His family and friends overloading a single motorbike scattered when he hit a pothole on the winter Angara River. “What happened?” I asked, but for Valerii, the event ended where it began for me. “Nothing happened,” he cheerfully responded. “Everyone returned home wet.”Footnote 1
Valerii (54) knows that he and his family were in mortal danger: that is what makes the story hilarious to tell.Footnote 2 Every year the Angara River claims lives in Anosovo, during summer and winter alike. I am unsure how to react to Valerii's disregard for danger and waiting for a confirmation of risk that is not forthcoming. At that moment, like many others in the field, the demand for a “thick description” of the anthropological omniscience proves to be difficult to achieve.Footnote 3 Presented with a scene of coldblooded amusement, I am uncertain what to call it. Later I will have a word for Valerii's attitude: nonchalance.
This piece is devoted to the problematization of the powerful affect that seems to be at play in a Siberian community.Footnote 4 In post-Soviet territory, the domineering affect has been described as nostalgia for the Soviet past, melancholia at the sight of Soviet ruins (critiqued as “ruin porn”), and the “patriotism of despair.”Footnote 5 What unites all these affects is their pensive quality and connection to the sense of loss, mourning, and melancholy. For a part of the population in Russia, the feeling of loss was also entwined with the shame that the admittance of loss entailed. Some people have been ashamed to admit that they experience loss in connection to the collapse of the Soviet Union. This situation is not without parallels. Getting at the affective register of change in South Africa post-apartheid, Thomas Blom Hansen recalls G.W.F. Hegel's figure of the “loss of loss.” Marginalization of certain fractions of community and change of “the township” with its spatialities and subjectivities overlap in a series of losses: “loss of economic security, loss of the township as ‘our place,’ loss of perceived existential safety,” and the greater loss—“the disappearance of the blockage—unfreedom and apartheid—that prevented true self-realization and thus explained most problems.”Footnote 6 This is an affective situation familiar to post-Soviet denizens, however by the “loss of loss” here, I mean denial of the sense of loss to self and others. Because in some clusters of society it is not socially acceptable to mourn the Soviet past in any shape or form, even in the face of lawless privatization and the absences and excesses of Putinist capitalism, the sense of loss was repressed and delayed. Affects such as nostalgia, melancholia, or despair may or may not be forms of a singular powerful “post-Soviet” affect lacking a name, aiming at a potentially present overarching construction. In addition to these terms, I suggest considering something elusive but prominently present that I call “cheerful nonchalance.”
The term “nonchalance” attempts to name the attitude “let whatever happen” that people adopt when scenarios of forthcoming improvement are not too realistic. When the alternative is to fall into a perpetual melancholy, people embrace nonchalance. “Nonchalance” does not imply that people are cavalier or embrace a completely blasé attitude. Rather, nonchalance is a spectrum of affective responses ranging from carelessness in observing the elementary rules of safety—like using seat belts—to a cheerful, upbeat attitude toward life and death. Nonchalance is a way of dealing with precarity, an affective response to the exploitative conditions of work and uncertainty of living. With this term, I am attempting to name an air of unconcern arising from the realization that a positive turn of events is not guaranteed. This affect bears the potential of radical change. Nonchalance that arises in precarious settings is not apathetic but cheerful, buoyant, having a dash and a dare, as well as displaying a readiness to take risks. The adjective “cheerful” is called to point out an uplifting, unbeatable, and at times heroic spirit of cheerful nonchalance.
This article suggests that people embrace nonchalance as a way to deal with precarity. Anne Allison defines precarity as the “condition of uncertainty, of rumbling instability”.Footnote 7 In Anosovo, the instability itself is stabilized, as people may not affectively invest in the future of the settlement even as they are staying put. There is no room for “uncertainty” either: it is quite certain that a hospital extinguished in the post-Soviet era will not return, and central electricity, powered by diesel generators, will not reach Anosovo in the near future. Many are convinced that the winter road will not be paved any time soon.
I have spent four periods of time between 2016 and 2019 in the village of Anosovo. I had an anthropological grant in my pocket and a project that I convinced the Wenner-Gren Foundation was doable with ethnographic methods. The project was supposed to answer the question, “What keeps people living in communities that experience economic decline?” I have been conducting in-depth interviews—more like conversations—and spending time doing “participant observation” at events, from birthday celebrations to big gatherings, like the inauguration of the new mayor or a meeting with a parliamentary candidate. I have also spent time with others in trivial pursuits that constitute the fabric of everydayness, from mushroom gathering to cooking. I spent a lot of time with people attempting to get into the affective register of things. Affect thus became not only a subject of research but also a method of sorts. In daily interactions, one shares an affect with people. Affect is “contagious.”
In the attempt to follow the principles of “slow ethnography,” I wrote down a lot of mundane occurrences and dialogs.Footnote 8 Looking at my notes, I noticed a pattern of “cheerful nonchalance”: an attitude of dismissing events that were troubling, an air of unconcern, sometimes affected, and resilience in the seeming absence of realistic, tangible hopes. Even if people conceded the absence of prospects for the village, they did not dwell on such absence but quickly turned to embrace some sort of cheer and unconcern. Sometimes, suggestions of improvements were made, but often they were not. Things were supposed to resolve themselves. I began suspecting that there is an “affective variable” that allows people to go on with their lives when the conditions of living have not only failed to improve but worsened. Nonchalance is an embracing of everyday risks and dangers in a practice of sliding across landscapes and opportunities knowing there might be caveats, and sometimes not even hoping that the dangers will pass or be averted, but still gliding around it in an excitement or cheer.
