The book under review has a strong political agenda. Informed by the author's strong belief that the Marxist critique of capitalism is a priori wrong, since capitalism has produced “global progress, technological innovations, plenty, and productivity . . .” with “hunger . . . overtaken by global obesity, absolute poverty by general affluence, ignorance by education, and illness by longevity” (25), State Ideology, Science, and Pseudoscience in Russia looks at the course of Russian history in the twentieth and, by extension, the twenty-first century as a deviation from this capitalist “normality.” This deviation has been expressed, according to the author, in Russian politicians’ and intellectuals’ persistent desire to obtain “a kind of ‘super knowledge’ capable of . . . turning Russia into a universal superpower” (xi). The three manifestations of this desire have been Soviet state ideology, Russian cosmism, and Eurasianism, which all emerged at the turn of the twentieth century as “pseudoscientific movements” in competition with each other (xiv–xv). After the collapse of the Soviet Union, all three of them merged in a peculiar regional phenomenon of the official ideology in the Republic of Kalmykia and have since then informed the revival of the ideological agenda in Putin's Russia.
The chronological scope of the book thus extends over a century, and Baasanjav Terbish combines his original anthropological research in Kalmykia (second half of the book) with a historical overview of Soviet state ideology, Russian cosmism, and Eurasianism (first half of the book). It was in Kalmykia that, during his anthropological fieldwork in the 2010s, he observed how the official ideological agenda of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, a former President and Head of the republic, represented a syncretic system of political statements and esoteric beliefs. The argument about the collusion and interplay between state ideology, cosmism, and Eurasianism, which is developed in the first four chapters of the monograph, thus represents a projection of Ilyumzhinov's syncretism onto the past by the author.
The problem with this approach is that it is simultaneously teleological and entirely speculative. Since ideology is the key concept for this book, in Chapter 1 Terbish develops a narrative-based understanding of ideology as “a storytelling embedded in rituals, practices, values, and the material world” (7), yet immediately betrays his own method in Chapter 2, titled “Soviet Ideology,” where he focuses on the hackneyed repertoire of Soviet political leaders from Vladimir Lenin to Mikhail Gorbachev instead of the texts that produced this ideology. Throughout this 50-page long chapter, Terbish makes two passing references to a speech by Iosif Stalin and an article by Iurii Andropov and provides one lengthy quote from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia; this sums up his primary sources on Soviet ideology as “a storytelling.” Chapter 3 on Russian Cosmism and Chapter 4 on Euroasianism are more substantiated in original texts by the proponents of these movements, yet none of them provides any evidence for the big claim of the reviewed volume: that they have been intricately connected with Soviet state ideology since the moment all of them emerged at the turn of the twentieth century. The only connection that Terbish has to offer is taxonomic. By pointing out that all of them claimed to be “genuine science” and dismissing these claims as false, he characterizes them as “pseudoscience.” Since all of them are pseudoscience, they should presumably have something in common. This taxonomy (state ideology, Cosmism, and Eurasianism as not “real” science) is also about as far as his discussion of “science in Russia” (the title of the book) goes.
Chapter 5 provides a brief historical overview of Kalmykia, the field of the author's anthropological research, and Chapters 6–9 finally bring us to original and interesting materials on the making and practice of ideology in this republic of the Russian Federation. Reflecting the postmodernist character of Russian politics, the tenure of Kirsan Ilyumzhinov as President and then Head of Kalmykia (1993–2010) saw a campaign to create an official ideology when the position of the State Secretary of Ideology was established in the republic and a textbook on Kalmykia's ideology was authored by Ilyumzhinov. Unfortunately, this research occupies a marginal place in the book (70 pages in total) and does not develop any argument apart from the author's observations that Kalmykia's ideology incorporated elements of Cosmism and Euroasianism and that his informants believe that Russia needs a state ideology.
The book has a number of questionable statements such as that Lenin was a half-Jew (8) or that state censorship was “reintroduced” under Leonid Brezhnev (suggesting that it had been lifted under Nikita Khrushchev [94]), but its real problem lies in its broader conceptual framework that sounds sensationalist yet remains entirely speculative. Scholars of post-Soviet ideology and Kalmykia will find interesting materials in the volume under review, but it can hardly be recommended for any other audience.
