Russia on the Edge

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed geographical metaphors-whether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center periphery and border-have become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal visible and colorful rightist ideologue Aleksandr Dugin the founder of neo-Eurasianism has articulated positions contested by such writers and thinkers as Mikhail Ryklin Liudmila Ulitskaia and Anna Politkovskaia whose works call for a new civility in a genuinely pluralistic Russia. Dugin's extreme views and their many responses-in fiction film philosophy and documentary journalism-form the body of this book.