Tag: Russia

The Coder Who Came in from the Cold

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A review of From Russia with Code: Programming Migrations in Post-Soviet Times, Mario Biagioli and Vincent Antonin Lépinay eds., Duke University Press, 2019.

From Russia with CodeFrom Russia with Code is the product of a three-year research effort by an international team of scholars connected to the European University at Saint Petersburg (EUSP). It benefited from the patronage of two important figures: Bruno Latour, who pioneered science and technology studies (STS) in France and oversaw the creation of a Medialab at Sciences Po in Paris; and Oleg Kharkhodin, a Russian political scientist with a PhD from the University of California at Berkeley who served as EUSP’s rector during most of the duration of the study. Based on more than three hundred in-depth interviews conducted from 2013 through 2015, the research project also benefited from a rare window of opportunity offered by political conditions prevalent back then. Supported by a consortium of Western research institutions, it was partially funded by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Science of the Russian Federation for the study of high-skill brain migration. It could build on the solid foundation of EUSP, a private graduate institute whose academic independence is secured by an endowment fund that is one of the biggest in the country. The brain drain of IT specialists was obviously a matter of concern for Russian authorities, as surveys showed that in 2014 the emigration of Russian scientists and entrepreneurs was by a wide margin the highest since 1999. The movement was amplified after 2014 by Russia’s decision to annex the Crimean Peninsula and, in 2022, by its all-in war of aggression against Ukraine. Conditions for fieldwork-based studies and international research projects in Russia would certainly be different today. The book’s chapter on civic hackers illustrates how fast the ground has moved in the past ten years: most of the civic tech projects it describes were affiliated with the foundation created by Alexey Navalny, a Russian opposition leader who was detained in 2021 and died in a high-security prison in February 2024.

Preventing the brain drain

The research questions framing the project demonstrate how social science can contribute to policy discussions while translating practical issues into scholarly interrogations. The concerns of the Russian authorities that sponsored the project are well reflected in the topics covered and the questions addressed. How can Russia prevent or reverse the brain drain that was perceived as a direct threat to the nation’s sovereignty? How to avoid dependence on Western imports and cultivate world leaders in an industry dominated by the GAFA? Is import substitution in the IT sector a viable strategy, or should the country rely on foreign direct investment and integration into global value chains? Could Russia create its own version of Silicon Valley by encouraging the clustering of industries in special economic zones and technoparks? These questions are reframed and displaced through the lenses of disciplinary studies mobilized by the members of the research team: STS, transition to market theory, economic geography, innovation policy studies, corporate management, migration studies, and so on. But mostly, From Russia with Code helps answer the questions that readers familiar with IT all know too well: why are Russian programmers so talented and prized by the market? What explains their unique combination of skills, and how to integrate these skills into a foreign business setting? Is it true that their technical prowess is offset by a lack of managerial skills and poor entrepreneurial spirit? The list of famous Russian IT developers include Andrei Chernov, one of the founders of the Russian Internet and the creator of the KOI8-R character encoding; Andrey Ershov, whose research on the mathematical nature of compilation was recognized with the prestigious Krylov Prize; Mikhail Donskoy, a leading developer of Kaissa, the first computer chess champion; Alexey Pajitnov, inventor of Tetris; and Yevgeny Kaspersky, founder of cybersecurity and anti-virus provider Kaspersky Lab. Russia is one of the few countries that is not dominated by Google, Facebook, and WhatsApp, but that has developed its own search engine (Yandex), social network (VKontakte) and message app (Telegram). As a last question that lurks into readers’ minds: what are Russian hackers really up to, and should we be afraid of their cyberattack capabilities?

