ANNA KRUGLOVA
National Research University Higher School of Economics
Driving in terrain:
Automobility, modernity, and the politics of statelessness
in Russia
A B S T R A C T
The developing culture of mass private automobile ownership in
Russia became a prominent platform for post-Soviet citizen-drivers
to (re)negotiate their relationship with the state. The convergence
of power, infrastructure, and modernity in automobility made
salient the old Soviet promise of infrastructural and cultural
development, delegitimizing the post-Soviet contraction of the
state’s sphere of responsibility. On the other hand, the inherent
danger and autonomy of automobile technology, combined with
highly spatialized local politics, reveal a number of political
mechanisms and imaginaries that make such withdrawals peculiarly
legitimate. Finally, through the windshield of a private car in
Russia, the state emerges as the ontology and a total social fact.
This contradicts the anti-statist, pluralist, and the localizing
concepts of the state in contemporary anthropology. [automobility,
accidents, the state, modernity, politics of statelessness, Russia]
Развивающаяся в России культура владения и пользования
частными автомобилями размечает площадку для
политической дискуссии и переговоров жителей
постсоветского пространства с государством. С одной
стороны, переплетение власти, инфраструктуры и модерности
в теме автомобильности обнаруживает Советскую уверенность
в государственном обещании инфраструктурного и
культурного развития, тем самым делегитимизируя попытки
государства сократить зоны своей ответственности. С другой
стороны, присущая автомобильным технологиям опасность и
автономность, в сочетании с пространственной
укорененностью любой политики в России, выявляют ряд
политических механизмов и образов политического
воображаемого, которые легитимизируют уходы государства
от ответственности. В целом же эти взаимосвязи в поле
частной автомобильности выявляют существование
государства в России в качестве центральной онтологии и
тотального социального факта. Этот взгляд противоречит
анти-государственническим, плюралистическим и
локализирующим представлениям о государстве в современной
теории антропологии. [автомобильность, аварии,
государство, современность, политика
безгосударственности, Россия]
ass private automobile ownership in Russia devel-
M
oped largely alongside postsocialism. In the context
of the USSR’s planned economy, the state had priori-
tized public, rather than private, transportation, both
infrastructurally and symbolically. Private lightweight
vehicles built in small numbers at local factories were first made
available to state officials and other “significant” citizens with close
connections to the state. The leftovers were distributed among or-
dinary citizens, who sometimes had to wait for years and pay a hefty
price. When the Iron Curtain fell and foreign goods flooded the coun-
try, the demand for private automobiles exploded; by the 2000s, Rus-
sia had the world’s sixth-highest rate of growth in the number of cars
(Ernst and Young 2008).
Arriving in the midst of significant social and historical dynam-
ics, mass private automobility—a term that describes the car “sys-
tem” or “regime” as a universal form of transportation (Urry 2004)—
came to objectify a personal and social system of value (Miller 2001,
2). It also reflected the transformations that these systems were
undergoing. In the 1990s the old and new concepts of deservedness
clashed when the means of transport for state servants and other
important citizens came to symbolize the brutal, masculine power
of Russia’s new class of “violent entrepreneurs” (Volkov 2016). To-
day, older people still doubt whether it is morally justifiable to drive
a luxury vehicle (or “to be happy in a Mercedes,” as Jennifer Patico
[2005] puts it), a status symbol that now signals to many the in-
justices of privatization and the conspicuous consumption of the
new Russian capitalists amid the economic crisis of the 1990s. The
postsocialist model of one’s relationship with the car-object indexed
newly legitimized consumerist and sexual desires, in contrast to a
model of automobile ownership in which a private automobile is
“not a luxury but a means of transportation” (as a popular adage puts
it), and in which it is a means by which (post) Soviet DIY enthusiasts
build roadside solidarity (Berdahl 2000; Dawson 2015; Kononenko
2011; Morris 2016, forthcoming). Finally, both the automobile’s
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 457–469, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12839
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
instrumentalist and status-laden potentials were explicitly
juxtaposed with its romantic meanings as the automobile
became a prop in tales of love, death, and survival.
When I studied the everyday morality of Russian ur-
banites in 2009–13, my attention was drawn to the grow-
ing Russian “car culture” (Miller 2001) as a powerful lens
through which to view how people articulate their rela-
tionship with the state. Born in the 1970s to families of
no particular wealth or significance to the state, many of
my interlocutors were first-generation drivers whose auto-
mobile careers had been made possible by the social and
economic changes of the 1990s. In their understanding
of the social contract, citizen-drivers should reciprocate
the state’s gift of modern infrastructure (Ssorin-Chaikov
2003) with well-mannered and civilized behavior and loy-
alty to the state as a system of accepted mores and strat-
ifications. Citizen-drivers closely monitor how people and
things around them occupy different stages of “develop-
ment,” ranging from fully modern to the nonmodern con-
dition of being “uncultured,” “undeveloped,” and “lagging
behind.” For them, the state is the only power that can
make people and things “modern,” rescuing them from
“backwardness,” boggy mud, or social anarchy (Grant 1995;
Humphrey 2001; Ssorin-Chaikov 2003). Correspondingly,
part of the state’s promise is that the features of moder-
nity come in bundles; developed infrastructure, for exam-
ple, goes hand-in-hand with professionalism, orderly road
interactions, and the presence of state power.
