January 2024 MBR The International Studies Shelf

The International Studies Shelf

The Russia That We Have Lost
Pavel Khazanov
University of Wisconsin Press
www.uwpress.wisc.edu
9780299345105, $89.95, HC, 208pp

https://www.amazon.com/Russia-That-We-Have-Lost/dp/0299345106

Synopsis: In 1917, Bolshevik revolutionaries overthrew the tsar of Russia and established a new, communist government, one that viewed the Imperial Russia of old as a righteously vanquished enemy. And yet, as Professor Pavel Khazanov shows with the publication of "The Russia That We Have Lost", that after the collapse of Stalinism, a reconfiguration of Imperial Russia slowly began to emerge, recalling the culture of tsarist Russia not as a disgrace but as a glory, a past to not only remember but to recover, and to deploy against what to many seemed like a discredited socialist project.

Professor Khazanov's careful untangling of this discourse in the late Soviet period reveals a process that involved figures of all political stripes, from staunch conservatives to avowed intelligentsia liberals. Further, Professor Khazanov shows that this process occurred not outside of or in opposition to Soviet guidance and censorship, but in mainstream Soviet culture that commanded wide audiences, especially among the Soviet middle class.

Excavating the cultural logic of this newly foundational, mythic memory of a "lost Russia," Khazanov reveals why, despite the apparently liberal achievement of the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Boris Yeltsin (and later, Vladimir Putin) would successfully steer Russia into oligarchy and an increasing autocracy.

The anti-Soviet memory of the pre-Soviet past, ironically constructed during the late socialist period, became and remains a politically salient narrative, a point of consensus that surprisingly attracts both contemporary regime loyalists and their would-be liberal opposition.

Critique: A fascinating and seminal study, "The Russia That We Have Lost" by Professor Pavel Khazanov is informatively enhanced for the reader with the inclusion of a listing of the illustrations provided, twenty-two pages of Notes, an eight page Bibliography, and a twelve page Index. Of special and particular interest to students of Russian History, Communism/Socialism, and Russian Popular Culture, "The Russia That We Have Lost" is a welcome contribution recommended for personal, professional, community, and college/university library collections and supplemental Russian Studies curriculum reading lists.

Editorial Note: Pavel Khazanov is an assistant professor of Russian at Rutgers University, where he teaches courses on Russian literature and history. (https://reell.rutgers.edu/people/faculty/pavel-khazanov)

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