Broken Verse

This chapter discusses the influence of materialist aesthetics on the formation of Azerbaijani Soviet nationalism, which emerged as a cohesive discourse during the first ten years of Soviet control in the poetry of the Baku Red Pens. This chapter highlights the role of Marxist speech acts in shaping the revolution on the periphery.

Like Tereshkova in the Cosmos

This chapter examines how women perform post-Soviet nationalism using the canon of European classical music by focusing on a project designed to produce Uzbek Western art music, one that retains prominence in independent Uzbekistan. The project has involved getting composers engaged in the creation of a sense of Uzbek style in composition. In Uzbekistan, from remarkably early in the Soviet period, women have been important figures in the performance and promulgation of Uzbek compositions. The chapter first provides a historical overview of Western art music in Soviet Uzbekistan and compares it with Western art music in independent Uzbekistan. It then considers how women's performances support a construction of national identity that began in the Soviet era and continues today. The chapter features interviews with Dilbara Abdurahmanova, the first female director of the Alisher Navoiy State Opera, and prominent pianist and former conservatory director Ofeliya Yusupova. By far the most pervasive musical style heard in Tashkent, popular music, known as estrada, provides audiences with a glamorous construction of Uzbek femininity.

The Euromaidan and the crisis of Russian nationalism

This article examines the reverberations in Russia of the Euromaidan protests and the fall of the Yanukovych regime in Ukraine. It shows how the events in Kyiv provoked a major crisis in the Russian nationalist movement, which was riven by vituperative denunciations, the ostracism of prominent activists, the breakdown of friendships, the rupture of alliances, and schisms within organizations. Focusing on pro-Kremlin nationalists and several tendencies of opposition nationalists, it argues that this turmoil was shaped by three factors. First, the Euromaidan provoked clashes between pro-Kremlin nationalists, who became standard-bearers of official anti-Euromaidan propaganda, and anti-Putin nationalists, who extolled the Euromaidan as a model for a revolution in Russia itself. Second, the events in Ukraine provoked ideological contention around issues of particular sensitivity to Russian nationalists, such as the competing claims of imperialism and ethnic homogeneity, and of Soviet nationalism and Russian traditionalism. And third, many nationalists were unprepared for the pace of events, which shifted rapidly from an anti-oligarchic uprising in Kyiv to a push for the self-determination of ethnic Russians in Crimean and southeast Ukraine. As a result, they were left in the uncomfortable position of appearing to collaborate with the oppressors of their compatriots.

Topography of Post-Soviet Nationalism: The Provinces—the Capital—the West

The cultural myth of the provinces provides the contemporary cultural elite with a semiotic apparatus for formulating Russia's new, postimperial identity. Today, cultural production locates true Russianness outside newly prosperous, multiethnic, and westernized Moscow. In mass culture, the traditional privileging of the center over the backward provinces gives way to the view of the provinces as a repository of national tradition and moral strength. Conversely, high literature and art-house films provide an alternative, harshly critical image of them. In both cases, a particular concept of Russianness is negotiated, one in which the provinces play a central role. Ultimately, both redirect nationalist discourse away from the deeply unsatisfying model of Russia versus the west and instead offer a hermetic national identity based on an “us versus us,” rather than “us versus them,” model.