The automobilists populating this article, however,
tend to problematize the view of modernization in which
things or ideas are neatly compartmentalized, bundled, or
“purified” (Latour 2012). The state’s effort to modernize is as
inconsistent as it is persistent, and the contract of modern-
ization is never clear or complete. Drivers reminded each
other that they must closely monitor their material and so-
cial environment because the state’s modernity can be un-
expected, absurd, or simply dangerous. The state’s claim
on modernity can also lapse because its reach, however
powerful and all-encompassing, is still lacking in compar-
ison to the ontological immensity of space and time. Some-
time in history or somewhere in the Russian geographic
peripheries, there are inevitably points where state power
and modern civility peter out, along with their provisions,
support, and controls. War, hardship, or any other situation
of crisis, including traffic accidents, is also a condition in
which the state can become “weary” (Lemon 2009). In such
a situation, the state can relinquish its responsibilities to its
citizens—or free them from its own overbearing presence,
depending on one’s perspective. The state does not, how-
ever, lose its claim on sovereignty, and it still insists that cit-
izens stoically maintain the social-material order, even in
the absence of its power.
The important yet unstable presence of the state and
modernity is made particularly salient in the context of
458
automobility in Russia. It also highlights the limits of some
of the vocabulary that political anthropologists use to write
about the state. For instance, it makes little sense to ask
about the “location” of the state when “the state,” “large-
scale infrastructure,” “modern rationality,” and even “civ-
ilization” are not merely connected but imply each other
(Collier 2011; for a similar observation in Poland, see Pine
2007). The state can be much more diffuse than the usual
suspects of corruption, police, prison, institutions, and bor-
ders. It is certainly present in automobility, the large-scale
technological and infrastructural embodiment of moder-
nity. Moreover, the idea that (state) sovereign power is the
ability to declare an emergency, as Giorgio Agamben (1998)
argues, is problematic in the context of Soviet modernity
because the latter was never, at least ideologically, business
as usual. The entirety of the Soviet modernist project was a
declared state of emergency—an unprecedented mass mo-
bilization of revolutionary forces in the name of establish-
ing planetwide communist rule. The difference between
emergency and nonemergency is equally problematic for
drivers whose moral economies are based on both the ex-
pectation of modernity and safety, and on the expectation
of their potentially deadly failure.
“The ontology of the state” approach may also not be
entirely useful in this context. If every significant piece of
cultivated materiality, or act of formalizing personal and so-
cial relationships, directs one’s imagination to the central-
ized state power, one is given to think of the “state as on-
tology” rather than “the ontology of the state.” In this case,
for citizens as for anthropologists, it may be more practi-
cal to view the state through a quantitative rather than a
qualitative lens. By “quantitative,” I mean that in a partic-
ular time or location, people think of the state as being “too
present” or “too absent.” How can the state’s gift of social
order and modern infrastructure be nowhere in sight? Is it
because the state is corrupt, or is it because it has lapsed?
Or did we stop being deserving citizens? How does one exist
and how should one behave in the absence of the state?
I seek answers to these questions in three ethnographic
situations. First, automobility: while driving helps mitigate
life’s material scarcity, it also implicates the driver in “road
wars” (dorozhnye voiny), an expression popularized by the
eponymous Russian reality television show that since 2010
has focused on tragic and comic roadside stories. Aided by
the seemingly unending supply of Russian dashcam videos
(Balmforth 2012), this television program has popularized
the view of the road as a stateless, nonmodern space of dis-
order, one where there is little difference among road rage,
criminality, and deadly collisions.
Second, the vast and underpopulated Russian interior:
for automobilists, reaching this interior land is mostly a
utopian, unrealistic desire because it lacks a developed road
infrastructure, if it has any at all. But the very uncertainty of
what a worthy automobile can do and what constitutes an

automobile-worthy road—both discussed within a tangled
discourse of modernity—makes the landmass seem more
real and makes it more salient in social and political imag-
ination, even if it is de facto unreachable and thus purely
imaginary.
Third, roadside disorder: this can be understood not
only as a Hobbesian “war of all against all” but also as a
“liminal condition,” in a classic Turnerian sense, in that
the only morally positive possibility of being nonmodern
consists in inhabiting a liminal space rather than a social
identity. When the state is absent, drivers often see them-
selves as an egalitarian community thrown together by dan-
ger, physical ordeal, hard labor, and death. In Russia, where
many people view with suspicion the very possibility of po-
litical action, roadside actors’ frame of common vulnera-
bility parallels the state’s equally salient roadside presence
(or absence), which then makes the urge to political protest
morally justified. Automobility in Russia brings death and
corruption poignantly close together, giving rise to some
automobile social movements that use it as a platform to
open a discussion about social equality and civil action.
Bodies in the mud: The last Soviet generation
and the morality of car ownership
The people who shared their car stories with me all shared
the same philosophy of car ownership. Old enough to
remember and often to identify with the Soviet social
and moral economies, they carefully abstained from any
conspicuous or merely prestigious consumption, and
they firmly expected that they would achieve the Soviet
promise of stable middle-classness. This expectation of
upward mobility, however, had often been undermined by
the social and economic turmoil of the 1990s, when their
tertiary qualifications became of little use and then quickly
became obsolete and led to random or unhoped-for careers
(Anipkin 2018; Kruglova 2017a). For example, among my
interlocutors figured a police lieutenant, a sales agent, an
electrician, a security guard, a factory operator of high-tech
machinery, and a public-sector pediatrician (a low-wage
occupation), just to name a few.
Acknowledging, sometimes too purposefully, that own-
ing a car is a normal (normal’no) and decent (prilichno)
thing to do “these days,” the drivers primarily saw their
cars as a practical possession. Even though they earned a
monthly salary (about US$500–$1,600), they had little sav-
ings and would be only a few months away from destitution
were there a sudden turn for the worse.1 Driving was a
means to adapt to scarcity and instability in the traditional
way of taking advantage of every small opportunity, a
practice known as “spinning around,” or krutit’sia (Morris
2016; Pesmen 2000, 192).2 These familiar ways of life in-
cluded buying things in bulk, commuting to little private
plots outside the city to grow fruits and vegetables, and
Driving in terrain  American Ethnologist
taking on informal employment, which often required
getting somewhere on short notice. “Spinning around”
soon became familiar to me as I joined in city commutes
and collective trips to the countryside. I assisted in rounds
of car-based shopping and helped a friend sell her four-
year-old Russian-made Lada and immediately turn around
to buy a four-year-old Renault at a chaotic open-air cash-
based car market. I spent hours inside cars parked in the
backyards of apartment buildings, where women habitu-
ally took respite from their domestic routines. The many
activities I participated in gave rise to stories about cars and
driving. They frequently arose in everyday conversation,
and I wrote them down.
