The Russia that We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse, by Pavel Khazanov, University of Wisconsin Press, 2023, $89.95 (hardcover), ISBN 9780299345105.

Drawing on a dozen or so movies, novels, and philosophical tracts, Pavel Khazanov convincingly diagnoses the driving force of post-Soviet Russian political culture.Revulsion at the Stalinist system is combined with a recognition that the society that exists today is the product of that very systemthe educated middle class in particular.One of the most important cultural products of the perestroika era were two films by Stanislav Govorukhin: Can't Live Like This (Tak zhit' nelzia) (1990) and The Russia We Have Lost (Rossiia, kotoruiu my poteriali) (1992).They were a shocking indictment of the Russian society that 75 years of communism had produced, from a nationalist perspective.The films were largely ignored by Western academia: social scientists had too many dramatic political events to deal with, and the literary community probably did not see much artistic merit in Govorukhin's work.But here we are 30 years later, and Pavel Khazanov has finally given Govorukhin the attention he deserves.Govorukhin's films are a vital reference point in understanding the ideological core of Putinism.Govorukhin reminds us that the broken, crime-ridden society of the 1990s was not the product of "shock therapy": the idea of Russian society rooted in a "eugenically degraded narod" was already well in place before the arrival of neoliberal reforms (108).One response to that unpleasant reality is to invoke the culture of pre-1917 Russia through reverence for the literary cannon and the values of the aristocracy.The liberal intelligentsia as a class were suspect because they led to terrorism and 1917; so instead what is valued is the humanity of the individual.The favored intellectuals are the doomed Decembrists of 1825 and not the Bolsheviks.The year 1917 was a tragedy that robbed Russia of its true historical future (8).This imperial retro framing carries with it a message of political powerlessness.The Subject that is being imagined through these literary works-which Khazanov cleverly explains as the "we" that has lost Russia-is a spectator to historical events, absolved of responsibility for the course of history-a "conservative suspension of agency" (13).This did not of course begin with Govorukhin.The Stalinist elite used Socialist Realist mass culture to sell the lie of postclass utopia to the masses and unleashed terror to eliminate the intelligentsia that could claim elite status.But then in the Thaw of the 1950s we saw the emergence of a politically disempowered humanism focused on the "lost" Russia of the 19th century (as in Anna Akhmatova's "Word on Pushkin"), with what Khazanov calls a neo-Decembrist intellectual elite emerging in Brezhnev's times.This approach can be found in both liberals and conservatives, dissidents and coopted intellectuals.They have a shared faith in their own elite status as bearers of culture and continuity, in contrast to the wild, uncultured masses on one side (that produced little of its own beyond the "criminal camp songs") and the heartless, despotic state on the other.Both liberals and conservatives have a shared fear of revolution.The educated elite of Soviet times are projected back into the "Russia we have lost," rendering the Soviet project an unfortunate historical detour.Khazanov explores these themes through a variety of sources: novels, essays, movies, and TV series.Chapter 2 discusses the movie Before History's Judgment (1965), featuring Vasily Shulgin (sometimes referred to as the "grandfather" of Russian nationalism"), and Operation Trust (1967), a TV series about a monarchist turned Cheka agent Aleksander Yakushev.The latter helps understand the appeal of the well-known Max von Stierlitz in the TV series 17 Moments of Spring (1973): a Chekist who passes himself off as a German aristocrat.That show is widely recognized as the most