In 2005, Russian President Vladimir Putin observed that “[p]eople in Russia say that those who do not regret the collapse of the Soviet Union have no heart.” Yet, he added that “those who want to bring it back have no brain.” In The Patriotism of Despair, Serguei Oushakine quotes Putin as evidence that the Soviet past has become “irretrievable yet not erased” (pp. 79, 3). What does mourning for lost aspects of communism mean in post-Soviet Russia? What ideals do Russians bring to the political sphere? Russian-born anthropologist Oushakine and American political scientist Ellen Carnaghan agree that praise for the Soviet era is not a sign that Russians want to turn back the clock. Something new has emerged from the ruins of socialism, and outsiders and insiders alike are struggling to comprehend it fully. In their recent books, Oushakine and Carnaghan each reveal important aspects of the impact of the “transitions” to democracy and the market on Russians' attitudes toward citizenship and the state. Driven by different disciplinary agendas, both scholars find recent experiences of disorder and suffering to lie at the root of Russian thinking about politics.

In Out of Order, Carnaghan inquires into seemingly contradictory answers given by individual Russians to surveys assessing openness to democracy and the market. Using in-depth interviews with some 60 Russians of varying ages, backgrounds, and places of residence, Carnaghan probes what lies behind the inevitably superficial responses to survey questions regarding deep beliefs. She concludes, not surprisingly, that Russians are imperfect democrats. But she challenges traditional explanations that attribute Russians' illiberalism to an ingrained preference for authoritarianism, arguing that Russians' willingness to disregard “the niceties of democratic practice” stems more directly from living in “an imperfectly functioning society, governed by deeply flawed political institutions” (pp. 3, 14).

Despite the stereotype of late socialism as a time of stagnation, Carnaghan notes that the shortage economy created a constant level of uncertainty, as did the capriciousness of party leaders. Democratization and the market, however, only increased the insecurity of daily life. Boris Yeltsin's poor relations with parliament, the decline in public services, inflation, and “bandit” privatization did not alter Russians' desire for responsive representative government in the abstract, but it produced frustration with the local variant. Hence, Russians' preference for a strong state and their dislike of quarreling interest groups should be interpreted as a reasonable response to rising crime, unemployment, and a weak state.

Carnaghan teases out interesting distinctions between those Russians who see their world as frighteningly chaotic, somewhat anxiety producing, and relatively stable. She also finds varying levels of political sophistication. As might be expected, more sophisticated and “relaxed” Russians take more open stances toward the market and place more value on representative institutions. Moreover, several of these liberals clearly identify the absence of rule of law as the key political deficit in Russia. Overall, Carnaghan's interviewees want predictability, rule of law, responsive government, and influence, but experience has taught them to expect far less.

Fear of chaos helps explain both disillusionment with Boris Yeltsin and attraction to Putin. Out of Order also exposes sources of passivity; Carnaghan shows that even those Russians who are highly dissatisfied with incumbent politicians are often unwilling to advocate change—for any change brings a worrisome possibility of upheaval. Similarly, she suggests that Russians' failure to protest the replacement of elected governors with appointed ones stems from relief at having governors who have been vetted, rather than a choice between relatively unknown candidates.

Despite the evidence that Russians are tolerating the curtailment of electoral democracy, Carnaghan injects a slightly optimistic note. She theorizes that if recent experiences of insecurity and upheaval are to blame for Russians' mistrust of institutions and unease with parliamentary fractiousness, then more effective governance might alter these views in a democratic direction. Yet one wonders whether the continuing failure of the Russian government to produce or permit key elements of democracy, such as multiparty rule and rule of law, might instead encourage Russians to accept claims by nationalists and statists that Russia needs a “special” (i.e., compromised) version of democracy.

To better identify novelties in Russian political thinking, Carnaghan questioned a smaller number of Americans on their attitudes toward democratic and market institutions. One major difference that surfaced was Americans' underlying pride in their nation and confidence that they were lucky to live in an admittedly imperfect but basically sound system. This patriotism based on national achievements starkly contrasts with what Oushakine identifies as a “patriotism of despair” in Russia.