It was a short conversation early in my fieldwork that
made me question the assumed normality of private auto-
mobiles. In 2010, I asked Batyr, an old friend and avid
driver, what his ideal (ideal’naia) car was.3 He replied that
he dreamed of having an amfibiia (an amphibian vehicle)
that he could drive on both land and water.
The answer was both simple and unexpected. Batyr at
the time struggled to support his family by combining em-
ployment in security with attempts to run a small retail
business. I anticipated a by then familiar discussion of the
superior engine power, trunk capacity, and body durability
of some car, a welcome and long-hoped-for replacement for
his secondhand Toyota. When it did not follow, I realized
that my use of the word ideal’naia may have led Batyr into
the realm of the fantastic, but I was still perplexed by his re-
ply. Like others, he often complained about bad roads, poor
signage, corrupt traffic police, and inefficient services, in-
cluding, most disturbingly, emergency services. The explo-
sive growth of car ownership had collided with a social and
material infrastructure that was never intended for such a
development, indicating that Russian automobility cannot
be unreservedly defined as “a system” that “facilitates move-
ment on the grand scale,” as Seiler (2012, 358) defines an
infrastructure. If the “ideal” car were to present a dream so-
lution to the woes of driving, one could think of better so-
lutions than an amphibian. A flying vehicle, for instance,
could soar over traffic jams and piles of snow. Something
like a Batmobile, a car equipped with radars, weapons, and
speed, could allow Batyr to escape the police or deter ag-
gressive drivers. After all, Batyr could have chosen a tank, a
real and widely respected vehicle and a common metaphor
for ultimate safety, both literally and figuratively.
Later, I realized that tanks, flying cars, and Batmobiles
are inferior to an amphibian because they imply various
forms of mediation. They disconnect a driver from his or
her environment with layers of metal, air, or technology.
An amphibian stood for something else—the exploratory,
sensory driving on the road or into the boggy Russian
plains. It embodied the deeply engrained morality of non-
alienation from one’s environment, to which these ordinary
city dwellers purposefully referred (Kruglova 2017b), often
459
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
portraying driving as intense physical labor immersed in
the material and hybrid qualities of the world. For instance,
Pavel, whose job as an electrician took him to many places
and along many roads, recalled that
when you drive, your muscles work all the time! Se-
riously! Recently there was a situation. I was driving.
Snowdrifts were piling up, but they cleaned up the
roads a bit. Well, one lane at least. So I’m going and I see
a huge pile of snow right in front of me. And from be-
hind this snow pile—a huge car muzzle, coming right
into me! For fuck’s sake! I was driving in an oncoming
lane, it turned out! So, I—one—step on the gas, blow
the horn, hop-hop-hop! Two, turn the wheel and, at
the same time, signal with my lights and gear down to
make the car jump, you know, over all these humps and
bumps and the tracks in the snow. What a circus!
Ekaterina, a trade consultant transitioning from corpo-
rate work to helping her husband in his budding business,
explained that “a good driver should feel the road with her
feet” and thus also connect with other drivers and their own
sentient bodies in a type of wordless communion. For her,
driving invoked the moral sentiment of merging the very ac-
tivity of driving with the materiality of the road:
That is what they taught us at driving school—do not
go around a hole in the road. Let it go between the
wheels . . . . Watch out all the time, learn to feel the road
with your feet! Yes, think about the road with your feet,
that is the thing. Now I do not think with my head when
I drive. And that man who is driving behind us, he also
knows that I will drive over this hole, and he will fol-
low . . . . And now, if I drive on a smooth road, if ever,
then really—I fall asleep! We even rejoice when we re-
turn to our kind of roads—oh, finally, a chance to wake
up.
While people often invoked the tragicomic or roman-
tic sentiment of merging with the land, they seldom talked
about either physically or emotionally identifying with the
car. I heard such a confession only once, when Alina, a pe-
diatrician in a state clinic, a mother of two, and an enthusi-
astic year-round driver, described her newly purchased (but
secondhand) car as follows: “I don’t know why, but I fell in
love with this Renault on the spot!” She, however, contin-
ued the conversation by proudly enumerating everything
she knew about cars and especially about how to recognize
a lemon by its skewed lines, uneven chassis, and patchy col-
ors; she thus subverted her feminine confessions with the
more common, masculinist car romance of taciturn, sub-
dued battlefield operations.
For others, and especially for men, it was not ap-
propriate to address cars in personalized terms or openly
appreciate their look and feel. Rather, men emphasized
their reliability, power, and especially their toughness: “The
460
winter was frosty. Some air got stuck within the glass, so the
windshield cracked. Apart from that, it is a sturdy little car”;
“I was offered this car for 250,000 rubles. It is a very good
price for such tough steel, so I think I will take it.” In such
conversations, the most complimentary remark one could
make about a car was to compare it to a tank [tank]: “Nivas
[a Russian four-wheel-drive vehicle] are super good, even
in the swamp. Wrap its wheels in chains and it is a tank.”
Advertisers for the Jeep brand in Russia capitalized on this
by organizing a “Jeep versus tanks” battle in which the Jeep
predictably lost, thus respecting nationalist sentiment, but
gave a good fight before being crushed.