In what follows, I provide the background to the place and situate it on the current “map” of anthropological writings. Then, I give an outline of two affects heretofore described that I find to be closest to “cheerful nonchalance.” Namely, I outline the “patriotism of despair” (offered by Serguei Oushakine) and “cruel optimism” (suggested by Lauren Berlant) to point out how “cheerful nonchalance” is similar to both, and where it differs.Footnote 9 I also outline the ways in which nonchalance was previously mentioned in literature. I then proceed to an ethnography and provide four illustrations that serve as emblems of cheerful nonchalance. These four emblems are as follows. First, the villagers’ relationship with the river's ice that makes it travelable. Second, I give a vignette of anxieties and their subsequent dismissal, related to the decision of the timber firm to implement the polygraph test. Third, I touch upon the sense of freedom in not abiding to safety rules when it comes to using seat belts (and masks). Fourth, I offer the theorization of Anosovians connecting forms of nonchalance to the “Siberian ethnos” and character. I conclude with the suggestion that buoyant nonchalance is an affective response to the precarious conditions that resurface around the mundane.
I do not claim that nonchalance is exclusively connected to the “Siberianness” of my interlocutors. On the contrary, I suppose “cheerful nonchalance” as a disregard for danger, demonstrative neglect of safety precautions, and the undefeated spirit can be found elsewhere. Studying this affect in addition to other manifestations of it in transformative, prolonged historic moments—along with the feeling of loss, nostalgia, and hope—can help us understand the attitudes of people toward scenarios of improvement proposed by from state agencies to activist organizations. Because cheerful nonchalance is powerful, it can play a role in the implementations of everyday safety rituals and measures (such as wearing a mask, a recent example of a protest behavior world-wide). Understanding the affect of nonchalance will help explain people's actions.
Anosovo on Maps
Anosovo is one of those places that anthropologists and historians variously defined as “out-of-the-way,” “on the side of the road,” “not yet forgotten” (forgotten by whom, one is tempted to inquire?)—locales on the “margins [of the state].”Footnote 10 The industrial infrastructure of the settlement of Anosovo arose in 1961 on the wave of Soviet industrialization. The settlement came to life composed of several villages that were flooded by the Bratsk dam. Since then, the settlement has been grappling with decline. Its population has diminished four-fold since the 1970s (from more than 2,000 people to a little over 500), and the process is ongoing.
Ephemerality was embedded into Anosovo from the start: many Anosovians are certain that their village was a temporary project from the beginning. Rumor has it that the Soviet planners, the architects of the settlement, had envisioned its abandonment. Some Anosovians are convinced that the Soviet planners and geolocators foresaw the settlements in its place only for as long as the forest worth cutting remained. Vera (32) told me that Anosovo was supposed to exist for ten to twenty years. The number I heard most often was fifty years. “They said, once all the good forest in the taiga is vyshchelkan (selectively cut, “knocked out”), there is no point in keeping a settlement there,” Alexander Victorovich (63) said.Footnote 11
I was unable to locate the documents officially declaring or indirectly confirming the settlement's planned obsolescence. The idea did not seem plausible to me: in the 1960–70s, great effort, including clearing an area in the taiga from trees, was invested into building and sustaining Anosovo on a new plot. My sense is that such an obsolescence would, to the contrary, contradict the socialist visions of colonizing space.
Be that as it may, Anosovo already exceeded the longest timeframe Anosovians gave it. Now, many are of the opinion that the government decided not to bother with a relocation. “They are just waiting until we all go away or die out,” is the way Galina (50) framed it.Footnote 12 Anosovo carries its transience, imaginary or real, like a bomb that is always ticking but may not have the capacity to detonate.
Between the “Patriotism of Despair” and “Cruel Optimism”
A period of shock, confusion, and reorientation followed the collapse of the USSR.Footnote 13 One of the prominent affects that emerged in a big Siberian city (of Barnaul; Altai krai), according to Serguei Oushakine, was the “patriotism of despair,” which is what he called the mix of feelings and states that people experienced as they attempted to wrestle with “their feeling of belonging once Soviet power and the Soviet motherland were ‘gone’” and left behind a “post-Soviet landscape,” “fragmented and disorienting.”Footnote 14 There was no singular aesthetic of meaning-making framework within which the disparate fragments of the “palimpsest” made a coherent whole. Like pavements in Barnaul—as well as in Angarsk, Irkutsk, and Bratsk, as far as I observed—they were created out of patches of different textures, and the layering of billboards where fonts and colors competed with each other, fragments of ideologemes and ideas refused to cohere. New ways of relating and belonging “had to be invented.”Footnote 15
The process of such (re)invention has been uneven. For many, the necessity to reorient themselves was traumatic. Feeling the loss of “a country that had vanished” was overwhelming.Footnote 16 The rehearsal of loss, the active and repetitive “negation” of scenarios and pictures of the future became productive as people found a shared ground in such negation. But the losses were, at the same time, acquisitions. Even though many post-Soviet denizens had to work toward the restoration of “the sense of collectivity and cohesiveness they felt during the Soviet project,” they found a shared ground, solidarity, community, and belonging precisely in the familiarity of the “deployment of pain.”Footnote 17 The centering on the losses, reiteration, and “recollections of past injuries” becoming a structure of the sense that national belonging is the “everyday patriotism of despair.”Footnote 18
The affect of “cheerful nonchalance” has a profound similarity with “patriotism of despair” in the way they wrap around the figure of loss. Arguably, this figure has emerged as a constitutive element of the freshly-post-Soviet identity.Footnote 19 Losses not only happened in the past but also awaited in a future powered by uncertainty. Such losses for Anosovians can include Anosovo itself, due to its perceived ephemerality. There were visions for Anosovo that did not materialize, spiking the feeling of nostalgia. In the 2010s, however, the sense of loss is lyrical and benumbed. “Soviet nostalgia” is possibly less prominent than it appears due to the ample scholarship on the subject. Especially now, almost thirty years after the official collapse of the USSR, nostalgia is not the only, nor the most prominent, affective register of relating to the Soviet past or going about the business of belonging or being in the present. Unextinguishable humor and prideful, boisterous, and affected-disregard-to-danger attitude made it into a sort of adaptive strategy and an affective condition in which life decidedly goes on no matter what. Frankly, there is hardly any detectable trace of despair in a collective affect.
