with those who were fighting on the other side” (Shipovnik UA, 2019). Those who accept inclusive policies are strongly in favour of (re)integrating the population of Donbas into Ukraine: “There are many Ukrainians living under occupation who even under the threat of execution raise Ukrainian flags. Does someone think we shall give these people up to the enemy? To hell with this!” (Радіо Свобода, 2019). In the meantime, a compromise is also seen as a possible option; “As soon as Russia withdraws its troops and takes its people, we start a de-occupation period reengaging with our people who need time to let all the propagandistic myths go away” (ТV Фокус, 2019b). Other protestors are more decisive about excluding those whom they do not see being their compatriots: “People who welcomed Putin should not have the right to vote” (GolosTV UA, 2019), many protesters overtly declared. Others seconded, “Terrorists should not have voting rights in Ukraine because people who kill can’t be part of our community.” The purified understanding of the Ukrainian nationhood might imply harsh forms of exclusion of people from

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the occupied territories: “The Steinmeier formula legalizes voting rights for those who invited Putin” (GolosTV UA, 2019) and who therefore are not welcome any more in “the real Ukraine.” “Should these people have an access to the whole Ukraine, they will disrupt live here” (Телеканал Репортёр, 2019), some video recorded interviewees said. These approaches reflect the opinion of those who are categorically against amnesty or any other forms of concession to separatist leaders (NewsFrontInternational, 2019) and who therefore ascertain the right of the sovereign state to persecute traitors and punish them for crime and violence. “We need time to make sure that the people who lived five years under the occupation are loyal to Ukraine. Does it make sense to let in our house people who hate Ukraine, who do not want to live in accordance to Ukrainian constitution? They can’t be Ukrainian citizens” (Факти ICTV, 2019b), the logic goes on. The medicalized language appears to accurately express the biopolitical crux of the matter: “Russia is a plague” (24 Канал, 2019) to Ukraine. “Donbas is a tumor that will destroy our Ukrainian state” (Одесская ХУНТА, 2019), and this is exactly what Putin wants – “an ulcer in Ukraine’s body” (Klymenko Time, 2019a). Some of the protestors used the language of biopolitical othering comparing the prospective opening of the country for all residents of Donetsk and Luhansk with contagion of a “social gangrene that might infect the whole Ukrainian body: angry and disgruntled people might become part of our community.” As a rally activist explained, “I don’t need a cancerous disease in my body and like even less if someone tries to sell this as a victory. It is not” (Newsone, 2019). However, supporters of exclusion leave some chances for biopolitical reintegration in the long distant future: “We might need years of de-separatization, and people living in Donbas need to demonstrate their loyalty to the Ukrainian state” (Klymenko Time, 2019a). In their opinion, de-passportization is a precondition for the reintegration of Donbas and election. The political core of these statements seems to be obvious: “People need to decide on what side they are – on the Ukrainian or not” (ПН ТV digest, 2019). Here is a typical example of this narrative: Do you understand what does it mean to live under occupation? People are afraid and scared there, they have to obey to curfew; they can’t go public with anything… Occupiers are like fascists… These people have to be rehabilitated because they live under the stress of constant fear… As a starter they need at least a psychological assistance, and only after that we can speak of election and all other things… It will take years to drag them away from the hell they live in nowadays… People who reside close

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to the border on the Ukraine-controlled side don’t want Ukrainian troops to go away and leave them. The conflation of bio- and geopolitical construction of the border is articulated through raising such questions as why the Ukrainian troops have to leave their positions, who is going to defend the people living in the border areas in case of disengagement, whether Russian troops will take advantage of Ukraine’s disengagement, and whether it would be possible to expect an international border mission? The potential “grey zone” is an object of particular concern: “What is going to be there? Some kind of local militia? Disarmament? Amnesty? Election?” This narrative continues as follows: “The disengagement will create a grey zone with our people who repeatedly supported Ukraine. I cannot even imagine what would happen to those patriotic people… If the troops are withdrawn, we veterans substitute them, and we don’t need any permission for doing that.”

… In this chapter, I have looked at Ukraine from the two different perspective of popular biopolitics, one reflecting the hegemonic discourse that genealogically is shaped by the Servant of the People sitcom, and the counter-hegemonic one cropped up through mass scale street protests against president Zelensky. The collision of these two approaches polarized the Ukrainian political scene and became a major source of new divisions within Ukrainian body politic. Both discourses – the hegemonic and the counter-hegemonic – are however unstable and dislocated. When it comes to Zelensky and his party, the legacy of Servant of the People, as we have argued, is important for understanding the most controversial points of his presidential agenda – an attitude to Russia as just a neighbouring country and a partner in conflict resolution, and a vague and ambiguous conception of ‘the people’ – more as a metaphor than as a concrete biopolitical notion. As for Zelensky’s opponents, their performative actions in Kyiv and other major cities of the country have even further split the idea of the ‘Ukrainian people’ through drawing lines between ‘the realists’ (in fact, war supporters) and ‘observers of the spectacle,’ on the one hand, and between ‘the real Ukrainians’ and ‘collaborators’ in the occupied territories. These two lines of conflict are to remain decisive factors defining the bio- and geopolitics of Ukrainian national identity in the years to come.

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Кирющенко, А. (2015a). Sluga Naroda [TV Series]. http://l2.llordfilm.tv/28189-sluga -naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2015b). Sluga Naroda (No. 1/19) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2015c). Sluga Naroda (No. 1/15) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=TuB-36VsL2Q&ab_channel=%D0%98%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%80 %D1%8C%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BB%D1%8E%D0%BA Кирющенко, А. (2017a). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/19) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017b). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/16) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=KI2ikdyWMUs Кирющенко, А. (2017c). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/8) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017d). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/5) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017e). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/7) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017f). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/14) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017g). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/23) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2017h). Sluga Naroda (No. 2/9) [TV Series]. http://lordsfilms.tv/28189 -sluga-naroda-2015.html Кирющенко, А. (2019a). Sluga Naroda (No. 3/2) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=idbnJ0UupNQ Кирющенко, А. (2019b). Sluga Naroda (No. 3/1) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=6weBm61tCgE Кирющенко, А. (2019c). Sluga Naroda (3/1-3) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=SCzv5e6GbrQ&f=52s&ab_channel=%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0% B8%D0%BD%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%BE2019-%D 0%9C%D0%B0%D1%82%D1%80%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B D%D0%A2%D0%92 Кирющенко, А. (2019d). Sluga Naroda (No. 3/4) [TV Series]. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=kDu8ami7Yno Міланова, Я. (2019, June 27). Глава ‘Слуги народу’ Разумков розкритикував демарш України у ПАРЄ. Pravda. https://www.pravda.com.ua/news/2019/06/27/7219363/ НАШ. (2019, July 13). Зеленський влаштував допит чиновникам в Одесі. НАШ 13.07.19. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wqgj_eD22EI&ab_channel=%D0%9 D%D0%90%D0%A8

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Нів’євський, О. (2019, July 29). Фальстарт: Чому відкриття ринку лише для державних земель – погано для України. Vox Ukraine. https://voxukraine.org/uk/ connector/falstart-chomu-vidkrittya-rinku-lishe-dlya-derzhavnih-zemel-pogano -dlya-ukrayini/?fbclid=IwAR2Fa-wwcWZE6HuETKjxRT2yJKSVQiu3Z10sTAmYTm Dgttn3Va8T7XwXCZ4 Новости Харькова. (2019, October 2). Харьковчане вышли на митинг против капитуляции Зеленского. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDrHG2r6qPY&ab _channel=%D0%9D%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%BE%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D 0%A5%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%8C%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B0 Одесская ХУНТА. (2019, October 2). Нет капитуляции! Одесса против формулы Штайнмайера! Акція ‘Ні капітуляції’ 02.10.2019. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=PrNdzEUs_Sk&t=2s&ab_channel=%D0%9E%D0%B4%D0%B5%D1%81 %D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F%D0%A5%D0%A3%D0%9D%D0%A2%D 0%90 ПН ТV digest. (2019, October 2). Митинг правых партий против ‘капитуляции’ возле УСБУ Николаевщины. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6tPhDcdrYI&ab _channel=%D0%9F%D0%9D%D0%A2Vdigest Радіо Свобода. (2019, October 6). LIVE | Формула Штайнмаєра. Мітинг в центрі Києва. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QXaKGg8usg4&t=21s&ab_channel =%D0%A0%D0%B0%D0%B4%D1%96%D0%BE%D0%A1%D0%B2%D0%BE% D0%B1%D0%BE%D0%B4%D0%B0 Союз Блогеров. (2019, September 20). Нормандский сговор – Государственная измена!!! Киев против формулы Штайнмайера и Донбасса!!! https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=zsE7egnzVSs&ab_channel=%D0%A1%D0%BE%D1%8E%D0%B7 %D0%91%D0%BB%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%B5%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2 Стефанчук, Р. (2019, May 22). Идеолог Слуги народа. Интервью с представителем Зеленского в Раде Русланом Стефанчуком – Максимально кратко [Interview]. https://nv.ua/ukraine/politics/ideolog-slugi-naroda-intervyu-s-predstavitelem -zelenskogo-v-rade-ruslanom-stefanchukom-maksimalno-kratko-50022944.html Страна.ua. (2019a, October 6). Акция «желтых повязок» в Киеве против формулы Штайнмайера. Как это было. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cnBXRKu OqNw&ab_channel=%D0%A1%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0.ua Страна.ua. (2019b, October 6). Почему на Майдан вышли против формулы Штайнмайера. Опрос. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17_5vflZCu8&ab_channel=% D0%A1%D1%82%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0.ua ТV Фокус. (2019a, October 2). Протестующие: Зеленский, иди ГЕТЬ. Зе! Ты закончишь, в Ростове! Акция ‘Нет капитуляции’. 2.10.19. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=RfEWvZJJ_lU&ab_channel=%D0%A2V%D0%A4%D0%BE%D0%BA%D 1%83%D1%81

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ТV Фокус. (2019b, October 4). Бессрочная акция протеста на Майдане ‘Нет капитуляции’. ЗЕ, где диалог с НАРОДОМ? ЗЕ! ОДУМАЙСЯ. https://www.youtube .com/watch?v=6nQNveLTkvM&ab_channel=%D0%A2V%D0%A4%D0%BE%D0 %BA%D1%83%D1%81 Телеканал Репортёр. (2019, October 2). “Нет капитуляции”: В Одессе протестовали против подписания “формулы Штайнмайера”. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mOJPUL_ug1s&ab_channel=%D0%A2%D0%B5 %D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%A0 %D0%B5%D0%BF%D0%BE%D1%80%D1%82%D1%91%D1%80 Украина 21 век. (2019, June 11). Митинг в Днепре /Нет капитуляции / Днепр поет Гимн Украины!!! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOorHFbBCEQ&ab _channel=%D0%A3%D0%BA%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B8%D0%BD%D0%B021 %D0%B2%D0%B5%D0%BA Украина задержала российский танкер. Экипаж отпустили домой. (2019, July 25). BBC News. https://www.bbc.com/russian/news-49114717 Факти ICTV. (2019a, July 10). Зеленский выгнал депутата с рабочего совещания в Борисполе. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ab32kzvvYgA&ab_channel=%D0 %A4%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%B8ICTV Факти ICTV. (2019b, October 6). Вече на Майдане | Давление улиц даст свой результат – Тягнибок. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-P25UZOvnQ&ab_channel =%D0%A4%D0%B0%D0%BA%D1%82%D0%B8ICTV

Chapter 4

Pastorate and “Somatic Sovereignty” in Russian Popular Biopolitics The Russian political regime is often characterized as hybrid (Herd, 2018). From a domestic perspective, this description implies a mixture of conservatism, nationalism, populism, and autocratic mechanisms of power (Fish, 2017) while geopolitically this characterization entails a hybrid warfare strategy against such Russia’s neighbors as Ukraine (Hosaka, 2019) and Georgia and also against the West in a broader sense. Being in a general agreement with these assessments, we want to unpack this proverbial hybridity from the vantage point of popular biopolitics that is rooted in – and inspired by – two sharply dissimilar traditions of thought. One might be dubbed, in the words of Boris Groys, Soviet biopolitical utopias that were largely influenced by deeply populist ideas of immortality, resurrection, and individual and collective rejuvenation (NYUJordanCenter, 2019). This mixture of Christianity and Marxism, embedded in Russian cosmism, might be regarded as representing a radicalized and totalized version of Foucault’s biopolitics in the sense that the state was imagined as being able to integrate the dead into the collective body of the nation: “the dead aren’t really dead… [and] death might not be final after all” (Kim, 2018, p. 816). This “total biopolitics” became compatible and merged with what might be dubbed the ‘utopian biopolitics’ of the Soviet universalist project of creating a classless, socialist society to serve as the model for the emancipation of humanity as a whole (Hoffmann & Timm, 2008). Some of the elements of biopolitical utopias/utopian biopolitics have been symbolically appropriated and integrated into the populist mythology of Putin’s regime. The opposite tradition nourishing Russian popular biopolitics comes from the rationalized understanding of biopower as part of the modern epoch, closely associated with scientific knowledge, resource management, anthropocentrism, and environmentalism (Escapes From Modernity, 2020). The importance of biopolitics for political analysis is defined by the conceptualization of the borders of sovereignty as increasingly embedded in the medical apparatus (for example, in this light the COVID-19 quarantine might be regarded as a sovereign property), which implies the power of the state to interfere into private and intimate spheres as an important object of regulation and ‘normalization’ (Escapes From Modernity, 2020) that, however, remains insufficiently known, studied, and understood by the state due to

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_006

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a lack of reliable statistical and sociological knowledge (Manuilova, 2019). COVID-19 has boosted public interest in the classical Foucauldian questions of the appearance of new social statuses and roles as biopolitical outcomes of the pandemic: the infected citizens might be biopolitically constructed as either outcasts or objects of additional assistance, and the medical diagnosis reaches far beyond the premises of hospitals, becoming a key element in political calculations (Алябьева, 2020). Legal repercussions of these societal shifts are also becoming an object of professional discussions (Denisenko & Trikoz, 2020). Given this polarized background of Russian popular biopolitics, this chapter looks at Putin regime’s hybridity from the viewpoint of two interrelated concepts of pastoral power and ‘somatic sovereignty’ as two constitutive dimensions of biopower a la Russe, both emanating at the intersection of – and integrating – utopian/mythologized/populist and rationalized/Foucauldian traditions of thought. The concept of “somatic sovereignty” (Hayes-Conroy, 2018) denotes a type of performative attitude to the sovereign power implying the reinterpretation of national or imperial territory as an analogue of a body that needs care and protection from sickness and intrusions. The concept is an ostensibly biopolitical projection of the idea of “organic sovereignty” deeply embedded in the European political philosophy, including Greek organicism (the state as a living being), Christian theology (the church as a mystical organic body), political theory of Enlightenment (political society as an analog to a body), German philosophy of romanticism (a fully sovereign state resembling a physically and mentally strong human being) (Paris, 2020, p. 3). These most important intellectual sources of ‘somatic sovereignty,’ transplanted from Europe to Russia, were complemented by the ideas of ‘sexual sovereignty’ (Баунов, 2013) and “sexual nationalism and conservatism” (Stella & Nartova, 2015, p. 25), articulated in the context of Putin’s regime populist attack against liberal lifestyle permissiveness and the ensuing pro-family turn, inscribed into the somatic core of the hegemonic understanding of power and politics. The reverse side of “somatic sovereignty” is what might be dubbed “naked power” (Gorokhovskaia, 2020), a pure, unmediated sense of force performatively represented, in particular, by the sovereign’s half-naked body as embedded in the authoritarian aesthetics of Putin’s rule, with “images of the president shirtless on horseback, tagging endangered whales in Siberia, or leading migrating cranes” (Smyth, 2014, p. 571). To paraphrase Jean-Luc Nancy’s trope of “bare sovereignty” (Wagner, 2006, p. 95), one may metaphorically assume that “sovereign power needs to show us this nudity in order to terrorize us” (Salzani, 2012, p. 7).

