Lesbian Lives in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia. Post/Socialism and Gendered Sexualities

THiS BOOK iS A HiGHLY ReADABLe eTHNOGRAPHiC ACCOUNT OF LeSBiAN and bisexual women’s lives in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia. it is a timely book which presents a valuable contribution to gender and sexuality studies, as well as to the literature on socialism and post-socialism. The empirical base of this monograph is the use of multiple research methods, such as participant observation and interviews, in two different fieldwork sites. Moscow and Ul’yanovsk represent ‘strikingly different urban settings in terms of size, living standards and the presence or absence of a gay scene’ (p. 9). while Moscow, as the capital of Russia, has a relatively established gay scene, Ul’yanovsk is a provincial city which has struggled to recover from the disturbances of the economic transition and lacks an established gay scene. This book is a seminal contribution to the study of post-conflict societies. Still, the study could have benefited from an alternative research design that relied less on description and focused on systematising empirical evidence towards some assessment of causality. The analysis of individual interventions discusses actors, actions, interactions, and results, yet refrains from providing a plausible theory of change. it could also be argued that the extremity of violence in Srebrenica renders this municipality an outlier context for the study of post-conflict social repair. even though it is valuable as an ‘extreme case study’, identifying its specificities and teasing out more generalised arguments would require a comparative approach, incorporating additional cases from Bosnia or beyond. Admittedly, Nettelfield and wagner partly pre-empt these observations by recognising both the uniqueness of post-genocide environments and the difficulty of making bold claims about social repair recipes. They explicitly state that they not only aim to examine how to fix a broken state, but also aspire ‘to give voice to survivors, explaining their disappointment and their burden’ (p. 29), while acknowledging the ‘disconnect between the experiences of the survivors and members of the Bosnian society and the intellectual exercise of assessing what works and what does not’ (p. 29). This, however, calls for a final point of critique: the one-sided emphasis on Srebrenica’s Bosniak community and its limitations. Social repair—the phenomenon analysed—is a bidirectional and reciprocal process, especially at the grassroots level. The narrow focus on a single constitutive ethnic group undermines the quest for a well-rounded analysis. while subtle mechanisms of neighbourly relations’ restoration are identified and examined—such as the category of ‘the decent people’ (p. 106)—these are exclusively extracted from Bosniak accounts. even if the impartiality of the authors is unquestionable when presenting the survivors’ views, the inclusion of the view of deniers, or the secretly remorseful, or those suffering from cognitive dissonance—sometimes victims themselves—could inform the analysis with important insights. Overall, Nettelfield and wagner’s contribution has important implications for the forthcoming literature on post-conflict reconstruction. The study abandons the macro analysis of social repair and emphasises instrumental action coming from a diverse ensemble of actors—local, national and international. it also encourages a research stream consisting of the focused, longitudinal analysis of interventions in a single locality in a way that recognises interdependency, complementarity and interconnectivity. it thus refutes the idea that the sequencing of reforms in the aftermath of conflict is largely pre-determined. This book challenges preconceived ideas about the nature of international humanitarianism and chooses to emphasise the complexities, paradoxes and distresses that accompany reluctant nation-building.