Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in Post-Soviet Russia

Abstract

The article examines how people in post-Soviet Russia learn to interpret Soviet political genealogies as implicated in their own family histories. Based on long-term fieldwork in a large provincial city in Russia, it focuses on a particular form of amateur genealogy called Rodologia (rodstvo = kinship). Informed by a burgeoning self-help culture, Rodologia's followers argue that psychological “self-realization” can be achieved by identifying the effects of state violence on family histories. Using a Lamarckian-like idea of heredity, Rodologia argues that social and political upheavals, such as gulags, collectivization, and wars, “scar” people's genes and shape the behavior, self, and history of their descendants. The article demonstrates how popular attempts to attribute meanings to Soviet state violence are mediated by a surprising alliance of two cultural logics for articulating the self emerging in post-Soviet Russia—a thriving therapeutic “self-help” culture and a form of recollection inspired by genealogical imagination. A flourishing therapeutic culture and amateur genealogy, I show, emerge as a means to both organize one's relation to the Soviet past and to make sense of fundamental changes occurring in meanings of political order in post-Soviet Russia.

Full text

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 135
Rodologia: Genealogy as Therapy in
Post-Soviet Russia
Inna Leykin
Abstract The article examines how people in post-Soviet Russia learn to interpret Soviet political genealogies
as implicated in their own family histories. Based on long-term fieldwork in a large provincial city in Russia,
it focuses on a particular form of amateur genealogy called Rodologia (rodstvo =kinship). Informed by a
burgeoning self-help culture, Rodologia’s followers argue that psychological “self-realization” can be achieved
by identifying the effects of state violence on family histories. Using a Lamarckian-like idea of heredity, Rodologia
argues that social and political upheavals, such as gulags, collectivization, and wars, “scar” people’s genes
and shape the behavior, self, and history of their descendants. The article demonstrates how popular attempts
to attribute meanings to Soviet state violence are mediated by a surprising alliance of two cultural logics for
articulating the self emerging in post-Soviet Russia—a thriving therapeutic “self-help” culture and a form of
recollection inspired by genealogical imagination. A flourishing therapeutic culture and amateur genealogy, I
show, emerge as a means to both organize one’s relation to the Soviet past and to make sense of fundamental
changes occurring in meanings of political order in post-Soviet Russia. [genealogy therapy, memory, power,
postsocialism]
Introduction
Attempts to attribute meanings to the Soviet past are ubiquitous in postsocialist societies.
Anthropologists and historians interested in the role of memory in postsocialist politics have
extensively documented ideological, historical, and institutional contexts of commemora-
tive practices and reconstructed the cultural pragmatics of the current evocations of the
past (Borneman 1997; Boym 2001; Brown 2003; Etkind 2013; Eyal 2004; Kaneff 2004;
Klumbyte 2010; Oushakine 2007, 2013; Rivkin-Fish 2009; Verdery 1999; Wertsch 2000).
Going beyond the intellectual legacy of Halbwachs (1992), this scholarship conceives of re-
membering not so much as shared, but rather as contested, representations of the past rooted
in social actions of the present (Connerton 1989). Typically, this literature centers on the
formal and public commemoration practices prompted by the changing political contexts
of postsocialist societies. Drawing on this scholarship, this article zooms in on less formal
and more emotionally charged evocations of past violence in contemporary Russia. Based
on a year-long ethnographic research project in a large, provincial city in Russia, it demon-
strates how popular attempts to attribute meanings to Soviet state violence are mediated and
informed by a surprising alliance of two cultural logics emerging in post-Soviet Russia—a
thriving therapeutic “self-help” culture and a form of recollection inspired by genealogical
imagination. In post-Soviet Russia, a flourishing self-help culture and amateur genealogy, I
ETHOS, Vol. 43, Issue 2, pp. 135–164, ISSN 0091-2131 online ISSN 1548-1352. C⃝2015 by the American Anthropological
Association All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/etho.12078

136 ETHOS
will show, emerge as a means to both organize one’s relation to the Soviet past and attribute
meanings to fundamental changes occurring in the post-Soviet political order.
To demonstrate the work of memory as mediated by popular psychological and genealogical
reasoning, I will focus on a particular form of postsocialist self-help enterprise called Rodologia
(from rod =kin and rodstvo =kinship). I first heard about Rodologia from Nina, a soft-spoken
woman in her early fifties, who I met on one of the coldest days of the winter. During our
serendipitous meeting at a supermarket, as we were picking items from a shelf with a variety of
frozen products, we talked about my research. I told Nina that I had come to Russia to study
the country’s “demographic crisis,” and she surprised me by replying: “You understand that
the demograficheskii krizis is psychological in essence, don’t you?” I paused. Nina continued:
It is clear why people don’t want to have more kids. It is all because of the psychological
problems we inherit from our ancestors and then pass them onto the future generations
without being aware of it. All those terrible things they experienced in their lifetime; it
affects our lives in the present. Yes, this is the core of our problems in general and of
the demographic problem in particular.
Nina’s understanding of the demographic problem of underpopulation differed strikingly
from popular representations of the issue. While other explanations tended to privilege the
social aspects of the “demographic crisis,” such as the threat it poses to the future workforce
or the economic prosperity of the country, Nina’s commentary took up the soul as the main
point of reference and intervention. My curiosity prompted me to suggest that we meet
again.
A week later, drinking tea at Nina’s workplace—a family center called “The Sail”1located
in one of the city’s northern neighborhoods—I learned that Nina’s description of Russia’s
social problems in general and demographic problem in particular reflected a self-help
method called Rodologia. Rodologia followers, called rodologists, believe that psychological
“self-realization” can be achieved by identifying the effects of political violence and social
upheavals on family histories. In a nutshell, this Lamarckian-informed2logic argues that
coping with political violence and social cataclysms, such as in the Russian case, gulags,
Soviet collectivization campaigns, displacements, deportations, World War II, and the fall
of the Soviet Union, “scar” or leave marks on individual genes. These inflicted genes are
then passed onto future generations, affecting the psychological and behavioral patterns
of one’s descendants. In the epigenetic behavioral terms that have recently gained ground
in international scientific communities and the media (Hurley 2013),3Rodologia is based
on the biopsychological premise that responses to social events form particular patterns
of behavior that are then imprinted on genes; these in turn become manifest in future
generations within the family. While the memory of an event itself might disappear, or be
dismissed as unimportant, this dramatic event materializes in genetic make-up and influences
the behavior of successive generations.
Rodologia’s modus operandus can be glimpsed in the following example. Lena, a woman in
her early forties and a mother of two teenage children, disclosed during a Rodologia meeting

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 137
concerns about the stability of her marriage. Lena lived in fear that her husband of 15 years
would leave her. Quickly moving away from Lena’s actual relations with her husband, the
rodologists turned to Lena’s kinship chart and her family narratives. Participants drew Lena’s
attention to the fact that three generations of men in Lena’s family were either killed during
two world wars or died in a gulag camp. Because of these violent historical events, women
in Lena’s family tended to outlive their husbands. These painful experiences, the moderator
explained, created an association between marriage and death and between happiness and
a violent separation from family. The psychological effects of these experiences made their
way down to Lena’s genes. This explained Lena’s anxiety—the serial injuries that seared her
ancestors’ genes had shown up in her fear of desertion.
Rodologia adroitly combines two popular forms of reasoning that make claims about the soul
in post-Soviet Russia: an emerging therapeutic discourse and a biographical or genealogical
imagination. Rodologia is part of a thriving popular psychology and self-help market that
arrived in Russia—following the dissolution of the Soviet Union—along with neoliberal
reforms. As such, its vocabulary is characteristic of a larger self-help entrepreneurial culture in
Russia (Matza 2012). This is evident in the topics discussed in Rodologia seminars: financial
and business success, self-fulfillment, self-improvement, self-realization, self-esteem, and so
on. Similar to other forms of popular psychological enterprises, the Rodologian therapeutic
process begins with identifying a personal problem and framing it in the language of “self-
realization” and “self-improvement.”
Rodologia’s distinctive feature, however, is its focus on family genealogies and their entan-
glements with the political history of Russia and the Soviet Union. The method’s healing
model consists of several consecutive steps, all of which ground these family histories in their
political and historical contexts. Most importantly, the Rodologian road to self-realization
and self-transformation always begins with genealogical research, and the people I met in
the Rodologia center spend a considerable amount of time researching their family histories
and producing elaborate kinship charts (Figure 1).4
In the Rodologian logic, family histories are always implicated in state genealogies. Healing
begins with identifying and graphically displaying historic moments that altered and often
destroyed the lives of one’s ancestors. Although it is safe to assume that the family relations
evaluated in Rodologia sessions are themselves frequently fraught with violence and unequal
power relations (Peletz 2001), rodologists concentrate on the violence inflicted by the state
and its agents. Unlike more conventional forms of therapy that focus on personal relations
and interactions between persons, Rodologia’s healing model grants special importance to
the relationship between the state and its citizens, and to the impact this might have on
behavioral patterns and psychological well-being across generations.
Judging from myriad stories I heard during Rodologia meetings, political violence and its
cataclysmic effects on families and personal lives analyzed in the Rodologia center roughly
correspond to the four generations of family members that have lived through the unsta-
ble history of Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in the 20th century. The recollections of the

138 ETHOS
Figure 1. Kinship Chart in Rodologia.
turbulent years of Stalin’s terror, collectivization campaigns, World War II, and their af-
termath thus play a prominent role in rodologists’ stories and their attempts to make sense
of their lives. These events, driven by political violence and/or clashes with political power,
are prioritized and chosen as an important point of origin from which to begin to rearrange
personal and familial narratives.