The standard diagnosis on Russia’s IT capacity is framed by transition theory and posits that “Russians historically have been good at invention but poor at innovation.” Russian computer scientists built successful academic careers outside their homeland, and many global technological giants such as Apple, Google, Intel, Microsoft, or Amazon retain Russian programers as valuable talents. Yet Russian IT entrepreneurs are scarce either in Russia or abroad, and outstanding success stories are the exception rather than the rule. It took one generation to produce a Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, who arrived in the United States at the age of six where his Russian Jewish parents typically pursued a teaching and research career instead of turning to the corporate world. The virtuosity of Russian software programmers is often explained by their high-level training in mathematics and pure science. The Soviet Union maintained a top-class scientific apparatus, from the fizmat model high schools specializing in math and physics to the dense network of research institutes, science cities, and elite academic institutions like the Academy of Sciences. This strong institutional basis translated into a high number of Nobel prizes and science olympiad laureates. Russian IT developers are praised for their deep interest and immersion in research, an inventive turn of mind, the ability to think independently and offer innovative solutions, and their intuitive grasp of complex problems. But they are also lambasted for their lack of management and entrepreneurial skills. Management was something to which Soviet scientists and science students had virtually no exposure. Even now, business culture is still perceived by many in the community as a superfluous and even disingenuous element. According to the standard view, Russian tech specialists are often interested mainly in new and technically exciting projects, to the point where they disregard the interest of their clients. They tend to think that if an idea is good technically, it will automatically translate into commercial success. They are criticized for a lack of business acumen, poor business etiquette, a certain intolerance for risk, a limited sense of the global market, and disinterest in management issues, which they see as “bullshit.”

Lack of management skills

The studies assembled in From Russia with Code both validate and complicate this diagnosis. Russian IT specialist are certainly heirs to a tradition that values the plan over the market, pure science over applied technology, and developing elegant responses to abstract questions over providing practical solutions to specific problems. Technical skills can be acquired using brute force and a sound foundation in basic science; management culture is taking much longer to cultivate and is more reliant on “soft skills.” The history of computer science in the Soviet Union lies at the root of the differences in programming cultures between East and West. As long as informatics remained a basic science akin to applied mathematics, Soviet scientists remained at the forefront of the discipline. Although cybernetics was initially perceived as an American “reactionary pseudoscience,” it quickly became part of a vision of a socialist information society. As in the United States, early computers were intended for scientific and military calculations. A universally programmable electronic computer known as MESM was created in 1950 by a team of scientists directed by Sergey Lebedev at the Kiev Institute of Electrotechnology. Electrical engineering and programming was one of the few careers in the Soviet Union that was relatively open to Jews and to women: hence their large numbers in these professions. The engineering education was fairly broad, with heavy emphasis on mathematics and physics, but without much foundation in computers: according to one former student, “learning to program without computers was akin to learning to swim without water.” Hardware limitations forced Soviet programmers to write programs in machine code until the early 1970s. By that time, the Soviet government decided to abandon development of original computer designs and encouraged cloning of existing Western systems. A program to expand computer literacy in Soviet schools was one of the first initiatives announced by Mikhail Gorbachev after he came to power in 1985. A network of afterschool education centers carrying programming classes for children led to a wide popularity of Basic and other programming languages.

A half century’s worth of Soviet experience with computing did not just disappear overnight with the end of the Soviet Union. Russians continued to play by the old rules they had internalized in the Soviet economy. The technical skills that Russian software programmers are internationally appreciated for and identified with are skills they have developed through the very specific Russian (and formerly Soviet) educational system. A case study of Yandex, the company behind Russia’s main search engine and the fourth-largest in the world, illustrates how coding socializes IT workers and creates communities of practice aligned with corporate objectives. Computer codes are written in languages that need to be executed by machines, thus leaving no space for semantic ambiguities. At the same time, and for the same reason, there is a specific sociality to code to the extent that lines of code also encapsulate relationships of collaboration, training, and skill transfer. At Yandex, young recruits are encouraged to immerse themselves in the source code of the company and to spot errors or typos for debugging. This way they learn the conventions of the community, all of which are inscribed in the codebase. Face-to-face interactions and oral communication are limited, as developers work from different office buildings and spend most of their time facing their computer screen, writing code or discussing through chatboxes. Yandex has a tradition of writing code without including comments in natural language: the code should be able to “speak for itself” by being accurate, simple, and “clean.” The very first thing every new employee has to learn is how to make code readable and to improve its utility for human readers. As in other programming communities, there is a difference in style between the “mathematicians” who prefer high-level languages such as Python and the “engineers” who favor low-level languages like C++. But projects at Yandex often mix the two approaches, while the corpus they create remains open to criticism and correction. All employees have access to the full codebase of the company and are free to comment on ongoing projects, upholding long-held principles of communal help that hark back to an idealized Soviet past.