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The pastorate, a concept with a strong Foucauldian legacy, might be considered as another “analytical paradigm for an authoritarian setting… denoting a particular technology of political rationality that ensures, sustains, improves, supervises, and commands the lives of individual and their bodies,” sharing core meanings with the concept of “bio-sovereignty” (Kalyvas, 2005, p. 120). In the interpretation of Elizaveta Gaufman, there are four main characteristics that define pastoral power: it is not exercised over a territory – it is a flock, rather than land; it is a beneficent power, “power of care” toward salvation; it is an individualizing power; and it is a dutiful and devotional power. However, pastoral power is inherently productive, working through discourse and not necessarily through repressive mechanisms… [The pastorate] is the Russian genealogical twin of the notion of “sobornost”: a church community that does not belong to a specific place… [It implies] common spirituality and inability to exist without a community of likeminded spiritual individuals. (Gaufman, 2017, p. 76) The pastorate fits well with Esposito’s concept of immunity that was introduced in Chapter 1 as a key element of community-building. Pastoral immunity deconstructs the idea of the individual and envisions the ability of the collective body to regenerate through salvation “primarily associated with a biological and bodily sense of health, soundness, physical vitality, and thus, with that of protection or healing from all kind of disease” (Esposito, 2011, p. 54). For both ‘somatic sovereignty’ and pastoral power, masculinity in its various forms is a core biopolitical category (Bunds, 2014). In particular, petromasculinity, a concept coined for discussing an authoritarian momentum in the contemporary American politics through “the relationship – both technically and affectively, ideationally and materially – between fossil fuels and white patriarchal orders” (Daggett, 2018), can be applicable to Putin’s populism as well (Sperling, 2016). In a wider sense, one may agree with Esposito that pastoral immunity blurs the boundary “between the preservation of life and the production of death” (Esposito, 2011, p. 57). In the meantime, there are other convergences constitutive for Putin’s populist project. For our analysis of Russian popular biopolitics, it is important to highlight some affinity and conflation between populist pastorate (to be illustrated by the case of ‘Night Wolves’ bike shows) and a Russia-specific version of governmentality (to be discussed as a part of the anti-COVID-19 crisis management). Both

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direct human behaviour in a manner which undercuts our self-assertive capacity to independently create the future … and produce obedient servitude… Although algorithmic technologies are a manifest development of the turn toward the scientific method which accompanied modernity’s break from its religio-medieval past, an underlying signaturial affinity nonetheless links the absconded God of late medieval nominalism to the techniques of artificial intelligence and computational analysis empowering the register of algorithmic control. (Cooper, 2020, p. 41) Besides, both Russian pastorate and governmentality owe their public functioning to the phenomenon of “biopolitical media,” a concept pointing to the “commodification of the human experiences in the media images” (Meek, 2015, p. 10), which makes today’s biopolitics – unlike in the times of Foucault – not only a crucial element of governmentality techniques but also a public phenomenon that is narrated through storylines and visual infographics” (Amit-Danhi, 2018), manifested in multiple “regimes of visibility” for various audiences. The two pillars of the biopolitical media – emotional consumption and control (Fazi, 2019, p. 12) – are closely tied to each other to form “an aesthetically mobilized state” (Williams, 2018, p. 884) and “define individuals and groups in terms of social, political, and biological inclusion and exclusion, health and sickness, productivity and waste’… and seek to regulate cultural conduct by imbuing a subject as worthy of life or death” (Rarm, 2018, p. 3). The conflation of the pastorate, somatic sovereignty, and governmentality produces different biopolitical forms and models grounded in “a unified and compact body politic” (Forti, 2006, p. 11), including populism, imperialism, nationalism, and fascism (Lynch, 2016, p. 108). The Russian case seems to have a strong cognitive potential for contributing to the ongoing academic discussion in this realm.

4.1

Night Wolves’ Performative Imperialism1

This section looks at the Night Wolves bike club’s shows (Harris, 2020) as one of strictest manifestations of the popular biopolitics of somatic sovereignty and the pastorate. I also extend my analysis to the political instrumentalization of the Night Wolves’ popular biopolitics by Russian media propaganda in Europe. 1 This section is partly based on: Makarychev, A. and A. Yatsyk 2018.

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This section reflects on a plethora of artistic and performative shows staged by the Night Wolves biker club – a direct recipient of Kremlin-controlled funds aimed at supporting nongovernmental organizations – from 2010 to 2019. In imagery and narrative, the Night Wolves’ productions are one of the most impressive political performances in today’s Russia, grounded in a blend of cultural representations of biopolitics and geopolitics to the point of indistinction. The biker shows are one of the key elements of the constructed imagery of nationalism and imperialism as “an alternative universe, a meta-narrative to feed to the public [that] has long been a cornerstone of Putin’s rule” (Whitmore, n.d.). In this sense, the phenomenon of the Night Wolves performativity is part of a larger debate over the Russian version of the “post-truth society” and alternative realities masterminded through the production of textual and visual messages with strong aesthetic components (Архангельский, 2016). In just a few years, the performances evolved from a politically marginal narrative to the hegemonic discourse. The annual biker shows in Crimea are the largest performative instruments operated by the Night Wolves, but they hold other events as well. The bikers are also known for their annual motorcycle rides to Berlin through several cities of Central Europe to celebrate Victory Day (9 May). The leader of the Night Wolves, Aleksandr Zaldostanov, nicknamed ‘Khirurg’ (The Surgeon), in addition to overtly supporting Russia’s messianic imperialism, has made numerous provocative statements against pro-liberal public figures. The Night Wolves have received extensive media coverage in both Russia (by RT and Russia Insider) and Ukraine (Ruptly, 2014; Thranholm, 2016). The case of the Night Wolves is exemplary for understanding the complex and multifaceted nature of the Kremlin’s performative creatures as hybrid policy tools: the bikers are openly patronized by Putin (larasdvatri123, 2014) and funded by his administration yet mimic ‘civil society organizations’ and their performances are mostly aimed at domestic audience, yet they also wish to have their say in Russia’s relations with foreign countries, from Ukraine and Georgia to Germany (NewsFromUkraine, 2015). But the feature most worthy of attention is the close and direct linkage between performing and acting: the Night Wolves have formed an armed battalion in the separatist region of Donbas where volunteers from Russia were recruited for the sake of waging a “holy war” against Ukraine’s “junta” (larasdvatri123, 2014). A product of the Kremlin’s proverbial “political technologies,” the Night Wolves demonstrate how short the distance is from staging shows to mobilizing fighters and how easily the imperial aesthetics of widely consumed cultural fantasies can morph into a network of military combatants.

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The question that motivates me in this section is how the concepts of somatic sovereignty and pastorate can help us better understand Night Wolves’ artistic performances with their visual representations of key nodal points in Russia’s hegemonic populism – a mélange of Communist nostalgia, Christian sloganeering, and a strong neoimperial momentum, with the annexation of Crimea at their core as an act of “restoring the historical truth”. As Khirurg put it in an interview, “I perceive my country as a human being. I feel bad when it gets sick” (Залдостанов, 2014). This metaphor is helpful for understanding Night Wolves’ interpretation of both somatic sovereignty and pastoral power. I argue that the Night Wolves’ concerts are aimed at normatively appealing to two supreme sources of veracity and universality, the Orthodox faith and the necropolitics of the Great Patriotic War. Both nodal points are juxtaposed and symbolically appropriated as undeniable ‘truths’ beyond political debate, a status that turns disagreement with either of them into an act of rebellious contestation of Russia’s primordial and sacrosanct sovereignty and therefore ought to be marked as lacking in authenticity and normatively false. 4.1.1 The Popular Geo-/Biopolitics and “Somatic Sovereignty” The Night Wolves’ narratives and imagery are replete with various selfconstructed meanings attached to both geo- and bio-political contexts articulated by the Night Wolves through their performative and highly publicized actions. The program of the 2010 show included a Soviet-era song, “My Black Sea,” that served as a meaningful addition to the revived imperial narrative of Putin’s Russia. The 2015 show was marked by overt rehabilitation of Russia as the ‘eternal empire,’ accompanied by the claim that Russia should neither hide nor regret its irremovable imperial identity. In the 2017 show, Crimea was referred to as “the savior” of Russian imperial tradition, which extends to the war-torn Donbas. This pathos of self-assertive impunity represented a drastic departure from the cultural mainstream of the late Soviet era, symbolized, in particular, by the Georgian film Repentance (dir. Tengiz Abuladze, 1984) and making a strong case for accepting and recognizing the guilt of the past as an indispensable step toward spiritual self-purification. Within this anti-repentance framework, popular geographies of imperial glory play a particularly important role. The 2015 show featured a symbolic parade of cities known for their outstanding contributions to the victory over fascist Germany. All of them were portrayed as inalienable parts of Russian military history, including Kerch and Sebastopol, located in Crimea. In a clear politicization of wartime memories, the narrative ascribed to Odessa the disapproval of the “Kyiv junta,” while Kyiv itself was compared to “Judas, who

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fails to notice a noose behind his head.” The Maidan was directly referred to as a source of “lies,” while the “truth” remained deeply imperial: the “imperial flag of liberty” was called on to reunite expanses from “Baikal to Ukraine.” The 2016 bike show followed the same line, claiming that a “new epoch of the Russian state” was being formed in anticipation of the Fifth Empire to come (the previous four were the Kievan Rus’, Rurikovich Muscovy, the Romanov empire, and the Soviet Union). This imperial mystique is a replica of the narrative widely propagated by Zavtra newspaper and its editor, Aleksandr Prokhanov. Again, popular geopolitics is an organic part of the imperial logic that symbolically aggregates in one chain Narva (conquered by Peter the Great), Donbas, Palmyra, and Karabakh as places culturally or linguistically connected, in one way or another, to the “Russian World.” The 2012 show portrayed through the lens of imperial geography cities as different as Warsaw (liberated by the Soviet troops in 1945) and Kandahar (a city in Afghanistan where a Soviet military brigade was stationed). Evidently, this chain consists of cities located beyond Russia’s borders, which attests to the detachment of Russian imperial imagery from the realities of the international system. With all its absurdity, the proliferation of the elements in this self-reproducing imaginary chain seems to be in line with President Putin’s rather provocative statement about Russian borders that “do not end anywhere” (Embury-Dennis, 2016). In 2017, referring to the Yuri Gagarin’s first piloted spaceflight, Khirurg, echoing the president, claimed that since that time, “the Russian lands have been bounded by the cosmos” (RT на русском, 2017). This celebratory – if not triumphant – declaration of Russia’s ‘infiniteness’ is metaphorically sustained by the multiple scenes in the biker shows in which motorcyclists ride around the moving circle, unable to stop without being in danger of falling down and collapsing – an artistic metaphor for the endless movement of Russia. Another idea behind the geographic chains is to resignify the peripheral connotations of their elements vis-à-vis Russia’s center. The narrative of the 2012 biker show refers to Sebastopol as “the last authentic Russian city” and “God’s favorite,” counterposed to a Moscow that, in Khirurg’s words, “is not a hero anymore” – an allusion to the lack of authenticity in the cosmopolitan capital. In 2014, this argument was strengthened even further, to the point of the lyrics referring to Sebastopol as the place where the salvation of Russia would eventually come from (Hotovy, 2014). In 2016, this argument was further reiterated by reference to 10 million Russians in so-called Novorossiya who “refused to submit to the global American tyranny” and thus heroically salvaged Russia from “moral slavery.” “As long as Sebastopol remains Russian, Russia will not perish,” the song went, underlining once again the centrality of Crimea to Russian geography of ‘somatic sovereignty.’

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Since 2010, the biker shows narrative has included references to Sebastopol as “a great Russian city,” “the city of our strength,” and a “unique truth,” combined with anticipation of a military conflict (particularly telling in this respect was a song with lyrics that included the politically mobilizing elocution, “I am waiting for the start of a new war,” in the 2010 show) (nwsev, 2012). The 2013 narrative of the bike show held in Volgograd included explicit references to Sebastopol as an inherently Russian city spiritually linked to other places of Russian and Soviet military glory, among them Stalingrad (респекТVолгоград, 2013). Moreover, the Stalingrad/Volgograd–Sebastopol linkage, in a figurative form, symbolically legitimized the annexation of Crimea before it happened, which only a year later became a reality. In 2013, almost a year before the annexation of Crimea, Khirurg vociferously proclaimed: “Rather Europe become an African country than Sebastopol lose its Russian roots” (Процко, 2014). Apart from racist allusions, the narrative of the 2013 show put a premium on symbolically relating Sebastopol to Stalingrad: “Let Sebastopol flaunt over the Volga, and Stalingrad meet its friends in the Black Sea.” This preemptive reconnection of Crimea to the geographies of past military glory not only charted an imaginary pathway to the annexation, but also placed Stalin’s name at the core of Russia’s sovereign aggrandizement. Thus, an important inspiration for performative populism comes from the playful manipulation of bio- and geopolitical signs is the reconnection of Crimea in general and Sebastopol with other imperial places. Consequently, the figure of the public enemy – a generalized object of hate that allegedly wishes to prevent the Russian collective self from attaining security and integrity – is an indispensable actor in the imaginary scenery, which is nicely exemplified by the Night Wolves’ performances with their clearly articulated anti-Western pathos. The dominant approach articulated in the shows is binary and divisive: Russia’s relations with the West are portrayed as a war of good against evil, a “natural” collision of paradise and hell. The argument underlying the lambasting of the West in the Night Wolves’ performances closely resembles leftist interpretations of globalization as totalitarianism, to be resisted. For example, the 2016 show started with an apocalyptic vision of mankind moving toward the abyss, with dehumanized bodies as visual incarnations of “uncanny ghosts and ugly chimeras” associated with the alleged Western tyranny and featured earlier in 2011 in zoological categories, such as “black ravens” and “jackals.” Russia, according to the ensuing narrative, had been forced to temporarily become part of this “anti-humankind,” but today it is liberating itself and breaking away from foreign domination. It is in this populist context that the United States is represented as the embodiment of global evil: the recognizable national symbols of America

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were presented as the universal signifiers of domination, control, oppression, and surveillance. One of the performing artists wore a t-shirt with the logo “Columbus, un-discover America!” a clear indication of the rampant antiAmericanism of the whole semantics of the performance. The 2011 show started by portraying the former CIA director Allen Dulles, who, according to the narrative based in conspiracy theory, in 1948 called for a confrontation with the Soviet Union, which serves as a universal explanation of the reasons behind the Soviet collapse in 1991. In the 2017 show, figures representing Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin appeared on stage, accompanied by diabolically spiteful laughter symbolizing America’s joyful celebration at the fall of the Soviet Union and the subsequent “dull 1990s,” a decade reconstructed in the nationalist narrative as destructive and submissive. In the 2014 show, the malign West was represented by the voices of Barack Obama and Angela Merkel against the backdrop of the crowd protesting on the Maidan, followed by the voice of Hitler and a swastika made of human bodies (Hotovy, 2014). Ukraine in this peculiar interpretation was depicted as a country completely dependent on its foreign sponsors and patrons overseas and as a victim of the global Western conspiracy. It is within this discursive frame that neofascism is represented as the evil with which Russian imperial nationalists wish to symbolically associate the Maidan. The imagined connection between the Maidan, neo-Nazis, and the United States is presented as a repressive force that only Russia can counterbalance and ultimately defeat. Physical might – celebrated and venerated by long and noisy theatrical shots in the air – is symbolized as the most effective means of restoring Russia’s ‘somatic sovereignty,’ which in turn is directly connected to the victory in the Great Patriotic War and Stalin’s successful campaigns against Nazi Germany. The muscular and supremacist language that the Night Wolves speak in their populist performances is, however, sometimes interrupted by a different narrative. In the 2014 show, Ukrainians, represented as slaves of Europe and traitors of century-long traditions of friendship with Russia, became objects of hysterical speech, “For how much did you sell Kievan Rus’ to Europe?” “Who convinced you, Ukraine, that Moscow is your enemy?” In a musical form, this narrative argued that in this part of the world there were different borders that historically had shifted many times, yet now Ukraine preferred to decisively drive to the West, thus abandoning its eastern citizens, who wished to remain in close touch with Russia. The hysterical and highly metaphorical dialogue with Ukraine reached its peak with the frequently reiterated question: “Tell me, Ukraine, why?” In the 2015 show, the hysterical appeal to Ukraine continued, ‘Who needs you, Ukraine, except Russia, which is of one blood with you?”