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 139
After the problem is articulated (e.g., Lena’s marital stress), important life events in the past
are identified (World War II and gulag), the relationships between one’s family members
and the state are recognized (repression and death), and the link between present problems
and family history is clarified (association between happiness and death), participants are
offered a variety of exercises aimed at self-transformation and are encouraged to do two
mental exercises. First, because in Rodologia life experiences of ancestors are both the origin
of one’s personal problems and the resource with which to solve them, participants are
asked to turn to what they call the power of one’s kin (sila roda). “Look for what is in your
chart,” I was told again and again. “You can always use the power of your kinship to solve
your problems.” Second, when considering the relationship between family narratives and
personal problems, rodologists focus on changes in the political order. As will become clear
from the following ethnographic examples, they train themselves to distinguish between the
Soviet state that inflicted violence on their families and the current post-Soviet order with
its different political priorities.
This article situates what might seem like an odd combination of unsubstantiated scientific
facts and psychological platitudes in a context that renders meaningful the Rodologian tech-
nique of placing narratives of self-transformation on a genealogical grid. Here, therapeutic
interpretations of political repressions in the family past turn the intersection of political
power and the self into a psychological-behavioral category through which answers to ques-
tions such as “Who do I think I am?” and “What are my relations with the past and the
present of my country?” can be tackled. Yet, unlike research that conceives of psychological
culture as contributing to the depoliticization of social identities (F¨
uredi 2004), I suggest
that the Rodologian psychologization of the past clears a space for the repoliticization of
relations between the state and its citizens.
I argue that in the Rodologian process of “self-realization,” family genealogies become
artifacts that provide opportunities to construct new orientations to the Soviet past and to
the current political order. Memory, the method’s main tool, is the axis of the therapeutic
culture, since arguably, any narrative of self-realization and liberation is built upon a narrative
of memory (Illouz 2008:182). However, Rodologia diverges from other forms of therapy
emerging in post-Soviet Russia in its genealogical thrust. Rodologists use kinship as an
idiom with which to articulate the impact of the Soviet past on post-Soviet citizens. They
politicize their current psychological well-being by grounding it in the historical context
of past political violence. Highlighting the relevance of past political legacies, followers
historicize their personal dilemmas and articulate their relations to their past and present.
Yet, as I will show in the article, while the psychologization of the past opens a space for
critical negotiations of Soviet state violence, the self-help concepts of self-reliance and self-
sufficiency, characteristic of self-help culture, tend to tame possible dissatisfactions with the
current political regime and to attach positive value to the current political agendas.
In Rodologia, self-transformation—the ultimate goal of the healing process—is not con-
fined to relations with family members. A successful self-transformation entails articulating
and altering one’s position vis-`
a-vis the state, thus bringing one’s interactions with the state

140 ETHOS
to the forefront of the healing process. Embedding one’s relationship with the state into
kinship charts and family stories is a creative response to the emerging and newly estab-
lished relationships between people and political institutions in postsocialist societies. The
genealogical imagination involved in this reckoning with historical state violence sheds light
on the cultural process that make kinship and family into a major idiom for articulating
changing political dynamics (Franklin and Mckinnon 2001), as well as personal and political
identities in post-Soviet Russia.
Popular genealogy as a modern cultural form of care for the self and/or care for others is
agrowingareaofstudyamonganthropologistsofEuropeandNorthernAmerica(Cannell
2011; Carsten 2007; Edwards 2009; Empson 2007; Howell 2009; Legrand 2009; Nash 2008;
Segalen 2001).5Scholars interested in amateur genealogical research typically conceive of
political structures and the state as contexts against which or despite which people recon-
struct their familial histories and rearrange their relationships with the living and the dead.
Genealogy as a hobby is often seen as a symbolic strategy through which people retreat
from the gaze of the state and celebrate their origins in private (Segalen 2001). In her
ethnographic account of amateur genealogists from East Anglia, Cannell (2011) argues that
amateur genealogy has become a moral and a cultural space in which the English revive their
ancestors, bringing back the dead to be part of a shared social life. Although wider political
contexts play a leading role in popular genealogical activities (see for example Carsten 2007;
Empson 2007), the framework through which genealogical narratives are presented in these
ethnographic accounts is exclusively cultural—that is, while political developments may fuel
family trajectories, the links between different generations of families evolve despite and
against these political contexts.
Yet, it is my argument that Rodologia—a particular form of a postsocialist genealogical
pursuit—uses kinship and family narratives to learn about the self through and not against
or despite relations with the state. Beyond using political disruptions and violence as a point
from which to begin rearranging personal and familial histories, in Rodologia—because of
its special emphasis on the embeddedness of familial trajectories in particular historical and
political circumstances—the political power of the Soviet state becomes a category of kinship
structure, inserted graphically into the chart. Self-knowledge, or, as the psychological logic
of Rodologia would have it, self-transformation, is not achieved solely by situating oneself
vis-`
a-vis other living or dead relatives. One must also position oneself in relation to state
genealogies and political power.
To illustrate these dynamics, I introduce the therapeutic and genealogical logics of Rodolo-
gia with a series of ethnographic examples in which different forms of political violence
and shifting moral orientation towards political institutions—both in the past and in
the present—were invoked by the narrators of family histories. The common thread is
that the evocations of the past were always linked to the narrators’ experiences of political
power in the present. Thus, I suggest that embodied and emotionally charged experiences
of the past serve as a means to not simply organize the past but also—and perhaps more
importantly—to constitute and articulate one’s proper relationship to state power in the
present. Rodologia numbers but few adepts, but its logic reflects emerging cultural ideas

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 141
about the Soviet past and appropriate relations between the state and its citizens. The histori-
cization of personal problems is part and parcel of a growing social concern over conflicting
understandings of the Soviet past and normative relations between the state and its citizens
in the present.
Remembering State Violence
In order to demonstrate how the cultural logic of Rodologia contributes to the political
negotiations of memory and power in contemporary Russia, I shall now sketch the ideological
context in which rodologists try to make sense of their family genealogies. The stories
told in Rodologia meetings were grounded in a particular normative understanding of
historical circumstances informed by the current ideological climate in Russia. Beginning
with perestroika, the history of the Soviet terror became a ubiquitous topic of discussion
in the media and in a variety of public settings. Identifying perpetrators responsible for the
millions of dead, disappeared, and displaced during Stalin’s terror continued to be a national
pastime following the dissolution of the Soviet Union. However, over the last decade, public
discussions of various Soviet policies (e.g., The Red Army campaigns during World War
II or Stalin’s population campaigns during the 1940s) have become less popular, and their
public criticisms more controversial.
In this fresh political environment, the new history textbooks for high school students
minimize the role of terror in Stalin’s leadership (Alekhina 2013), and in an interview,
Vladimir Putin praises Stalin as an undeniable winner over the Nazis in World War II
(Milshtein 2003; Rudensky 2002). In 2009, President Medvedev signed a decree setting
up a Presidential Committee, whose role was to monitor attempts to falsify history to
“the detriment of Russia’s interests” (RF Sozdaet Komissiiu 2009).6The committee was
dismantled in 2012, but proposals to criminalize critical historical accounts continue to
emerge. Since 2009, different groups of federal senators and Duma members proposed
bills limiting the public’s freedom to criticize actions undertaken by the Red Army and other
coalition armies during World War II (Kozlov 2013; Subbotina 2013). A recent bill proposal
was prompted by a criticism expressed by oppositionist politician Leonid Gоzman, who
publicly compared the Soviet SMERSH (Stalin’s counterintelligence squads that operated
within the Red Army during World War II) with the Nazi Gestapo. As a response to this
public criticism, a group of Duma members under the leadership of Irina Yarovaya, proposed
a bill that is supposed “to protect the Soviet warrior from being undeservingly slandered
and Soviet history from being mistakenly rewritten” (Gortinskaya 2013, see also Rozhkova
2013). In April 2014, following a rapidly developing crisis in Ukraine, the Lower House
of Duma urgently passed the bill “criminalizing rehabilitation of Nazism.” Among other
things, it provides up to five years in prison for distributing “false information about the
actions of Russia and its allies during World War II” (“Duma passes bill” 2014). Although
using an explicit anti-Nazism rhetoric, the bill makes it illegal to criticize any action of
Stalin’s government, such as Stalin’s problematic treaty with Nazi Germany or the transfer
of peoples during the war (Svanidze 2013). Along with these legislative initiatives, public
commemorations of Soviet atrocities have been marginalized and stigmatized by the state
elites as an unpatriotic ideology aimed at destroying the national unity of the new state.