Smart cities and technoparks

A key concern of policymakers is to create conditions by which IT industry can flourish. Interventions to promote public-private partnerships and foster cooperation between institutions and actors occur at different scales, from macro to micro: special economic zones, regional corridors, smart cities, creative hubs, technoparks, startup incubators, rentable work-space, and so on. Russia can build upon a model of science promotion that has concentrated resources in isolated science cities and non-teaching research institutions such as the Academy of Sciences. It has been successful at generating scientific breakthrough and achieving technological milestones in fields such as space exploration or the nuclear arms race. However, it has failed consistently in translating scientific discovery into technological innovation and market success. Commercialization was never a priority in the planned economy. In the IT sector, where innovation was increasingly driven by the market, the Soviet Union soon lost its advance in basic science and cybernetics and was reduced to licensing or copying Western technologies. Emerging from the ruins of the Soviet Union, the Russian state had its own particular vision of IT development. It was aiming at not simply imitating the West, but at keeping innovation within state control through authoritarian policy decisions and administrative guidance. But instead of supporting existing science cities and research institutions, the state decided to build a new technological apparatus separate from the Soviet one and inspired by the Silicon Valley model. As a result, Russia got the worst of both worlds: increased competition and the profit motive brought many IT professionals to exit the country in search of more remunerative opportunities, while domestically industrial policy gestured toward Silicon Valley but continued to follow the template of the old Soviet science apparatus. Created with great fanfare by then President Dmitry Medvedev, the Skolkovo “Innovative City” is almost impossible to find on a map and very difficult to go to from Moscow. At the time oof the book’s writing, it was criticized for “inefficiency, corruption, high rents, a complicated architectural plan, and a failing program for the support of startup companies.” Technoparks have been established in many other Russian cities to host both IT startups and larger technology companies. But local authorities are competing against each other through incentives and subsidies programs, while thousands of IT specialists have left the country and are likely never to return. Meanwhile, grassroots initiatives and homegrown developments were annihilated by the state’s attempt to regain control over peripheral regions. In the Russian Far East, a thriving ecosystem built around the online trading of used Japanese cars was suppressed by one stroke of a pen when the Russian state decided to impose a hefty levy over imported cars of more than five years. Other experiments such as Kazan’s self-branding as “the capital of the Russian IT industry” have met with more support from the centralizing state whose priorities are aligned with the interests of local politicians in Tatarstan. However, at present the city plan remains more a layout than a fully functional smart city, and the reader cannot escape the feeling of being led through a Potemkin village by an overtly enthusiastic research guide. It is easy to adopt the jargon of IT success and talk the talk of startup promotion. To walk the walk is another matter.