Batyr, for whom the amphibian remained out of reach,
purchased a Jeep when a good deal came his way in 2013.
But amphibias were also possible, as I learned when I
looked further into the matter. Cars, it turned out, could not
only be maintained but reinforced, though this might com-
promise the purity of the brand or the technology. Is it pos-
sible, one might wonder, to install a Jeep suspension in a
Toyota? To make Batyr’s amphibian dream come true, one
installs the body of a motorcycle or a light car on a set of
wheels or inner tubes taken from a large truck. The wheels
or the tubes are then set to low pressure and wrapped in
chains. The resulting karakat (Laviolette and Sirotina 2015)
easily traverses boggy terrain, glorifying its builders’ tech-
nological mastery and their down-to-earth, pragmatic
resourcefulness.
Terrain
Where nonalienation meets vigilance
A good Russian driver of a certain age praised herself for
never forgetting about the world’s irregular, physical, three-
dimensional materiality. One should always remember that
there is a contrast—of the absurdity, the “circus,” in Pavel’s
definition—between the presumably “bodiless” modernity
of automobile technology and its bodily felt reality. In Rus-
sia, however, this philosophy of nonalienation also im-
plies perpetual vigilance. Any road will inevitably, and often
suddenly, disappear, luring unwitting drivers into a pellet-
spraying gravel dip. Or, as happened when Alina and I were
lost on the way from her dacha (a wooden countryside hut
attached to a vegetable plot), the road gave way to a village
street barricaded by thick tree branches that some cunning
locals used as DIY speed bumps. Asphalt roads disappear
into the wilderness or, worse, into the clay-filled swerve of
the wheel tracks that are ubiquitous in the Russian country-
side. They seem made to drown a conceited or persevering
driver.
Like American combatants in the Middle East (Gordillo
2018), drivers used the word terrain (mestnost’) to remind
each other and their (civilian and anthropologist) friends
that modern controls and conveniences can disappear or
be rendered useless by the world’s complex, shifting, and

opaque materiality. To a cartographer, Russia’s interior may
look flat, but the driver knows intimately the depth of its
mud and the thickness of its forests. Here and there, the
wilderness is interrupted by the state’s modernizing and
cultivating efforts. For the most part, however, terrain un-
dermines any attempt at control and severely punishes
those who expect the consistent presence of modernity.
I also use the term terrain to refer to how car talk
betrays a particular anguish, an understanding that mod-
ern sophistication and its conveniences are everywhere
and unattainable, lamented yet unavoidable. For example,
prodigal natives like myself were frequently reminded
by others to be perpetually vigilant against the sudden
appearances and disappearances of modernity and the un-
expected combinations of modern and nonmodern
features. My foreign experiences and perceived (over)
education made others suspect that I would forget about
the physicality and the danger of driving, and assume
instead that driving is a purely modern, technologically
enhanced, and disembodied progression along a smooth
road in a “cushy car” (komfortabel’nyi avto, a term that
emphatically borrows words from other languages). But
people also freely exchanged these reminders among them-
selves, to establish a conversational common ground of
equality, propriety, and cultural intimacy. They juxtaposed
powerful but reckless and pretentious cruisers and people
in jeeps with even more powerful but unpretentious tractors
and tanks.4 As we drove away from the market, Alina tried
to keep herself and her Renault from being seen as leaning
too much toward status, power, and foreignness: “Renault
is a presidential car in France, they say. But now it will be
driven by the narod [people] to their dacha!”—that is, by
simple folks, by her own unassuming self, on the way from
civilization to the countryside. Where the contrast is not
immediately obvious, people make ironic remarks. Alina,
observing someone’s red cabriolet, said, “Look at this beau-
tiful car, so sporty. What do you think, is there enough space
in the trunk to store the spades to dig potatoes at the dacha?”
Among the many uses of terrain, it is a popular source
of amusement that demonstrates the assumed or observed
mixture of modern and nonmodern. “The road was so bad!
A cop was checking everyone’s documents, and he did not
even have to stop the cars to do it. He simply walked along
the road—they were driving so slowly over all these pot-
holes that he did not have to stop them!” In saying this,
Pavel observed what could be called the collapse of an in-
dustrial rhythm. The conveyor-like cadence of police bu-
reaucratic procedure assumes that the car is stopped, docu-
ments are checked, the car is signaled to go, and the next car
is stopped. Instead, the figure of a policeman merges with
the undifferentiated materiality and temporality of the ter-
rain, following its irregular undulations.
However amused the driver is and however submerged
into the land the policeman is, one still has to watch where
Driving in terrain  American Ethnologist
and how “roads” and cops appear and disappear. This
knowledge, in turn, becomes a type of social currency in
specialized internet forums in which drivers share infor-
mation about particular potholes and other road obsta-
cles they encounter. They give the potholes funny names,
which both domesticate them and express skepticism that
they will be fixed in the foreseeable future. Last but not
least, terrain is used to dis/connect time, when the same
reminders are used as “words of wisdom” in intergenera-
tional critiques of young people and their reckless reliance
on technology. A friend scolded his millennial daughter for
having gotten
stuck many times, because [young people’s] psychol-
ogy is that if you are in a jeep [the term Russians use
for all four-wheel-drive vehicles], then you can go any-
where! In reality there are no roads, only directions
[net dorog, est’ napravleniia]. Though I got stuck my-
self, thank God there were some construction workers
nearby, muzhiki [lads, men]. They dragged me out.
Using a popular adage, he was explaining that roads are
not there to facilitate one’s movement but to show “direc-
tions” that other people may find useful. Those who forget
this universal truth will face a situation put succinctly, if ob-
scenely, by a stranger in a conversation I once overheard in
a streetcar: “The more powerful and stuck-up your cruiser
is, the longer you will have to cunt-walk [pizdovat’] back [to
the nearest village] to find a tractor.”