142 ETHOS
Therefore, organizations and memorials commemorating the victims of Soviet political
violence, such as Memorial and Perm-36, have been under attack in Putin’s campaign for
national mobilization (Merkacheva 2014). The unresolved nature of the Soviet past plays
an important role in Putin’s campaign for national unity. Thus, the president ordered the
government to urgently complete a long-term project of a unified history textbook for high
school students. The textbook, Putin said, “should not have internal contradictions and
double meanings” (Putin 2013; Samokhina 2013).
The memory of state violence during Stalin’s era, although minimized by the elites, continues
to penetrate the present (Etkind 2013; Oushakine 2010).7Popular recollections of the past
respond to these ideological changes by adopting and reconfiguring official expectations
(Miller 2009; Trubina 2010). A comparison of the Rodologian approach to the past with
another ethnographic example from an earlier post-Soviet period illustrates this ideological
shift. Galina Lindquist’s ethnography of alternative healers and magicians in the post-
Soviet Moscow of the 1990s documents a phenomenon similar to ours. There too, these
practitioners invoked the Soviet past to make sense of their patients’ personal predicaments
in the present. The “kinship curse” (rodovoe prokliatie), Lindquist writes, was a diagnosis
provided by healers and magicians to explain difficult cases that they deemed beyond repair.
In Lindquist’s ethnography, as in Rodologia, the Great Terror of the 1930s and the turbulent
Soviet history were fingered as the bedrock of current somatic and psychological afflictions.
An important difference between the two, however, points to new post-Soviet practices
of remembrance emerging over the last 10 to 15 years. In Lindquist’s “kinship curse,” the
immoral act of a specific ancestor would bring the curse. For instance, someone’s grandfather
might have been a KGB officer complicit in Stalin’s purges. He might then have been cursed
by his victims, with the curse transmitted from one generation to the next in order to
eliminate one’s sinful kinship line (2005:60–62).
Rodologia, by way of contrast, never places into question family members’ morality, and tales
of perpetrators are rarely raised. Rodologists identify their forebears as victims. Contrary
to the ascription of guilt in Lindquist’s examples, morality or lack thereof is attributed to
the political system itself, and afflictions are caused by political power alone. In an entire
year of fieldwork, I was told only one story about a perpetrator. Sergey’s grandfather on his
mother’s side was a high-ranking KGB officer during the worst years of Stalin’s terror. After
identifying Sergey’s problem and explaining to him how it had been transmitted through
his genes, Sergey was encouraged to locate a source of power in his family history. Among
other things, the moderator advised Sergey to look for “kinship power” (sila roda)inhis
grandfather’s story. Setting aside the violent historical context of Sergey’s grandfather’s life,
the evaluation went as follows: the grandfather’s KGB position indicated that he possessed
strong leadership skills. Sergey would do well to leverage these strengths toward success.
Oleg: the Rodologian Healing Model
The basic Rodologian model of healing can be observed by considering Oleg, a young,
aspiring businessman who attended a Rodologia seminar called “Kinship and Business”

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 143
Figure 2. Kinship Chart of Oleg, born 1969.
(Rodstvo i Biznes). This example demonstrates how the rules guiding the method’s therapeutic
process systematize recollections of the Soviet past, as well as organize the relationship with
and towards the state in the present. One of the most popular Rodologian exercises is
called “the burning chair” (goriachii stul). “The burning chair” is effectively an individual
consultation open to audience participation. The participant under scrutiny is called to sit
before the audience and is asked to articulate her or his particular concern. Oleg stepped
forward as a volunteer in one such exercise. He explained that he had come to the seminar
because despite his considerable talent, effort, and motivation, his business was failing.
Distraught, Oleg decided to resolve the problem through Rodologia, which he had heard
about from his maternal uncle. After helping Oleg verbalize his dilemma in therapeutic terms,
the seminar leader and founder of Rodologia, Larisa Dokuchaeva, asked him to share with the
group his kinship chart, which he had prepared in advance (Figure 2). Visibly embarrassed by
his solicited confession, Oleg opened a large poster with carefully sketched circles and squares
depicting at least four generations of his family. Oleg’s family tree resembled a kinship chart

144 ETHOS
from a classic anthropology textbook, except for the black rectangles placed next to certain
generations of his relatives. As I learned early on in my year of fieldwork, these rectangles
indicate particularly dramatic social and political events under which these generations
lived and died. In Oleg’s kinship chart, black rectangles denoted The Bolshevik Revolution
and World War II next to his paternal line of descent and the Soviet collectivization and
deportation campaigns next to his maternal grandparents.
Pointing to the black rectangles on Oleg’s chart, Larisa helped Oleg identify the origins
of his predicament. She spoke of his maternal grandfather, whom Oleg barely remembered
as he died when Oleg was very young. Prior to the Bolshevik revolution, this man was a
relatively affluent farmer in one of the Southern Russian provinces. After Stalin collectivized
the peasantry in 1928, Oleg’s grandfather, similar to many other Russian peasants, was
designated a kulak—his farm was seized by the Soviets, and he was deported to Siberia.
His wife died during the famine that followed the collectivization campaign, and he lived
in poverty for the rest of his miserable life in Siberia. This event, Larisa explained to Oleg
and to the audience, left a “scar” (shram) on the grandfather’s genes, which he then passed
on to Oleg. Moving into behavioral language, Larisa said that along with the genes, Oleg
had inherited from his grandfather an unconscious formula—“success in business leads to
deportation, poverty, and death of the loved ones.” Larisa’s final “diagnosis,” supported by
the eager participants, was that Oleg had an unconscious fear of success because he believes
that he and people close to him might be punished for his success in business.
Oleg’s story is by no means unusual. His narrative could have been told by many seminar par-
ticipants. After all, millions of people were displaced during the collectivization campaign
or affected by other forms of political violence during the first half of the 20th century.
These contingent events—the Bolshevik Revolution, collectivization campaigns, and World
War II, or rather the Great Patriotic War in the Soviet and post-Soviet parlance—are what
scholars of memory call “temporal landmarks” that structure personal narratives (Halbwachs
1992). Known to each and every participant in the room, these temporal landmarks and their
historically situated interpretations both oriented Oleg’s personal narrative and make it in-
telligible to the others (Birth 2006; Cole 2006). Yet, despite the similarities of the narratives,
rodologists insist on the unique quality of each story. In this process of individualization of
shared history, political violence becomes an intimate part of family genealogy. Followers
focus on Soviet political genealogies as implicated in their own family history, and they
believe that only by articulating the role of political violence in the lives of one’s ancestors
can individuals transform the inherited behavioral patterns responsible for their present
predicaments.
The Rodologian healing process consists of two opposing yet complementary moves. First,
Oleg was asked to identify with his grandparents: after all, his behavioral patterns—he was
repeatedly told—originated in his grandparents’ life experiences. Using a graphic display of
his relatedness, Oleg was encouraged to sympathize with the dead. Similarly to the perfor-
mance exercises at the Russian Academy for Theatrical Arts, described by Lemon (2009), in
which credibly depicting a character from a different historical context relied on students’