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“Whom do you serve, Ukraine?” the singer Gleb Kornilov rhetorically asks in his composition. These symbolic appeals to Ukraine only shed light on the numerous discrepancies and inconsistencies in the version of Russian ‘somatic sovereignty’ shaped by the dominant popular geopolitics. For instance, the reiterated lament “Sebastopol will forever remain Russian” undermines the narrative of Ukraine and Russia as one nation propagated by Sergei Ivanov and supported by Putin himself. The Kremlin clearly lacks a single discourse toward Ukraine and thus must vacillate between rhetorical pragmatism (with Putin’s famous phrase, “Let them [Ukrainians] return our money!” at its core) (Levchenko, 2014) and what might be called ‘enforced friendship’ or – in even more biopolitically explicit form – ’enforced family relations.’ The latter model is overtly articulated by Gleb Kornilov, constant participant in the Night Wolves’ shows, in his musical reaction to the Ukrainian poet Anastasiya Danilyuk with the self-explanatory title, “We’ll never be brothers.” Kornilov’s riposte, marked by a strongly gender-biased context, portrays Ukraine as a misbehaving sister that Russia as an elder brother needs to protect and take care of (Корнилов, 2014). This type of attitude, with some conciliatory notes inside it, represents a milder form of Russia’s symbolic domination that is still deeply patronizing, arrogant, and insensitive to Ukraine’s political or cultural subjectivity in its background. 4.1.2 Patriotic Pastorate: The Stalinist–Orthodox Potpourri Attempts to reconsolidate Russia’s ‘somatic sovereignty’ are grounded in two seemingly contradictory discourses. On the one hand, there is a growing tendency toward a religious renaissance and an ensuing politicization of the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC). What started in the early 1990s as a revival of faith earlier suppressed by the Communists since the 1917 revolution evolved, in a matter of a decade, into an imposition of Orthodox moral, cultural, and social norms as interpreted by the ROC, which led to the creeping revision of the very principle of the secular state. The analysis of the Night Wolves’ narrative gives a clear picture of the declared intention to reify the imperial plans of reassembling “the pieces of the Motherland,” initially as a series of speech acts and performances, and later as a mainstream state of mind in the Kremlin, supported by a significant part of the society. On the other hand, nostalgia for Soviet times transformed into a political platform with the overt rehabilitation of the Stalinist blend of necro- and biopolitics as its central tenet. The Soviet nostalgia is a populist phenomenon that exists deep within society and represents a point of meeting of cultural acceptance of authoritarian rule and commercial reasoning (includ-

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ing patriotic fashion (Окрест, 2015) and “gastronomic nostalgia”). Arguably, an important cultural precondition for the spread and proliferation of nostalgic sentiment since the beginning of the 1990s was a “feeling of the impossibility of returning” to the communist era (Волчек, 2016). Yet today, it is exactly this feeling that the performative culture of ‘somatic sovereignty’ endeavors to undo, in conjunction with the practical attempts of some Kremlin-affiliated officials to legally contest the dissolution of the Soviet Union (‘Депутат Госдумы вновь попросил проверить законность распада СССР’, 2015). Both nostalgia for the “good old times” of an “authentic” prerevolutionary Russia as an Orthodox state and nostalgia for the Soviet era initially represented cultural phenomena that became deeply populist. However, the problem to be tackled is the paradoxical convergence of two nostalgic cultures, the Orthodox one and the Soviet one. The Night Wolves’ populist concerts offer abundant evidence of such a merger. The 2013 bike show, for example, delivered a postmodernist potpourri of popular Soviet songs immediately followed by an explicit display of signs of Orthodoxy. The patriotic blend of communism and religiosity found its visual rendering in the portrayal of Stalingrad as an icon, a city possessing “a holy might.” This synthetic narrative reached its affective peak in representing the 1943 Battle of Stalingrad as “the second advent of Jesus attired in the uniform of the Soviet soldier.” Two coats of arms, the Soviet one and the prerevolutionary one, visually merged into one, followed by a song that started, “We still have not burned everything down.” The same motif was central to the 2015 biker show titled ‘The Smithy of Victory’ (Thesavspb, 2015). In a historical reconstruction of the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941, this production starts with the on-stage image of a scared woman kissing the Orthodox cross during a cruel air strike. The narrator says that “the Soviet Union was praying all the years of the Great Patriotic War and turned into a huge red monastery ready to sacrifice its lives for the sake of humanity.” Then, the voiceover asserts that both Stalin and Zhukov prayed before each battle; ultimately, the 1945 victory became an icon with the Soviet flag over Reichstag in Berlin was tantamount to the Gonfalon. Since Russia was blessed by the Virgin Mary, the wine of victory was Jesus’s blood, the narrative continues. Predictably, in this context, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 is interpreted as the result of a “conspiracy of demons” that, in the 2017 show, was visualized as a gigantic snake “transgressing Russian space and Russian time,” as Khirurg’s voice explained offstage. Religious motifs were a major focal point in the 2016 biker show, titled The Arc of Salvation (nwsev, 2012). The performance offered a populist vision of the Soviet past, claiming that “the Bolsheviks drove Russia to the abyss of world revolution and chaos, but Stalin salvaged the country, transforming it

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into a complete and aggressive alternative to the West.” The religious zeal reached its zenith with mystic claims that “Russian empires from the outset rejected Western reason” and that “Stalin’s empire debunked the third law of thermodynamics.” In the 2017 show, what Ted Hopf dubbed “Imperial Russia’s usable past” (Hopf, 2016, p. 242) translated into an archaic veneration of a Tsarist Russia that was destroyed by the Bolsheviks. The 1917 revolution was driven by a search for utopian justice yet ended up with bloodshed masterminded by the generalized West that “invented the borders between republics to make Russia collapse”. In this narrative, the civil war was metaphorically portrayed as a wound in Russia’s body that Stalin had to tackle. Stalin’s necropolitics of repressions and terror, accordingly, were meant to disavow the destructive energy of the revolution and reverse the revolutionary fervor. The Pioneers marching on the scene were supposed to visualize the unitary force of ‘somatic sovereignty’ exemplified by Stalin himself and then continued by the exploration of outer space with Yurii Gagarin’s flight as its epitome. Against this background, the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 was performed as an analog of the resignation of Nikolay II and the fall of Romanov’s empire. According to the Night Wolves’ interpretation, the Soviet state collapsed under the pressure of external enemies visualized as a gigantic snake, a non-human evil that destroyed cities and burned people. This storyline justifies the role of Putin – he reversed the disaster caused by Gorbachev and Yeltsin, two destructive figures dependent on the West. This populist combination of conspiracy theory, political phantasy and religious mystique was crowned by what Gleb Kornilov dubbed in one of his songs “the Russian Truth:” Russians are snakefighters whose mission is to make gardens blossom and churches reappear after decades of communist rule. The “Russian energy” makes Russia, in this imagination, a savior of the world, a global “reactor” (RT, n.d.). The merger of the Orthodox normativity with the centrality of the 1945 victory over fascism for today’s imperial nationalists’ vision of ‘somatic sovereignty’ has several important effects, to which the performative role of the Night Wolves is essential. First, this populist mixture of the pastorate and imperial rehabilitation of communism gave rise to a pronounced totalizing effect, with a clear shift toward discursive foreclosure and consequent isolation from the “malign” West. The speaking position contrived by Khirurg and his scenarists leaves him with almost free hands in articulating an endless number of the most pretentious claims: speaking on behalf of the selfcontrived “truth,” he feels free to construct and play with equivalences and consequently totalize the discourse to the point of direct vindication of the most repressive of Russia’s rulers, from Ivan the Terrible to Stalin. This type

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of totalization a la Russe might take different forms, including populist appropriation and the resignification of earlier cultural practices: thus, Viktor Tsoi’s famous song Kukushka (The Cuckoo), which in the late 1980s was an epitome of youth protest against the Soviet regime, in the 2015 biker show was performed as a declaration of Russia’s past and future might, with “my palm turned into a fist” as a metaphor of physical force indispensable to a national ‘somatic sovereignty.’ Second, this totalization, with all its inherent indeterminacy, stretches far beyond the aesthetic field of postmodernist irony and is not as innocent or as marginal as it might appear. The juxtaposition of scarcely compatible arguments can be a rather explosive and subversive mix owing to its proclivity to create a fertile ground for manipulations with meanings sustained by culturally appealing techniques. For Laclau, discursive dislocations are tantamount to freedom, but this is only one side of the story (Laclau, 2015, p. 31). Another side is much less celebratory and has to do with the multiple malicious effects of the dislocated identity grounded in intentionally blurring lines between the national and the imperial, interior and exterior, friends and foes, conservatism and subversion, and – the most consequentially dangerous – between the forceful refutation of fascism and the implicit reproduction of Nazi-like aesthetics and style in artworks (Малкиэль, 2017). These multiple conflations and overlaps of opposites paradoxically turn Russian ‘somatic sovereignty’ into a rebellious conservatism, purposely crusading against any type of rational knowledge in epistemological sense and revolting against the extant international norms in policy terms. The pathos of emancipatory liberation from the imagined oppression is the reverse side of the well-recorded conservative wave in Russian politics, with the overtly retrospective mind-set at its core performed by the Night Wolves. Of course, the Night Wolves’ performances are not the only populist productions to fuse Stalinist nostalgia with a politicized Orthodoxy. In 2015, the openly pro-Stalinist writer Aleksandr Prokhanov symbolically sanctified an icon bearing the likeness of Stalin and gained the tacit approval of from some Orthodox priests (‘Трепещите, ядом плюйте Как Иосиф Сталин возвращается в жизнь современной России’, 2016). In the same vein, the Russian Orthodox tycoon Konstantin Malofeev suggested there was “nothing wrong with the ‘Orthodox Chekists’” (Таратута, 2015). However, the uncanny convergence of religious mystique with imperial nationalism leads the Night Wolves to a populist assumption of the “unfinished business of the 1941–1945 Great Patriotic War”: “a new fight with fascism is inevitable, as is inevitable Stalin’s eleventh strike,” Khirurg pathetically claimed at the 2014 bike show, alluding to the “ten most successful Soviet military operations against fascist Germany.”

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This discourse stretches far beyond the evident rhetoric of militaristic mobilization; it de facto legitimizes the public discussion of a future global war (Колесников, 2016) and its probability (Рыковцева, 2016; Немцев, 2015). This marks a radical shift from the ‘never again’ discursive frame, central to the Soviet culture of war commemoration, to the celebratory sloganeering (“We can do it again if needed”) typical of Putin’s Russia. In other words, it is not mourning and grief but a victorious festivity that defines the nature of the ‘somatic sovereignty’ discourse in contemporary Russia. It seems symptomatic that new efforts to rehabilitate Stalin have spiraled in the aftermath of the annexation of Crimea. This act of ‘somatic sovereignty,’ widely supported in Russian society, reveals, in Andrey Zubov’s words, the centrality of Stalin for Putin’s regime. For professional historians, it is clear that “the USSR actually entered World War II on September 17, 1939, as an ally of Nazi Germany with which it divided Eastern Europe in full accordance with the secret protocol annexed to the non-aggression pact of August 23, 1939, which went down in history as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.” Not incidentally, the annexation of Crimea instigated the discursive activity in the imperial flank of Russian nationalists who openly advocate for the rehabilitation of Stalin (Веселый Роджер, 2015) as a step toward a new division of Europe into spheres of influence (Goble, 2017), a gloomy scenario that presupposes only limited sovereignty for the Baltic States and the de facto elimination of Ukraine as an independent nation. 4.1.3 The Biopolitics of Life and the Thanatopolitics of Death The biker show scenarios can also be interpreted from the viewpoint of an intricate combination of biopolitics (or the politics of managing people’s lives) and thanatopolitics (or the politics of death) (Murray, 2008) with what the nationalist Zakhar Prilepin dubbed “glorification and anesthetization of war as a biological necessity (Fedor, 2018, p. 24). A key biopolitical metaphor in the shows is the rapture of faceless and similar if not identical bodies of workers, representing the Soviet ideal of disciplinary power. This outlook is reminiscent of the way the Soviet Union was portrayed in the opening ceremony of the Sochi Olympics as a collective body of people, a biopolitical mass whose individual units were deprived of individuality and agency yet united in sharing a feeling of belonging to a powerful community cemented together by its long history, defined by the fight for biological survival. The main politicizing factor now is the discursively constructed image of dispossession and deprivation, rendered visually in systems of signs and messages and articulated in narratives of victimization. Indicatively, Khirurg started the 2012 show by dedicating it to “my disappeared

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Motherland,” that is, the Soviet Union. In biopolitical terms, this narrative portrayed Russians as people without “proper” territorial grounding. This people, according to the narrative of the 2012 show, was contaminated by traitors: thus, Sebastopol was referred to as a “humiliated city betrayed by grandchildren of the wartime generation” and by “dogs who sold out the country that kept the whole world in fear.” Therefore, this people need “purification” and a rebirth of national spirit. The collective biopolitical “we” on behalf of whom each of the annual stories is told is skillfully constructed by different means, such as by appealing to ethnic Russians as “brothers” (the 2011 show) who are ready to “rise from their knees” and revive their centuries-long belief in “God, love, force, and truth” (the narrative of the 2012 show). It is exactly at this point that this biopolitical imagery reveals its reverse side, which can be viewed through the prism of thanatopolitics as the cult of physical coercion and violence, characterized by the inevitability of sacrificing human lives, with, ultimately, death as a symbol of the great national spirit. “The last mortal combat,” heroically proclaimed as an ethical ideal during the revolution and civil war, is now recycled as a thanatopolitical resource and instrument manipulated by the Night Wolves. In this sense, it is indicative that the 2016 bike show was replete with fire as a sign semiotically representing the painful and inevitable Real – both in terms of eternal resistance to “devilish forces” (the 2011 show) and in terms of purifying the national self. In the 2012 show, one could see multiple references to the forthcoming military conflict with the West: “We’ll bring bullets in amounts sufficient to send a clear message to the fascist Maidan.… Actors from NATO will be rehearsing their death,” Khirurg set the thanatopolitical tone of the storyline. In a different episode, a voice behind the scenes called out “to be ready for a melée.” Constructing the feeling of Sebastopol’s submission to a foreign occupation, the narrative continued with direct references to the Great Patriotic War: “Every night here resembles the twenty-second of June, every day here is like the ninth of May.… Soon there will be another 1941, and one more 1945.” The appropriation of Victory Day is an important part of the 2017 show as well; “It is impossible to turn aside from the road of the ninth of May,” Khirurg declared. The 2018 “Russian Dream” show is full of thanatopolitical allusions (one of them is a joker appearing out of a huge skull symbolizing the West). The populist metaphor of global dump is represented through the images of zombies, the living dead as an external threat to the purity of Russian “somatic sovereignty.” The West is represented as a huge thanatopolitical machine that functions as an enormous meat grinder and produces death (cadavers, mutant creatures and non-humans, which refers to zombies as part of Western mass culture exemplifying radical and contagious otherness as a deadly threat to

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the living beings) (Saunders, 2012). “The stinky breath of hell” is supposed to verbalize the decline of the capitalist West with its hate, greed, and violence. “What shall we do with this dump that transforms people into garbage connected to artificial spaces?” the voice of Khirurg rhetorically asks. At a certain point, another incarnation of the Western aggressive impurity appears on the scene – a gigantic fire-breathing snake exemplifying the global evil that “penetrated the European skin and embodied in America.” Naturally, the snake was performatively defeated by “the eternal Georgy” with a spear who – for some reason – was riding a bike. The ensuing “happy life” is exemplified by the Soviet-time pathetically optimistic song “Sunny Circle.” The biopolitical crux of the show is manifested through a robust contrast between the clear (green meadows and blue lakes) and the dirty (the impure civilization of capitalism that contaminates the environment and makes a giant dump out of it. The new “global Russia” that defeated evil commits itself now to “produce life” (Мотоклуб Ночные Волки, 2018). As Marlene Laruelle argued, “the Russian nationalist landscape was undoubtedly disappointed by what it interpreted as a lack of support from Moscow, but its call for a full-scale war with Ukraine and the conquest of Kyiv was supported neither by public opinion nor by the authorities. Ideological entrepreneurship around the notion of Novorossiya was rapidly disaggregated and neutralized…The only space left for free use of the term Novorossiya is the literary realm” (Laruelle, 2019, p. 730). However, Russian pastorate and ‘somatic sovereignty’ remain attractive elements of the Kremlin-controlled popular biopolitics beyond Russian borders. The next section discusses how the mass-culture version of pastorate may find its enthusiasts and sympathizers in Europe and how Russian media industry uses these sympathies for positioning Russia as a global biopower whose society shares Christian identity and whose government is committed to taking care and protecting its population, both in political and biological sense.

