Citizens of the future : infrastructures of belonging in post-industrial Eastern Siberia

The Soviet Union’s promises of the radiant Socialist future failed to materialize but left behind material reminders—ruins, broadly conceived: not only architecture and infrastructure but also values, popular tropes, and ideas. My dissertation argues that these “ruins” of a future as imagined in the past continue producing warped meanings. They become a kind of affective infrastructure for the present. Through daily engagement with the material reminders of Socialist industrialism’s failed promise, people are entangled in a particular affective infrastructure of belonging. I study these entanglements by focusing on a village in the Priangar’e region of Siberia. In the 1950s and 1960s, the developmental transformation of Soviet infrastructure manifested in the region with the construction of the Bratsk Dam and Hydroelectric Power Station. The dam and the station were a massive terraforming project. The dam-induced flood displaced thousands of people. New settlements arouse at the shores of the Angara River. They were centrally planned. One such settlement, the primary site of my research, is the village of Anosovo. Almost sixty years since relocation, eloquently described by the Russian writer Valentin Rasputin in the novel Farewell to Matyora, Anosovo, a sister-prototype of Matyora, is still there. With the official disbandment of the USSR in 1991, Anosovo saw the drastic reduction of government support on the way of marketization, privatization, and liberalization of prices with the turn to the neoliberal market economy. Anosovo, along with countless other small settlements across the former USSR territories, found itself in a position of a monotown with the privatized enterprise with the plummeting social sphere. How do people survive there and in so doing, how do they navigate the entanglements of ruins and new beginnings? What keeps the remaining villages rooted in a place whose population has dwindled from more than 2,000 in the 1970s to a little over 500 today? How do they define their belonging and how do they effectively “belong”? This work argues that among the factors that define people’s connection to the place postponing their movement is the multiplicity of the ties of “affective infrastructure” understood in two senses: first, as the human (and animal) connections, and second, as the workings of the infrastructural agglomerations of objects upon the consciousness of the people. People become the sensitive joints in affective infrastructures. Being incorporated within these affective infrastructures and in effect manifesting as the elements of such, the villagers in Anosovo connect to the place with strong ties. The affective profile of the villagers turns out to be optimistic, directed toward the future, hopeful, nostalgic, longing for immortality and awaiting compensation or retribution. The mood is marked with what this works calls “cheerful nonchalance”: a disregard for the everyday risks and dangers of life in the industrial margins of Russian Siberia. This work argues that cheerful nonchalance—the upbeat spirit of caring less or not at all—is an affective response to precarious conditions. This ethnographic work is grounded in participant observation, collection of narratives, and my own family history: my grandmother lived in Anosovo until the death of her husband, and the story of her peregrinations, her theorization of the “Siberian character,” and the analysis of her written memoirs add a personal and intimate dimension to this study.