The article examines how people in post‐Soviet Russia learn to interpret Soviet political genealogies as implicated in their own family histories. Based on long‐term fieldwork in a large provincial city in Russia, it focuses on a particular form of amateur genealogy called Rodologia (rodstvo = kinship). Informed by a burgeoning self‐help culture, Rodologia's followers argue that psychological “self‐realization” can be achieved by identifying the effects of state violence on family histories. Using a Lamarckian‐like idea of heredity, Rodologia argues that social and political upheavals, such as gulags, collectivization, and wars, “scar” people's genes and shape the behavior, self, and history of their descendants. The article demonstrates how popular attempts to attribute meanings to Soviet state violence are mediated by a surprising alliance of two cultural logics for articulating the self emerging in post‐Soviet Russia—a thriving therapeutic “self‐help” culture and a form of recollection inspired by genealogical imagination. A flourishing therapeutic culture and amateur genealogy, I show, emerge as a means to both organize one's relation to the Soviet past and to make sense of fundamental changes occurring in meanings of political order in post‐Soviet Russia.
Using the Baltic states as an empirical example of a wider social problem of categorization and naming, this article explores the statistical categories of ‘international migrant/foreign-born’ population used in three major cross-national data sources (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Eurostat and The World Bank Indicators (WBI)). We argue that these seemingly politically neutral categories ignore historical processes of state formation and migration, and privilege the current ethnonational definition of the state. We demonstrate how, in regions with recent geopolitical changes, the international migrant category’s spatial and temporal constraints produce distorted population parameters, by marking those who have never crossed sovereign states’ borders as international migrants. In certain social contexts, applying the international migrant category to those who have never crossed international borders shapes and legitimizes restrictive citizenship policies and new forms of social exclusion. We further argue that, when uncritically adopting this category, transnational institutions assert territorial imaginaries embedded in ethnonational political discourses and legitimize exclusionary citizenship policies.
The discourse on the demographic crisis in contemporary Russia resonates with a neoliberal political project that attempts to govern populations through the market logic of optimization, responsibilization, and efficacy. Yet, as this article argues, the basic categories of the discourse, although evocative of a new neoliberal rationality, were in fact born of epistemological changes that took place in the Soviet science of population in the last decades of the USSR. Specifically, the analytical shift from Marxist-Leninist demography, which stressed a strong economic determinism, to the concept of demographic behavior, which became central to the discipline's analytical toolkit in the late Soviet period, produced political ideas in which individual behavior became both the core of the population problem and its solution. The article follows these institutional and conceptual transformations and shows how knowledge produced by Soviet demographers in that period continues to provide the foundation for neoliberal state efforts to solve the population problem. When seen from a historical perspective, the neoliberal character of the new population policies loses its apparent ideological and political coherence.
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