In contrast to Carnaghan, whose analysis is driven by predetermined questions about Western style democratic values, Oushakine takes his fundamental inspiration from ethnographic observations. He traces his interest in assessing Russian values to a piece of graffiti that reads: “We have no motherland.” The visual dichotomy of old Soviet symbols next to new capitalist and globalist imagery in the landscape of his Siberian hometown further motivates him to look at how Russians are coping with their past. Through interviews, observation, and study of local texts, Oushakine examines how some Russians are trying to make sense of post-Soviet society and their place in it. In this quest, he goes beyond Carnaghan's general description of disorder to explore the very language that Russians use to describe lawlessness, anarchy, and suffering. He depicts individuals—most notably veterans of conflicts in Afghanistan and Chechnya and mothers of dead soldiers—mired in a sense of loss. He introduces young people who remember little of socialism and yet long for a missing, perhaps mythical, time of collectivism and self-sacrifice.

Oushakine shows how feelings of loss have become the core of new communities, such as young neo-communists and Slavophiles, who blame economic inequality and loss of territory on the political reformers of the 1990s and foreign forces. Disgusted by corrupt Russian capitalism, young militants reject consumerism. They aspire to awaken their fellow citizens to the ways in which “money-pulation” is damaging the moral base of society. Perceived moral decay as well as the ongoing demographic crisis in Russia similarly inspire local sociologists to reexamine Russia's traumatic past and to mix cultural, geographic, and economic theorizing. Oushakine demonstrates how these scholars use narratives of Russian tragedy to formulate a national security imperative calling on Russians to resist alien religions, foreign languages, Western values, and so forth. His genealogy of these semiscientific, highly paranoid discourses helps us make sense of Carnaghan's interviewee who remarks, “We common people sometimes think that spies have been sent in specially. They entreat us to kneel in order to literally enslave us, to turn us into zombies” (p. 190).

Oushakine also focuses on veterans of recent wars and mothers who have lost their sons to military service. Here, he exposes the absence of the state in dealing with the long-term consequences of its decisions to go to war. Draftees' experience in the disorganized, hasty invasion of Chechnya and upon their return to civilian life epitomizes besprede—a kind of lawlessness and a lack of boundaries. In the absence of material benefits or a legitimating narrative of war, veterans and their families must craft their own support system. Soldiers' mothers and veterans form closed circles in which sacrifice and pain are the leveling and binding forces, but their grief tends to turn them inward, away from politics.

Both Carnaghan and Oushakine are empowered by, and limited by, their disciplinary traditions. Carnaghan addresses a topic of great interest: the nature of political attitudes among Russians. Yet by looking only for convergence with Western democratic practices, she limits herself to interrogating her subjects as to their attitudes toward formal institutions. In so doing, she misses the networks and informal institutions that many Russians tap to solve problems (e.g., see Alena Ledeneva, Russia's Economy of Favors, 1998). Russians who want responsive governance may be pursuing this end by sidestepping formal channels. Moreover, although Carnaghan probes deeper into her subjects' lives than pollsters do, her interviewees become data points to be charted, rather than memorable individuals with vivid tales of “disorder” and distinct hopes for the future. Oushakine's anthropological methods allow him to bring to life his diverse subjects and to create atmospheric images of post-Soviet rituals. Yet he seems unwilling to speculate about the larger or lasting effects of the “patriotism of despair.” For instance, how broad is support for conspiratorial thinking about the West? Does it influence local politics? Oushakine provides rich, thick description of his subjects, but does not place them in the larger context of Russian politics.

Will trauma and grief continue to prove poor fodder for civic responsibility, or will they inspire more demands on the Russian state? Oushakine and Carnaghan explain Russians' antipathy toward the first generation of “democratic” leaders, but they leave us wondering how Russians will react to the erosion of democratic institutions and the continued weakness of the state. One hopes that both of these scholars will continue to probe the nature and impact of Russians' attitudes toward their political system.