Russia’s soviet heritage continues to linger in the present.  But the Western capitalist model exemplified by Silicon Valley doesn’t represent the sole alternative. Not all Western countries share the same approach to running IT business. Elements of the socialist model, such as an orientation towards social justice, have influenced policies and mindset in Scandinavia, where Russian expatriates appreciate the communalist ethos and the family-friendly environment. Other Russian migrants who have relocated to Boston or to Israel place high value on a corporate capitalist model of large organizations which are both risk-adverse and profit-oriented. As the last article in the book concludes, “the entrepreneurial capitalism of Silicon Valley is not the only game in town.” There are circumstances when a ”socialist” technological model or a “corporate” capitalist model are more applicable than the purely “entrepreneurial” model of IT startups and venture capital. From a Russian perspective, it makes sense to cultivate the tradition of high technical skills and complex problem-solving that constitute Russia’s soviet heritage. Business models that originate ion the academic community are quite distinct from the capitalist motive or profit generation. Even in the West, open source programming and the free software movement have led to sustainable ventures and now undergird a vast portion of today’s internet. Moreover, the lack of entrepreneurial spirit by Russian IT specialists may be due to institutional factors: the lax attitude toward intellectual property, the absence of trust among young professionals, the relative isolation of Russia from global trade patterns, the absence of venture capital and related services to scale up enterprising businesses, the shadow of the criminal economy, etc. According to the authors, the brain drain narrative also needs to be complicated. Experiences of work migration by IT professionals from India or China have demonstrated that the “brain drain” is not an unfixable curse and can instead be viewed as “brain circulation,” with people looking for better conditions regardless of the country. Here again, the profit motive is not the only driver of individual decisions. Student and young researcher mobility is increasingly part of the academic curriculum, and the choice of destination is often motivated by existing collaborative networks or diasporic connexions. Scholars get a first taste of academic life abroad by spending a few months as a postdoctoral student or a guest lecturer before considering more long-term migration options. The same process of migrating step-by-step can also be found in a corporate environment where the decision to relocate is preceded by offshoring contracts and temporary missions. The story of Russian Jewish IT practitioners migrating to Boston during the Soviet period dispels the myth of the “tech maverick” and shows that migrants often have to re-train and upgrade their skills sets before they can find employment in US companies. The concept of brain drain assumes a kind of inherent and fixed value to the “brains” that leave their homeland and settle abroad. In practice however, migration often leads to occupational downgrading, deprofessionalization and de-skilling, as highly educated graduates lacking connexions and job-search skills become employed in low-skilled work or, at best, “upper-middle tech” in big US corporations. The failure to produce technological entrepreneurs among Russian immigrants should not be read as a result of their inability to operate in a capitalist economy or as a lack of entrepreneurial skills. Considering the limited options offered to migrants in a new environment, settling in for a mid-level corporate position in a large corporation instead of starting a new high-risk venture seems like a reasonable option.

The shadow of cyber criminality

In addition to the three models identified by the authors—socialist, entrepreneurial, or corporate—, there is a fourth model that they don’t consider in their essays: the criminal one. Much late-Soviet entrepreneurial activity emerged as an antidote to the country’s collapsing economy, and the idea of “dishonest speculation” was seen as the predominant form of engaging In business activities. From semi-legal market practices to criminal activities, there was only a fine line that many young professionals equipped with IT skills were ready to cross. The same skills that made fizmat school graduates valuable on the IT job market could also be turned toward quick gains in the shadow economy. During Russia’s market transition, the grey zone between legitimate, semi-legal, and illegal activity led to surprising developments, such as a publicly organized conference of avowed criminals that took place at Hotel Odessa in May 2002. The First Worldwide Carders Conference was convened by the administrators of CarderPlanet, a website on the dark web that specialized in mediating between vendors and purchasers of stolen credit card data. In the early age of e-commerce, when American banks and card issuers lagged behind in the chip-and-PIN technology which their European counterparts had developed, “carding” or credit card fraud became a very lucrative activity.  Russian fizmat kids with access to a computer and an Internet connexion turned into early-day hackers and cybercriminals.  CarderPlanet became the breeding ground of a whole generation who turned to cybercrime for lack of better opportunities in the context of a crumbling economy and a disintegrating state. Later on, these hackers turned to ransomware as the preferred mode of attack and to bitcoin as the privileged means of payment. Russian cybercriminality cannot be understood without appreciating its relationship to Russian national security interests. Early on the FSB, Russia’s secret service, made it clear that any criminal operation against domestic state interests was clearly off-limits and would be met with strong retaliation. Later on, criminal gangs were mobilized into cyber attacks against newly independent states such as Estonia or Georgia. Members of cyber gangs were also recruited into notorious state-backed hacking teams such as APT28 or Unit 26165. Cybercriminals hide behind anonymity services, encrypted communications, middlemen, puppet accounts, and pseudonyms. This makes it challenging for law enforcement agencies, let alone social scientists, to track them or describe their practices. A few facts highlighted by From Russia with Code might however be relevant here. Like conventional Russian software developers, Russian cybercriminals and hackers are likely to value technical prowess and coding virtuosity above all else. For them, code is a political instrument that has the power to challenge geopolitical power relations and capitalist business interests. Code also serves to create groups and communal identities of like-minded professionals, like the software-writing teams at Yandex. Studying their coding style and particular signature may help intelligence agencies to attribute cyberattacks to known actors in Russia, thereby responding to the challenge of attribution in cyber warfare. Like the professionals described in the book, Russian cybercriminals’ relation to the motherland is likely to be transactional. They are also geographically mobile, and need to venture abroad to close some illicit transactions, which gives Western law-enforcement agencies an opportunity to locate them and bring them behind bars. Most participants in the 2002 CarderPlanet Conference have been identified, tracked down, arrested, and condemned by justice.