4.2

Iben Thranholm’s Biopolitical Interfaces

The story of ‘Night Wolves’ does not stop here. It extends to another story of conversion of the Russian pastoral power into a foreign policy tool one with one of the main protagonists being Iben Thranholm, Danish journalist, public intellectual and media commentator who defines herself as a believing Christian and a promoter of Christian values. Having actively propagating her religious views for years, at a certain point she started more and more often to include in her public speeches positive references to Russia as an encourag-

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ing and illuminating example of a “truly Christian” devotion and service to the sovereign nation in its traditional meaning. One may interpret Thranholm’s worldview as grounded in distinguishing the spheres of governmentality and biopolitics. She recognizes that in Denmark – as well as across Western Europe – the welfare state is functional, and the government effectively distributes social benefits. However – paradoxically – she assumes that this is exactly where the problem comes from, since the well-functioning administrative/managerial system of policy making prevented people from investing into the immaterial domain that is plagued by what she calls “spiritual disease.” This approach is inherently biopolitical, as Thranholm tends to blame the sexual revolution for declining birth rates, arguing that due to the culture of contraception, “we are not open to life anymore,” which in her opinion changes the whole concept of family and disconnects the idea of life from the veneration of God (EWTN, 2019). “Women in Denmark can have a child with the state that will take care of everything. You do not need neither a man nor God anymore. We have replaced Christianity with the welfare state” (Thranholm, 2019), she said. Her populist narrative is explicitly replete with biopolitical categories; “In the West, we experience a spiritual crisis as an effect of the sexual revolution that led to existential emptiness. We need changes in abortion laws to make society open to life” (EWTN, 2019), Thranholm suggested in an interview. She is particularly unhappy with liberal democracy, arguing that it cannot protect Western societies from being colonized by Islam-associated forces; “The Danish people have recently voted to open up to Islamists” (Thranholm, 2019). On a different occasion, she extended this argument, “Many in Europe deem that we don’t need men anymore since we have the state… With the differences between the left and the right blurred, the conservatives are nowadays in a deep crisis… Europe moves towards a totalitarian system like the Soviet Union… The spiritual void in Europe is filled out by Islam; the only option left for us is to convert them in Christianity” (Thranholm, 2019). The result, in her view, would be fierce resistance from ethnic communities and potentially a civil war. Thranholm’s populist logic valorizes sovereignty (laws have to be observed by all, including the immigrants) over the liberal regime of care-taking (“politicians acting like mothers: Ok, let us be nice people and make everything it takes to accommodate the refugees”). She posits that “secular humanism doesn’t believe in the existence of evil that can’t be negotiated with or integrated through the mechanisms of democracy… But this implies that there is no truth either.” She blames globalism for leaving “no place to Christianity in the new world order… We are not ready to die for anything” (RT, 2019). She also complained that she allegedly was accused of damaging Denmark’s interests

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due to her critique of EU immigration policy (RT, 2017), which explains her anti-EU pronouncements. As many other populist speakers in Europe, she is harshly critical of the entire normative core of “European politics – soft values, inclusion, openness, and a lack of masculinity that had been overtaken by aggressive feminism… Islamic culture is assaulting European women because they consider themselves weaker and abandoned by men” (Thranholm, 2016c), she said in a talk show. This combination of illiberal and anti-postmodernist rhetoric makes her inimical to individualism, the pursuit of personal success, concerns about jobs and ‘happy pills,’ and, the other way around, sympathetic with ‘a return to the natural order,’ where sexuality (physical pleasure) will not be any longer divorced from reproductive behavior (feminine social function), and what she dubs “spirituality” would return as the key element of national identity. Referring to the ongoing “spiritual warfare.” Thranholm identifies “two sources of the elimination of Christianity: Brussels (the incarnation of malign liberalism) and the Islamists, acting in tandem.” Moreover, she assumes that the EU bureaucracy (“people in Brussels”) lets Islam do a “dirty job” of eradicating Christianity from Europe for the sake of advancing secularism (Imperia News, 2018). Developing this argument, she lambastes her major enemies – the cultural Marxists who, in her view, colonized both left-wing and right-wing discourses – for their desire to “create a new, post-human world order under the guise of liberal secularism which amounts to cultural imperialism” and wagers that “there is no secular future for Europe’ (Turley, 2019). However, she deems, “Eastern Europe is different from Western Europe” (Imperia News, 2018), which explains her sympathies to such leaders as Viktor Orban who challenge Brussels on the “Christian grounds,” thus opposing “the second coming of Marxism” in Europe. It is at this juncture that her populist narrative turns to Russia and embraces it not simply as an inherent part of the European civilization (an argument that many in the West would contest) but as an alternative to the EU. Her affection to Russia starts with a peculiar sense of spatial authenticity: “people in the West love this country because it is so easy to get lost there so that no one would find you” (The Official Mike Church Channel, 2017). Then, this expression of sympathy takes an explicitly biopolitical turn with an apparent accent on what we have discussed earlier as the Russian pastorate. Having named Russia a “Christian superpower,” she assumed, “to be a Russian is to be an Orthodox… The West hates Russia for rejecting Marxism in favor of Christianity… I felt freer in Russia than in Europe” (Herland Report, 2018). In her opinion, the “Russian government’s reaction to the Pussy Riot action was a proof of Russia’s frank adherence to Christian values.” Obviously manipulating numbers, she ascertained that “Russians are going to build 2000 new churches around Moscow” and then almost

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immediately switches to a direct apology of Russia’s Ukraine policy, stating, “spiritually, Ukraine is so important to Russia” (Price, 2017). This background explains Thranholm’s engagement with the pro-Kremlin RT channel. In one of her interviews, she portrayed Europe as a feminized post-political subject short of stamina and physical force, thus falling victim to other actors with a masculine understanding of strength and the capability to use it when necessary (Thranholm, 2016a). In an interview with an American bishop who moved into Russia and converted into Orthodoxy, she concluded that Russia is the country where you should go if you want to escape from “strict draconian measures” (Thranholm, 2020) of your government. Unlike those governments in the West that introduced laws envisioning control over human bodies, the ROC opposes mandatory vaccination, thus “leaving people a choice of whether allowing or disallowing to inject something into their bodies that might be dangerous. Ultimately, they reached a consensus on vaccines being part of the ominous plans to reduce human population,” her interlocutor said. Again, Russia in this conspiratorial narrative is described as “a hope for humanity,” a country that runs against the global liberal stream, welcomes traditional Christianity, and is safe for practicing faith. This mindset explicates the nature of Thranholm’s affection for the ‘Night Wolves’ as an intrinsic part of Putin’s pastorate. After visiting Russia and having met Zaldostanov and his gang, she started popularizing them in the West: The identity of the club has developed a strong Christian element. Its core concept is now Russkiy Put, the Russian Way, which aims to apply the motorbike subculture to reviving traditions, spirituality, and patriotism in Russian society. Being a night wolf does not mean indulging in sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. Instead, it means developing new forms and methods aiming to apply traditional Christian and spiritual values in combination with the activities appropriate to being a Russian motorcyclist. This includes organising several annual pilgrimages. (Thranholm, 2016b) As one may see, Thranholm’s understanding of the ‘Night Wolves’ phenomenon is marked by explicitly biopolitical categories as a peculiar masculine lifestyle: Night Wolves is a man’s world… This remarkable combination of masculinity, raw strength, metal, and Christian faith resembles nothing I have ever seen in the West… Men who dare to stand up to the spirit

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that suppresses Christians in the West and elsewhere. Spiritual warriors. Men who are able and willing to defend me and defend my faith. Thranholm solidarizes with the Night Wolves in interpreting the conflict between the West and Russia in pastoral terms, and – in a more general sense – as a struggle between two drastically dissimilar projects of biopower. It is the biopolitical interpretation of masculinity and femininity, coupled with a populist emphasis on pastoral power, that defines the Night Wolves’ and Thranholm’s reading of key political categories of strength and weakness, national identity, security, freedom, and legitimacy. Both Zaldostanov’s bike carnivals and his Danish admirer’s media talk shows are biopolitically symmetrical populist phenomena, grounded in direct appeals to ‘the people’ and the simultaneous construction of ‘the people’ by means of reiterative performativity, with an evident totalizing potential. Of course, the ‘Night Wolves’ are a part of Russian hegemonic discourse and imagery – while Thranholm is a counter-hegemonic public speaker – but this distinction did not prevent the two from encountering and at a certain point mutually amplifying each other. This encounter of two structurally similar and gravitating towards each other discourses illustrates how biopolitical narratives might become an important semiotic element of external projection of Russia’s version of illiberal ‘soft power’ that might find some resonance far beyond Russian borders, among multiple groups and individuals in the West sympathetic with the right-wing populism and (mis)perceiving Moscow as an epitome of social conservatism, Christianity, and national vigor. What Marlene Laruelle called “sovereignism as an export strategy” (Laruelle, 2020, p. 123) under a closer scrutiny turns out to be a biopolitical interface, a meeting point for mutually reinforcing versions of populism growing out of medialized popular culture of politicized performativity.

4.3

The Popular Biopolitics of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Russian Hegemonic Populism

As we have seen in the previous section, the object of Night Wolves’ popular biopolitics is the imaginary construction of the collective body of Russia as an imperial nation which disavows the meaning and the value of the individual life that can and should be sacrificed in the case of necessity for the sake of Russia’s grandeur. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed another facet of Russian popular biopolitics that merged somatic sovereignty and pastoral power with biopolitical governmentality as a core of Russian crisis manage-

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ment policy. Both imperial biopolitics and the biopolitics of pandemic imply a strong necropolitical component that normalizes prospects of a “patriotic death” for the great imperial cause, on the one hand, and a ‘natural death’ due to age, sickness, or unhealthy lifestyle during the pandemic, on the other. In the meantime, the popular biopolitics of COVID-19 embraces a meaningful anatomopolitical element revealed through constitutive references to individual bodies and specific cases of illness, as exemplified by the medi(c)alized performances by Elena Malysheva and Alexandr Myasnikov, two “biomedical voices” (Van Dijk, 2008, p. 47), who were building their speaking positions in the “biopolitical media” on a “doctor-patient” type of hegemonic populism. The performative discourses about the issues of health and illness of human bodies with many taboos lifted and intimate issues exposed to the public gaze, is a relatively new genre in Russia, and Elena Malysheva, a medical doctor turned into a TV star, was one of its pioneers and frontrunner. This genre required a particular language of popular biopolitics, avowing and inciting to openly and positively speak about medicine, healthcare, sex, and diseases. Malysheva claimed that her popular TV show Zhit’ Zdorovo (‘Life is Cool’) was the first to explore this genre of visualizing human physiology, raising tabooed themes (from defecation to circumcision), and thus sticking to an emancipatory logic of healthy somatic lives which she – though indirectly – presents as a populist counter-balance to the ubiquitous negativity and alarmism typical for the Russian media (А поговорить?, 2020). Malysheva personifies a hybrid product of Russian popular biopolitics, a mix of media sensationalism (visualization of human genitalia and other forms of ‘direct talk’ with ordinary people about their bodies) and medical business (she was blamed by many commentators of using public TV shows for commercial advertisement, and the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny has documented her expensive property in the United States where her two sons work as medical doctors) (Навальный News, 2020). This type of popular discourse and populist imagery is key to articulations of a “biological identity – with underlying conceptions of health and illness” (Friend, 2014, p. 3) as a biopolitical construct and a matter of public concern. This “therapeutic politics” encourages “people to adjust to life as it is rather than to attempt to change the structure of society… and operates as an insidious form of power that turns structural issues into individual psychopathologies to be remedied by commodified regimes of self-management… [It] replaces collective mobilization with quests for self-fulfillment and legitimizes deep-seated social inequalities” (Salmenniemi, 2019, p. 410) as something ‘natural,’ ‘normal,’ and acceptable.

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The idea of self-management of individual bodies embedded in this type of popular discourse seems quite compatible with the neoliberal responsibilization, a concept with strong Foucauldian background: “the state is no longer the sole agent of control but individuals/communities themselves participate in their own self-monitoring, self-scrutiny, and self-discipline through mundane and taken-for-granted regulatory mechanisms such as alcohol level testing, community care, technologies of contraception, vaccinations, food dieting, training, and other forms of ‘technologies of the self’” (Ajana, 2007, p. 3). This technique of biopolitical governmentality might be dubbed algorithmic in the sense that it designates “the process by which individualities and multiplicities are reduced to the profiles and series of statistical data involved, for instance, in the constitution of databases (through what is called “data mining”) which serve to influence further choices. In this respect, every profile is normalized and offers a way to predict, based on tendencies derived from observed regularities” (Lallement, 2012, p. 87). Indicatively, this logic of responsibilization is fully integrated into Malysheva’s explicit justification of the Russian government’s social and medical policies; for example, she publicly supported the highly unpopular legislation that raised the retirement age, incorrectly arguing that due to medical progress, Russian women having retired at 55 will on the average live another 30 or 40 years (ИА Дейта, 2019). Unsurprisingly, she characterized the Kremlin’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic as timely and effective due to the Russian epidemiologists as “a super organized team of professionals” (Новости на Первом Канале, n.d.). Malysheva praised the authorities of the city of Moscow for doing a great job in combatting COVID-19 and claimed that the virus should not prevent the government from organizing a highly symbolized in Putin’s Russia military parade dedicated to the Victory Day on 9 May (which was however ultimately rescheduled to 24 June, 2020). Malysheva has started her tranquilizing narrative of de facto denial the severity of the new virus in late February 2020 with arguing that “the world went nuts with the Corona virus… All the cases are registered only in China… Nothing serious happens in Europe and Russia… Pandemic is hardly possible; we are calm and unaffected” (Жить Здорово!, 2020a). “Here in Russia we don’t have even the slightest reason to talk about this infection” (Жить Здорово!, 2020b), she said in her talk show less than a month before the lockdown. Therefore, the populist idea of a ‘pure’ Russian body that remains immune to the virus erupted abroad was key to Malysheva’s popular biopolitics. Perhaps, the most illustrative in this regard was a short video recorded by a COVIDpositive Chinese national in the city of Chita in the Far East who apologized for

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bringing the virus to Russia and putting Russians in danger of being infected (Жить Здорово!, 2020b). In her later overt attempts to normalize and de-securitize the spread of the virus, she dubbed COVID-19 a regular “seasonal infection” and had repeatedly claimed that the situation in the entire Russia is completely under control. In her predictions, by April 2020 the virus would go away (Живой Гвоздь, 2020), which of course was far away from the reality on the ground. In her words, the virus has a low contagion capacity and does not look dangerous for the bulk of society. Moreover, she ventured to assume that “the virus is a miracle,” since it mostly kills elderly people (Мысли Навального, 2020): this virus, in her opinion, is “one of the most wonderful viruses,” “a dream, thank God” (Телеканал 360, 2020). These statements unleashed a flurry of angry comments on the Internet and made Malysheva an object of several satiric parodies (БЛОКНОТ Старс, 2020), including a sarcastic rap song “magic miracle” (KEKS, n.d.). If Malysheva performed – with a limited success – the role of a softspoken and smiling doctor who projects into the audience her usual positivity and optimism, Alexandr Myasnikov’s performative character is different – he embodies an experienced and knowledgeable medical professional with clearly and intentionally exhibited masculinity and cynicism. His multiple public interventions widely publicized by the Kremlin-controlled media lifted a taboo on bringing the issue of death as a legitimate part of the public discourse on medicine in general and the pandemic in particular. His personal background fits well this role identity: his grandfather was one of Stalin’s medical staff, and Myasnikov himself has the six-year experience of working as a Soviet military doctor in Mozambique (Россия 1, n.d.). Later, he had received a US medical certificate which he seems to be proud of, but then returned back home from the United States; however, his family lives in France, which – as it is the case of Malysheva’s sons – does not prevent him from performatively promoting a patriotic version of popular biopolitics. An important component of Myasnikov’s public image is his religious profile. He positions himself as an Orthodox believer, which is evident from his interviews with the TV Channel “Spas” (Телеканал СПАС, 2019) where he extensively discussed issues of faith from a medical perspective. In his words, “in medicine, not everything may be explained through rational knowledge, and each doctor knows cases of miraculous cure from deadly diseases.” “Nobody believes in God as much as doctors who each day have to deal with death” (Телеканал СПАС, 2019), he assumed. At the peak of the pandemic, Myasnikov had to acknowledge, “epidemiologically the decision on lockdown was correct, yet people have souls and therefore churches should have remained opened” (Соловьёв LIVE, n.d.-b) despite the risks of contami-