Another affective phenomenon that “cheerful nonchalance” both resembles and seems dissimilar to is “cruel optimism.” Lauren Berlant describes an affective condition of “cruel optimism” as a “circuit of optimism and disappointment.” “Cruel” refers to the “abysmality” of such disappointment. “Cruelty is the ‘hard’ in a hard loss.”Footnote 20 Berlant problematizes cruel optimism as a manner of affective attachment that is both anxious and excited. It knows that it will not meet fulfilment. “A relation of cruel optimism exists when something you desire is an obstacle to your flourishing.”Footnote 21 Cruel optimism is a trauma bond and an emotional rollercoaster.Footnote 22
Cruel optimism, to me, is an affective dimension of “sunk cost fallacy.”Footnote 23 The sunk cost fallacy refers to the seemingly irrational persistence of the investor who continues investing—be it in terms of money, time, effort, or emotion—sometimes long after realizing that the return will not follow. Instead of what is “rational,” that is, cutting their losses, actors continue bringing themselves into a situation with fading hopes of a certain reward delaying the moment when the inevitable strikes. Sunk cost effect depends on the glimmer of hope that the system will miraculously have a return on investments. Sunk cost “fallacy” is bolstered by the fear that the slot machine will pour out coins the moment after one walks out. Slot machines, financial pyramids, and all sorts of “hope is the last to die” enterprises, from maintaining an abusive relationship to rooting for a collapsing social order, are cruelly optimistic and represent varieties of the “sunk cost” psycho-economic trap. The investments continue for no other reason but because a lot has already been invested. This is a “cruelly optimistic” commitment. Cruel optimism is an exercise of longing for that which never was or is not to be; it is a fantasy of possession predicated on the impossibility of attaining a thing.Footnote 24
Anosovian relationships with the materialities or the realities of the world have “cruelly optimistic” features. People invent phantasmagoric machines and fantasy scenarios—pneumatic tubes for cars not needing the road on the ground, inventions capable of blaring the road with fire and making it “porcelain”: “What if people leveled deep tire tracks, evened out the road, and then exposed it to fire?” Footnote 25 Since the road largely consists of clay, making it porcelain is absurdly imaginable.
The main difference between “cruel optimism” and “cheerful nonchalance” is that, tautologically, cruel optimism is optimistic; it is hopeful against reason and against judgement. But nonchalance is unattached to the outcome. Sure, people mean to survive, but they seem to be nihilistically certain that something better does not await them. They are realists in this sense. Yet they do not give up because on this, fairly pessimistic, “realism,” maintaining an attitude of cheer instead.Footnote 26
The similarity of cheerful nonchalance to cruel optimism is in the intensity of the realization that there is a stubborn and unbending quality to the world resisting our desires, in that a wish is elusive and rewards rarely or never. The difference from cruel optimism is in that nonchalance is not invested; it is free from investment into life, a better future, or post-mortem remuneration. It may fantasize about the future, but it lives in the present, and does so cheerfully.
Before turning to ethnography in attempt to show the workings of nonchalance on ethnographic examples, I need to spend two paragraphs on what has been said about nonchalance to date. Nonchalance, specifically, does not appear to have been theorized in depth—perhaps it seems like a topic that is not too fruitful. Nonchalance has been connected to mobility, particularly a refusal of mobility, “staying,” and—to bullying.Footnote 27 Furthermore, according to New Yorker journalist Care Buckley, in the time of warning against hurricane Sandy, as an “often reluctant parade of evacuees” moved out of affected zones, some refused to leave.Footnote 28 Buckley interpreted the reluctance as “New York-style” nonchalance. As we will see later, Siberians may ascribe nonchalance to themselves as a markedly Siberian and Russian feature. Buckley similarly found nonchalance to be a markedly New York feature. Nonchalance is fairly attractive, since people seem to want to write it into their locally-bounded genealogies.
So far, I have discussed nonchalance as characteristic of a precarity synonymous with uncertainty. Yet nonchalance can be a sign of a certain privilege, too. Sheila Croucher found that US-born migrants to Canada are “nonchalant” in the sense of an absence of strong emotions that other migrants experience. These privileged travelers did not indulge in the “themes of fear, heartbreak, relief, or joy.”Footnote 29 Their stories were characterized by “limited forethought that preceded their migration.” They assumed familiarity of cultures and often also initially assumed their move would be temporary. In this case, Croucher concluded, the attitude of nonchalance emanates “from a position of relative privilege.”Footnote 30 The nonchalance of American immigrants to Canada is perhaps not so closely synonymous to that of Siberians. I use this example to illustrate that nonchalance is a cross-cultural affective condition that accompanies certain situations of marginality, risk-taking, plunging into an unknown experience or putting up with the present.