Too Much Shock, Too Little Therapy?

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A review of Shock Therapy: Psychology, Precarity, and Well-Being in Postsocialist Russia, Tomas Matza, Duke University Press, 2018.

Shock TherapyWhen Russia broke away from socialism, reformers implemented a set of economic policies known as “shock therapy” that included privatization, marketization, price liberalization, and shrinking of social expenditures. In retrospect, critics claim there was “too much shock, too little therapy”: the economy spiraled down into a deep recession, currency devaluations sent prices up, and inequalities exploded. Huge fortunes were built over the privatization of state assets while the vast majority of the population experienced economic hardships and moral disarray. The indicators of social well-being went into alert mode: the psychological shock and mental distress that was caused by Russia’s transition to market economy was evidenced in higher rates of suicide, alcoholism, early death, and divorce, as well as precarious living conditions. People learned to adapt to freedom and the market the hard way: some took refuge in an idealized vision of the Soviet past, while for others traditional values of Russian nationalism and Orthodox christianity substituted for a lack of moral compass. The society as a whole experienced post-traumatic stress disorder. But contrary to the claim that economic shock therapy was “all shock and no therapy”, on the psychological front at least, therapy came in large supply. During the 1990s and 2000s, there was a boom in psychotherapeutic practices in postsocialist Russia, with an overwhelming presence of psychology in talk shows, media columns, education services, family counseling, self-help books, and personal-growth seminars. Shell-shocked Russians turned to mind training and counseling as a way to adapt to their new market environment. Political and economic transformations were accompanied by a transformation of the self: in order to deal with “biopoliticus interruptus”, homo sovieticus gave way to a psychologized homo economicus. Long repressed, discourses of the self flourished in talk therapies and speech groups in which, under condition of anonymity and privacy, individuals could say things about themselves that they wouldn’t have confessed even to their close friends or relatives. Russia became a talk show nation: the forms of psychological talk cultivated by TV hosts came to define the way Russians saw themselves as they sought guidance on how to adapt to their new environment.

