states. After World War II both pressed for dismantling colonial orders that had produced slavery, resource extraction, and white nationalism—yet both the United States and the USSR continued to build upon colonial institutions and imperial infrastructures. For instance, both extended prison and military systems in ways that appropriated free labor and fed proxy wars. Both states, to sustain these contradictions without losing credibility, veiled or denied their similarities and connections, even in spaces of cooperation or intersection.3 In paranoia, we together shaped a militarized, carceral world.
In the United States, critics and comics mocked fear of enemy influence, exhorting us to fear instead our own failures to understand, as in Dr. Strangelove (1964), in which U.S. leaders mistakenly attack the Soviets, believing they have poisoned American waters. The year before Dr. Strangelove was released, the U.S. Air Force released educational videos addressing such concerns (Air Force Audio Visual Service,1963). The film demonstrates checks and balances along a chain of communication contacts through channels of telephone, radio, and then finally gesture. The U.S. president picks up a special phone to reach Strategic Air Command (SAC); his command, as a radio signal, is verified by two fighter planes; and then SAC relays the command down to individual missile silos. In each silo two men sit at matching consoles, equipped with matching keys. The pair confirms receipt of the command, each nodding to the other, holding eye contact as they turn their keys in synchrony to launch the missile. Just as a beautiful system of government is checked and balanced to prevent tyranny, all will be well with the system mediating nuclear commands; no contacts will break, no circuits misfire, because the agents confirming that the authorized contact has occurred are duplicated at each point. Of course this reassured few, and people searched elsewhere for the promise to survive planetary destruction, reviving New Age movements, writing science fiction in which humanity evolves skills for intuition and empathy. Meanwhile, the so-called Iron Curtain did not just divide and block communication and movement; it also motivated attempts to communicate, generated “excess” communications, and shaped longings for more contact.
Soviets and Americans faced those barriers differently, and we produced and performed knowledge of the other differently. As an ethnographer and American citizen, I have had ample opportunity to incite talk about superpower competition, and it has always struck me that random taxi drivers in Moscow ask me more informed questions about the United States than anyone I know in America, no matter how brilliant, has ever asked me about Russia or the USSR, except other specialists. In the Urals countryside, on trains crossing the Volga and the Kama, I have spent days and nights talking to people—people who identify as Russian, Romani, Chuvash, or Armenian (often some mix, as all may live as Russian citizens). My path has led me to speak with scientists and linguists, actors and bankers, designers and shop clerks, beading artists and metalworkers. All have commanded more detail about U.S. history and literature than the other way around, asking specific questions about state taxes, politicians, roads, breakfast cereals, and race politics in the United States. Back home, conversely, old classmates and even colleagues suggest that there is something awry in my interest in learning anything about Russia at all. My Russian visitors in the United States have rarely been greeted by the detailed comparative discussions I have met with in Moscow, Tver’, and Perm’. In Russia, print news, television, and radio produce a better baseline of knowledge about events beyond the borders than is usual in the United States; for example, one program on the independent radio channel Echo of Moscow devotes an hour each week to exploring unusual legal cases in America. Mainstream papers give full citations in daily reviews of the American press. Post-Soviets of several generations, in both city and country, even those having no contact with foreigners, sing songs by the Beatles, Stevie Wonder, Beyoncé. How many U.S. citizens know a single poem by Pushkin or would even recognize a song by psychedelic folk-rock band AuktsYon? Perhaps if American paranoia flourishes over blind spots, Russian versions adhere almost affectionately to details.
Patterns of migration explain some of the difference; many Russians published their American impressions to circulate back home (via tamizdat), and contacts did not completely wither with immigration even during the deepest frosts. It was Russian friends who taught me how the U.S. federal highway infrastructure works in tandem with trucking hospitality plazas and weigh stations; they have an émigré friend who drives a freight truck across the continent, and I do not. In the real world, where some Russians become better Americans than I can be, paranoia is a means to erase such inconvenient impurities—it can even transform the immigrant’s or tourist’s very affection for things American into a reason to reject all things Russian.
ROMANCING OPACITY
When I first began to plan pursuing ethnography in the USSR, around 1987, a graduate adviser warned me, “No one will ever trust you over there.” This was even before the world order changed in 1989. Political regime changes from Eastern Europe to South Africa, monetary reforms and educational overhauls after the fall of socialist states drew attention to new crises of representation and reanimated older ones: “Is this a counterfeit ruble?” “Can we trust our Swedish colleague?” “Does she really love me, or want a visa to Canada?” The stakes for interpretation within Russia shifted for a good while, from fearing enemies of the state to fearing enemies in the markets. Russians in the 1990s warned me to avoid merchants, to avoid Roma; women cautioned against alfonsy, men looking for sugar mommas. People debated: Were Russians the samyj iskrennij narod (“most sincere people”), or the most ironic, or the most suspicious?
Still no one, not one of these people, nor any of those about whom they warned me, ever let me down, cheated me, robbed me, or took advantage of me. Some gave me advice, rides, repairs, birthday parties—an engagement party!—meals, shawls, books, jewelry, candy, cards, embraces, opinions, stories … and time. I tried to reciprocate. Did they give to cultivate an American spy or a connection overseas? It has been thirty years, and by now it is clear that I have no good information and not a lot of money—and people still spend time with me. Moreover, I have too often seen too many of these people treat even strangers with careful responsibility, if not cheer, orienting to an ethic of mutual aid—one that some complain has vanished since the demise of the USSR, but that (to my American sensitivity to preserving individuality and refusing aid) seems vital and alive. Where markets blossomed in Russia, they did so without the objectivist strains of extreme individualism that dominate among American financial elites (thanks to another Russian émigré, Ayn Rand, who made more ripples in Chicago and New York than in St. Petersburg and Moscow). After three decades of fieldwork and study, I reject assertions that mistrust and illusion structure the ways people in Russia actually relate, any more than they do in other places I have lived. Instead, people there begin, probe, and nurture relationships even against proliferations of narratives driven by paranoid logic, filling them out over time.
Mistrust is not the motor for this book. It is but one approach to contact, one that sparks and recharges not within the space of a single state but across them, and that is embedded among specific technologies for intuition, sets of skills, procedures, networks and institutions for interpreting others. In Moscow in early 1992 the mother of one friend, a talented tailor, gave me a photocopy of a “very useful book,” a recent translation of Dale Carnegie’s How to Make Friends and Influence People. As I read it for the first time, I recalled that the giver was already assiduously following its precepts; for example, she began every turn at talking by addressing her interlocutor by name, a practice to which I developed an aversion after reading about its purpose and function according to Carnegie. A decade later, a different friend in Moscow, a writer, voiced a position closer to mine, asking whether people in the United States read Carnegie’s “lessons in hypocrisy” as avidly as did people in Russia. I told her that, while many know of Carnegie, I know few who quote the text—but we seem to have already absorbed many of its principles.4 A decade later in Moscow, living experts such as Paul Ekman were in vogue, teaching not how to make friends, but how to discern false friends. He has become popular both there and elsewhere through translations of his books and a fictional television series based on his work (Lie to Me, 2009–2011).
It turns out that Ekman started visiting psychologist colleagues in St. Petersburg, Russia,