On the other side of the spectrum from the privileged, the radically dispossessed seem to exhibit a kind of nonchalance confronted with alternativeless situations. Some striking cases feature a certain “nonchalance” without naming it as such. In Precarious Japan, Anne Allison speaks of a woman who left a zone contaminated by radiation but returned shortly thereafter. When the woman was told being there was risky, she replied that other places were risky for her; here, in her home, she at least had a place and something to do. “Riskiness defined by what and by whom?” Allison asks.Footnote 31 Sometimes nonchalance is not a choice or a character attribute, but an affect that allows one to embrace the situation.
To summarize, nonchalance can accompany precarity or privilege when people are unattached to a specific outcome of their actions. Nonchalance accompanies the bracing for what is to come, even if for each of these groups, what is to come is vastly different. In the following section, I transition to the ethnographic material that provided me with the ground for the inference that cheerful nonchalance is an affect present in Anosovo and is worthy of being written about as a bigger phenomenon.
Anosovian Kaleidoscope
Cheerful Nonchalance in Action: Traveling the Ice
How do people know when ice is safe—thick enough to travel? I continued asking Valerii whose story started this piece. He explained, “When Oleg the water-truck driver goes across the river, then it's ok.” “How does Oleg know?” “Well, he just knows.” Laughter.Footnote 32
The explanation is once again not forthcoming. I suggest that Oleg comes by this knowledge by glancing at the river. He looks at it, and instantaneously realizes, “It is time.” Or, maybe he makes a series of inquiries examining how the ice looks, how sturdy it sounds, what the tempo is with which it deepens in outside temperatures? My interlocutor hints, mainly through smiles and gestures, that Oleg is the first to take the risk because he is restless and needs to go places where others have no business going.
No matter how Oleg comes by this knowledge, it is very reliable since his living example proves, visually for the whole village, that the ice is indeed travelable. I have another moment to ask Oleg how he knows when the ice is safe. He laughs and shrugs his shoulders. The silence is open to interpretations. I imagine Oleg's bracing for the danger—unnecessarily, for there is no one who lives on the other shore, for many kilometers—as nonchalant. He finally tells me that the travel is dictated by not much but the sense of danger. He is curious: will he make it there and back again safe, or not. This kind of gamble is nonchalant to me. The stakes are high, and the victory uncertain. In the eyes of others, it does not look particularly heroic or deserving of special respect or even interest. But it is useful for the community: when Oleg conducts his travel, others know it is safe.
Thus nonchalance of a community member brings unexpected benefits for everyone—not that it should. Nonchalance springs up under conditions of uncertainty and indeterminacy (it is unclear when the ice is safe), as a way to deal with that uncertainty (by trying if the ice is travelable). I now have two examples of “nonchalance” playing out in stories: Valerii's family being thrown about upon his hitting a pothole with his motorbike, even as he did not think much about it, and Oleg traveling on ice, curious if the frozen river is going to endure his truck's weight, deciding, “It might.”
The Dismissal of Polygraph-Induced Anxiety
Nonchalance is not merely a private feeling or idiosyncratic response to the situation. Rather, a nonchalant outlook emerges systemically. For example, it appears in a workplace. Workers employed in the enterprises that took over Soviet bases cannot help but espouse a nonchalant attitude. They suppose that not a lot is going to improve for them in how their work is organized, so why affectively invest? During the Soviet times, the village of Anosovo's “city-forming enterprise” was Yegorovsky lespromkhoz (state-owned socialist timber enterprise).Footnote 33 For decades, lespromkhoz provided the means of livelihood for the village. The period of transition to the market economy was rough for Anosovo. The collapse of the factory that was “town-forming” meant not only a change in livelihood but also a rise in crises questioning aspects of identity from personhood to masculinity or femininity.Footnote 34
The readjustment or reinvention of one's own ways of belonging and practices of relating went hand in hand with the “unmaking” of Soviet notions. In the 1990s, people scavenged for metal scraps of tractors and trucks abandoned in the taiga.Footnote 35 Scrap collectors passed their gain on to metal processing offices. When I was trying to ask for details, people shrugged it off: “We collected scraps, what about it?” (“Nu sobirali i sobirali”). No one was fond of recollecting that time.
When I came to Anosovo in 2016, what was left of the lespromkhoz premises—privatized, sold, or abandoned—was managed by the manager Misha (31)—in tattoos, with hay-like hair, and a massive golden chain on his bare chest in the summer. He successfully managed the firm that replaced the lespromkhoz. The CEO lived in Irkutsk. Misha lived in Anosovo; he knew his workers and their families. He built close relations with them, spending weekends in hunting, fishing, and drinking pursuits. That were not just mindless entertainment but “corporate celebrations designed to strengthen the spirit of the company,” I was informed with a wink.Footnote 36
Before long, a conflict sparked between Misha and the enterprise managers (nachalstvo) and Misha went on to the Lena River taking the best workers with him. The firm in Anosovo remained without a local administrator. The new managers visited Anosovo reluctantly and for short periods. Disorganization intensified. The firm exerted strained attempts to establish authority. Finally, the managers came up with a solution that evidently appeared elegant to them: using a polygraph test to check the trustworthiness of workers and prospective hires. It was announced that everyone would be going through the procedure of re-hiring accompanied by a polygraph check.
The polygraph test aroused distrustful curiosity, anger, and many rumors. Even before the polygraph was used, it already induced anxiety. By virtue of it being present, the polygraph already functioned as “a truth-telling,” or, rather, truth-generating machine.Footnote 37 The machine not only constructed the would-be interrogated subject, already anxious and disturbed, but weaved the surroundings and entanglements in which people operated. It created a paranoid world.
