In The Russia That We Have Lost, Pavel Khazanov explores the pre-Soviet past as a cultural construct. The anti-Soviet discourse, argues Khazanov, revived many pre-revolutionary values and influenced post-Soviet nostalgia. The book aspires to understand why “the truths about the glorious past … have been held as self-evident among so many people in contemporary Russia” (5). Khazanov traces the existence of the conservative anti-Soviet discourse in the works of various authors and filmmakers, including Anna Akhmatova, Grigorii Pomerants, Sergei Bondarchuk, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Bulat Okudzhava, and Nikita Mikhalkov. As Khazanov puts it, his book “excavates the historical context of the ideologeme ‘the Russia that we have lost’ by tracking its appeal to speakers and their audiences, beginning with the Thaw era” (9). Khazanov associates the nostalgic revision of the past with Russian intelligentsia whom he sees as being obsessed with seeing culturedness as an antidote to communist ideology. Several parts of the book offer a close analysis of Russian intellectuals’ self-representation as a new kind of nation (narod).

Khazanov develops many ideas found in Vladislav Zubok’s book Zhivago’s Children: The Last Soviet Intelligentsia (2011) and considers the representatives of Soviet intelligentsia of the 1960s–80s as “cultural, creative elites who took leading roles in articulating the future of Russia and the USSR at that time” (9). The book comprises an introduction, six chapters, and an afterword, and discusses such topics as Soviet intelligentsia, Soviet humanism, and the reception of Pyotr Stolypin in the 1990s–2020s. Despite many fascinating comments on specific texts and contexts, the book appears one-sided. It does not engage critically with significant studies relevant to Khazanov’s book: Norman Shneidman’s and Rosalind Marsh’s books on Russian literature in the 1990s–2000s; existing scholarship on Viktor Pelevin’s Chapaev and the Void; the many important articles on Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark (referencing just Dorota Ostrowska’s article); and Inna Kochetkova’s book The Myth of the Russian Intelligentsia: Old Intellectuals in the New Russia (2009). Surprisingly, the Introduction omits mention of Russian émigré literature’s role in forming the myth of the glorious past, when the post-Soviet book market was flooded with publications from Russian émigré writers and philosophers (whose works were partially available to the representatives of Soviet underground culture in the 1960s–80s), and when Mikhalkov’s post-Soviet television documentaries and programmes about Russian émigrés of the First Wave significantly shaped the Russian audience’s imagination of the past.

Khazanov’s study is not always reader friendly. Terms such as sovok (141) and “Lotman’s variety of the Decembrist discourse” (53) could have been explained in footnotes. There are extended quotes, like the one on 140–41 that is almost a page in length. Page 125 has an example of one of the factual errors: the landlord Manilov from Gogol’s Dead Souls is twice called Malinin, despite Boris Akunin correctly using Manilov in his article “If I were a Newspaper Magnate” discussed by Khazanov on that page.

Some evaluations of literary characters are obscure. Khazanov uncritically appropriates the notion of sovok from Pelevin’s essay “John Fowles and the Tragedy of Russian Liberalism” (1993) and applies it to Pelevin’s character Petr Pustota from Chapayev and the Void: “Petr is Ranevskaya, but déclassé, a ‘parodically ugly’ version of her, a product of humdrum Soviet education and urbanization, of Soviet Chapaev jokes that in their scatological silliness might occasionally sound a bit existential” (141). Surprisingly, he does not explain that Pelevin’s text refers to Aleksandr Genis’s essay “Sovok,” published in Nezavisimaia gazeta on September 15, 1992 (8). Drawing on Genis’s portrayal of the Sove, Pelevin offers his own interpretation of this concept, suggesting escapism and hostility to the market economy. In contrast, Genis defines the Sove as a product of the Thaw. Genis views the Soves as intellectuals who felt liberated from the market’s laws and who “lived in an imaginary, illusory world, where practice was never a criterion for truth.” Readers could have been given more information about Pelevin’s engagement with Genis’s article on John Fowles. Pelevin’s odd comparison between Fowles’ characters and post-Soviet subjects might largely be seen as ahistorical. Despite referencing post-Soviet nostalgia, Khazanov omits Ekaterina Kalinina’s important study Mediated Post-Soviet Nostalgia (2014) and its excellent methodological framework for studying post-Soviet nostalgia highlighting television’s role in shaping the post-Soviet audience’s view of the past; which would have helped Khazanov give a more lucid account of the contemporary anti-Soviet discourse and its origins.

Nevertheless, his insightful readings into a wide range of examples will interest students and scholars of post-Soviet history of ideas and culture.