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 145
training in sympathy (simpatiia)andcompassion(sostrodanie), the “burning chair” enabled
Oleg to learn about himself through learning about his relatives. This included Oleg’s de-
tailed account of his grandfather’s journey to Siberia and the recounting of the historical and
political circumstances under which he lived and worked. Thus, Oleg’s narrative about his
grandfather’s life after he was sent to Siberia was made sensible to the rest of the audience
through introducing both physical and emotional evidence of his “miserable life” (neschast-
naia zhizn’). Oleg described his grandfather’s house in a Siberian village as “ramshackle”
(shatkii), his mood as “crotchety” (razdrazhitel’nii), and his relationship with his children
as “awful” (uzhasnii). It is through these identification exercises and by acknowledging the
powerful presence of the past in the present that rodologists learn to organize their relation
to the political past and to make sense of its presence in their lives.
After conceding the hardships of his ancestor, Oleg was offered a second course of action,
which involved mentally distinguishing himself and his life from that of his grandfather. The
context in which both Oleg and his grandfather interacted with the state received special
attention. Oleg was reminded by a moderator and other participants:
Your grandfather lived in a particular historical period with its own specific historical
circumstances (istoricheskie obstoiatel’stva). He did what he did because he clashed with
the hostile political power. You live in a different society, in which the state does not
punish for success in business. Therefore, you need to learn to distinguish between
different circumstances, but embrace the business acumen that has been passed down
to you.
In the process of genealogically reconstructing Oleg’s family history as affected by the
turbulent history of Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia in the 20th century, the rodologists
were also negotiating changing ideas about the nature of political order in post-Soviet
Russia. The political and social contexts of Oleg’s and his grandfather’s respective lives once
again turned out to be crucial for the therapeutic work at hand. In order to convince Oleg
to separate his life-course from that of his grandfather, Larisa punctuated another “tem-
poral landmark”—the dramatic changes in the political order occurred in Russia following
the dissolution of the Soviet Union. “It is important to know the context in which your
grandparents lived,” Larisa told him. But it is also important to root oneself in one’s precise
contemporary historical circumstances (istoricheskie obstoiatel’stva). The entrepreneurial skills
as well as the ethos of self-sufficiency that made Oleg’s grandfather’s life wretched in the
Soviet past are highly appreciated in the current historical circumstances, Oleg was urged.
These can bring success and prosperity.
The continuity of behavioral patterns between Oleg and his ancestors does not imply con-
tinuity in political and social circumstances of different periods. Unlike other forms of
therapy that conceive of the human psyche as apolitical, for rodologists, the political order
(both past and present) becomes the critical point of reference in the process of acquiring
knowledge about oneself and in the therapeutic process of transforming oneself. The pivotal
dyad between the state and the self becomes a focal point through which participants are

146 ETHOS
encouraged to construct their moral orientation in relation to the Soviet state, their new
post-Soviet state, and the future of its political power.
Oleg’s path to self-transformation lays in his ability to consider his and his relatives’ identity
in relation to the past of the Soviet state. It also involves repositioning himself in relation
to the current political and historical circumstances. In this process, Oleg was asked to con-
sciously entrench himself in the current political context which, he was assured, is favorable
to the set of entrepreneurial skills for which his ancestors were brutally punished. The violent
political power of the Soviet state implicated in Oleg’s family histories becomes a means to
answer the question of: “Who do I think I am?” This in turn leads us to another question:
“What is my relationship to different forms of political power?” The genealogical continuity
of Oleg’s self does not necessarily imply continuity in the form of political power, and yet
caring for oneself also means constructing affinity and effective relations with the political
circumstances under which to do so.
Rodologia and the Post-Soviet Therapeutic Culture
Rodologia is part of the thriving post-Soviet therapeutic market. Psychological and self-help
programs (Matza 2012; Mazzarino 2010; Salmenniemi and Vorona 2014), natal healthcare
ideologies (Leykin 2011; Rivkin-Fish 2004), spiritual healing practices (Lindquist 2005), tele-
vision talk shows built around psychological expertise (Lerner 2011; Lerner and Zbenovich
2013; Matza 2009), addiction treatments (Raikhel 2010), and semisecular drug rehabilitation
programs (Zigon 2010, 2011) have become major sites for emerging post-Soviet practices
of self-fashioning. Rodologia and other therapeutic forms flourishing in post-Soviet Rus-
sia share what sociologist Eva Illouz (2008) calls a common emotional style that provides
social actors with language and metaphors for framing and shaping their relationships to
themselves and with others (Illouz 2008).
The emerging self-help market in Russia is driven by a therapeutic discourse associated
with neoliberal reforms and founded on the ideas of self-realization, self-sufficiency, and
personal authenticity achieved by autonomous subjects (F ¨
uredi 2004; Illouz 2008; Rose 1996,
2006). These idioms of self-reliance, self-esteem, and personal growth have long become
an internationally recognized toolkit for managing the self in most countries with advanced
capitalist economies (Gordo and De Vos 2010; Illouz 2008:241; McLaughlin 2010). The
current ubiquity of these labels has been variously accomplished by appropriating therapeutic
language into the political lexicon (Carr 2011; Rose 1996), by naturalizing human desire as
competitive and self-serving (Illouz 2008), by cultivating a sense of the vulnerability of the
modern self (F¨
uredi 2004; McLaughlin 2010), by naturalizing normative gender roles (Lutz
1990), and by producing neoliberal subjects through turning the self into the subject of
governance (Rose 2006; Yang 2013).
In Russia, similarly to their Western counterparts, the therapeutic idioms of self-reliance
and self-sufficiency have become important signifiers that shape the ways people understand

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 147
themselves and their relationships with others (Matza 2009, 2012). Yet, cultural homoge-
nization is not the inevitable result of the flow of Western therapeutic practices to different
cultural settings. Clashes spring up, as people try to reconcile the imported ideas with their
own historically rooted understandings of self. For instance, the Japanese turned on its head
the borrowed American concept of “codependency.” Unlike in the American case, where
codependency is considered a sign of maladjustment, within Japanese society, codependency
in women is conceived of as culturally normative (Borovoy 2005). To understand this dis-
juncture, it is important to consider how a particular therapeutic practice is woven into the
local social fabric and intertwined with the local national ideologies.
For the purposes of this article, I am interested in the capacity of the therapeutic discourse
to be translated and refracted in different cultural contexts. Eva Illouz (2008) argues that
what makes the therapeutic discourse a potent cultural resource with which to formulate the
self and social relations is its ability to combine old and new cultural forms. This recom-
binational capacity turns the therapeutic culture into a guideline as individuals struggle to
redefine their relations to themselves and others. In the Russian context, as anthropologist
of Russian popular culture Julia Lerner (2011) demonstrates, the newly imported thera-
peutic discourse both draws upon and superimposes on existing cultural articulations of
subjectivities and self. Thus, the Soviet cultural forms and concepts of character (kharakter),
personality (lichnost), and consciousness (soznanie) intersect with imported psychotherapeutic
concepts and provide novel and unexpected ways of relating to oneself and others (Lerner
2011, see also Lerner and Zbenovich 2013; Matza 2009; Rivkin-Fish 2004). Post-Soviet
consumers of self-help technologies make sense of the new normative models of self and
personhood through existing cultural frameworks. Using these cultural frameworks, they
often criticize a universalizing orientation of the imported self-help methods and their “how
to do” tendencies (Salmenniemi and Vorona 2014).
Rodologia attracts many of its participants through self-help seminars available to a pub-
lic eager to invest in its personal growth and development. For instance, Nina, who first
introduced me to the method, told me that following the birth of her son, she grew pro-
gressively interested in the process of self-realization (samorealizatsii) and in helping others
to transform their lives. When a friend told her about Rodologia, she decided to give it a
try. Although trained as an accountant, by the end of her maternity leave Nina had quit her
job and had begun working at the family center, devoting most of her time to Rodologia
consultations of different sorts.
Similar to other forms of self-help enterprises in post-Soviet Russia, women constitute
the bulk of Rodologia followers. Throughout the year, I met only five men interested in
Rodologia, although two of them were diligent participants in almost all the activities.
Women are enthusiastic consumers of popular psychology, and many self-help enterprises
are explicitly targeted to a female audience (Salmenniemi and Adamson 2014). But there is
more to the gendered character of Rodologia’s discourse. Female rodologists often reflect
on its uneven gender division by claiming an exclusive responsibility for making sense of the
afflictions caused by the past. For example, Olesia, a young journalist born in the wake of