Aptly, the Russian word for terrain combines the word
for seat or place (mesto) with the suffix-nost’, which, like
-ity and -ness in English, denotes a state or a quality. If
space is unimpeded movement, and place is sedentary
belonging, terrain is place-ity, a reminder that modern two-
dimensional space can uncomfortably and suddenly be-
come three-dimensional place the moment one gets stuck
in the mud. It is a reminder that roads run the full range
of modernity, from the shampooed Kremlin boulevards to
the two-lane interurban highways to the legendary “tracts”
(trakty) of Siberia and the Far East, which try the toughness
of equally legendary 10-wheel KAMAZ trucks. Like roads,
social encounters range from formal state interference to
informal gallantry to violence and bodily collisions.
The everyday politics of social encounters
How does one operate in such a social terrain? Social modes
of interaction, like spatiality, assume a mixture of modali-
ties between two poles. The higher pole is located mostly
in the imagination and connects the metropolitan milieu
with the formal, cultured, and law-abiding civility of inter-
actions between strangers. In the countryside or the wilder-
ness, and in times of crisis, modernity and civility may reach
their lowest point and disappear completely, engendering
461
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
two types of social dis/order. One is the collective body of
muzhiki, the “simple lads” whose mundane physical labor
is the only force that can drag cruisers, Ladas, and other
pieces of metal out of the all-embracing mud. The other,
equally physical but much less benevolent, is the Hobbes-
ian anarchy of “road wars.”
I assumed that ordinarily, my respondents drove in the
spatial and social middle ground, without touching either
pole. Their interactive frames ranged from civil and formu-
laic politeness to perhaps less formulaic and less formal
gendered gallantry. But I was told this was not the case.
Everyday automobility tries one’s wits and patience pre-
cisely because it is both expected and unexpected to run the
full gamut from high-strung formal interactions (which, at
least in theory, should index high civility, traffic regulation,
and law enforcement) to chaotic, formless violence. Mak-
sim, another small-scale entrepreneur who practically lived
at the wheel, was “traumatized” by the rapid change of ex-
pectation and counterexpectation:
I was, well, traumatized today! I did not expect it. I
just drove up to the gas station. Every hose was locked.
Only one was working, and there was a line. I drove up
and took my place in line behind a man. He takes his
time. And then I see a car driving up from the opposite
direction, against the rules! I drove in to block it, and
this woman in a Lexus just tries to push me away! I tell
her, “You are coming from the wrong direction!” She
says, “So what, can’t you let a lady go first?” I say, “Sure,
God bless you.” She fills up—I try to move—there is
another car right behind her. The guy in the car says,
“I have been waiting in this [wrong] line!” And he is a
huge guy, you know. But I told him, “Listen, I already
had a squabble with that woman. You can go after me.”
He said, “All right.”
Driving is nervous business because even minor
undulations on the gradient of modernity evoke the
possibility of running into the highest modern and the
lowest nonmodern forms. Managing one’s expecta-
tions against the changing material and social environ-
ment becomes everyday moral labor. Maksim castigated
himself for lazily forgetting that the city is also a kind of
terrain. A skilled negotiator, he was envied for the ease
with which he could steer any situation toward formality
or informality as suited his interest. How he had talked his
way out of trouble after trying to bring a huge hunting knife
through airport security (a juxtaposition that brings to mind
the juxtaposition of spades and sport cars, cruisers and trac-
tors) was the stuff of legend. His relative success in business
was also attributed to his gift for manipulation. And yet he
was fooled into expecting that people would abide by the
rules at a gas station, a modern convenience and a public
hazard. Instead, he was confronted with a flagrant traffic
violation on the part of the woman in a Lexus, a luxury
462
vehicle that suggested that she could have become aggres-
sive herself or call her connections. To his surprise, she
appealed instead to gendered norms of gallantry, to which
he succumbed. The next moment, he again had to ready
himself for possible violence (“the guy was huge”). After a
few waves of vigilance and relaxation, mobilization and de-
mobilization, on his part and probably everyone else’s,
order was restored. But “the trauma” had already been
inflicted.
How does one deal with the unpredictability of social
encounters? A practical strategy was to always assume the
worst. Others point out that always readying oneself for a
violent outcome in road negotiations may just be a losing
strategy, considering that anything can happen in terrain,
and a muddy rut may lead back to a road. And one also
has to consider boredom and depression, which are caused
by thinking about the worst outcome and which may also
sneak up on one unexpectedly. Tatiana, a mother of two
who worked in sales and spent a considerable part of her
day chatting behind the wheel, was pleased when a situ-
ation in which she had expected aggression turned into a
flirting situation and an agreement to settle the matter in
a civilized way. The sequence of events resembled the one
Maksim had encountered:
I ran into a truck the other day. Just caught on it lightly,
with my bumper. And you know, the man who drove
that truck, he was so calm, even joking! Usually, you
know, people start shouting: “What the hell were you
doing! Ah! Eh!” And this one, he joked! He said to
me—“Miss, ordinarily, do you drive normally? Is there
something special about today? Seasonal, perhaps?”
[Women’s “irrationalities” in Russia are seen as depen-
dent on both the seasons and “that time of the month.”]
He then asked, “Shall we call the police to make the re-
port?” I looked, and the scratch on my car was really
nothing, so I just suggested that I sign off [i.e., sign a
note in which they agreed not to involve the police] and
we go our separate ways.
Should one assume the worst and risk becoming de-
pressed, or be optimistic and risk trauma? By way of re-
sponse, Pavel once shyly showed me a baseball bat in the
trunk of his car. It marked him both as a disciplined and vig-
ilant moral actor prepared for anything and as a savage de-
void of culture. The fully moral position for him, however,
was neither optimism nor pessimism. It was, rather, fully
acknowledging terrain as an undifferentiated whole. “In the
mornings,” he said, “I drive especially carefully—the road is
slippery, and the cops are hungry [for food, but also bribes,
which may have to be larger when they feel miserable].”
