Alexander Etkind

European University Institute | EUI · Department of History and Civilization

Russian leaders first tried to poison him, then unlawfully imprisoned him, and now are publicly torturing him. His enemies see him as an illegitimate pretender to the Russian throne. His fans are captivated by his ability to survive assassinations and withstand torture. I was among those who nominated Alexey Navalny for the Nobel Peace Prize. Thoug...

If we agree that the oil price is a social institution, embedded in socio-economic and political practices (Belyi 2016), this means that it is not only the outcome of these practices, but also a causal factor, shaping actions and events. From an interpretivist perspective, however, there is yet another distinction to be drawn: that between the pric...

Can we distinguish between those historical events – wars, revolutions or man-made catastrophes – that were intentional and those that were not? Does this distinction matter, and in what way? Somehow the issue of intention has become central in the debates about the Ukrainian Famine. Writing her review in The Guardian , Sheila Fitzpatrick puts the...

Oil and gas stand at the center of Russia’s post‐Soviet economy and have been crucial in the rapid economic growth under Putin in the 2000s. Though hugely unequal, the growth in incomes has caused a growth in national pride. Yet the Russian state’s reliance on fossil fuels has led to rapid demodernization. Politically isolated, economically shrinki...

With a focus on Kant’s early writings, Etkind situates Kant’s political thought on cosmopolitanism within his career as a lecturer and author in other subjects, including his Universal History and Ethnography of the North. Exploring Kant’s life, ideas and publications during the Seven Years’ War and the Russian occupation of Königsberg, Etkind revi...

Using its custom-made version of Marxism as a road map for the transformation of economy and society, the Bolshevik state acknowledged a role of culture. The early 1920s saw the unbridled creativity of futuristic projects in many domains of high culture. The next decade saw a decisive turn of the Soviet culture toward conservative ideas, with mass...

[A]lthough the level of political control in Putin's Russia is not much different from what was typical for the late Soviet period, the means of control have changed entirely. Second in a series on public spheres around the world.

In the late imperial period, Russian historiography was dominated by the self-colonization school. Russian historians wrote detailed accounts of Russia’s takeover of the Crimea, Finland, Ukraine, Poland, and other lands, but they did not describe these areas as Russian colonies. Instead, mainstream Russian historians argued that ‘Russia colonized i...

Drawing on his book Warped Mourning, and psychoanlytic studies of post-traumatic syndromes, the author analyses the processes by which a national culture comes to terms with its own violent past, as in the case of the French revolution, Soviet Russia, Nazi Germany. After the French revolution, relatives of the guillotined victims came together in V...

In Nabokov’s works we find homosexuals, unhappy, highly enigmatic people, often associated with the moon, as in The Gift and Pale Fire. Nabokov probably drew this metaphor from Rozanov’s People of the Moonlight. This essay traces the various references to this metaphor that can be found throughout Nabokov’s oeuvre

The early twenty-first-century Russia still calls itself, and is called, “post-Soviet.” But this term increasingly sounds like a purposeful euphemism, which both insiders and observers from outside are using to conceal the novelty of Putinism. Though Putinism is entirely different from Stalinism, post-Soviet Russia still defines itself in contrast...

Il magico letterario, così bizzarro, che anima la narrativa post-sovietica è palesemente diverso dai generi gotici, fantascientifici, o fantasy di ambito occidentale o Anglo-americano. Le differenze sono molte, ma le più importanti riguardano il centro di vero interesse, che in questo genere post-sovietico, si localizza su congetture storiche bizza...

The article contextualizes Grigorii Kozintsev’s celebrated films, Hamlet and King Lear, and El'dar Riazanov’s Beware of the Car, in the historical environment of post-Stalinist Russia. Scrutinizing Kozintsev’s political and artistic itinerary, the Shakespearean productions are interpreted as works of mourning for Soviet victims. In his writings on...

In conversation, two prominent scholars of Russian literature discuss the post-Soviet novel and trace its particular characteristics to the trauma created by the collapse of the USSR.

Combining ideas from cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this essay proposes an interdisciplinary approach to the emerging field of post-Soviet memory studies. Sociological polls demonstrate that approximately one-fourth of Russians remember that their relatives were victims of terror, yet the existing monuments, museums, and...

Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture. By Borenstein Eliot . Culture and Society after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008. xv, 265 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Illustrations. Photographs. $69.95, hard bound. $21.95, paper. - Volume 68 Issue 1 - Alexander Etkind

Paralogii: Transformatsii (post)modernistskogo diskursa v russkoi kul'ture 1920-2000-kh godov. By Lipovetskii Mark [Lipovetsky]. Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2008. xxviii, 840 pp. Notes. Index. Photographs. Hard bound. - Volume 68 Issue 4 - Alexander Etkind

Consolidating its power in Russia and post-Soviet space, the Russian administration strives for a double monopoly over natural resources and violence. To achieve these goals politically, the Kremlin cultivates a new parapolitical group of professionals that call themselves "political technologists." In this article, the authors analyze this group's...

Russia's Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917. By ZhukSergei I.. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson Center, 2004. xxi + 458 pp. $60.00 cloth. - Volume 75 Issue 4 - Alexander Etkind

A changing context narrows the possibilities of analysis. When a situation changes so precipitously and, moreover, so frequently as is currently the case in Russia, then this swiftness of personnel turnover produces a deceptive desire to find a nontraditional method of understanding, one in keeping with an era of change. This swiftness causes a fee...

L. S. Vygotsky has been the subject of many serious works in the Russian and Western literature. In this context special mention must be made of the many years of effort of M. G. Iaroshevskii, in whose latest and most detailed monograph Vygotsky's work is considered a classic of developmental psychology [50]. His work continues to interest psychoan...

Alexandre Etkind, Rise and fall of the "paedological " movement. From psychoanalysis to the "new Soviet man." The article relates the history of paedology (pedologiia) in USSR in the 1920's and 1930's. Elaborated by Stanley Hall, paedology was introduced in USSR at the beginning of the NEP and enjoyed extraordinary success since it was officially i...