148 ETHOS
the collapse of the Soviet Union, told me that beyond being a psychological tool to achieve
personal transformation, Rodologia was for her an instrument with which to help men to
recover from their Soviet past:
My first thoughts were not about myself . . . I thought about how men have been infan-
tilized by the state because of the violent history of the 20th century with its wars and
repressions. This history produced women who had one mission in life—to hide men
behind their skirts in order to protect them. I thought to myself: we need to change this
mission, we need to make men powerful again and to reaffirm our trust in them.
In Olesia’s view, the burden of making sense of the past is strongly gendered. While the
atrocities are clearly associated with the masculine nature of the state, which, paradoxically,
infantilized men, it is women’s responsibility to reconcile with the past in order to reaffirm
men’s role in the present.
The socialist model of female emancipation has been critiqued throughout the postsocialist
world (Ghodsee 2004). This has led to the rise of traditionalist notions of gender as a way
to deal with the Soviet past (Salmenniemi and Adamson 2014). Echoing this conservative
discourse currently popular in Russia, Olesia implied that the Soviet state destroyed a nor-
mative gender balance by making women more powerful than men. Ironically, and in a
manner that reproduces the language of socialist emancipation, Olesia believes that women
should once again step forward and take upon themselves a national mission of restoring a
normative gender balance.
The school of Rodologia operating at Nina’s family center was founded in the mid-1990s by
Larisa and Valery Dokuchaev. Throughout the year, the Dokuchaevs taught me and other
participants to apply Rodologia’s insights about the inescapable presence of the past in the
present in a variety of individual and group meetings dedicated to themes characteristic of
a larger self-help entrepreneurial culture in Russia: “The Power of Kinship,” “Money and
Kinship,” “Men and Women,” “Business and Kinship,” to name just a few.
The Dokuchaevs became interested in psychotherapy in the 1990s, when the self-help market
in Russia began to generate steam. Once a Soviet schoolteacher and a physicist, Larisa and
Valery are charismatic people in their late fifties. They have been together since their early
twenties and have four grown children (two of whom are adopted). Both graduates of Ural
State University with wide interests in philosophy, literature, and only later in psychology,
the Dokuchaevs project wit and intelligence. Preserving the image of a secluded scientist,
Valery is the quieter partner, while Larisa is usually the one who gives public interviews,
participates in TV programs, or represents their organization at public events. Valery writes
books that are then made available for purchase on their website.8Applying their developed
entrepreneurial spirit, they proudly refer to their enterprise as “international,” in that they
also work with groups outside of Russia. Bordering Kazakhstan, with its massive Russian-
speaking population and several places in Ukraine, both former Soviet republics and now
independent nation-states, have turned out to be amenable to Rodologian notions. Once a

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 149
year, usually during the summer months, participants and consultants from different parts
of the country have an opportunity to meet at the International Festival of Rodologia where
they recount the different ways in which the method transformed their lives or the lives of
those close to them.
In addition, Larisa is the chair of the regional nongovernmental foundation “The 21st
Century’s Family,” and a member of the public chamber of the regional parliament—an
institution aimed at representing civil society under the current political regime. Working at
the city administration, she began acquiring her political capital during the late socialist pe-
riod. In 1999, she ran for the state parliament (Duma) as the representative of the “Women’s
Movement of Russia,” a liberal women’s social movement, but did not acquire enough votes
to participate in national legislative politics. After yet another unsuccessful run, she decided
to form a nongovernmental organization, which was registered as a foundation in 2001.
Larisa’s position within a wide network of political power—both regional and national (she
has long been a member of the national committee on family policies in Duma)—made her
a key figure in the process of introducing psychology and therapeutic discourse into the
sphere of government. Thus, in almost every public event dedicated to questions of social
welfare that I attended during my fieldwork, Larisa herself or one of her colleagues from
the Rodologia center or her foundation was asked to reflect publically on the psychological
state of the country and its effects on the country’s demographic, economic, and political
development.9
The Dokuchaevs told me with pride that they were trained by an American psychologist,
physicist, and one of the ideologists of universal consciousness, Champion K. Teutsch. Once
apopular“success”consultantintheUnitedStatesandthecoauthorofFrom Here to Greater
Happiness (1975), Teutsch, at the age of 72, found Russia to be fertile ground for his theory of
“psychogenetics.” Rodologia, similar to psychogenetics, is based on the premise that every
problem has a genetic etiology, and in order to solve it, one must first unearth these roots.
This is how Larisa explained the difference between the two methods:
What Teutsch and his wife were interested in, mostly, is how inherited behavioral
patterns affect individuals. We put more emphasis on kinship ties (rodstvennie svyazi)than
on individuals. Teutsch is a representative of a Western culture, which, as you know,
prioritizes individuals. We are concerned not with a particular person but rather with
kinship as a system. Our interest lies in a larger system of relations, we are both interested
in what effects our ancestors might have on us today but also, no less important, on how
these ancestors might affect our own descendants.
Quite consciously, the Dokuchaevs translated what they learned from Teutsch into a dif-
ferent cultural context, using individualism as a distinguishing marker that renders Western
culture different from their own (cf. Salmenniemi and Adamson 2014:8). They made the
embeddedness of an individual in a larger kin system their distinctive trademark.
Although Rodologia is clearly informed by the imported ideologies of self-help and New
Age, local cultural forms and scientific concepts affect how these ideologies have been

150 ETHOS
translated and adopted into local technologies of self. Thus, Rodologia emphasizes the
power of sociopolitical forces to constitute, shape, and alter people’s lives and identities,
which differentiates it from other imported therapeutic practices. This concept of self as
being constituted by political and historical forces echoes the peculiarly Soviet take on the
discipline of psychology.
While adepts of Freudian psychology referred to the human psyche as a universal and
relatively autonomous entity, Soviet theoreticians insisted on a different approach to the
self. First, they argued for the material basis of any psychological activity (McLeish 1975).
While initially Soviet leaders (most notably Leon Trotsky) embraced psychoanalysis in their
mission to create a New Soviet Man, during Stalin’s regime this therapeutic practice was
replaced by pedagogical principles that rejected the idea of the unconscious (Etkind 1993,
1996; McLeish 1975). Similar to these legacies, Rodologia is based on a behavioral model of
self.
Second, Soviet psychologists believed that the human psyche is inherently malleable, an
object that through deliberate efforts and under new social principles could be easily re-
constructed (Etkind 1996). In Rodologia, as the ethnographic examples illustrate, a par-
ticular social and political context dictates one’s behavior and psychological well-being.
Self-transformation requires the recognition of the social and political contexts under which
they and their forebears lived and worked. Such an understanding, as Oleg’s case makes
clear, allows for more effective interaction with political power.
Finally, although biological determinism was officially repudiated by Soviet psychology, in
reality it coexisted with a widespread acceptance of a neo-Lamarckian theory of acquired
characteristics (Beer 2008:201). This theory was particularly popular in the Soviet Union
during the 1940s and 1950s, following Trofim Lysenko’s ascendance to scientific and political
power.10 Rodologia’s model of genetic transmission is based on similar ideas that draw special
attention to the social environment in which behavioral patterns are acquired.
Rodologia: Post-Soviet Popular Genealogy
Aside from being part of a growing therapeutic culture, the Dokuchaevs’ emphasis on
broader family relations firmly grounds Rodologia in genealogical imagination. Genealog-
ical imagination indexes a particular way of thinking—shared by both European cultural
metaphors and modern science—in which individuals are imagined as integrated people that
both have unique identities and are connected to others through knowledge, that is, cate-
gories of kinship (Bouquet 1996; Nash 2008; Segalen 2001; Strathern 1992:17, 2005:43–46;
Zerubavel 2012).11 Unlike other forms of self-help and new-age technologies circulating
in Russia that are aimed at creating autonomous subjects (Matza 2009, 2012), Rodologia
imagines identities as integrated in a complex web of relations. Therefore, prerequisite to
any Rodologia session is the reconstruction, however fragmented and selective, of family
histories.