For drivers on the road, surveillance, signage, other drivers,
and policemen are of a piece with potholes, weather, emo-
tions, hunger, and road rage. As such, they are best met with
equally distributed calm and unreflective vigilance.

The last technique of automobile intersubjectivity is
leaving it all behind—roads, civil discipline of body and
mind, and mindless embodied vigilance. In Russian auto-
mobile forums, meme makers celebrate the exhilarating
and frightening autonomy that drivers’ bodies acquire with
experience. When the good driver “feels the road with her
feet” and is one with “our kind” of road, a state of mind or
body admired above by Ekaterina, the mind takes a back
seat. Roman confessed to seeking this state in particular by
spending weekends drunk-driving a Niva in the country-
side in the company of his policeman friend. In doing so,
he invoked both Soviet-era popular culture and a more re-
cent vogue for spirituality. “Once we leave the city and the
turn toward the village of Bobki,” he said, “there is no longer
Soviet power! It is, kind of, going into the astral [plane].”
Roman is not a New Ager, although his speech echoes
his previous encounters with the esoteric in the 1990s, when
it was immensely popular. Although some would argue that
astral plane connotes bodilessness, in his story it is rather
the state of ecstatic mindlessness. “There is no longer So-
viet power,” meanwhile, is a reference to a popular 1967
comedy A Wedding in the Village of Malinovka (Svad’ba v
Malinovke, by Andrei Tutyshkin and Boris Aleksandrov), in
which a villager, a pawn in the battle of the revolutionary
and counter-revolutionary forces during Russia’s Civil War,
muses on the vagaries of modern rule. Roman has reasons
to be similarly uncertain. He got into university on a state
stipend but was thrown out after a run-in with the rector;
he is now reasonably content operating machinery in one of
Perm’s more high-tech industries. Going to Bobki and into
the wilderness is his way of escaping the cities’ modernism
and discipline of thought. The figure of the policeman in his
story is pointedly ironic, however, indicating that separa-
tion from modernity—and stateness—is always happening
yet not happening. The policeman is a policeman but also
a friend. He loses, yet does not lose, his proximity to power
when their morally good, pragmatic, and locally made Niva
almost drowns in the mud. At Bobki, Roman said, they got
into a road war with another driver and used the police-
man’s ID to scare him away. Then Roman giggled and added
that the card had expired. But he and his friend’s commit-
ment to modern disciplinary power is sealed by his final re-
mark: “In the city, [the policeman friend] always observes
[blyudet] the traffic rules.” Yet again he simultaneously re-
places the more modern, and more stylistically appropriate
Russian word for “to observe” (the rule), soblyudaet, with
the loftier and therefore perhaps sarcastic blyudet.
Power, state, and modernity constantly fail to suffi-
ciently purify their own signs and agents out of the mud
and the informality of human relations. As a result, social
and spatial terrain is the playground of intersubjective
economies in which one must manage one’s own ex-
pectations and anticipate a full range of reactions from
other drivers vis-à-vis the gradients of infrastructural
Driving in terrain  American Ethnologist
development. In these fields, the state’s presence and
hence its responsibility are an all-important and ambigu-
ous factor.
Negotiating the state’s responsibility
Where, and how, does terrain end? This is the question. In
Russia’s highly spatialized politics, the significance of a city
recedes according to its distance from Moscow, while every
city strives to surround itself with its own infrastructural,
cultural, and political periphery. People assume there is
a correspondence between a city’s size, its infrastructural
development, and the social status of its residents. Perm,
my home town and the location of my fieldwork, takes an
awkward position on the grid of modern development.
On the one hand, it has a population of 1 million, making
it a large enough modern center to be bested only by the
capitals. A casual visitor would remark that Perm is literally
a “sufficiently articulate” or “compos mentis” [vpolne
vmeniaemyi] city, in contrast with smaller and “illegible”
provincial towns. Perm’s regional authorities would agree,
considering that they made building roads and other infra-
structural development a much-publicized priority. Rank-
and-file city dwellers, however, beg to differ. They mock
Perm, with its striving but failing modernity, by labeling it
“the very last European city.” It is indeed the last European
city if one moves east and accordingly down in social
position on one’s way from both Moscow and Europe to
Asian Siberia.
One important and notoriously lacking modern feature
in Perm is good roads. Endemic corruption and persistent
corrosive temperatures that range from –30°C to 30°C in a
typical year make summertime road repairs a permanent
feature of the cityscape. Winter traffic is a story of its own.
Alina viewed it with humor. Driving in winter was, she
said, “figure driving” (figurnoe vozhdenie)—a play on figure
skating (figurnoe katanie). I said it felt less like any such
controlled activity as skating and more akin to a game
of hockey, in which pucks slide and squeeze between
snow piles out of sheer momentum. When I made such
pronouncements, people said I had lived too long in the
“civilized West.” I underappreciated the skills required
to “survive here.” The kernel of the “figure driving” joke
was, however, clear to us both: the presumed regularity of
automobile traffic was not regular at all.
For Pavel, the “circus” of embodied driving labor was
both an absurdity and the “truth of life” (pravda zhizni).5
He often expressed these complex meanings indexically, by
the very structure of his stories and the spatial relations em-
bedded in them. For instance, one typically “wintertime”
story attested that assuming the state to be “faceless” or
immaterial would be neither correct nor absurd but merely
stupid. He once spent several hours dragging his car out
of the snowed-in road leading to his dacha, which his wife
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American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
had believed to be winter-proof enough to inhabit, to his
dismay. He castigated himself for not anticipating the crisis
right when his wife left for the dacha, against his better
judgment; against his better judgment again, he poured
himself a drink. The house was indeed usable, but the road
immediately leading to it was impassable. Like so many
spaces and places in Russia (Molyarenko 2017), the road
was neither state owned nor private but simply abandoned
to the liminality of being owned by no one in particular.
