Recent decades have seen a proliferation of social science studies focusing on nostalgia in post-socialist countries. The number of nostalgia-driven takes on post-socialism has grown substantially, turning nostalgia into a dominant paradigm for understanding experiences of the social upheavals following the collapse of socialism. A range of scholarly discourses on post-socialist nostalgia with all its shades, twists, and turns is exhilaratingly wide ranging, from the politics of memory and past-oriented nostalgia to social action, cultural production, and affective futurities. In my view the most recent book by Marjorie Mandelstam-Balzer, presenting profiles of the three Siberian Republics of Buriatiia, Tuva, and Sakha, stands out for its environmental and ethnonational focus that helps unpack the ways nostalgia produces a galvanizing effect for environmental activism: activism that has been formed in response to the decades of communal spiritual revitalization efforts, “encroachment of political, cultural and human rights alongside erosion of territorial guarantees, and unprecedented industrialization without adequate ecological oversight” (165). The book's inquiry constitutes the author's lifelong research agenda pertaining to identity, interethnic relations, ethnonationalism, tradition, and sovereignty among three large Siberian groups of Turkic-Mongolic heritage: Sakha (Yakut), Tuvans, and Buriat, who suffered varied degrees of political repression during the Soviet era. However, this time the discussion centers on the figure of a charismatic leader to galvanize nostalgia “defined as the conscious search for a usable past that can help unite an ethnonational group and enable its members to focus on cultural change and social reform” (9). Each republic receives a detailed consideration of the aforementioned issues in a separate chapter providing a complex overview of the sociopolitical and economic tensions between the Russian colonial center and three non-Russian peripheries.
At the heart of the book is a meticulous engagement with the dynamics of political and charismatic leadership among the three ethnic groups. Several profiles of potential leaders discussed by the author illustrate that the autocratic regime of President Vladimir Putin's Russia has been actively suppressing charismatic leadership, despite the initial emergence of potential leaders in the chaos of the immediate post-Soviet period. The most recent case of a Sakha New Age internet-viral shaman, Aleksandr Gabyshev, who has “touched a nerve in Russia's body politic” by his intention to exorcise the Kremlin of its current occupant and who, as a result, was incarcerated by the authorities in a psychiatric clinic, is considered to suggest that the value of such ambiguous figures as he has been the ability “to raise consciousness and stimulate open debate about the precarious condition of Russia's society and leadership” (157). Accidentally or not, “he managed to tap into amorphous simmering resentments and gelled them into simply expressed coherence” (157). Mandelstam-Balzer suggests that the degree to which Aleksandr's prominence will politically affect and mobilize the public in the future will depend on what trajectory his agency will take. This may take the form of religious martyrdom or may lead to acquisition of stronger political influence if affirmed by a conscious desire of the shaman to take “his social and political critique to a new level of programmatic ethical principles and practice (ritual), as have many new religious movement leaders before him” (157).
While contextualizing political conditions at the time when the centralizing state is getting increasingly less federal and more authoritarian, the study offers the most up-to-date scholarly report on the genealogy of historically and culturally inflected political means potentially generative for mobilization of civil society and broader senses of collective self-worth across three republics. The author argues that while such politically and genealogically unifying discourses as Eurasianism, pan-Turkism, and pan-Mongolism posit a “phantom” threat for Russian federal authorities, the cross-republic solidarity symbolism has been helpful for “ethnonational mobilization, enabling limited and uneven advocacy for social, cultural, and ecological rights” (96). The political aspirations for ethnonational sovereignty within these republics are widespread but difficult to realize in Russia's current political climate. But, as her consideration of the Tuvan case shows, if and when sovereignty bids are suppressed harshly, the situation may quickly spiral into out-of-control political violence. Patterns concerning “increased public anger over election falsification at various levels, fear of police discrimination against those of Asian appearance and cynicism about Russia's role in local histories,” as well as relentless despoliation of Siberian natural resources at the expense of the local population's public health and safety, constitute deep rifts in the already unstable ground of interethnic relations throughout Siberia. This monograph, offering fine-grained analysis of interethnic relations, represents an important milestone in the anthropology of Siberia and anthropological approaches to the politics of ethnonationalism.