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nation. Through this, he in fact solidarized with a certain part of the Russian Orthodox community that was skeptical about obeying to the governmental regulations and insisted on keeping churches open during the Easter celebration and on other religious occasions. Myasnikov started his media career years before the 2020 pandemic, yet with the COVID-19 crisis, he became not only a key public speaker in virusrelated issues but also was appointed spokesperson for the national Emergency Center led by the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin. For several months, Myasnikov has been appearing on the daily basis on ‘official’ Russian TV channels taking questions from viewers, discussing the most recent developments, and alternating his medical narratives with patriotic and religious interruptions as well as lengthy personal memories and even literary citations. Myasnikov’s visually accentuated masculine identity, paralleled by a tough language he used in communicating with his viewers and listeners, are key components of his role play – an incarnation of the often conflicting images of a saviour (as all medical doctors) and a speaker of truths. As a personification of a saviour, he aimed to bring hope through neglecting the seriousness of the COVID-19 pandemic and its effects. As a speaker of truth, he operated within the logic of ‘algorithmic governmentality’ and ‘statistical governance’ with numbers and figures in hand, openly admitting that at a certain age and under certain medical conditions death is natural and inevitable, and there is little he or someone else can do about it. It is the balance between these two roles, largely contradicting each other, that lie at the very core of Myasnikov’s contribution to Russian popular biopolitics in times of the pandemic alert. By performing these two roles, Myasnikov occupied an empty niche of a biopolitical discourse maker, a speaker on behalf of the medical knowledge whose performative TV appearances might be more in demand than the public pronouncements of state officials mostly narrated in a bureaucratic language where the nodal points are economic, financial, and administrative measures as opposed to Myasnikov’s talks about corporeality and human bodies. By the same token, given the obvious proximity of Myasnikov to Russian state-led propaganda – he repeatedly featured in a tandem with one of the diehard mouthpieces of Putin’s regime, Vladimir Solovyov, and is known for close relations with the Mayor of Moscow, Sergei Sobyanin – his populist discourse in many respects parallels the trajectory of the Kremlin’s reaction to the COVID-19 pandemic from neglect to over-securitization and then back to normalization and tranquilization. Yet under scrutiny, both roles played by Myasnikov in the context of popular biopolitics are problematic and deserve a critical gaze. When it comes to his discursive performances as a giver of hope, this speaking position was

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grounded from the outset in the denial of the danger of the pandemic as such. In his words as of February and March 2020, the crisis was believed to be intentionally escalated by a media that managed to create a sense of undue panic and despair in society. In the beginning of the pandemic, Maysnikov assured that the threat of the virus is artificially inflated, that it is not more menacing than a regular flu, and eventually it should go away by itself – “all we can do is to register the infected and wait for the end of the outbreak” (Телеканал СПАС, 2020). Therefore, a hysterical reaction – basically coming from abroad – is irrational and detrimental. Myasnikov’s riposte to that was simple: “The individual threat is close to zero” (Яров, 2020), he insisted, and then added, “Let us think less – we can’t change anything” (О самом главном, 2020c). Later, he reiterated this point, saying, ““Don’t think too much about how many died of COVID – people are mortal” (О самом главном, 2020d). He compared what he dubbed an overreaction to the virus with “threats of telephone terrorists: we all understand that there is no bomb, but we anyway have to evacuate people and search for the bomb” (Россия 24, 2020a). In his rhetoric of normalizing the pandemic, he has challenged the strict measures introduced by Rospotrebnadzor, the governmental body with controlling powers in the sphere of safety of working conditions and food security, boldly declaring, “they think they are saving the Motherland, it is impossible to talk to them, they put all the incoming Europeans on quarantine with no good reasons for that. All country laughs at them. No one is afraid of COVID, but all are afraid of actions taken against it… Why aren’t decisions taken by some kind of a board with civil specialists, not military guys who want to ban everything… Why there is no public debate on that?” (О самом главном, 2020e). This critical gaze on restrictive measures did not make Myasnikov immune from reproducing conspiracy theories widely spread in the world, i.e., “I feel there should be a coordinating hand in all this, and someone might have enormous profit from this [situation].” More specifically, as many populists in the world, he assumed that “the problem is whether major pharmaceutical companies get rich or not during the panic… The global producers of medicaments will not leave us alone anyway… Trump gave an order to develop a vaccine, and all companies urgently started investing in this… Their market is the whole globe. They might perhaps regret that there are not so many cases nowadays… We’ll get vaccinated anyway, through the World Health Organization or other international bodies, and since we are encircled, it is better to have our own vaccine. It is stupid not to take the lead and not to go ahead with that. However, since we are ignorant of the long-term medical effects, I would hesitate to vaccinate myself” (О самом главном, 2020d).

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Later, this narrative has transformed into a de-facto adherence to the herd immunity theory that relies on the assumption that an epidemic is best overcome by leaving it unregulated… Opting for herd immunity allows governments to blame the failure of the health system on the virus, rather than on bad governance. Just like individual poor people can be blamed for not trying hard enough, individual sick people can be blamed for not following quarantine measures. It doesn’t matter whether its nature, fate, or one’s own fault – as long as it’s not the government which is held accountable for peoples’ deaths. (Frey, 2020) Myasnikov’s interpretation of herd immunity sounds straightforward: “the numbers of infected persons are growing – and thank God, this only increases our collective immunity” (О самом главном, 2020d). “In May or June, the virus will certainly go away” (О самом главном, 2020b), he optimistically – yet incorrectly – predicted. With the virus progressing and the death toll rising, Myasnikov modified his arguments – at certain point, he started reiterating that in many cases the causes of death might remain unknown even after autopsy, saying, “In most occasions, we can’t define with precision whether a person died of COVID or with COVID” (О самом главном, 2020b). This was basically meant to claim that it is hard to ascertain whether it is the virus itself that kills people or not, which questions – or at least seriously complicates – the very model of statistic governance as such. The most important point within this discourse of tranquilization was its transformation into a direct ageism and apology for “natural deaths”: “those who died were supposed to die anyway” (Сташенков, 2020), he overtly said. On a different occasion, he mentioned that at any rate “90 percent will survive, so we don’t have many problems” (О самом главном, 2020e). He de facto excluded the elderly from the regime of care provided by the state referring to something close to the “natural selection” argument, which implies a minimal role for and responsibility of the state authorities in protecting lives of the older generation and vulnerable people with chronic diseases and other medical conditions. “You don’t need to go to a hospital, COVID is treatable inhouse… You won’t get back from the hospital without COVID, because there all are infected” (О самом главном, 2020b), he recommended. This reasoning has later led him to go public with such assessments, as “35 thousand deaths would not be an excessively high price for us during the pandemic” (Соловьёв LIVE, n.d.-c). “For the health care system, it is better when people pass away in a controlled and regulated way” (О самом главном, 2020a), he continued this

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logic. Myasnikov’s performative masculinity plays its semiotic role in projecting this narrative: it is meant to send a message of physicality and stamina with its promise of survival as the strong will get well while the weak will perish. Interestingly, from denying the pandemic through searching excuses for its growing number of victims, Myasnikov’s narrative evolved into a phase of epidemiological securitization. With the skyrocketing numbers of infected and dead in Russia, with the inevitable future – and more deadly, in his view – outbreaks of new viruses, he started advocating a “complete and total quarantine for at least 40 days” in the case of a new outbreak with borders immediately to be closed and domestic communication interrupted and measures of enforced isolation strictly controlled (О самом главном, 2020c). “We’ll need curfew, fines and total ban on exit from apartments,” he said (Воин света, 2020), claiming that, according to his predictions, a next pandemic would kill up to 30 per cent of all the infected in the globe. The version of popular biopolitics represented and publicized by Myasnikov’s medialized performances vacillates between truth and knowledge. On the one hand, his narrative is performed on behalf of a number of “bitter truths” – particularly, of the lack of treatment of COVID-19 and of its inevitable mutations. Yet on the other hand, these appeals to truthful arguments undermine the cognitive pillar of the biopolitical discourse in the sense that by ‘speaking the truth,’ Myasnikov admitted that the medical science that he is supposed to performatively represent knows very little about the nature and the origin of the virus and its characteristics, and thus cannot effectively predict its behaviour and consequences in the future. This accentuated ignorance not only has led him to take a ‘wait-and-see’ position but also was meant to discourage people from asking for help from medical doctors. It not only weakened Myasnikov’s speaking authority but also blurred the line between medical experts and ordinary citizens, thus creating ample space for a mixture of professional advice and vernacular practices of elementary hygiene. Both roles performed by Myasnikov might be turned into an implicit or explicit support for the ruling regime. The conversion of medical discourse about the pandemic into a political resource is key to understating the functioning of Russian popular biopolitics, with three points being of importance in this regard. First, Myasnikov used a strong masculine wording and image to carve out a speaking position, allowing him to solidarize with Putin’s regime and its supporters. He did not hesitate to publicly demonstrate his friendship with one of the most blatantly pro-Putin propagandists, Vladimir Solovyov, whom he called one of few Russian journalists who “has balls” and is ready to defend his views with arms in hands, as Putin does. Myasnikov is respectful to Stalin and Brezhnev (Соловьёв LIVE, n.d.-b) and overtly identifies himself

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with Putin using mainly corporeal arguments: “we are of the same age, were born in the same city, and I understand him intuitively… After the graduation, he chose the KGB, I chose army, – and perhaps we have had a similar mind set… I was enjoying observing him in different situations” (Соловьёв LIVE, 2020). Playing this role, Myasnikov does not hesitate to publicly curse his critics among viewers by pronouncing phrases like “Those like you should be killed” (О самом главном, 2020b), or “I wish you die as soon as possible. (О самом главном, 2020a)” He performatively uses this type of macho-style brutality and verbal aggression for creating an allegedly positive contrasted with those “many people with thin voices around” (О самом главном, 2020a), which is a clear reference to a vernacular representation of gay people in Russia. Secondly, Myasnikov regularly included in his medical talks usual populist references to Russia’s specificity and distinction from the West. His recollections of the United States are overwhelmingly gloomy: “In American hospitals, patients can be abandoned, drugs can be sold, and people may shoot each other… US healthcare does not leave room for compassion or regret… They got used to humiliating people… Once I had to say to my American supervisor: do not talk to me like that… I am a Red Army captain, and should we have met somewhere in Angola, I would have simply killed you” (О самом главном, 2020a). When it comes to the COVID pandemic, Myasnikov’s speeches are replete with verbal othering of Europe as well: “Perhaps we’ve got first virus in 1812 when Napoleon invaded Russia… Yet now, Russia can afford taking a position of assessing Europe” (Россия 24, 2020b). He presumed that “we played better than all others” (Яров, 2020), and did not hesitate to speak about a “Russian miracle” that he explained differently. For example, once he mentioned that “we don’t give up our elderly parents to pensions and live in families” (Соловьёв LIVE, 2020). Even conversing about wearing masks in public, Myasnikov would start drawing lines of distinction between Russia and other countries, saying, “The Chinese and the Japanese wear masks because this is part of their cultures, but we Russians are different” (О самом главном, 2020e). Third, the normalizing part of Myasnikov’s popular biopolitics includes strong references to the Soviet glory; in statements such as, “During the Great Patriotic War, our people were dying in the thousands by day, we went through all this, executed those who spread panic, and we survived and enjoyed life afterwards, and we gave birth to kids. We are resilient perhaps because we drink vodka with pickles and sauerkraut. And now, a small microbe scared us to death… The V-Day is a basic thing to me” (Соловьёв LIVE, n.d.-a), he said, thus supporting the idea of hosting a military parade in Moscow despite the pandemic as a matter of national pride and grandeur. On a different occasion,

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he referred to the legacy of the Soviet public healthcare system that, in his assessment, has proven its practical advantages in times of the COVID crisis. Ethnic factors also matter for him: “Byelorussians are of the same blood with us – and they don’t fall ill” (О самом главном, 2020c). Myasnikov thus became another hybrid figure in the field of popular biopolitics – he incarnates medical expertise yet admits a lack of good knowledge of the virus and its properties. He performs a role of a ‘patriotic doctor’ (with multiple references to the sacral nature of the Victory Day and to his connections with authorities), yet in the meantime, he is part of the neoliberal economy of entertainment and “society of the spectacle,” repeatedly asking for ‘likes” while speaking to his Internet audience. His popular biopolitical knowledge he shares with his viewers is overtly personified – due to the lack of a universally accepted expertise what matters is personal experiences, practices, and attitudes. All of this makes the position of power-knowledge he occupies conceptually incomplete, if not hollow, always requiring performative investments; he operates with numbers and then disavows himself by presuming that numbers don’t matter and claims the ineffectiveness of any medical treatment against the virus yet then claims that Russia should invest in developing its own vaccine. He refused to dub COVID-19 a disease yet then demands more severe measures for future epidemic outbreaks. The cases of Malysheva and Myasnikov are emblematic of the hybridity of Putin’s popular biopolitics and its conceptual emptiness that is being filled out with a mix of ignorance (i.e., “COVID-19 is a regular flu”) and naïve attempts to portray Russia as a virus-free area that can afford arrogantly looking from a distance at the panic in the West. On the one hand, both populist protagonists of our analysis are instruments of the Kremlin and the Moscow city government they both repeatedly praise, yet on the other hand, they are capable of streamlining and dovetailing the mainstream discourse by indirectly speaking on behalf of the officialdom from the self-constructed yet precarious position of power-knowledge.