Digging out the car through the hip-deep snow, he could
see clearly where the federal road, cleared of snow, started,
and he looked for it longingly while losing car parts, ropes,
and a muzhik who agreed to help for a bottle of vodka at
the beginning of the snowed-in stretch, but despaired after
the second emergency hook broke off the bumper. The
story of the ordeal filled several pages of my field diary with
profanities, pearls of wisdom, and ironies about what could
be defined as modernization and its discontents. Calling
it merely a complaint would not do it justice. Pavel’s story
somehow allowed him to be a perfect moral actor who had
it all: modern, naively hapless, resourceful, rational, and
absurd.
It all ended well for Pavel, but sometimes the mate-
riality of the state’s reasoning—supposedly abstract and
bureaucratic—can be lethal. Roman told a story about how
this combination of the abstract and the concrete almost
killed him and his cotravelers:
We went to [the town of] Berezniki and almost got into
a nasty accident. It was on a federal highway. It was
at the boundary between the zone that Perm’s clean-
ing services are responsible for and [the zone] of the
[smaller and much less significant] Dobrianka munic-
ipality, haha. And Dobrianka started on a steep down-
ward slope! The difference in road level! A huge hole
in the snow. All four tires blew. And we were driving
at 120 kilometers per hour. And we went into a spin.
And we spun into the oncoming traffic lane. And we
had three KAMAZ trucks coming toward us. [ . . . ] We
swerved back into our lane, backside forward.
I was not driving, and I had a can of beer in my
hand. Frightened, I squeezed it—beer waterworks in
the car! There was a lot of blood, too, of course. We
were lucky, and no one was [seriously] injured. We got
out and peed on the wheels [a masculinist ritual of un-
known origin] and drove on . . . slowly, of course.
Such casual stories about careless driving on inter-
urban roads do not tell, and yet show, the lethal potential
of automobility in Russia. Within the city limits, serious traf-
fic accidents happen regularly, usually resulting in pedestri-
ans falling victim to some “figure driving” at high speed. But
a truly death-defying experience is driving in the country-
side to some village, even when the driver is sober. In the
hilly Uralian landscape, the so-called ordinary two-lane
464
roads are often busy with trucks, and the view is often ob-
scured. Most drivers habitually and blindly overtake slower
vehicles by accelerating from 120 to 140 kilometers per hour
into oncoming traffic lanes, whooshing closely between the
traffic and the side ditch. My remarks about the danger of
this practice were usually dismissed; I had spent too much
time abroad, someone would say, before telling a string of
stories about scary traffic accidents or near accidents that
the driver had witnessed or lived through.
These stories were always curiously focused on yet hes-
itant about the allocation of responsibility. In Russia it is
a question whether the state needs to legally declare a
“state of exception” to exercise its emergency powers. His-
torically, at least, it already held all power. This power was
always-already indexed by the implied, perpetual state of
emergency because it was exercised under the ideology of
an extraordinary, groundbreaking, all-encompassing trans-
formational modernization. The purposeful declaration of
emergency, on the contrary, allowed the state to be weak,
absent, or stretched thin and therefore not expected to help,
calling instead on citizens to rely on their own resources and
to maintain material and social order.
The actual politics, then, comes down to negotiating
whether a particular situation is within the state’s reach and
dire enough to be deemed its responsibility, and whether it
involves deserving citizens who are committed to moder-
nity. In Roman’s case, the situation was caused by the
clear negligence of state actors. It happened, however, in
a rather remote location. Was the hole in the snow that
formed on an interurban lane, in the crack between the res-
ponsibility of different jurisdictions, both deadly enough
and close enough to the centers of modern power to
make a case for righteous indignation? Was it closer to
Perm (more modernity) or to Dobrianka (less modernity)?
Were the automobilists themselves sufficiently disciplined,
driving at the speed limit in the material conditions of
winter?
Roman, like all my interlocutors, always thought of
himself as an ethical actor, but one who was not the im-
age of a fully modern, civil, or law-abiding citizen. His own
behavior had always adapted to the undulations of terrain.
He also eagerly acknowledged that sometimes he purpose-
fully abandoned stateness and modernity by drunk-driving
to Bobki. Was the driver sober, considering that the passen-
ger had a can of beer in his hand? Was the driver mindfully
vigilant or mindlessly ecstatic? Does it mean that the state
and its modernity can abandon hapless and undisciplined
drivers to their untimely death? Beer in a passenger’s hand;
blood, though not from serious injuries; collective peeing on
wheels in a masculinist, bodily, and communal existential
register; and administrative borders—all these are brought
together to ponder these questions.
Batyr leaned toward state responsibility in how he told
his stories:

A buddy called me. He got into an accident. I came to
help. The cars are still in the middle of [a street in Perm].
Two accidents a hundred meters apart. In another car,
a pregnant woman was hurt. In my buddy’s car, the
front had folded like an accordion. The radiator was
pushed into the front seat, one passenger had flown
into the windshield, a woman in the back seat broke
her nose against the headrest. And, you would not be-
lieve it, they are all laughing. They were all in shock, of
course . . . . And everyone is on their phone, calling the
police, the paramedics. But it took the paramedics one
and a half hours to come. A police car went by, they
did not even stop! Traffic cops came after two hours.