Lumberjack Sasha was offended that the firm stood by its distrust of workers. He did not deny that he indeed stole some engine details that, by the Russian saying, lay badly (plokho lezhalo), that is to say, were lying around as if no one needed them anymore. His mother, Natalia, suggested that he should tell the truth: “If you are guilty, tell them like it is. To tell the truth is always good in the eyes of God.”Footnote 38 Natalia was a member of a Baptist church in the village. She frequently appealed to God in day-to-day conversation. “Besides,” she added, “They steal plenty from you too.” Natalia went on to elaborate on the absence of social benefits and, deeper still, that the firm occupied and used the infrastructure—the buildings, the roads—that the Soviet workers, including the father of her son, had constructed. The firm did not invest in social programs. It used resources—constructed and “natural,” like the taiga—that it did not create and failed to properly maintain.
Natalia's sense-making endeavor rendered the polygraph less threatening by displacing it in a world of fair values. Hers was not an attempt to establish a higher moral ground or virtuousness of open stealing justified by the lawlessness of the firm. Rather, by reflecting on exploitative conditions, she was giving her son a psychological mechanism to cope with the looming danger of being exposed as a thief, losing his job, and—who knows what the polygraph test could bring—perhaps even a sentence. It is one reality in which people say, “everyone steals,” and quite another where one is disgraced as a thief.
As strong as the anxiety was, however, it was also eventually devoured by nonchalance. Those who dealt with polygraph tests in life, like Leonid, suggested it was not a big deal. “Why do you care? (Chyo vy parites΄?). These things make errors all the time.” Leonid went through several polygraph tests in the army, and every time, the machine showed that he was lying when he was not. “So, what happened?”—“Nothing, the commanders just shrugged their shoulders.”Footnote 39 It was an apparent display of nonchalance on the part of everyone involved: Leonid and his commanders alike.
Leonid's nonchalant dismissal helped. Nonchalance was strong enough to dismiss even the anxiety-inducing prospects, like a polygraph test. At some point, there comes a certain fatigue, the anxiety wears off, acceptance sets in, and with it, nonchalance. It does not mean that people do not care—instead, seeing that there is little they can do to improve the situation, they become unbothered. The polygraph test and its dangers fell out of consideration as they entered it. Continuing to be anxious about it would probably not bring any results. While nonchalance may not bring solutions, sparing yourself the anxieties helps. In other words, nonchalance alleviates troublesome situations.
The Freedom to Not Abide by Safety Rules
Nonchalance, sometimes bordering on recklessness, emerged not only in outstanding events but made itself known in daily life, smoothly woven into the fabric of everydayness. In Anosovo and many villages throughout Siberia and Russia, especially the more remote locations where the state presence is minimal and the road patrol is absent, very few people use seat belts. Even toddlers travel in front seats unfastened. If I, a stranger, voiced my concerns, the reply was, “What is going to happen?” and even the affronted, “Do you not trust me to deliver kids safe and sound?” Further probing as to why not use devices of safety when they are available met the response, “The kids like it better that way.” Belts were not needed due to the drivers’ perceived ability to handle risk. Like with the wearing of masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, a mild bodily inconvenience outweighed the considerations of safety. Apparent mischievous breaking of a rule supplied an additional thrill. This behavior may be reckless, but it is brimming with subversive freedoms.
Why do people sometimes opt out of relatively easy safety measures? Probing possible analogies between not using safety belts and not wearing masks, I conducted an informal survey in the Russian sector of Facebook asking two questions: whether people wear masks, and how they perceive others who wear / do not wear masks. One hundred and forty people partook in the survey, informed that their responses were going to be used in my research. Elena (63) stated: “We have a lot of unmaskers, and, considering Russian specifics, I suppose that in 90% of the cases the reason is pofigism and stubbornness of not wanting to observe elementary rules of safety.”Footnote 40 Later in this article, I translate pofigism as nonchalance, but nonchalance the way I aim to define it here is greater than “pofigism,” which is a markedly negative, inertia-powered lack of drive.
Ekaterina (59) wore a mask consistently: on public transportation and in stores, but added that if she spoke to someone who was not wearing a mask, she would take down her own: “Taking down your mask is a sign of trust nowadays.”Footnote 41 Igor (48) admitted: “I do not wear masks because I despise the bacchanalia that unfolded around COVID-19, even though I do not deny its existence since I myself was sick. I still despise the fuss because it all is a lie. I don't believe medics, I don't believe statistics, and I don't believe that masks and gloves help…Besides, the attempt to put a muzzle on everybody is an offense to the human dignity.”Footnote 42
A lot of respondents did not care for “unmaskers,” while others talked about their anger and urges to hit others not wearing masks or making fun of those who do. There were admittances of irritation at the lack of “moral responsibility,” while conscious unmaskers spoke of the moral demand of wearing a mask to be “an infringement on personal freedom and absurd from the point of view of epidemiological defense” (Clarissa, 32).Footnote 43
“Unmasker” Galina (52) called herself a “COVID-dissident,” clearly alluding to the conscious and reflected resistance to the state and the “order of things” inflicted by the powerful onto the resisting minority as opposed to the majority's sheepish obedience. Daria (25) explained not wearing a mask by resigning to her fate: “When a person is born, the Great Father (Velikii Otets) forges a chain of your fate; who is going to be hanged will not drown.”Footnote 44 The last part of her statement is a Russian proverb, and the first part is her own, rather poetic, image.
To sum up, it is not that conspiracy theories—such as seeing the pandemic as a hoax—prevailed. Nor do people justify not wearing masks because they do not want to endure a bodily discomfort or wish to assert their independence from the norms of morality or responsibility. Rather, a moral responsibility of a different order (not wanting to obey, reliance on preordained fate), and a dismissive attitude—that is to say, nonchalance, the way I describe it—play a role in mask-wearing refusal in Russia, at least as far as my survey allows a glimpse into this layered behavioral choice.
