Imaginative Dimension of Post-Soviet Militarism

Article

Abstract

[In Russian]

The recurring militarism of post-soviet states, especially Russia, requires theoretical tools other than just moral and sociopolitical criticism for its conceptualization. What is now urgently needed is to bring to light the deeper cultural foundations and motives of the alleged Russian people’s susceptibility to different kinds of the mobilization politics. To this end, I propose to use a regulative notion of ‘radical modernity’ based on the idea of social imaginary introduced by Cornelius Castoriadis and Benedict Anderson and elaborated recently by Charles Taylor. Within this theoretical optics, modernity is a permanent though not linear tendency to the disembedding of social imaginary from all the kinds of outer determination, whereas the (post-)soviet cultural (that is, not restricted to manifest forms of aggression) militarism is mainly the result of the cultural and historical blocking of this disembedding by substitution of the notion of modernization for the one of modernity which unavoidably led to far-reaching deformations of the (post-)soviet version of the European modern imaginary. One of the key indicators of this deformation is the paradoxical self-alienation and impoverishment of the meaningmaking potential of this kind of the social imaginary. The globally occurring individualization and intensification of social imagery, mediated by the developments in the information technology, is considered both as a model and as the promise for improvements in the post-soviet cultural region.