Russia’s ‘fortresses of solitude’: Social imaginaries of loneliness after the fall of the USSR

Abstract

Based on the distinction between three approaches to loneliness, and the development of the phenomenological and existential framework of loneliness studies, this article explores Russia’s discourse of national loneliness on three levels: a) the level of the official discourse of the Russian government; b) the level of political and philosophical concepts; and c) the level of popular media and cinema (with a specific focus on a case-study of the post-Soviet Russian blockbuster film Brother and its sequel, Brother 2). In this article I concentrate on the particular experiences of loneliness and their interpretations in Russia after the fall of the USSR. The case of the fall of the USSR has shown that social and political exploitations of different forms of national loneliness can become the flip side of the doctrine of autonomy, equal individual rights and freedom from authoritarian rule. This should be considered and never disregarded within our analysis of the contours and new transformations of emerging hegemonic discourses, including the different forms of nationalism in Russia, and in a wider cross-cultural perspective.