But let us return to the seat-belt conundrum. In the field, I observed that even though the long-standing gender labor divide meant that women were the ones almost exclusively entrusted with childcare, it was often fathers who would not fasten their kids’ seatbelts. One would think that such behavior by men would make them vulnerable to the critique of being irresponsible or infantile.Footnote 45 After all, women habitually constructed themselves as more responsible subjects, better abiding by the rules, and highly virtuous and moral, as the scene of Natalia's gentle admonishing of her son already demonstrated. Indeed, women would often castigate men's nonchalance and inertia as something that precluded them from achieving better positions in life. Yet many women did not fasten kids’ seatbelts either. They similarly went about it with an air of unconcern and conviction that little is going to happen.
The dismissal of veritable dangers was a motif prominent to a degree that sometimes elicited a reaction. Two villagers discussed a school director allowing a pile of timber to loom precariously over a path where children walked to class. “One wrong movement, and it will come down to their heads.”—“Tell her that.”—“I did, and she waved her hand, ah, it's alright, what is going to happen?” To me, the villager mused, “How does she know that nothing is going to happen?” And added, answering himself, “I do not know what this is, some sort of fatalism.”Footnote 46 Fatalism, having in Russian culture and literature a rich history of its own, may or may not be an explanation. It comes across in day-to-day life as a nonchalant behavior. One way or the other, nonchalance was not a specifically male characteristic. It merely took different expressions depending on gender.
Anosovians were not the only ones unenthused about using seat belts. The rules of transportation for children and adults in Siberia are informally lux. Even in big cities like Irkutsk and Bratsk, the Road Patrol's enforcement was lenient. Non-observance of safety rules carried a protest charge. Here, again, the analogy of not fastening safety belts and not wearing a mask in a pandemic is pertinent. Not wearing a mask could be a protest behavior directed against the all-reaching state control. While there is a risk of spreading the disease, a flipside that is not admirable, such small actions of self-sabotage have an underpinning of not wanting to be controlled by the state. Nonchalance is a form of resistance: it is a refusal to participate, or at least a refusal to be affectively invested. Disinvestment and disinterest are a form of affective response to disenfranchisement. One of the drivers I spoke to said, “I don't care what anyone else wants; I personally have no need for seat belts.”Footnote 47
Throughout the time I spent in Bratsk archives, my struggle with taxi drivers was the crux of my everydayness. Drivers would arrive one after another with belts on their back seats hidden from view and unusable. Offended, drivers would mock my insistent requests to find a way to fasten my then-seven-year-old child, “Isn't he too big for that?” I had to call so many times asking for that miraculous car with seat belts that once I was recognized by a call center worker. She identified me as that strange woman who wanted a car with seat belts.
In my fieldnotes, I was wondering how ethnocentric it was of me to ask for a service that apparently was simply not provided. Which ethnocentrism was it? That of a Muscovite (Moscowcentrism—as I grew up in Moscow; granted that Moscow is not an ethnos)? Or the ethnocentrism of an American implant since I have lived for ten years in the US? I am not pro-state-enforcement of safety measures, which often become an issue of control, with “security” being a shield for the potential spread of pernicious governmentalities. Not using seat belts (or masks), even though it may be unsafe, signals refusal to submit to the regimes of the ordinary. But I also did not want my child to travel unfastened, and I continued dragging his car seat to every destination. The damned seat remained an inconvenience and a testament to my stubbornness in a world that rejected the use of car seats for seven-year-olds. When everyone is nonchalant and you are not, it can be a problem.
A lot of male drivers would have a seat belt “on,” keeping it across shoulders unbuckled so that the patrol would not stop them. Those drivers created the appearance of compliance while breaking the rule in practice. One driver told me that a belt felt uncomfortable to the point that it created pain in his “big, old body.” Coupled with the motif of nonchalance—people trust their driving skills—this is a strong incentive topped with a bit of mischievous pleasure in “breaking the law.” Those drivers did not want to be “docile bodies.” They refused to be tamed in that way.
Siberians that I encountered were not buying safety concerns over inconvenience. They valued the enjoyment of a good ride without restrictions. Not using a seat belt gave the driver a sense of autonomy to live life on one's own terms. I was told, “Listen, they (presumably, manufacturers) insert these belts everywhere now. They don't know what else to add to a car to keep those prices high.”Footnote 48 Refusal to fasten seat belts in cars, even though it may be unsafe, signals the lack of submission to the demands of the state, capitalism, post-industrialism, and everydayness. Nonchalance is woven into the daily fabric of unnoticeable actions and mundane interactions, shining like a bright banner of defiance.
Nonchalance and the “Siberian Ethnos”
Anosovians would readily frame their nonchalance theoretically. The guard Sergei Kluyev (56) was a most avid champion of various breeds of nonchalance among the people I spoke to. “Russian disregard for danger (prezrenie k opasnosti) has been long noted by the Russians themselves and the outside world. It is in our ethos (mental΄nost΄),” he declared.Footnote 49 Sergei was giving me an impromptu lecture in his guard's hut, lit by one bulb. It started with the discussion of Valerii's story of running into a pothole in the ice. Sergei called Valerii's attitude to the danger “veseloye… razgildiaistvo” (cheerful carelessness). The pause was to signify that he purportedly chose a milder synonym to raspizdiaistvo, an obscene word that I heard far more often. Raspizdiaistvo has the root cunt and refers to disorganization and irresponsibility. It was used as a general diagnosis and a critique of the order of things. Razgildiaistvo, being a literary word, is more benign, and it is also more “good-humored.” Both words name a type of behavior that is nonchalant about the outcome of actions. Both words are condemnatory ways to call someone's actions or attitude. To utter them would be a judgement of character.