Supply and demand

There are at least two ways to interpret this psychotherapeutic turn. The first mobilizes the tools of standard economics to analyze the growth of therapeutic services in terms of supply and demand converging under conditions of liberalization. Russia transited from centrally planned economy to market capitalism by removing state controls and unleashing the forces of the market. Under market conditions, supply meets demand, and pent-up demand leads to a supply boom when the constraints limiting market entry and expansion are lifted. The supply of psychotherapeutic services in the Soviet Union was severely restricted. Individual were to blame for affective disorder and social maladaptation, which diverted energies from the building of a socialist society. Care providers and psychologists had to adhere to a strict materialist approach, and subjective approaches of the self were replaced by neurophysiology and rational psychotherapy. Mental health and psychic wellbeing were tools of state control: political opposition or dissent were interpreted as a psychiatric problem, and the KGB routinely sent dissenters to psychiatrists for diagnosing to avoid embarrassing publiс trials and to discredit dissidence as the product of ill minds. During late-Soviet liberalization and perestroika, new therapeutic approaches were introduced and ideas from the West began to gain influence. This turned into a full psychotherapeutic boom after 1991: market entry conditions were relaxed, as anybody could set shop as a psikholog or a psikhoterapevt, and entrepreneurs began to advertise their services to the fraction of the public that could afford private counseling. Talk therapy and self-help, virtually nonexistent in the Soviet Union, became a booming industry. Private corporations established human resource departments and began to emphasize the cultivation of soft skills and emotional intelligence. Under volatile market conditions and with the disappearance of Soviet institutions, people strived for stability and points of reference. There was a new demand for treningi (training), koyching (coaching), and personal growth (lichnyi rost) or leadership (liderstvo) seminars. Raising a child also became a new challenge, and anxious families as well as school administrators began to use psychological services to improve performance and guarantee success.

A second interpretation, not necessarily contradicting the first, understands the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia as a symptom of the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. In social science studies and critical discourse, neoliberalism is identified with notions of individual rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence. These discourses and associated techniques constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. Neoliberalism extends to education and to the self the vocabulary and mindset of economics: individuals are compelled to assume market-based values in all of their judgments and practices in order to amass sufficient quantities of ”human capital”, “invest” in skills and capabilities, and thereby become ”entrepreneurs of themselves”. They are led to believe that they are autonomous subjects responsible for their present condition and they have control of their own destiny. Those who fail to thrive under such social conditions have no one and nothing to blame but themselves. The cost of social protection, which was once supported by state programs of social security, is now transferred to the individual or to families and communities; and social ills such as unemployment, poor health, obesity, drug abuse, or school failure are blamed on individuals, as opposed to putting the blame on the societal system as a whole. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies. Within the logic of global neoliberalism, the role of government is defined by its obligations to foster competition through the installation of market-based mechanisms for constraining and conditioning the actions of individuals, institutions, and the population as a whole. Neoliberalism is not laissez-faire, but permanent vigilance, activity, and intervention. The rationality of neoliberalism consists of values and principles that must be actively instituted, maintained, reassessed and, if need be, reinserted at all levels of society.

Neoliberalism at work

When he set foot in Saint Petersburg to study the psychotherapeutic complex operating in various state and private sector institutions, Tomas Matza expected to find neoliberalism at work: as he notes, there is “an extensive literature that describes how the neoliberal reforms of privatization and marketization are not just accompanied but in fact depend on the cultivation of particular kinds of citizens—namely, self-sufficient, individualized subjects of freedom able to survive austerity measures such as the withdrawal of state social programs.” But instead of homo neoliberalis in the making, he met concrete individuals with their ideals and hopes, their fears and frustrations. The story of neoliberalism couldn’t give full account of the way people perceived changes in their environment and in their own selves. The growth of the new psychotherapy market was linked to numerous reasons and motives: happiness, self-realization, improved relations, healing, change from routine, discovery, and learning. Therapists and patients came together in search of an alternative kind of social experience, rooted in an heightened form of togetherness. They described their first taste of group therapy as a kind of electric shock: “It was a new way of thinking, a new point of view. We called each other by first name […] It was shocking how new it was.” Psychotherapy was associated with a liberation of the self, a blossoming of free speech and a new age of freedom: hardly the imposition of new constraints and disciplines that critics of neoliberalism would have us believe. Besides, care providers identified themselves as political liberals as opposed to supporters of free market neoliberalism. Their technologies of the self were not aimed as much at the rational actor motivated by self-interest as at a particular kind of individual flourishing in a well-functioning democracy. They straddled a divide between political and economic liberalisms: insofar as they had political programs or opinions, these were for reforms of political practices to achieve more transparency and put a halt on immoral greed that was corrupting the basic values of society. Psychotherapy had a social and political purpose in Russia; but it was more aligned with the political values of classical liberalism than with the economic imperatives of neoliberalism.

