The Post-Soviet Technical Elite and the Making of Subject Position

• In Event: Left Perspectives on Decolonization and Geopolitics III: Transnational Flows and the Falsifiable "Center" and "Periphery"

Abstract

This paper examines the self-presentation of the early post-Soviet technical elite amidst the collective loss of subject position during the long perestroika. As one of the most influential social groups of late Soviet and post-Soviet societies, the technical elite was hardly disenfranchised but was also far from achieving the cultural hegemony of the super-subject as it joined the global IT industry. This paper examines this ambiguity, focusing on the post-Soviet technical elite’s self-positioning as the First World and the Second World merged and collided in one common virtual space of the Internet. Drawing on Misha Verbitsky and Iuliia Fridman’s countercultural webzines from the late 1990s and early 2000s, this paper explores the tension between the feeling of exceptional progressiveness of Russian intellectuals and the cultural and technological apparatus of the American-born Internet in which they situate themselves.

Author

• Yoonmin Kim, Yale U