“There is that Russian proverb, right? Dvum smertiam ne byvat΄, a odnoi ne minovat΄ (there will be no two deaths, but one death could not be avoided).”Footnote 50 For Sergei, the proverb provided a theoretical ground for acting on the spur of the moment. It reconciled the person with the perils of life: we would not have to go through the ordeal of dying twice, and yet, a human life is (thankfully) transient. Nonchalance was something long-standing in the “mentality” of “Siberians”: “Cheerful nonchalance is best expressed in Siberians. It is conserved here in harsh conditions, and this is a legacy of the pioneers (pervoprokhodtsy).”Footnote 51 As far as Americans were concerned, Hollywood was playing a bad role by constructing nonchalant role models in cowboys and gangsters. These images allowed Americans to play it cool, but, for Sergei, Americans were not really nonchalant. Muscovites were less nonchalant than Siberians for sure: they valued life and its petty pleasures too much.
Sergei worked as guard of an industrial-looking territory that was vacant save for several ten-meters-high empty cisterns. In the summer, the cisterns are surrounded by blooming flowers abuzz with bees and grasshoppers. The cisterns arrived in Anosovo in the 1960s to store fuel but were never used. Empty cisterns remained, in their virginity, memorials to a future that failed to materialize. The territory was enclosed by a fence with broken iron ornaments that once may have been Soviet pentacles but were now distorted beyond recognition. Sergei guarded cisterns until his post was obliterated. Even teenagers were disinterested in exploring the cisterns, perhaps having explored them already. “Take these two words, ‘avos’’ and ‘nebos’,’” Sergei continued. “Somehow we know that everything is going to sort itself out. We just refuse to sweat small things. It is in our Siberian character, Siberian ethnos.”Footnote 52
“Avos΄ da nebos΄” are the two elusive twin notions of Russian culture that allude to the reliance on things miraculously aligning by themselves. It is fate, chance, or god that is acting as the subject in the subjectless phrase “avos΄ proneset” (Let us hope that [it] will pass us). “Avos΄” and “nebos΄” belong to the mundane register of the language and are marked “razg [ovornoe] ” (colloquial) in dictionaries. They are linguistic vehicles of nonchalance, the “affective infrastructure” of sorts: ready cultural categories one can use to bolster one's stoicism or an unbothered attitude.
The affective attitude of nonchalance is connoted by and transmitted in a variety of expressions. The words that marked nonchalance, according to Sergei, included the expletives “pokhui,” “do pizdy,” and such, all roughly translated as “I don't give a fuck,” but variously alluding to male and female genitalia. “Take ‘pofigu,’ a milder version of ‘pokhui,’” Sergei suggested (the attitude of not giving a fuck). “From ‘pofig’ sprung the word ‘pofigism.’ Like an attitude (otnoshenie) in general.”Footnote 53
Sergei continued developing the idea that pofigism was characteristic of younger people's attitudes in the 1990s–2000s. The older generations would speak of pofigism with disdain. “They think that younger people lack personal responsibility,” he said apparently counting himself among the youngsters despite being 56. In the view of their elders, the youngsters had a general nihilistic outlook. Kluyev's theory was that the older generations’ experiences conditioned them to expect tangible rewards for certain behaviors, but for post-Soviet generations, such expectations were unrealistic. The people were just not in the same positions.
Indeed, as noted earlier, short-term achievements in post-Soviet realities failed to translate into a sense of life-long accomplishment as the new economies of everydayness came into being.Footnote 54 As Dale Pesmen describing the Siberian city of Omsk in the 1990s put it: “The friction on the path to even simple goals was greater than most people's power to overcome it.”Footnote 55 Pending the convertibility of effort into value, people responded with an affective power of pofigism, or nonchalance. The previous social contracts did not work, and the emergent conditions sidelined those who were from rural or urban outskirts and neighborhoods and not already in possession of resources and education. Jennifer Patico, having conducted fieldwork in freshly-post-Soviet St. Petersburg, observed: “Most of today's Russian adults reached maturity with one set of assumptions about status, professionalism, respectability, and their rewards, but in the 1990s they found themselves thrust into a context where many of those assumptions no longer held.”Footnote 56 I would add that those who saw a way to attain rewards through alternative systems tried to do so by any means necessary, and those who could not responded with the “cheerful nonchalance”—the attitude of “not giving a fuck.”