4.4

Russian Illiberal Populism: An Afterword

The populist elements of the Russian political regime have been already discussed in the academic literature (Busygina, 2019). Some authors deem that “in Russia, the objective conditions for the development of a populist movement are even riper than elsewhere” (Van Herpen, 2018). In a very general sense, the Russian version of populism is associated with “Putin’s stern rejection of revolution, homosexuality, and feminism” (Fish, 2017, p. 65). Some schol-

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ars derive “proto-populism” from the ‘sovereign democracy’ discourse that initially has been balanced by Russia’s commitments to the general principles and norms of Western democracy, yet later, this balance shifted towards a full-fledged “official populism” that embraced the whole spectrum of traditionalism, conservatism, and civilizational approach with their anti-Western bias. This interpretation semantically ties populism with such vague notions as “popular values” and “popular support”; however, it is exactly at this point that the main controversy crops up: Russian state-centric populism “places the people at the centre of political discourse and at the same time denies them agency independent of the state” (Robinson & Milne, 2017, p. 422). This contradiction stems from the fact that “Putin adopted a populist frame that delegitimizes actions other than those taken by the state. Pending conservative traditional values, Putin propagates the unity of the people against Western aggression, multiculturalism, and the pro-Western domestic economic and intellectual elites, who according to official discourse are corrupted” (Stockemer, 2019, p. 5). Important in this context is the idea of chains of equivalences as a general mechanism that generates the hegemonic momentum fostering the spill-over of populist discourses. This approach, borrowed from Laclau, serves to explicate the expanding logic of populism and its proliferation and thickening. Russian populism, bent on a blend of somatic sovereignty, the pastorate, and medical governmentality, might take different forms, including those structurally similar to fascism. In particular, the Night Wolves performative/popular biopolitics gives an important argument to those Russia scholars who on other occasions claimed that distinctions between the Nazi fascism and the Russian anti-fascism are not absolute but often relative and contextual (Гусейнов, 2015). One of the arguments charting this perspective is a high level of popular mobilization that exists in the Russian society susceptible to the state-led propaganda, thus amplifying its political effects. The Kremlin’s populism is also sustained by the war machine whose logic was well articulated by Putin himself: “Do we need a world in which there will be no Russia?” (albertnaryshkin, 2018). In this context, one may refer to Eugene Holland who assumed that one of the striking features of the German fascist regime was preference of total destruction to defeat; “Better to destroy a world considered to be irremediably steeped in sin than to accept almighty God’s defeat by such a degraded and degrading world” (Holland, 2008, p. 88). These parallels should be definitely kept in mind for assessing the totalizing potential of different historical forms of bio-/necropolitical populism. In the conclusion of this chapter, two points can be briefly touched upon for charting some pathways for future discussions. First, in mainstream literature,

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the Russian political regime is often described as an autocratic one-man-show. Looking at this characterization from the viewpoint of popular biopolitics, one may find Putin’s taken-for-granted centrality for the whole edifice of power in Russia is rather limited, if not problematic. As Mikhail Yampolsky assumed, “Putin apparently disgusts imageries of mass politics. He is fond of perceiving himself in a solitude, without any accompaniment. A series of [his] staged photos is revelatory since they systematically exclude humans and underline the loneliness of the leader encircled by wild nature, a paradise preceding the original sin” (Ямпольский, 2013). This nuanced insight into Putin’s aesthetics begins an interesting discussion on Putin’s centrality for and within the regime of Russian sovereignty not as an institutional leadership based on a rigid ideology but rather a discursive product of multiple narratives, speech acts, cultural representations, and imageries not necessarily designed and performed by Putin himself but rather fabricated and staged by other figures allowed to speak on behalf of Putin from the position of power legitimated and personified by him. The personalities of Zaldostanov, Malysheva, and Myasnikov, with all generic distinctions among them, are just a few examples of speakers and discourse-makers who contribute to the construction of the model of sovereign power associated with Putin yet representing a series of self-reproducing and often self-referential performative acts that – paradoxically – do not always necessitate Putin’s agency. It is in this sense that ultimately Putin may find himself being a hostage of this sophisticated mechanism producing semiotic messages and symbolic meaning that may function without direct involvement of the formal leader on behalf of whom the whole system sustains itself. Secondly, Putin’s biopolitical populism can obviously be typologized as illiberal. However, its connections with liberalism seem to include more than relations of distancing and contestation. This illiberal populism articulates, legitimizes, and performs itself through complex and implicit interactions with liberal discourses and imageries. Many of the instruments central for Putin’s populist project were borrowed from the liberal West where, for example, practices of “governing through sacrifice” long time ago became parts of national identities and memory politics (Baggiarini, 2019). Putin’s illiberal biopolitics has learned a lot from what might be dubbed the “visual economy” of fantasies and imaginations that are intensely translated into our everyday lives and increasingly shape the dominant understandings of key biopolitical categories of life and death, citizenship, family matters, peoplehood, and regimes of belonging and abandonment – all of them being genealogically connected to the neoliberal order (Väliaho, 2014). The Kremlin’s communication with some populist movements within the European liberal polity attest

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to the need for constant symbolic exchanges and performative interactions with individuals and groups that take full advantage of liberal freedoms in order to lambast their functioning. And – what seems to be of particular interest for the nearest future – many of pro-Kremlin speakers’ reactions to the COVID-19 “state of exception” can be viewed as a resistance to the global biopower and what some Russian commentators call “digital fascism” (Четверикова, 2020). On all of these accounts, Russian popular biopolitics not only displays its populist characteristics but also creates new spaces for conspiracy theories and manipulative language games meant for both domestic and global consumption.

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-konstantin-malofeev-ne-vizhu-nichego-plokhogo-v-pravoslavnom-chekizme ?page=0,1 Телеканал 360. (2020, April 17). ‘Чудесный вирус’. Елена Малышева назвала COVID-19 ‘прекрасным’. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_VXwKAARHNc&ab _channel=%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0%BD %D0%B0%D0%BB360 Телеканал СПАС. (2019, September 21). В ПОИСКАХ БОГА. ВРАЧ АЛЕКСАНДР МЯСНИКОВ. С БЛАГОДАРНОСТЬЮ К ЖИЗНИ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v =gHyOdEmA9c8&ab_channel=%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA %D0%B0%D0%BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%A1%D0%9F%D0%90%D0%A1 Телеканал СПАС. (2020, February 9). ПАНДЕМИЯ ПАНИКИ. ДОКТОР АЛЕКСАНДР МЯСНИКОВ О КОРОНАВИРУСЕ. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nVd0xqzr 5iY&ab_channel=%D0%A2%D0%B5%D0%BB%D0%B5%D0%BA%D0%B0%D0 %BD%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%A1%D0%9F%D0%90%D0%A1 Трепещите, ядом плюйте Как Иосиф Сталин возвращается в жизнь современной России. (2016, February 25). Meduza. https://meduza.io/feature/2016/02/25/ trepeschite-yadom-plyuyte Четверикова, О. (2020, May 30). Ольга Четверикова: «Цифровой фашизм вылезает из болота правовой смуты» (А. Фефелов, Interviewer) [Interview]. https://newizv.ru/article/general/30-05-2020/olga-chetverikova-tsifrovoy-fashizm -vylezaet-iz-bolota-pravovoy-smuty Ямпольский, М. (2013, February 15). Политика как эстетика. Colta.ru. http://archives .colta.ru/docs/13720 Яров, А. (2020, April 3). #КОРОНАвирус русский доктор Мясников Александр. Корень Зла. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kn7FRT7nt5Q&ab_channel =%D0%90%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%B5%D0%B9%D0%AF%D1%80% D0%BE%D0%B2

Populations, Popular Biopolitics, Populism: Concluding Thoughts This book was about how the relations of power in general and populist policies in particular may be discussed through the prism of biopolitics, embracing a broad spectrum of policies of inclusion and exclusion related to corporeality, bodily practices, sexuality, lifestyles, and care taking. The multiple usages of biopolitical language enrich our understanding of politics and the mechanisms of hegemony that may come in many cultural forms appealing to mass audiences. Biopolitics is shown in this book as an integrative concept that synthesizes different forms of categorization and integration of life into political strategies and as a field of interdisciplinary interconnections and intertextual encounters. It bears a strong legacy of political philosophy that reflects upon the issues of life and death as existential categories that, despite their materiality, always require significations and conceptualizations and therefore are inalienable parts of ideational – and, more specifically, discursive and imaginary – landscapes. However, the bulk of debates in political philosophy seem to be implicitly ideological and politicized by their constitutive references to foundational presumptions – be it ‘productive’ nature of power in the Foucauldian tradition, or the alleged degeneration of liberal democracy into a permanent ‘state of exception’ for Agamben. From the perspective of philosophical debates, the contemporary liberal order is an extrapolation of experiences projected from either the Europe of early capitalism (Foucault) or Nazi Germany (Agamben). All this necessitates and justifies the opening of biopolitical theorizing to other disciplines in the social sciences, as well as to other national experiences. From a political science perspective, biopolitics is an important element of the linkage of sovereignty and governmentality as two distinct forms of power, occupying a middle ground between the two. The sovereignty reclaimed by conservative, nationalist, and right-wing populists looks however vulnerable and precarious, which is particularly visible in Europe as a hotbed of postliberal transformations. This precarious sovereignty is an inverted replica of Judith Butler’s idea of ‘precarious life,’ thus pointing to the fragility of sovereign power, which is particularly visible in times of emergency. The conceptualization of sovereignty as precarious implies its dependence on what Foucault dubbed governmentality as the routine techniques of governance grounded in a balance of responsibilities between the rulers and the governed.

© Andrey Makarychev, 2022 | DOI:10.1163/9789004513792_007

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This nexus of sovereignty and governance is inherently controversial; while to fulfil its responsibilities to the people, the state tends to concentrate more power in its hands, and conversely, the state acts along the lines of Foucault’s concept of ‘responsibilisation’ – individual practices of taking care of ourselves and managing our corporeal lives to minimize or avoid possible risks. Three empirical chapters confirmed the initial presumption of biopolitics as a changeable and context-dependent concept shaped by and through interactions with the domain of sovereign politics. In this sense, the country cases demonstrate the broad spectrum of the sovereignty-biopolitics nexus. In Russia, as we have seen, the collective sovereign power structures the hegemonic understanding of biopolitics propagated and translated through the Kremlincontrolled media apparatus and its entertainment industry. This explains why some authors share an Agambenian reading of Putin’s regime; in their view, Agamben “asserts that biopolitics is an effective method of empowering the sovereign. Arguably, it provides the fundamental basis for the sovereign, in the first place. Putin seems to know this all too well. Since Putin is the sovereign, he can decide which groups of people ‘fit’ in the nation’s identity and instill within them specific fears of who the enemy is and what to do about them” (Langdon & Tismaneanu, 2020, p. 131). However, Vladimir Putin, with whom the entire system of power relations is often symbolically associated, paradoxically does not always hold the central speaking position in it – the system functions and performatively sustains itself through narratives and imageries that are (re)produced by an army of discourse-makers who speak on behalf of the sovereign and thus construct their public appeals to the people from the position of self-reproducing, self-sustaining, and self-referential power. In Ukraine, the contested domain of sovereignty is also constructed through direct media interventions, which explains the conversion of Volodymyr Zelensky’s resources as an artist into presidential power. Therefore, the sphere of sovereignty is built on one type of popular biopolitical narrative and is constrained by another, emerging from urban protests against presidential policies towards Russia, which is an important facet of the dynamics of Ukrainian political scenery. In Estonia, sovereignty was always articulated in implicitly biopolitical categories since it is the survival of a small nation located at Europe’s eastern margins that is at political stake. In this sense, the collapse of Estonia’s shortlived sovereignty and the subjugation of the country to the occupying power during and after the Second World War may be represented as a biopolitical catastrophe that triggered deep cleavages within the national body. The recent populist turn exemplified by – but not limited to – EKRE’s entry into the coalition government since spring 2019 till January 2021 has further saturated

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the concept of sovereign power with biopolitical meanings. EKRE’s policies aimed to complicate living conditions for certain categories of foreigners (primarily students and their families as well as seasonal workers), along with EKRE’s resolve to hold a national referendum on defining marriage as a union between a man and a woman, clearly attest to this biopoliticization of Estonian domestic agenda. At the intersection of biopolitics and the discipline of international relations, one may find a plethora of issues explicitly or implicitly connected with the ongoing discussion on the transformative trajectories of liberal international order. With full cognizance of the Western roots of the debates on liberalism and biopolitics, this book opens up the two concepts to a broader range of conceptualizations, namely those emerging at the margins of European polity and in zones of close interactions with non-European and non-liberal political spaces and regimes. This ‘Orientalization’ of biopolitical knowledge makes its linkage with liberalism more precarious and exposes various forms and models of illiberal (Russia) or hybrid biopolitics closely intertwined with cultural nationalism (Estonia). Such post-Soviet countries as Ukraine might serve examples of a specific form of post-liberal biopolitics that cannot be classified along the lines of classical/traditional distinctions between liberals and conservatives or right-wingers and left-wingers. Having moved away from the Western hotbed of the liberal biopolitics, we saw how liberalism transfigures from a cohesive political doctrine promoted by its zealots, supporters, and sympathizers (political parties and established social movements) to an archipelago of particular practices and policies that might be only loosely connected with each other. In Estonia – quote paradoxically – Russophone public activists’ appeals to – and demands for – making their viewpoints legitimate parts of the political debate can be formulated in an inversion of the liberal language of human rights and freedoms of expression. Thus, liberalism, as understood by many Estonian Russophones, might become tantamount to giving more space for political pluralism and the acceptance of the ethnic and linguistic minority’s views in the public debates. However, the chances for these demands to be considered are proportional to the constitution of the Russophones into a political community on its own as opposed to playing a role of translators and reproducers of the Kremlin disinformation machine. In Ukraine, liberalism might be associated with the idea of Europeanization in general and more specifically with the practices of good governance and trans-border mobility, both harmonious with EU’s post-liberal turn. Yet in the meantime, liberalism can also take a form of a full-fledged resistance to

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Russian neo-imperial policies and therefore can well coexist with appeals to conduct a force-based resistance to Russia’s war-by-proxies in Donbas. In Russia, liberalism is sidelined by the cultural and political hegemony of biopolitical conservatism, a muscular and a masculine vision of power as grounded in projection of physical force as opposed to norms or values. This deeply explains the conceptual gaps and cleavages existing between Russia and the EU, which is exacerbated by Kremlin’s alliances with illiberal governments and groups across the globe. We have also learned from the empirical material that references to geopolitical vocabularies are always inscribed into biopolitical reasoning through spatial metaphors, reconceptualizations of borders and boundaries, and linkages between certain biopolitical practices and specific territories (regional, national, local, or urban). In this sense, countries located at Europe’s eastern margins produce their own bio-spatialities; in other words, the mass perceptions of space are conditioned by a combination of the intertwined geo- and biopolitical discourses and imageries. In Estonia, the biopolitical suffering of the past with occupation and deportations at their core were direct results of inimical geopolitical incursions by Russia. Due to these interconnections, each specific situation of foreign oppression and domination can be read as either from a biopolitical or a geopolitical perspective, or equally, as both. Russia’s conflict with Ukraine, being largely based on a geopolitical logic embedded in the Russian World concept as Kremlin’s neo-imperial tool, in the meantime has an important biopolitical dimension on both sides of the border. Russia biopoliticizes the conflict – as it did in the case of the war with Georgia in 2008 – through mass-scale passportization of the residents of Donbas and their conversion to Russian citizenship. On the Ukrainian side, the biopolitical repercussions of the conflict manifest themselves in the polarizing debate over attitudes to the people in the Russia-controlled territories, both remained in Donbas and escaped to the Ukrainian mainland. As seen from the viewpoint of cultural studies, biopolitical concepts were always inspiratory for artists and performers interested in portraying and contextualizing human bodies, and contemplating and reflecting upon social hierarchies through the imageries of gender and sexuality, exposing the vulnerabilities of human bodies vis-à-vis structural violence. In this regard, Estonian popular biopolitics reveals deep perceptional gaps between the Estonian national discourse and its Russophone opposite. Both are heavily focused on historical issues and in this sense contain strong doses of necropolitics yet in a very dissimilar way. The Estonian hegemonic discourse, grounded in a combination of liberalism and cultural nationalism, being highly sensitive to out-migrations and deportations as biopolitical calamities that happen

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to the nation in the 20st century, reflectively reactualizes these experiences from contemporary perspectives. For example, the chain of people’s solidarity with anti-Lukashenko protestors in Tallinn in 2020 was performatively modeled after the famous Baltic Chain three decades earlier that became the strongest symbolic blow to the communist system. In the same vein, stories about ordeals of Estonian refugees and escapees during WWII serve as a reference point for today’s discussion about immigration and refugees with ensuing implicitly liberal connotations. Yet the Russophone discourses – again, being also embedded in historical analogies and comparisons – are much less open to the acceptance of the biopolitical purge committed by the Stalinist regime. By the same token, a significant part of Estonian Russophones are strongly influenced by a Russian media that intentionally blurs the boundary between cultural consumption and political engagement. The Russian cultural scene, as we have already noted, is dominated by biopolitically illiberal representations of both public and private lives with the concept of sovereignty largely analogous to the supreme power in a large family. However, the cultural outlook is also instrumental for demonstrating that the idea of an “organic unity” is a “metapolitical illusion” (Müller, 2017, p. 28) that is “doomed to exist as an aesthetically produced imagination of a moral community and a mission of ‘salvation’” (Zuquete, 2017, p. 458). The performative nature of sovereignty, particularly in illiberal contexts, exposes multiple dislocations in the sovereign-centric discourses and imageries, and therefore betrays their fluid and unstable nature, which became a focal point in post-foundational theorizing. In Ukraine, the sphere of mass culture has proven its key role in generating the hegemonic perceptions of the national body and its pains. The cultural forms of political representations might give a fast practical effect, exemplified by Zelensky’s short path from entertainment industry to presidency, yet in the end, culturally produced forms of leadership might be easily contested by people mobilized along the lines of national patriotism and resistance to foreign intervention.