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 151
Interest in creating detailed kinship charts and conducting genealogical research among the
living and the dead looms large among participants. At nearly every meeting I attended, at
least one individual would tell a story, eyes welling up, about how her interest in Rodologia
brought her to a long-lost relative whom she either did not even know existed or whom
she believed to be already deceased. Building and analyzing their kinship charts and looking
for family connections, participants key in on their ancestors’ interactions with state power,
trace dramatic moments in their family histories, and identify particular historical events and
state policies responsible for these dramatic events (e.g., a collectivization campaign that led
to displacement or imprisonment). Only by reconnecting with one’s own past, according to
this discourse, can one begin to tackle current psychological pain.
In the Soviet Union, as rodologists are wont to note, genealogy was far from a popular
hobby. In different periods throughout the history of the Soviet Union, family origins might
have had serious repercussions for individual freedom. I heard numerous stories about a lone
surviving picture of a great-grandfather in a Russian Imperial Army officer uniform during
the Great War that was kept despite all the dangers it entailed: at certain times, being an
officer in the imperial army almost automatically meant being an enemy. A common lament
was the failed project of gleaning personal information from the surviving generations, as
older family members flatly refused to participate in the recollection of the past. Popular
culture in the Soviet period ridiculed the ascription of personal deficiency and malaise to past
history. In the well-received play and film “A Commonplace Miracle,” written by Evgenii
Shwartz, a despotic king of an imaginary kingdom justifies his despicable behavior, uttering:
“I am not at fault. My ancestors are. Great-grandmothers, great aunts and uncles, forefathers,
foremothers, yes. They are at fault. They behaved like pigs during their lifetime but I am
the one who is paying for it” (Zakharov 1978). Clearly satirical, this monologue placed into
sharp relief the abandonment of personal and political responsibilities via the family history
“blame game.”
While genealogy as a hobby was not popular in the Soviet Union, people in the Soviet
Union were quite preoccupied with their origins and with reconstructing their genealogies.
Paradoxically, the repressive political system of the early Soviet Union wound up training
its new Soviet citizens in self-expression. A large corpus of historical evidence confirms that
following the Bolshevik revolution, Soviet citizens were actively engaged in an autobio-
graphical process in which they reconstructed their family histories and their eschatological
trajectories of becoming communists (Halfin 2003; Hellbeck 2006). Yet, when put on a
genealogical grid, the historical imagination involved in these reconstructions of personal
histories differed from the ones I observed in Rodologian sessions. Rodologian family trees
feature a central individual ego from which multiple branches extend, whereas the Soviets
reconstructed the past around a particular communist genealogy (Marx begat Lenin, Lenin
beget other communists, and so on) (Verdery 1999:117–119, cf. Zerubavel 2012). In such a
genealogical pursuit, the autobiographer’s objective was to demonstrate his or her symbolic
proximity to the party leaders and their philosophy.

152 ETHOS
Situating oneself on a genealogical grid has become an important part of both personal
and collective self-understanding in many postsocialist contexts (Oushakine 2004; Paperno
2002; Verdery 1999). Through creating family histories, people have attributed new mean-
ings to ruptures in social processes, and in the absence of classificatory and evaluative models
provided by the state, genealogical ties acquired the organizational logic essential to the pro-
cess of meaning making (Orlova 2004; Oushakine 2004:10, 2010; Razumova 2004; Savkina
2004). The growing number of amateur genealogical clubs throughout Russia points to
the popularity of genealogical imagination as a form of cultural reasoning (Lokhina n.d.).
Television programs such as the Russian version of the British and American “Who Do You
Think You Are?”(Moia Rodoslovnaia), which literally means “My kinship history,”12 and a
locally produced program “Wait for Me” (Zhdi Menia)13 that attempts to reunite long-lost
family members and relatives are good examples of this phenomenon. Most telling of all
may be a burgeoning interest in the nonfiction biographical and autobiographical genre in
post-Soviet literature, with its inexorable flow of memories and personal accounts of the
Soviet past (Oushakine 2010; Paperno 2002).
Ariana: Searching for Genealogical Community
A fieldwork example may help to illustrate these attempts to situate the Soviet past on a
personal genealogical grid. The particular example accentuates the interrelatedness of family
and state genealogies in the work of memory prompted by Rodologia. During one meeting, I
joined others in their collective attempt to analyze a kinship chart of Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
a well-known and celebrated Russian author who lived in exile in Vermont for many years,
and returned to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. Solzhenitsyn spent more than 10
years in a labor camp after being accused of anti-Soviet propaganda. His novel, One Day in
the Life of Ivan Denisovich,waspublishedintheSovietUnionafterthedeathofStalinand
revealed to the public for the first time the brutal realities of Soviet labor camps. In 1974, after
the political climate in the Soviet Union became more repressive, Solzhenitsyn was stripped
of Soviet citizenship and deported to the West. The author’s The Gulag Archipelago has had a
major impact on the understanding of 20th-century Soviet history, and Solzhenitsyn himself
has long been associated with the Soviet dissident movement. His citizenship was restored
during perestroika, and in 1994 he returned to Russia (Chalenko 2008).
It was a familiar Rodologian exercise. Using a particular set of famous characters, an attempt
was made to sharpen the Rodologian model of reasoning about relations between the past
and the present. Ariana, a young moderator who reconstructed Solzhenitsyn’s kinship chart
using mostly Internet resources, told me that she had chosen the story of Solzhenitsyn, but
she could have also picked Mstislav Rostropovich (a famous cellist who left the Soviet Union
in the 1970s and returned to Russia in the 1990s), his wife, a famous opera singer Galina
Vishnevskaya, Alexander Pushkin (a famous Russian poet from the 19th century), and Boris
Yeltsin (the first president of Russia, a native of Yekaterinburg, and a controversial figure
in today’s political environment). “No one wanted to pick Yeltsin. I don’t know why,” she
mused.

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 153
Ariana began her lecture. Looking at Solzhenitsyn’s meticulously drawn kinship chart, we
learned that the rebellious spirit that had made the author the vanguard of the Soviet
dissident movement could be identified in one of his paternal ancestors, who was the leader
of a 18th-century peasant rebellion and had spent the rest of his life in Siberian exile (much
like Solzhenitsyn himself). Ariana indicated rebellion, confrontations with the state, and
exile on Solzhenitsyn’s kinship chart, and she began to draw links between these events
and Solzhenitsyn’s personal and professional history. When I asked Ariana why she had
picked Solzhenitsyn, she replied by relaying the story of her own family: “My family history
resembles Solzhenitsyn’s story,” she told me. “And I feel this rebellious spirit in me too. I
also had a great-great-grandfather who was very courageous and rebellious, and he achieved
things in life despite the fact that the world was against him most of the time. And it was
also because he had a very supportive family behind him . . . I’m learning to live with this
rebellious spirit and I’m learning to apply it only when it is needed.”
Romanticizing both Solzhenitsyn’s past and that of her own family, Ariana established
Solzhenitsyn and herself as part of the same genealogical community: Ariana first established
a connection between Solzhenitsyn’s family history and her own ancestors, situating them in
roughly the same historical context (her and Solzhenitsyn’s ancestors as fellow rebels). Then,
by presenting one of her ancestors as a historical contemporary of Solzhenitsyn’s paternal
ancestor, she deduced a symbolic proximity not only between her great-great-grandfather
and Solzhenitsyn’s family, but also between herself and Solzhenitsyn (Zerubavel 2012:16–
23). It is this distortion of historical time, allowing for the construction and deconstruction
of genealogical communities, that the genealogical imagination achieves here. By including
certain historical figures and excluding others (Solzhenitsyn in, Yeltsin out), Ariana was
actively involved in the process of reconstructing the genealogical community to which she
herself belongs.
By selectively reconstructing historical narratives and reestablishing the relations between
the living and the dead (Cannell 2011), Ariana did more than just create a kind of genealogical
community of which she and Solzhenitsyn are co-descendants. By creating the contours of
this genealogical community, she also tried to conceptualize an appropriate moral orientation
to the interactions with political power. Rodologia helped her tame her rebellious spirit, and
Solzhenitsyn was a part of this process.
By making Solzhenitsyn and herself co-descendants of the same genealogical community,
Ariana made an attempt to construct a particular kind of a moral person able to identify just
and unjust political power and to stand against injustice. In Ariana’s narration of Solzhen-
itsyn’s story, the writer was not initially opposed to the Soviet regime. However, when the
violence of Stalin’s regime dawned upon him, he could not remain mute. Solzhenitsyn’s
family history made it impossible for him to sit idly by. While noting the effects that par-
ticular historical events had had on her and Solzhenitsyn’s ancestors, Ariana imagined and
articulated a specific virtuous response and a moral orientation one should have facing the
destructive forces of the state and political violence (Lambek 1996, 2007). Ariana’s moral
person does not situate herself entirely outside of political power. It is not about dissent as