“There is even a stronger expression than po figu—do pizdy. ‘I don't give a fuck,’” Sergei continued, “And I am sorry to speak in mat, but a non-normative language emerged precisely to describe this kind of thing. The normal language just could not get into the heart of the matter,” he asserted.Footnote 57
Sergei Kluyev saw such nonchalance as an entirely warranted response and more. He spoke of it admiringly. For him, nonchalance was not merely a personal stance deserving of recognition and appreciation, but a uniquely Russian and Siberian trait (“Russian disregard for danger,” a feature of the “Siberian character / ethnos”). It was as much individual as it was collective. Nonchalance encompassed risk-taking, a masculine contempt for hardships, and a heroic readiness to overcome difficulties. The nonchalance was cheerful: it included a playful disdain to danger, was upbeat, carefree, and carried itself with pride. Nonchalance helped to embrace the risk with azart.Footnote 58
Not everyone in Anosovo lauded nonchalance like Sergei did, however. Discussing injuries occurring at the diesel generator facilities, the technician Dmitrii remarked, “Life here is often shorter than it should be. When you are young, you think that you will live forever.”Footnote 59 Dmitrii buried his son about ten years ago. In his memory and as a way to cope, Dmitrii Vasilievich, who used to love loud company and feasts, adopted a strict dry law. “You know what is fascinating? When I had vodka on my table, day and night, I had so many friends! But now, no one comes to me. Suddenly, everyone is busy.”Footnote 60
Abandoning vodka, Dmitrii Vasilievich concentrated on the tobacco that he grew enmeshed with poppy flowers in his backyard. Neighbors expressed concern that this would not end well. The authorities—much as Anosovo seemed to be beyond supervision—might take notice. “Who cares,” Dmitrii replied. “I will tell them that I never sowed those poppies.” “Who will listen, Dmitrii?”Footnote 61 As he dismisses neighborly worries, poppies continue to flourish. Ironically, he was responding to warnings with the same nonchalance for which he reproached young people who supposedly thought that they would live forever. Thus nonchalance, being a morally charged category, could be disapproved of in words and theory—only to be reaffirmed in action and practice.
Cheerful Nonchalance: Morally Ambiguous Affect that Makes Survival Possible
Unlike some of my interlocutors, I do not claim, nor do I believe that Russians—or Siberians, for that matter—possess some special nonchalance. Instead, I am suggesting that a nonchalant attitude can relate to refusals, commitments, and decisions when it comes to living, staying, surviving, and connecting to a place that has difficult and demonstrably worsening economic conditions. Cheerful nonchalance may endanger a livelihood when the necessary precautions—such as using seat belts—are not taken. On a grander scale, nonchalance is the affect that allows people to continue day-to-day living. Dismissing troublesome events, such as the implementation of a polygraph test by a timber firm, people can turn to something else in their private lives.
But nonchalance in Anosovo and Bratsk bears local features. Nonchalance in Anosovo emerged as the future was deprived of tangible and immediate scenarios of improvement and came to be (re)imagined in terms of fantastic scenarios of “porcelain roads” instead. This piece has been suggesting that people embrace nonchalance to deal with precarity, and, as such, nonchalance is not an occasion nor an individual choice. Rather, cheerful nonchalance is an affective response to exploitative conditions of work and a “certainty of uncertainty,” as I discussed above. Such an affective response is surprisingly efficient in affective relations with post-Soviet enterprises and businesses that use the Soviet “material basis” to advance extractive practices. Nonchalance can be perceived and is sometimes viewed by Anosovians as a lack of personal responsibility and carelessness. But nonchalance can also be a factor of personal and communal survival. The imperturbability of spirit and body when things are not about to get better is strategic. Perhaps nonchalance will eventually be fully demonstrated as an affective attitude that allows people across the world to live fuller lives in precarious conditions. At least, this could be a hypothesis for further investigation.
In this piece, I pointed at the existence of this affective attitude and suggested some of its qualities. First, nonchalance can be useful without being intended as such. This is suggested by the story of Oleg, who is the first to know when it is safe to travel on ice. Even though he travels on his own accord and for his own entertainment knowing that the travel is risky, the community observing him witnesses that movement across the frozen river is possible. Second, nonchalance helps in dealing with troublesome situations where other leverages, like collective action, seem out of reach. Dismissing the polygraph test implementation can prove to be the best strategy in the struggle with a timber harvesting firm as workers may feel exempt from obligations because they never received any social benefits or proper compensation for their work. Third, refusal of safety measures in day-to-day life and at the workplace—which, people know, could lead to harm but think that they personally will not be affected—becomes a point around which a specific set of relationships with the world is built. This is demonstrated by examples of not fastening seat belts and not wearing a mask during the pandemic. Overall, nonchalance makes itself known in the fabric of everydayness where it is woven into the mundane.
Finally, nonchalance is a category that is morally ambiguous: it causes admiration as a disregard for danger and is condemned as a lack of foresight and recklessness. Nonchalance is nevertheless present across socio-economic categories and positions, from privileged travelers (Americans in Canada) to “stayers” in New York refusing to leave despite the coming hurricane. In the Siberian village, nonchalance is an affective response to the precarious condition of daily life and a feature of staying and being there. Nonchalance is part of a connection to the place that demands effort and exertion, sometimes at the physical limits, to maintain ordinary life. But nonchalance also gives a sense of freedom, which is the avoidance of constant supervision by the state and its meticulous disciplining demands of bodily control. Nonchalance is not an ethnic trait, since so many different behaviors around the world can be viewed as nonchalant. Nonchalance may be studied based on the cultural production of a period; above, I aimed to demonstrate its effect on the ethnographic material. Nonchalance can be productively conceptualized as flourishing in a set of socio-economic conditions.
Studying the affect of cheerful nonchalance in numerous other affects emerging in different longue durée historical moments, in addition to the traditionally studied nostalgia, hope, sense of loss, melancholia, and other pensive affects, will aid in understanding the attitudes and behaviors of people as defined by a variety of affective responses that so far have not been taken into consideration or fully ethnographically described. The affective attitudes, Stoler and Thrift have argued, are not superfluous to the arrangement of “the order of things.”Footnote 62 Cheerful nonchalance is powerful and ubiquitous. Nonchalance plays a role in everyday living when safety concerns are dismissed. Some people feel that such a dismissal boosts the quality of their lives, or at least does not interfere with the pleasures of living unbothered. What others may see as inertia or lack of will to live is stoicism and wisdom of refusing troubles, be they those of movement, labor, demand for justice, dreams of prosperity, or worry.
