Serguei Oushakine is a guest professor, teaching a second module mini-course on post-Communist Russia. He is staying in Oberlin for five weeks upon invitation from the Russian Department.

Are you a graduate of Columbia University?

Yes, I am finishing my second dissertation there. I did my first one in St. Petersburg. I am from Siberia, I grew up in Siberia and I moved to St. Petersburg to do my Ph.D. in 1991. I made my dissertation on Political Theory and kind of lived there and then moved to the U.S. and continued with Anthropology in Columbia.

What department is your class in?

It’s Russian. It’s Russian 121, but it’s mostly about Russian culture in the 1990s. The title is ”Post-Communism and the Cultural Problem;” in other words it’s an attempt to look at culture. In Russia in 1990s through some kind of political lenses, I guess, to see how changes influenced cultural patterns, cultural criteria, cultural production, but the changes are mostly political. For example, such things as “new poor” so to speak, that became suddenly more quickly poor, or the “new Russian” that is the opposite of this, and each group has very different cultural patterns and cultural consumptions that we will be looking at. So far we have been doing a session on identity and the theoretical aspects of identity and that was one on transition so we tried to look today at how transition can be interpreted in different interdisciplinary settings. In anthropology a boy becomes a man and a girl becomes a woman, but also what happens when a socialist society becomes a capitalist society and who is supposed to teach that society how to behave and how do you know if it had become a capitalist society?

Why did you choose Oberlin for this minicourse?

I knew Tim Scholl who is a professor in the Russian Department. That’s the connection, we met several years ago at a conference and we’ve been in touch and he asked me last year if I would be interested in coming to teach and I thought, “why not? That sounds interesting.” Because I had heard it is a good college and students are good.

Isn’t it difficult to explain post-Communist society, where the culture is so different and the post-Communist society itself so far away?

It is, and I think you should ask students about how they feel about this and if it becomes clearer or more and more complicated. And I think that what I am trying to say is that the Soviet society was not as simple as it is often portrayed and the post-communist situation is very interesting precisely because it is very complex and it had a lots of groups emerging in a very short period and people want to find out how they would negotiate the differences, how they get used to them too because for many people there were many changes to their environment and their habits and these changes were very quick in many cases.

For example, take the Academy of Sciences, which is in decline, so how do you deal with this change of status? Or different situation, people suddenly become very prominent at least financially, culturally, politically, so how do you negotiate these changes in your life? If you take for example the younger generation, their parents have very different breeding, so you get a huge group to which parents cannot relate. This is what we deal with. And the problem here is that I don’t know what to expect, I don’t know what the students know, to assume that they don’t know anything is not very interesting, because they do know something, the question is how to get to know what they know.

I had friends, Americans, who visited Russia last Christmas and when they came back they were absolutely fascinated by the country. They also said that they always thought of Russia as a merely Communist, now post-Communist country. They were surprised to find out that it was so much more than that. What can you say about this?

Well the Communist period is how long, about seventy years, from 1917 to about 1987. And Russia’s history is back from ninth century, so it would be like a thousand years? So on this background it may seem like nothing, but it was an important period because a lot of things changed. But what I am trying to show, though, is that the Soviet period as not as homogeneous as often presented.