154 ETHOS
a virtue, but rather about one’s ability to distinguish between reasonable and unreasonable
political power.
Using the past to reflect on the present, the exercise helped Ariana imagine the current
political context as something that she and other participants should be able to manage
without being “rebellious.” Similar to Oleg who was encouraged to make a distinction
between the Soviet past and the present, Ariana’s genealogical practice aimed at taming
her “rebellious spirit,” because as long as she is able to distinguish between reasonable and
unreasonable state power, she should be able to effectively interact with such power.
Nastya: Self-Transformation through State Genealogy
Within this discourse about normative expectations of how one should relate to power, the
following example illustrates how effective contact with political power might be personally
transformative. Nastya, a woman in her mid-forties, told me that she had been working
with a Rodologia consultant on overcoming the anger toward the state that she had ex-
perienced since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Nastya brought a spirit of debate to
every Rodologia event she attended. She often argued with the moderators, posing difficult
questions and contradicting other participants. Once, when a moderator asked the group to
identify a significant life event and consider our emotional reaction to it, Nastya conveyed
her story: Shortly after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Nastya’s job at a state enterprise
was eliminated, and she lost her eligibility for a state-sponsored apartment: “In the 1990s,
when all hell broke loose, I don’t know what I did wrong. I thought I’d be working at this
place until my retirement and then here we go, my job is no more. I was angry at the state
(gosudarstvo). I don’t know what I did wrong. I didn’t do anything wrong, the state did.”
Sergey, one of the few men I met at the center, interrupted: “We all lost something in
the 1990s. Some people didn’t survive and some did.” Another participant added a general
thought very much in the spirit of Rodologia and other self-help practices: “The way we
react to what happens is what helps us survive or perish.” Nastya seemed dissatisfied with
the idea of resolving her emotional problems by turning inward. She countered: “But it
wasn’t my fault. The state was responsible for that. I resent the state because my life changed
completely after that . . . my plans were destroyed.” The moderator asked: “Who among
your forebears was denied income and opportunity to work?” Nastya thought for a moment:
“Well, my grandmother was stripped of her farm (raskulachena) and deported to Siberia.”
Nearly in unison, she was told: “You see.” Someone offered: “You need to learn to forgive
and go forward.” “To forgive whom? The state?” Nastya asked. “Yes, exactly, stop resenting
it.”14
Nastya’s story prompted a lively discussion about proper emotional responses to political
power. The group did not deny the legitimacy of Nastya’s anger, as she laid it out. Indeed,
emotions have become very important signifiers of meaning for individuals’ interactions with
others (F¨
uredi 2004). Yet, while in the Western therapeutic discourse the focus on emotions
is aimed at guiding interpersonal interactions, Rodologia zeros in on the individual’s ability

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 155
to recognize, reflect on, and take responsibility for the ways in which she addresses power.
As in the Solzhenitsyn example, confronting power in and of itself—in the past as well as
in the present—does not seem to be the source of moral virtue. Genealogical knowledge
fuels the Rodologian quest to situate oneself vis-`
a-vis both Soviet history and changing
political preferences in the present. This practice lies at the core of their successful self-
transformation. Thus, Nastya’s anger was managed by locating within her family history
the deepest source of frustration and disappointment with the state and her taking personal
responsibility for what she termed its structural failure. Her talk about state responsibility
was met with a chorus of voices suggesting that a comprehensive understanding of her
dissatisfaction might transform her perception of the state from enemy to ally.
Nastya seemed to speak nostalgically about the Soviet state, the one that set up life trajectories
for its citizens—after all, it offered her a job after she finished her professional studies, and
she expected to become a lucky recipient of a state-owned apartment. Other participants
pointed out the changing nature of relationships with the post-Soviet state. The conversation
about whether or not Nastya should forgive the state, built around changing ideas on
obligation and responsibility, exposed the contradiction between the normative therapeutic
discourse of self-reliance and autonomy and Nastya’s actual relationship with a state that
betrayed her trust. Through Rodologia, Nastya reconstructed her personal and familial
history, reconciling the therapeutic discourse about the relationship between the self and
the state and the actual experience of this relationship. The conversation also laid bare
changing ideas about a proper orientation toward interactions with the state. It appears that
in post-Soviet Russia, citizens would do well to relate to the state as an Other, with whom
they would negotiate their own interests. Reorganizing experiences of social transformations,
the therapeutic language of Rodologia valorizes the ability to identify, take responsibility
for, and manage emotional responses to political change. In this discourse, genealogy and
family history are seen as the primary site for locating pathologies and transforming the self.
Conclusion
Rodologia is a particular form of social analysis projected onto biology. Although the model
borrows much of its general language from the imported Western ideologies of self-help,
New Age, and psychotherapy, it adopts the cultural idioms of genealogy that emerge from
a different, more sociological understanding of self and Other. In Rodologia, genealogy
is imagined as a psychotherapeutic instrument, something that can potentially lead people
forward in their search for better lives and “self-realization.” It projects this genealogical
imagination onto the individualized (and in this case biologized) logic of psychology and
offers a type of social analysis of political power.
Rodologian notions of the self as carved out by social and historical forces echo the local
traditions of psychology developed in the Soviet Union. Legitimating its validity using
scientific justifications of psychogenetics and behavioral psychology, the bio-psychological
model of Rodologia locates the material basis of the self and insists on the individual’s
embeddedness in her historical and social conditions.15 Kinship charts and family histories

156 ETHOS
are used as a resource for identifying social forces that shape people’s lives and bodies. In
this enterprise, therapeutic work on the self is a necessary step toward understanding and
apprehending these social forces. The ultimate goal is transformation of one’s nature.16
Social scientists have written extensively on the centrality of the therapeutic culture in
modern societies. Although therapeutic discourse is generally considered the quintessential
product of modernity, individual researchers have honed in on different aspects of its insti-
tutionalization. Many argue that the therapeutic culture leads to a disruption and fragmen-
tation of social relations (F¨
uredi 2004; McLaughlin 2010). Others stress its positive power to
constitute social relations and to generate new cultural forms (Illouz 2008). Nicholas Rose
contends that psychology “has been bound up with the entry of the soul of the citizen into
the sphere of government” (1996:77) and that in modern Western societies, therapeutic
terms figure prominently into the political vocabularies of advanced liberal democracies
(Rose 2006). Nonetheless, there is across-the-board agreement that autonomy of the self
constitutes the crux of this discourse. The ethics of the autonomous self is perceived as an
ideal and one of the major organizing principles of modern life. As such, the therapeutic
discourse is thought to produce moral codes that shape and orient the autonomous self.
Rodologia offers an interesting variation on the liberal assumption of a free and autonomous
self. Instead of arguing for the homogenizing nature of the therapeutic discourse, the method
challenges the assumption of autonomy behind the modern self and encourages its followers
to move outwards first and search for answers outside the self, not only in one’s family histo-
ries but also in the effects historical developments might have had on these histories. In other
words, Rodologia sees the autonomous self as a fiction that it tries to dismantle. To para-
phrase Nina, my first Rodologia teacher, we only think that we can be independent of our ge-
nealogical trajectories. In reality, we carry within ourselves the experiences of our forebears.
There were two lines of argument in this article. First, I argued that Rodologia serves as
a cultural vehicle with which its followers attempt to evoke and organize their relations to
past political violence. Scholars concerned with the Soviet terror highlight the unique and
unresolved nature of post-Soviet memory. Although the post-Soviet state is often considered
to be the main body in charge of the post-Soviet collective memory (Wertsch 2002, 2008),
this article suggested that rodologists identify the intimate links between violent political
histories and their own personal narratives as an alternative frame of recollection. Given the
unresolved nature of post-Soviet memory, Rodologia, with its emotionally charged memories
of the personal past as related to the country’s history, allows the participants to reflect upon
different and at times contradictory historical narratives circulating in contemporary Russia.
It is through these personal recollections informed by new cultural forms of reasoning that
the history of the Soviet past lives in the present.
In the second line of argument, the article suggested that reflecting on the historical narra-
tives of political violence also enables Rodologia followers to ponder the meanings of political
power in the present. As the ethnographic examples demonstrate, because of the method’s
particular focus on political genealogies, rodologists often find themselves considering and