For Tomas Matza, the psychotherapeutic turn in Russia is better described as postsocialist. It was determined by a set of experiences specific to Russia, of which the import of economic disciplines and psychological doctrines from the West was only one element. Shock Therapy attempts to describe Russia’s psychotherapy boom following the collapse of the Soviet Union by attending various terrains: psychological education camps and municipal counseling services in public schools, adult training and personal growth seminars, messages appearing in the advertising industry or exchanged in TV talk shows, and a psychoneurological outpatient clinic. Tomas Matza studied these various sites by doing participatory observation:  he took part in the kid camp’s discussions, wrote answers to the questionnaires, drew images and made clay representations of his “internal world”, and attempted professional school meetings where the cases of “problem children” were discussed. He shows that psychotherapy inherits from a long story of applied psychology in the Soviet Union. There were several periods when an interest in the subjective factors of human behavior emerged in Soviet science—the 1920s, 1960s, and 1980s. The early efforts to join Freudianism and Marxism were thwarted by the dogmatism of Pavlovian science and the Stalinization of psychology, which was banned from the faculties and redesigned as a subfield of philosophy. The fact that Soviet psychology was based on Marxism did not do away with the diversity of theoretical concepts and therapeutic approaches, which sometimes paralleled Western psychodynamics and in other cases offered home-grown discourses and concepts. Yet even in the 1970s, psychotherapists could be questioned by the KGB for mentioning Freud in group discussions. Modern practicians and academics remember the widespread repression and control that characterized late-Soviet psychology: “In the Soviet Union, there was no need for therapy.” Doctors would give a moral lecture to their patients, lie to them in an adversarial relation based on deception, and transform the clinic into a “theater of the absurd” in which power was exerted in an erratic and contradictory fashion. However, things began to change with late-Soviet liberalization and Perestroika. New approaches to education, healthcare, work, and sports were proposed, emphasizing the “human factor of production” with a huge potential yet to be tapped. More frequent exchanges between American humanistic psychologists and Soviet researchers also spread new therapeutic orientations in the USSR. The rapid expansion of psychotherapeutic services in the reform period was thus prepared by intense discussions and experimentations in the late-Soviet era.

Russian psychotherapy

As a result, Russian therapeutic practices and vocables only partly overlap with Western science. Russian professionals developed a lexicon of domestic words to translate or adapt concepts imported from the West, or to propose home-grown versions of talk cures and self cultivation. Freedom, translated as svoboda, has a more social connotation in Russian than in English: it has historically connoted a form of “freedom with”, and an emphasis on the idea that “we are free together” rather than a limitation on individual freedom. Samootsenka, now translated as self-esteem, was in Soviet times conceived as a transformation of the self that would make self-sacrifice possible. The idioms of dusha (soul), energiia, and garmoniia,  which were often used in psychological training sessions, had meanings different from their English equivalent. Through these terms and others, a new language was invented and circulated for thinking about society and the self, providing reassurance and meaning in a time of increasing anxiety and change. Some of the affects produced by psychotherapists have a strong religious undertone: “tears of bitterness and joy” flowed from the eyes of a participant attending a conference by American psychologist Carl Rogers in 1986. Some American ideas and mindsets were transmitted wholesale through seminars and book translations; others doctrines were imported from Germany, such as the “systemic constellations” theory of Bert Hellinger (a “Zulu-influenced ontology of trans-generational connectedness”); yet others were produced domestically by best-selling authors such as Vadim Zeland (“transsurfing reality”), Mirzakarim Norbekov (“how to get rid of your glasses”) or Valery Sinelnikov (“love your disease”). Tomas Matza doesn’t expand much on these doctrines, and he presents the content of the psychotherapeutic sessions in a neutral, nonjudgmental way. Another way to look at it would be to assess their scientific value based on some rational benchmarks, or to do an internal critique of the ideas and messages they convey. Shock Therapy lacks a detailed description of the therapies that are provided to the individuals in state of shock. But even a faint acquaintance with the self-help literature and personal development methods covered in the book can make the reader highly suspicious of their intellectual or humanistic value. More than the “education of freedom” that their promoters advocate, these commercial methods of self-manipulation seem to provide the “opium of the people” that Marx identified with religion.