… Based on the empirical research, the concluding chapter comes back to the key questions posed at the outset of this volume – how the populist phenomenon can be discussed as one of the symptoms of the transformations within the contemporary liberalism and how useful is biopolitics in general and popular biopolitics in particular for explaining the variety of populisms across different

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countries. Four interrelated points elucidate the main essences of the undertaken analysis. First, as posited in Chapter 1, populism is a broad and often imprecise concept that can be applied to the whole spectrum of political forces looking for public support and offering simplified explanations of political issues. However, the distinction between appeals to ‘the people’ and appeals to objective knowledge seems to be the defining feature of populism as a key element in the ongoing transformations within the liberal order, conducive to the making of new political niches for postliberalism and illiberalism as hybrid political forms. The former grows out of liberalism; without denying the validity of its key premises, it shifts accents from values of democracy and freedoms to technologies of good governance and market management. The later denies the efficiency and appropriateness of the liberal doctrine and offers an alternative to it, formulated in the language of cultural (often including linguistic and ethnic) unity as the precondition for national survival, and institutionally exemplified by authoritarian consolidation of power. Illiberalism is often regarded as an external force for European democratic culture and thus is discursively Orientalized with countries like Russia serving as visible examples of this exteriority. However, illiberal political forms might arise within democratic polities as well. In this regard, apparently, countries with historical legacies of illiberal rule, both domestic and imposed from outside, are particularly vulnerable to the proliferation of illiberal discourses and practices. Obviously, populism is conveniently positioning itself within – and takes maximum advantage of – the illiberal turn, regardless of its roots and national specifics. Its right-wing versions (for example, EKRE in Estonia, along with Jobbik in Hungary or PiS in Poland) define themselves as opponents to the liberal idea of Europe as a hotbed of secularism, sexual emancipation, women’s rights, and lifestyle tolerance. The biopolitical core of the right-wing populism is exposed through the projection of national sovereignty onto people’s bodies and resignification of political power as a corporeal force, a possession that might and should be appropriated for the sake of ‘national survival’. An intricate combination of liberalism, postliberalism and illiberalism has reconfigured the sovereignty – governmentality – biopolitics triad touched upon in the Introduction. It is among the adherents of illiberal politics that sovereignty appears to be the most indispensable concept, largely understood through a biopolitical prism of protecting, surveilling and regulating lives, and practicing measures of exclusion and bordering. Postliberal transformations, in their turn, are objects of the populist discontent, being associated with technocratic governance by a cosmopolitan elite that, in the populist logic, deviates from the original meaning of democracy as a grass-roots rule of the

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people. Interestingly enough, postliberalism (as a transformation of liberalism from values to governance) and illiberalism (as the denial of liberal principles) produce two different forms of biopolitics: the former is bent on a merger of governmental technologies and biopolitical regulations. while the latter envisages biopolitical investments in national sovereignty and its attributes. The COVID-19 emergency seems to sharpen the competition between the two strategies of tackling the pandemic challenge, and thus renders divisive effects on the affected societies. Second, the “need for new theories” (Bogaards, 2018, p. 1482) in populism studies has been clearly articulated, and a performative perspective (BaldwinPhilippi, 2019) seems to be one of possible answers to this call. The approach to populism as a discursive and stylistic repertoire allows to claim that references to – and narratives about – ‘the people’ remain a sphere of always contested and inherently pluralist interpretations, imageries, messages and signs competing with each other for a ‘proper’ representation of the concept (the ‘people’ as citizens, as legal residents, or as majority loyal to the dominant ethnic, religious or linguistic characteristics of the nation). Each of these semiotic constructs presupposes a series of distinctions between different categories of ‘the people’ (majority and minorities, loyal and disloyal, integrated and marginalized, nativist and cosmopolitan, etc.) that are grounded in a logic of biopolitical othering, bordering, and exclusion. This vision of populism sidelines the ideological connotations of the concept and peers into a variety of discursive representations and visual imaginaries that “may belong to other political repertoires as well” (Brubaker, 2018, p. 29). Therefore, the populist style has “created incentives for almost all political actors to draw, in some contexts, on some elements of the populist repertoire” (Brubaker, 2018, p. 36). With all duly understood distinctions between discourses and styles, the “dramaturgical approach to politics” sympathetically taken in this book does not necessarily differentiate and detach them from one another. Discourses and styles can merge, as do representations and performances, and both “can go so far as to bring political subjects into being” (Moffitt & Tormey, 2014, p. 389). The definition of “the people” as an empty signifier, dating back to Ernesto Laclau’s approach, is key to understanding the importance of popular culture for tackling populism. ‘The people’ as a concept is destined to remain hollow in content and open to endless interpretations above the diversities of class and religion or gender and generation” (Pelinka, 2013, p. 4). However, at the same time, “the ‘demos’ has to be represented” (Pelinka, 2013, p. 4) – not only institutionally, but also culturally and aesthetically. In a more radical formulation, “the people does not exist as a collective prior to the representation” (Ochoa

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Espejo, 2017). As shown in case studies, this representational dimension of populism necessarily contains strong performative and aesthetic components. Third and related, this book’s contribution to the academic debate consists in approaching populism as an inherently cultural phenomenon. “Cultural populism is the intellectual assumption, made by some students of popular culture, that the symbolic experiences and practices of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than Culture with a capital C” (McGuigan, 1991, p. 4). In a similar vein, some cultural events – including actionist art – may be referred to as “populist affairs,” since they imply mass participation and forge a sense of unity/togetherness (Berry, 2018, p. 300). The interpretation of the “cultural populism” concept offered in this book implies three basic arguments. The first one deals of the culture – populism nexus. Undoubtedly, the cultural environment creates a fertile ground for populist interpretations that emerge as important elements of public debates on the plethora of issues related to care and protection as general functions of governing subjects, along with medicine, sexuality, citizenship, and other more particular themes. This nexus might be understood through the lens of the idea of performativity that presupposes a semiotic mediation, or “mechanisms through which the connections between life and politics are articulated” (Puumeister, 2018, p. 9). Therefore, the entire palette of meanings attached to populism is performatively produced in cultural “plateaus” through the multiplicity of popular genres, from sitcoms to bike shows, from museums to art activism. Consequently, the argument goes on, the roots of populist gestures (direct appeals to the crowd, construction of an audience with artistic means, emotional manipulations through imagers and language games) are inherently cultural, and often populist politicians performatively appropriate them through imitative borrowing. Thus, the meanings generated by cultural producers are often politically reproduced by operators of populist markets – politicians, party functionaries, opposition leaders, parliamentarians, members of the government, and public servants. They performatively transform cultural discourses and imageries into populism as a politically marketable product, using its creative, artistic, and aesthetic ingredients as tools in the struggle for hegemony. Secondly, cultural connotations are also of primordial importance for understanding the populism–sovereignty linkage and, more specifically, the claims for “people’s sovereignty, or the ‘sovereign people’” (Albertazzi & McDonnell, n.d., p. 2). The boundary between the sphere of cultural production and its instrumentalization by bearers of – and aspirants for – political power is always moving and contextual. Not only artists might be considered as parts of a broadly understood political class, supplying new narratives to

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power holders and infusing new ideas into political narratives; what is more, as the case of Ukraine perfectly illustrates, artists might convert their popularity and recognition among viewers into a political capital that solidifies the populist blend of politics and art. Conditions that facilitate these conversions and transformations vary from one national context to another. Yet even in such countries as Russia where the bulk of mass cultural production is controlled by the state, pro-Putin political entertainers and media performers do not simply articulate, verbalize, and visualize Kremlin-generated messages, but to a large extent, they also frame and shape them. Thirdly, the biopolitical crux of populism is manifested in persistent attempts to redefine “the people” and therefore to “extract” the “proper people from the sum total of actual citizens” (Müller, 2017, p. 20), or ‘the population,’ according to the Foucauldian language. The line between those who fully belong to the national community and those who simply count as statistical numbers in the algorithmic governance, is inherently biopolitical, since it involves such categories of biopower as regimes of care and protection, prioritization of state-provided services for specific groups, and de-facto differential treatment of people along the lines of their citizenship, residence conditions and many other criteria. The definitional void (the “non-existent homogeneity”) (Pelinka, 2013, p. 8) is often filled out by public narratives and storylines “about the necessary inclusion of excluded people” (Pelinka, 2013, p. 4) but also about multiple exclusions and exceptions. Therefore, the question, “Is everybody who lives in a given territory – independent of their roots – part of ‘the people’?” (Pelinka, 2013, p. 3), is equally biopolitical. It is these irremovable uncertainties with defining “the people” that require a biopolitical approach, since major characteristics attributed by populists to ‘the people’ – such as “hard-working, family-oriented” (Brubaker, 2018, p. 30) and so on – possess strong biopolitical connotations. In the body politics of the right-wing populism, “the ‘national family’ must preserve the traditional paternalistic order of the sexes and maintain the nation’s body as white and pure” (Wodak, 2019, p. 25). The others, as seen from different populist vistas, are equally biopolitically defined – “immigrants, homosexuals, Muslims, unmarried mothers, drug addicts, the long-term unemployed and so on” (Mastropaolo, n.d., p. 36). Issues of mobility (migration), faith (religion), equality (gender) and cultural/ethnic/linguistic affiliations (minorities), with their strong biopolitical connotations, are central for populist repertoires all across the world (Fitzi et al., 2019). What can be inferred from this analysis is that the biopoliticization of public policy agendas through a variety of ways – the growing concerns about the coherence of ‘the people,’ the multiple forms of differentiation between its

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categories, the ascending attention to the practices of care taking and physical survival in times of crises – has created strong preconditions for the spread and multiplication of various forms of populism. This partly might be explained by the proclivity of the biopolitical agenda that continuously expands its audiences and involves large groups in its orbit of ordinary – and originally depoliticized – populaces concerned with mundane issues, from health care, medicine, and sexuality to the routine attitudes to ‘newcomers,’ ‘strangers,’ and ‘aliens.’ Performative politics centered on corporeal life appears to be engaging; in this realm – unlike in institutional politics, financial management or geopolitics – everyone is supposed to be an expert, and everyone’s experience counts. These inevitable engagements with vernacular opinions and sentiments of ordinary people are based on a mass involvement in biopolitical issues that the populist cohort constructs for the sake of promoting “healthy” – as opposed to “sick”/“pathological” – societies (Hirvonen & Pennanen, 2019, pp. 30–31). In a radical case, this agenda may require “purifying the empirical people” (Arato & Cohen, 2017, p. 287). Perhaps one of the most politically relevant and sensitive issues that ought to be discussed at this juncture is the possibility of transformation of populism into a sort of “proto-fascism” (Thomassen, 2020, p. 736). Again, a cultural gaze seems to be primordial at this point: “from the motifs and metaphors of diverse folkloric traditions to the countless genres of popular culture, fascism assimilates new meanings and affective predispositions” (Holmes, 2019, p. 62), and radical versions of populism seem to be a source of some of them. What this analysis highlighted is that populism as a concept should not be over-generalized; on the contrary, it always ought to be deployed in countryspecific contexts and attached to particular events and circumstances that produce cultural demands for populist languages and styles. The war on terror, the EU financial crisis, the refugee crisis – all these events produced their own forms and versions of populism ostensibly marked by national colors. The same goes for COVID-19 that – perhaps paradoxically – opened up space for three dissimilar types of populist narratives: one stemming from demands to toughen exceptional measures and de-facto merge the spheres of sovereignty and governmentality, another one revolving around pledges to save each life even at the expense of economic collapse, and the third one bent on tranquilizing narratives arguing that ‘the majority of society’ will stay safe and unaffected. It is the last form of the COVID-related populism that seems to be the most problematic not only because it establishes a new biopolitical hierarchy that stratifies and differentiates lives but also because it creates an ample imaginative space for constructing a doomed minority through explicitly biopolitical othering – as being ‘too old,’ having some pre-existing con-

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ditions, practicing unhealthy lifestyles, travelling too much abroad, or behaving irresponsibly in public spaces. This discursive frame shows – again quite paradoxically – how the idea of responsibilization formulated by Foucault in explicitly liberal categories can be hijacked by illiberal regimes with the purpose of vindicating policies of neglecting or downgrading lives of certain groups that do not fit into the hegemonic – and always discursively produced and propagated – model of responsible behavior. It also further facilitates external forms of populist othering through shifting responsibility for contamination to foreigners or outsiders (international travelers, seasonal workers, foreign students, etc.).

… Yet, what does the prism of popular biopolitics tell us about the three researched countries? In Estonia, we saw a very diverse landscape of genres and representations grounded in the cultural interpretations of ‘bare life’ in its multiple variations that frame both the Estonian national and the Russophone discourses and imageries. The former is heavy grounded in the reactualization of historical experiences of the Soviet-time deportations and occupation, while the latter spotlights the largely self-constructed and introvert narrative of marginalization of the Russian-speaking community in the independent Estonia. These clashing with each other public discourses are inherently biopolitical in the sense that both give prominence to victimhood and disenfranchisement as corporeal experiences, and build strategies of discursive hierarchization on the basis of attaching diverse meanings and importance to different forms of life and lifestyles. This biopolitics is not necessarily embedded in the liberal political setting due to a tight conflation of Estonian liberalism with cultural nationalism. In the meantime, one can see how popular biopolitics may create dislocatory effects that challenge the uniformity and coherence of each of the two competing discourses and thus unveil their intrinsic vulnerabilities. To a certain extent, the case of Ukraine is similar to the Estonian one since biopolitics in this country revolves around the different definitions of ‘domestic others’ and prospects of their integration into the Ukrainian national body politic. As in Estonia, the Ukrainian discourse is largely grounded in internal divisions and fragmentations that imply the biopolitically constructed notions of selfhood and otherness. Yet if the Estonian popular biopolitics is heavily historicized, in Ukraine it is much more securitized and militarized due to the annexation of Crimea and the Russia-inspired war in Donbas. The case of Ukraine opens up new research vistas for looking at biopower not simply as

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a care-taking function of political authorities but mainly from a security protection perspective, which necessarily implies a conflation of geopolitics (with control over territories and borders at its core) and biopolitics (with peopleto-people connectivity and human security as key points of reference). Ukraine’s example can also be used as an important reference point to rethink the Foucauldian embeddedness of biopolitics in the liberal policy setting. Ukraine – as well as many other post-communist/post-socialist countries – demonstrates that the liberal-illiberal frame of distinction might be too narrow for exposing a greater variety of biopolitical meanings to academic scrutiny and opening them to other spectral differentiations, such as centralization versus regional autonomy, cosmopolitanism versus nativism, or patriotic intransigence versus concessions to and reconciliation with Russia. Within all of these policy debates, there is an ample room for biopolitical connotations that should not necessarily be attached to one or another conceptualization of liberalism or its multiple disavowals. When it comes to Russian popular biopolitics, it is marked not only by a clear conservative tilt but also by a distinct predominance of imperial characteristics due to which the function of biopolitical care-taking extends beyond Russian national borders and projects into countries like Ukraine and Estonia that host minorities partly identifying themselves with the Kremlin-sponsored Russian World. Unlike any other post-Soviet country, Russia inscribes biopolitics into its foreign policy, which again leads to tight interconnections between geopower and biopower. All of our case studies gave a strong evidence of a nexus between popular biopolitics and populism, though of course, national modalities vary from country to country. None of them, however, gave any strong back up to consider biopolitical populism as an anti-elite phenomenon; in all countries, populist discourses and imageries are incorporated into the hegemonic regimes of power. Neither have we received sufficient evidence to qualify populist narratives as ideological constructs in the strict sense, as most of them are hybrid combinations of media-based imageries that evade ideological qualifications but instead possess huge performative resources that give them plasticity and adaptability, as well as mobilizational force. This only sustains the qualification of populism as a performative style, for which the key is not that much the expressive (visual or textual) act as such, but its (re)iterability in other circumstances and under other – though structurally similar – conditions. By the same token, as noted in Chapter 1, populism can be viewed as a grass-roots reaction to something that is articulated and constructed as encroachment of people’s sovereignty: this might be a generalized ‘Gayropa’ in the case of Russia, corrupt and manipulative government in Ukraine, or