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 157
negotiating the meanings of power. In their efforts to articulate the inescapable presence
of the past in their present, participants also seem to make an attempt to conceptualize the
social reality in which they currently live.
While marking the effects that particular historical events had on their ancestors, the past
influences the ways in which rodologists try to construct specific responses to the state and
political power in the present. The therapeutic language of Rodologia imbues existing ideas
about a virtuous relationship to the state with a new narrative that privileges the moral
status of self-reliance, in which the state is absolved of certain responsibilities for its citizens.
The cultural logic of Rodologia is reflective of larger political and social processes occur-
ring in Russia, in which ideologically conservative campaigns for national unity coexist with
neoliberal principles of self-reliance and autonomy. With a clearer understanding of how
relationships between the state and its citizens are mediated by local and adopted forms of
cultural knowledge, we might be better able to solve one of the biggest current anthropo-
logical riddles—Putin’s Russia and its future. Understanding the ethical expectations of this
relationship sheds light on the aspirations and moral dilemmas of Russia citizens, as they
try to reproduce knowledge about the past, while at the same time orient themselves to a
new social and political reality. For people like Oleg, Ariana, and Nastya, the genealogical
grid serves as a proxy to the postsocialist eclectic discourses and imaginations about virtuous
relationships with the state.
INNA LEYKIN is Visiting Assistant Professor at The Open University of Israel.
Notes
Acknowledgments. This essay has benefited from the close reading and comments of Yifat Gutman, Igal Halfin,
Michal Kravel-Tovi, Cathy Lutz, Tom Pessah, Danny Rabinowitz, Michele Rivkin-Fish, Dan Smith, and Erica
Weiss. I am also grateful to audiences at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Ben Gurion University of the
Negev, as well as the participants of the Doing Politics-Making Kinship workshop at Humboldt University,
Berlin for their very helpful critical comments on earlier versions. I am thankful to the National Science
Foundation for generously funding my research in Russia in 2009–10 and to The Edmond J. Safra Center for
Ethics at Tel Aviv University for funding portions of this research and writing. I would also like to thank Edward
Lowe for his invaluable suggestions and comments. I am grateful to three anonymous Ethos reviewers who offered
constructive guidance for revision.
1. During the late socialist period this family center was part of an extensive network of extracurricular educational
institutions and was affiliated with one of the larger industrial factories in the city. After the dissolution of the Soviet
Union and the attendant privatization campaign, the major part of the social infrastructure belonging to industrial
enterprises was either privatized or eliminated all together. The once thriving network of family clubs thenceforth
came under the aegis of municipal budgets and often was among the last financial priorities for struggling city
budgets. With the growing popularity of self-help culture in post-Soviet Russia, paid psychological consultations
and self-help workshops of different kinds became a popular way to keep these centers afloat. Today, as it is the
case with many other municipal family centers, “Sail” combines municipal educational programs for children and
their parents with private and collective psychological consultations and seminars for self-improvement.

158 ETHOS
2. Lamarck, whose evolutionary theory preceded Darwin’s and who first posited the idea of genealogical links
between different species, is best known for his theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics. Historians
of science continue to argue whether those were Lamarck’s original ideas, or he simply put down on paper what
was widely accepted as a folk wisdom since antiquity (Gould 2002:170–208). The classic example of Lamarckism
is a giraffe, forever stretching its neck to reach leaves positioned high up on trees. According to the theory, such
behavior would result in offspring having longer necks. For an historical account of Lamarck’s ideas, see Jablonka
and Lamb (1995).
3. In a series of recent studies published in Neuroscience Nature, scholars examine the transmittance of traumatic
experiences in the form of genetic memory. Using animal studies, the authors conclude that the experience of
a parent, long before conceiving, can be genetically passed on to future generations. The research, conducted
along rigorous scientific methods, produced findings that are in line with Rodologia’s general philosophy. Both use
epigenetics rather than a more traditional understanding of random hereditary transmission as the main vehicle of
intergenerational transmittance (Jablonka and Lamb 1995). On the recent revival of epigenetic studies focusing on
how social experiences mark genes, see Dias and Ressler (2014); Meaney and Szyf (2005); and Meloni (2014). For
popular representations of these studies in the media, see Gallagher (2013) and Newitz (2013).
4. Aside from a clear difference in emotional style, there was another distinction that people familiar with the
popular psychology scene in Russia revealed to me. Rodologia turned out to be a much cheaper way to transform
oneself. A two-day Rodologia seminar, at the time of my research was priced at RUB 4,000 ($120), and a private
two-hour consultation cost RUB 5,000. In comparison, Landmark (a popular U.S.-based self-help method) seminars
running all across Russia, cost RUB 7,000 per single seminar day. The average salary in 2009–10 when I conducted
my research was approximately RUB 23,5001. Alena, who is very active in the popular psychology scene and is
quite fluent in “the language of selfhood” (Illouz 2008) specific to this scene, told me that she stopped going to
other self-help seminars when she “saw dollars in the eyes of their organizers.” Their recruiting methods were too
aggressive, she told me: “They would call me to invite me to a new seminar and I would say: ‘No, I can’t. I am still
working on the previous assignment you gave me.’ Their response would be: ‘How come? You should have been
done with it already.’ You see, I don’t like it. I don’t like when I am being forced to be happy. Each one has her
own pace.”
5. Traditionally, genealogical research has been almost exclusively in the hands of the European aristocracy, which
was concerned with registering and preserving its inherited positions. In the 19th century, genealogy became
popular among the newly emerging middle class and served to preserve and reinforce their bourgeois pedigree and
property rights (Tebbe 2008; Timothy and Guelke 2008). Throughout the 19th century, genealogy also played an
important role in constructing the narratives of nation building and promoting the importance of family research
for national interests (for the German case, see Tebbe 2008; for the Scottish case, see Basu 2007; for the Irish case,
see Nash 2008). In the late 20th century, popular genealogy played an important role in challenging essentialist
narratives of nationhood. Perhaps the most well-known example of such a project is Alex Haley’s (1976) bestselling
account of his journey to his ancestral home in West Africa. In this account, entitled Roots, Haley reconstructs a
family history of an African American whose past was denied by the mainstream American culture. The popularity
of Haley’s book is undoubtedly responsible for the meteoric rise of genealogical interest in the West (Nash 2008).
Thus, we see an historical transition, wherein the genealogical pursuit of pedigree and property rights became a
form of social activity aimed at recovering personal and often marginalized histories.
6. http://www.zakonprost.ru/content/base/252916/
7. The lack of proper retribution and restitution policies (millions of peasants whose fate was similar to many gulag
political prisoners have never been “rehabilitated” or compensated for their suffering) contributes to sustaining the
memory of the terror (Etkind 2013:10)
8. http://www.rodolog.ru/category/metki/magazin

GENEALOGY AS THERAPY IN POST-SOVIET RUSSIA 159
9. Similar to the eclecticism of the self-help and popular psychology scene more generally, psychological expertise
at these conferences is often very broadly defined. At the multiple conferences I attended while in the field,
representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church would often pair with psychologists under the title of “the moral
and psychological problems of modern society” to lament the moral decay of Russia’s youth.
10. Lysenko rejected Mendelian genetics, and his scientific theory of acquired characteristics was the only accepted
scientific truth in this field until after the death of Stalin in 1953 (Graham 1993; Pollock 2009).
11. Shryock (1997) uses the concept of “genealogical imagination” to explore “genealogical nationalism,” a phe-
nomenon he describes in his ethnography of Jordan. In his work, local tribes use their oral historical traditions
to make claims for inclusion in a larger national community. Shryock examines how local notions of genealogy
figure into national historical narratives. My use of the concept is looser, and it indicates a particular cultural way
of thinking about identities as integrated in the networks of identities across time and space (Strathern 1992).
12. http://www.1tv.ru/rod
13. http://poisk.vid.ru/en/index.html
14. Nastya’s narrative and other rodologists’ responses to it bring to mind the transformation undergone by a
once-popular Soviet comedy in its recently released remake. In the cult Soviet sci-fi black comedy “Kin-Dza-Dza,”
released in 1986 at the dawn of perestroika, two Soviet citizens—an older “Uncle Vova” and a younger student from
Georgia, “Gedevan the violinist”—find themselves on the desert planet of “Pluke” in the “Kin-dza-dza” galaxy.
The planet serves as a general allegory of a modern society, with its extreme inequality and a dog-eat-dog culture.
More important, it is a parable that references the crisis of the late socialist society. In a moment of despair, Uncle
Vova urges Gedevan to persevere, saying that he is still young and should live to see changes that would inevitably
come. In 2013, an animated remake of the film was released. The remake also has Uncle Vova encouraging Gedevan
to go on, but his reasoning has changed. Whereas in the old version, experiencing inevitable change was dangled
before Gedevan, the new version has Uncle Vova telling Gedevan that he would habituate to the situation. See
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0091341/ and http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2659374/.
15. Postsocialist New Age practices of healing and spiritual revival are often legitimized using the language of
scientific justification. For examples of how tension between soul and science resonates in other self-help oriented
practices, see Lindquist (2005) and Quijada (2012).
16. The assumption of biological determinism probably accounts for the absence of the concept of trauma in
Rodologian logic. Despite the apparent similarity between the discourse of cultural trauma and Rodologian narra-
tives, both of which serve as vehicles for carrying memory of past events, the respective mechanisms of memory
transmission differ strikingly. For an excellent example of trauma narratives among second-generation Holocaust
survivors who see themselves as descendants of historical trauma, see Kidron (2004).
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