All the psychotherapeutic work that Tomas Matza attended and that he describes in Shock Therapy do not fall into the categories of sham and scam. There is indeed some value in training the emotional intelligence of children, in cultivating the values of teamwork and leadership, or in providing support to people in times of distress. The work of care, whether it addresses the body or the soul, is a valuable endeavor. But it comes at a cost, and this financial burden is not distributed evenly across the Russian population. Tomas Matza compares two different kinds of institutions he was able to observe close-range, the first servicing primarily the children of the elite, the second focusing on poor children in difficult circumstances. While both were concerned with children’s interiorities, the first addressed children’s psychology in terms of potential, while the second brought the issues of pathology and abnormality. The psychotherapeutic turn in post-socialist Russia is associated with social inequality which it helps produce and reproduce. New forms of care focusing on well-being and the flourishing of the self are generally much more available to the better-off. Psychologists have been enrolled in the cultivation of the new elite, inciting a potential-filled, possessive individualism through the development of techniques of self-knowledge and self-esteem. For the upper and middle classes, parenting has been turned into a commercial enterprise, an activity involving financial investment, expert knowledge, and careful planning. By contrast, in municipal institutions applying psychological knowledge to public schools, resource constraints and a new management culture have squeezed their services into prophylaxis for the “problem child.” Psychological lenses are used for the management of risk and the anticipation of various possible problems: computer addiction, substance abuse, delinquency, various troubles at home, and poor school results. These differential uses of psychology may have the effect of deepening social differences and hierarchies: the soft skills and emotional intelligence acquired through supplementary education can make the difference between success and failure in the market society, while the hasty use of diagnostics with children at risk can deepen the troubles associated with the psychosocial environment.

Close-range concepts

Self-work in Russia is therefore a far more complex enterprise than simple references to the onslaught of neoliberalism would allow for. The “psychological complex” involves both the cultivation of the self and the attention to others, and it has been profoundly shaped by privatization and the emergence of consumer culture in Russia. It provides healing and care, but also reproduces social difference and class structures in a society characterized by deep inequalities. To call this complex assemblage “neoliberal governmentality” misses important details. What is at stake in the turn toward psychological explanations and therapy is not so much the construction of neoliberal subjectivity, but a search for new interpretations and new modes of sociality in a society turned upside down by the demise of socialism. Rather than stratospheric notions such as “neoliberalism”, Tomas Matza provides close-range concepts that help understand a specific situation: “psychosociality” describes the warm feeling of togetherness experienced by participants in talk groups and psychotherapy sessions; “precarious care” refers to the provision of care and the cultivation of self under conditions or precariousness; “commensuration” brings together norms and values belonging to different spheres, such as the ethical and the economic, the political and the individual. The book offers social critique while taking into account the testimonies and feelings of the persons involved with the work of care. Psychologists and psychotherapists have their own views about the social and political effects of their work. They claim to be promoting a democratic spirit and personal emancipation by helping people “learn to be free.” Other practitioners invoke the negative side effects of marketization and rationalization to argue that they are fostering social connection. The paradox is that these claims contradict the social context in which these psychotherapeutic techniques take place: they are complicit with a social hierarchy that they help reproduce, and they feed on the anxieties of people that they are supposed to assuage.