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Western liberal permissiveness in Estonia. In this sense, populism represents a form of repoliticization that in the meantime might render a totalizing effect that implies its ‘thickening’ through constant acquisition of new meanings. Totalization operates even in a democratic context; Peeter Selg and Andreas Ventsel have qualified the Estonian “national – romantic” discourse, grounded in the Singing Revolution traditions, “fairly closed and self-centered,” as well as “undemocratic” and “authoritarian” (Selg & Ventsel, 2010). It is at this point that popular biopolitics’ contribution to the academic debate ought to be most appreciated; it helps look beyond the Western hegemony of cultural liberalism and thus offers a more nuanced alternative to the predominantly instrumental understanding of culture as a tool for building and consolidating relations of power. The research optics of popular biopolitics allows for the discernment of the cultural roots of political actions. Popular biopolitics makes us think beyond official discourses and always mind the gap between that which is signified and the signifiers, the mimetic and the aesthetic, and academic concepts and imageries. Popular biopolitics broadens our research perspectives by taking the whole palette of cultural artefacts seriously. The growing diversity of performative genres (from video blogging to patriotic spectacles, from popularized medical knowledge to commemorative public shows) expands the space where biopolitics is produced, communicated, and enacted. The proliferation of cultural practices has its effects on the very fabric of today’s politics – it creates new niches for emotive expressions whose force of attraction grows with the ongoing saturation of the political field with issues pertinent to bodies, lifestyles and corporeal matters. It is in this sense that the biopolitical domain becomes a powerful source of manipulation, language and image games, and also of brainwashing, misinformation, and a particular type of propaganda. The ideal of rational politics – shared by both liberal and realist traditions, along with the Foucauldian model of knowledge-based power – faces huge challenges in this respect. After the COVID-19 emergency, one should take the idea of post-truth biopolitics seriously as an existential condition of life under conditions of ontological uncertainty, with multiple regulations and restrictions coming nor from a consensually accepted source of epistemic authority but rather produced as a result of a series of assumptions, policy compromises, exceptions, and elite bargaining, all mediated by a growing army of discourse-makers – journalists, bloggers, and cultural producers. The broadly understood populist narratives will undoubtedly remain key elements of this post-truth biopolitics – pretty much in the same way as, in the immunological paradigm of Roberto Esposito, viruses are to remain parts of our everyday routine. The biopolitics of post-truth may give differ-

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ent effects – it may transform a nation into a semblance of a highly totalized Agambenian ‘camp’ (Russia), may give hope to a nation desperately searching for new sources of inspiration beyond the incumbent elite (Ukraine), or may produce divisive effects in society organized along liberal principles (Estonia). This variety of political effects reflects the inherent diversity of forms and genres of popular biopolitics, which this book tried to discuss.

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Ochoa Espejo, P. (2017). Populism and the Idea of the People. In C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism (p. 74). Oxford University Press. Pelinka, A. (2013). Right-Wing Populism: Concept and typology. In B. Mral, R. Wodak, & M. KhosraviNik (Eds.), Right-Wing Populism in Europe Politics and Discourse (1st ed., p. 368). Bloomsbury Academic. Puumeister, O. (2018). On Biopolitical Subjectivity: Michel Foucault’s perspective on biopolitics and its semiotic aspects [Dissertation, University of Tartu]. https:// dspace.ut.ee/bitstream/handle/10062/62550/puumeister_ott.pdf?sequence=4 &isAllowed=y Selg, P., & Ventsel, A. (2010). An outline for a semiotic theory of hegemony. Semiotica, 2010 (182), 443–474. https://doi.org/10.1515/semi.2010.067 Thomassen, L. (2020). Introduction: New Reflections on Ernesto Laclau’s Theory of Populism. Theory and Event, 23 (3), 734–739. Wodak, R. (2019). The micro-politics of right-wing populism. In G. Fitzi, B. Turner, & J. Mackert (Eds.), Populism and the Crisis of Democracy: Vol. Volume 2: Politics, Social Movements and Extremism (1st ed., p. 192). Routledge. Zuquete, J. P. (2017). Populism and Religion. In C. Rovira Kaltwasser, P. Taggart, P. Ochoa Espejo, & P. Ostiguy (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Populism (p. 74). Oxford University Press.

Index Agamben 6, 8, 10, 12, 20, 29, 33, 35–40, 42, 44, 45, 60, 62, 63, 65–67, 115, 190, 191, 203 Aesthetic populism 189 Aesthetics 73, 121, 126, 134, 136, 150, 152, 153, 161, 179, 197, 202 Agency 23 Anatomopolitics 7, 23, 169 Authoritarian populism 8, 14 Ban 81 Bare life 2, 11, 13, 20, 30, 35, 37–39, 44, 60, 64, 65, 67, 73, 83, 85, 115, 116, 200 Bare sovereignty 150 Belonging 12–14, 20, 23, 29, 75, 79, 99, 104, 105, 116, 136, 179 Biocracy 14 Biohuman 14 Biology 3 Biometrics 8 Biopolitical aesthetics 23 Biopolitical assemblages 47 Biopolitical border 77, 89 Biopolitical communities 21, 70, 90, 115 Biopolitical displacement 81 Biopolitical escape 84 Biopolitical management 116 Biopolitical media 152 Biopolitical memory 78 Biopolitical othering 19, 84, 85, 137, 139, 196, 199 Biopolitical performativity 21 Biopolitical populism 10, 14, 201 Biopolitical regionalism 43 Biopolitical sovereignty 14, 30, 151 Biopolitical utopia 13, 149 Biopolitical violence 8 Biopoliticization 14 Biopower 2, 44, 168, 180, 198, 200 Bios 5, 116 Biosecurity 37 Biospatiality 193 Body / bodies 10–12, 14, 33, 60, 150, 151, 156, 160, 162, 167–170, 172, 190–195, 198, 202 Border(ing) 14, 24, 195, 196

Butler

22, 30, 119, 120, 190

Camp(s) 11, 34–37, 39, 42, 61, 63, 64, 67, 81–84, 86, 203 Carceral state 8 Care(-taking) 12, 20, 32–34, 38, 44, 48, 79, 80, 102, 106, 115, 136, 137, 150, 151, 158, 164, 165, 170, 174, 190, 191, 197–199, 201 Citizenship 11, 43, 103, 179, 197, 198 Civilization 40, 82, 89, 90, 164, 166 Conservatism 149, 150, 161, 168, 178, 193 Conspiracy theories 9, 12 COVID-19 9, 30, 34, 39, 43, 48, 149, 150, 151, 168–173, 180, 196, 199, 202 Corporeal(ity) 2, 23, 25, 43, 65, 84, 85, 104, 172, 176, 190, 191, 195, 198, 200, 202 Crimea 4, 79, 92, 96, 99, 115, 135, 153, 154, 156, 162, 200 Critical biopolitics 2, 24 Critical discourse analysis 45 Death

13, 20, 43, 48, 61, 90, 136, 150, 152, 162, 163, 171, 172, 174, 179, 190 De-humanization 15, 77 Democracy 11, 27 Democratic backsliding 9 Depoliticization 77, 78 Disciplinary power 8, 20, 32, 162 Discourse(s) 8, 10, 14, 21–23, 25, 26, 30, 35, 38, 41, 42, 45, 65, 89, 91, 92, 95, 103, 105, 118, 140, 151, 153, 158, 170–172, 174, 177, 179, 196, 197, 200, 201 Dislocation(s) 75, 84, 89, 97, 137, 161, 194 Donbas 3, 73, 115, 116, 122, 127, 129, 135–137, 139, 153–155, 193, 200 EKRE 10, 37 Epistemic / epistemology 20, 23, 25, 31, 33 Esposito 5, 32, 33, 40, 151, 202 Estonia 2, 5, 6, 13, 21, 23, 24, 28, 30, 36–38, 41, 43, 44, 60, 191–193, 195, 200, 201 Exception(s) 37, 39, 198, 202 Exclusion 11, 14, 27, 29, 38, 44–46, 48, 60, 99, 137, 152, 190, 195, 196, 198

206

Index

Family 3, 10, 41, 66, 106, 119, 126, 130, 150, 158, 165, 179, 194, 198 Fantasies 12, 13, 121, 130, 153, 179 Fascism / fascist 35, 36, 42, 85, 139, 152, 160, 161, 163, 178, 180, 199 Feminism 41, 166 Flesh 11 Foucault / Foucauldian 2, 6–8, 10, 19, 20, 31–33, 36, 38, 44, 45, 47, 48, 60, 67, 115, 149–152, 170, 190, 198, 200–202 Gender 30, 119, 120, 158, 193, 196, 198 Geopolitics / geopolitical 60, 61, 63, 65, 67, 68, 75, 77, 85, 88, 99, 102, 104–106, 115, 116, 118, 120–122, 135, 137, 140, 150, 153, 156, 193, 199, 201 Georgia(n) 2–5, 44, 71, 101, 105, 150, 153, 154, 193 Governmentality 4, 27, 39, 44, 151, 152, 164, 168, 170, 172, 178, 190, 195, 199 Happy life 165 Health(care) 3, 4, 20, 23, 32, 152, 170, 174, 176, 177, 199 Hegemony 22 Homo sacer 10, 11, 37, 39, 67, 68, 136 Human bodies 4, 19, 20, 35, 60 Identity 10, 14, 25, 27, 31, 33, 41–43, 45, 60, 61, 66, 69, 81, 87, 89, 90, 92–94, 97, 105, 106, 115, 120, 133, 135, 136, 154, 161, 164, 167, 168, 171, 172, 191 Ideology / ideologies 9, 27, 28, 30, 40, 44, 70, 119, 179, 201 Illiberal(ism) 6, 8, 13, 31, 36, 63, 166, 168, 195, 201 Illiberal populism 177, 179, 193, 194, 196, 200 Image / images 12, 14, 24, 25, 41, 65, 71, 88, 91, 92, 103, 118, 119, 126–128, 150, 153–155, 162, 163, 168, 170, 172, 179, 191, 194, 196, 197, 200–202 Immigration 41 Immunity 151, 174 Individualization 4, 12 Intertextual(ity) 14, 48, 61 Laclau

45, 125, 178, 196

Language(s) 9, 45, 66, 71, 94, 103, 105, 106, 120, 126, 128, 131, 133, 136, 170, 172, 180, 190, 192, 195, 197, 199, 202 Law 8, 19, 27, 35, 40, 65, 66, 68 LGBTQ 5, 40 Liberal(ism) 6–9, 12, 14, 26, 28, 31–36, 38, 92, 166, 167, 179, 180, 190, 192, 194–196, 200, 202, 203 Liberal democratic politics 12 Liberal subject 14 Life 4, 8, 19, 20, 23, 28, 29, 32, 34, 43, 66, 68, 72, 73, 75, 81, 84, 88, 90, 116, 122, 136, 137, 152, 162, 164, 165, 168, 170, 176, 179, 190, 198–200 Lifestyle 29, 30, 73, 90, 119, 150, 169, 190, 195, 200, 202 Liminal in-betweenness 80 Marginality 130 Masculinity 14, 41, 151, 166–168, 171, 172, 174, 193 Medicalization 13, 35 Migration 13, 32 Multimodal analysis 46 Narratives 8 Narva 70, 71, 85, 99, 100, 106, 155 National body 14 Nationalist biopolitics 11 Nation(hood) 11, 24, 27, 29, 90, 103, 104, 115, 129, 137, 150, 203 Nativism / nativist 9, 11, 89, 92 Nazi(sm) 7, 11, 35, 87 Necropolitics 24, 32, 41, 49, 61, 62, 64, 65, 77, 102, 154, 158, 160, 169, 178, 193 Neoimperial biopolitics 3 Nodal point(s) 45, 48, 63, 154, 172 Norm 37 Normalization 14, 33, 117, 128, 150, 172 Nudity 150 Ontology / ontologization 102, 120, 121, 202 Outmigration 84

19, 20, 27, 33, 39,

Pastoral power / pastorate 4, 14, 43, 137, 150–152, 154, 158, 160, 164, 166–168, 178

Index People(hood) 14, 25, 27, 29, 70, 71, 118, 122, 126, 127, 129, 132, 134, 137, 139, 140, 168, 174, 178, 179, 191, 194–196, 198, 201 Performativity 10, 12–14, 21, 22, 34, 46, 119, 120, 136, 153, 168, 197 Politicization 3, 41 Popular biopolitics 2, 3, 14, 19–23, 43, 75, 84, 91, 92, 105–107, 116, 119, 120, 136, 140, 149–151, 155, 158, 164, 168–172, 175, 177, 179, 180, 190, 193, 194, 200–203 Popular culture 12, 14, 121, 122, 127, 132, 168, 197, 199 Popular geopolitics 24 Population(s) 10, 14, 19, 20, 30, 31, 33, 35, 44, 47, 63, 115–117, 122, 137, 164, 167 Populism / populist 9–14, 21, 23, 24, 29, 41, 63, 69, 71, 80, 92, 99, 102, 106, 107, 117–119, 122, 123, 134, 135, 150–152, 154, 156, 158, 161, 163, 165, 166, 168–170, 176–178, 180, 190, 194, 195, 197–199, 201, 202 Positionality 46, 47, 68 Post-colonial 42, 43, 68, 92, 93, 96, 97, 105, 129 Post-human 74, 166 Post-industrial 73 Post-liberal(ism) 190, 192, 194, 196 Post-politics / post-political 27, 36, 166 Post-Soviet studies 1, 2 Post-structural (analysis) 48 Post-truth 9, 124, 132, 153, 202 Practical biopolitics 44 Race 11, 35, 85, 88, 104 Racialized biopolitics 11 Racism 32, 41, 91, 156 Rational(ity) 19, 151, 171 Reductionism 11 Refugee crisis 5, 61, 92, 102, 135, 199 Relativization of knowledge 12 Representation(s) 13, 26, 31, 33, 45, 46, 75, 92, 93, 104, 116, 121, 122, 126, 131, 134, 153, 154, 179, 194, 196 Reproductive behaviour 3 Resignification 23, 27, 61, 78, 79, 97, 103, 120, 161, 195 Responsibilization 170, 191, 200 Rhizome 47

207 Right-wing populism 5, 30, 37, 41, 168, 190, 195, 198 Russia 2, 5, 6, 8, 13, 21, 23–26, 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 41–44, 61, 67–70, 76–84, 117, 118, 127, 133, 136, 137, 139, 140, 150–180, 191–194, 198, 201, 203 Schmitt 5, 37 Security 13, 27, 32, 34, 39, 41, 42, 44, 47, 63, 69, 103, 115, 116, 125, 127, 129, 135, 156, 168, 201 Self-governing life 12 Semiotic(s) 22, 25, 46, 47, 120, 196 Sexual(ity) 3, 4, 11, 32, 41, 84, 85, 166, 190, 193, 197, 199 Sexualization 11, 130 Sexual sovereignty 150 Sign(s) 22, 25, 162, 163, 196 Signifieds and signifiers 23, 25, 202 Simulacrum 13 Somatic sovereignty 4, 150, 151, 154, 155, 157–159, 161–163, 168, 178 Sovereign(ty) / sovereign power 2, 5, 6, 10, 11, 13, 14, 20, 22, 25, 27, 31, 32, 35, 37–39, 44, 61, 67, 88, 102, 116, 135, 137, 139, 149, 154, 162, 165, 179, 190–192, 194–197, 199, 201 Space(s) 24 Spectacle 10, 22, 121, 122, 129, 132, 140, 177 Speech act(s) 45, 158, 179 State of exception 20, 115, 180 Statistical governance 172, 174 Subaltern(ity) 68, 75, 129 Subjectivity 10, 21–24, 96 Suture 92, 93, 96 Surveillance 33 Thanatopolitics 32, 38, 65, 66, 88, 101, 102, 162, 163 Therapeutic politics 169 Totalitarianism 7, 9, 11, 34, 36 Totalization 12, 28, 31, 34, 38, 161, 202 Traditionalism 9, 11 Translation 12 Ukraine 2, 4–6, 8, 13, 14, 21, 23–25, 31, 41, 43, 44, 71, 99–101, 106, 115–140, 150, 153, 155,

208

Index

157, 158, 164, 167, 191–194, 198, 200, 201, 203 Utopia(n) 123, 131, 160

Visual(s) 9, 71, 72, 92, 118, 119, 135, 137, 152, 154, 156, 196, 201 Visualization 104, 170

Vaccination 167, 170, 173 Visibility 152

Zoe

116