Started measuring stuff. I asked one of them, “Why
do you look so tired?” He said, “I was at 10 accidents
today—that is, if I only count the accidents in which
people got hurt. It was 25 altogether. I don’t go to all of
them but choose the ones designated ‘aggravated’ and
‘very aggravated.’ Here you have got ‘aggravated,’ but in
that other car, where the pregnant woman is hurt, it is
‘very aggravated.’” They have only two or three inspec-
tors for a district, imagine! One car! No wonder I waited
once three or four hours. He said, “Be glad you did not
have to wait till the next morning.”
Again, the story condenses the familiar themes: the
participants’ mindless state (a result, this time, of the shock
of the collision and near-death experience); the brutal phys-
icality of the crash; the vulnerability of womanhood and
motherhood (two women—one pregnant, one injured); the
state, both present and absent (the police car did not stop);
and the negotiation of state responsibility on the part of the
tired policeman, who saw proximity to death as a relative
event within the space of the accident, calculating the grav-
ity of cases against the scarcity of state resources. The whole
accident, however, happened in the streets of a city that is,
according to its authorities, just one step behind the capi-
tals on the grid of modernization, a context that, although
unspoken, is pointed out by the teller.
Piotr, who generally favored vigilance, autonomy, and
self-reliance, was shocked to hear me saying that in Canada,
one winter, the government sent helicopters to lift some
hapless drivers who got stuck in a serious traffic jam on
an interurban road near Toronto. The drivers, he observed,
ought to have taken survival into their own hands:
Our muzhiki, they are prepared for everything. If they
are on the road, they have a gas cooker with them, some
produce, a cooking pot. How can it be otherwise? Your
car breaks down, you must survive! No way around it.
This is from the Soviet times. My father was often on
trips on behalf of the factory he worked for. He took
food and blankets and a little cooking stove with him at
all times. Once the car breaks down, one cannot count
on anything but oneself. No service, no transport. You
sit in one place and fix your car. You cook, eat, and you
tinker again. You fix it, you get on the road, and you will
Driving in terrain  American Ethnologist
live. All is good. And in the West, they hope to just make
a phone call and get lifted out!
Piotr defies every stereotype of a typical (post) Soviet
subject who depends entirely on, and benefits from, the
state. His preference for autonomy is also apparent in his
job choice and lifestyle, as he is self-employed teaching
yoga in a wooden bungalow in the suburb where he and
his large family also live. His pointedly Soviet indignation
at the spoiled Canadian truckers, however, shows that the
old Soviet models of emergency mobilization are alive and
well. They allow the post-Soviet Russian state to continue its
legitimate play of presence and absence, giving and with-
drawing help and responsibility at will, and relying on the
habitual mode of subjectivity with its normalized prepared-
ness for risk and danger. When the state is stretched thin,
all that citizens can expect is moral support, an idea aptly
and famously expressed in 2016 by Prime Minister Dmitry
Medvedev: “The state has run out of money; but please keep
calm and carry on [deneg net, no vy derzhites’ ].”
The latter expression exemplifies how important is the
deathly and embodied politics of terrain in negotiating
power; an understanding of this led a curiously broad spec-
trum of political forces to focus on automobility. For exam-
ple, the pro-Putin All-Russia People’s Front (ARPF) offered
an interactive “map of bad roads,” in which citizen-drivers
can post photos of the most treacherous spots on the roads.
This was proposed as a way to pass the people’s mandate di-
rectly to the highest of powers. According to the website of
the ARPF—created in May 2011 “on the [personal] initiative
of Russian Federation President Vladimir Putin”—its mem-
bers enjoy “means and license to contact [Putin] directly,”
assuming the position of “a social movement that unites
those inhabitants of the country who are active and want to
get involved.” Meanwhile, the unofficial leader of the Rus-
sian opposition, Alexei Navalny, has also made road quality
one of his top three community outreach projects, having
offered a similar “map” on his website.
The state also refers to the terrain politics, interpret-
ing it, as Piotr did, as a question of self-responsibilization.
Emotions and moralistic performances played a major role
in such interpretations. In 2011, for example, the police in a
village in the Astrakhan region organized a stunt to high-
light the problem of public indifference in the aftermath
of traffic accidents. A 14-year-old boy was covered in fake
blood and placed facedown on the side of a road (BBC News
2011). Some drivers slowed down, but no one called for
help, and later the police chastised the public for its “in-
difference.” In another controversial case, the Sverdlovsk
Oblast’s traffic police attempted to raise accident awareness
by displaying images of the aftermath of traffic accidents on
their website, inviting the public to rate the pictures (Lenta
2010). A public outcry erupted when people noticed that
some of the images depicted the maimed bodies of accident
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American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
victims. After some defensive PR management, the gallery
was taken down. These political performances, however, do
not differ much from how my interlocutors negotiated the
boundaries of the modern, the factual, and the absurd. They
were similar to the drivers’ everyday moral tales of acci-
dents and near accidents, pointing to the need for vigilance
and the absolute imperative of mutual help in the liminal
space of the road. The public indignation, therefore, may
have stemmed from the state’s appropriation of the “simple
lads” moral genre. In terrain, however undifferentiated and
muddy, it matters from which position one speaks vis-à-vis
the center of power.
People also reacted in varied ways to the state’s scare
tactics. One case in point: the state authorities installed
roadside markers to keep a “live score,” almost like a
sports scoreboard, of how many people died on the most
accident-prone roads. In Batyr’s opinion, such displays
were both necessary and effective. Trying to scare him-
self out of his own “addiction to speeding,” he collected
gruesome crash videos on his phone. In contrast, Mak-
sim, the entrepreneur who was traumatized by the un-
dulations of in/civility at the gas station, sternly dis-
approved of the state’s scare tactics. Having always been
creative in matters of power negotiations, he shifted away
from the issue of whether one has to be autonomous on the
road to how far away the authorities were from understand-
ing the real fears of the narod, the simple folks, the muzhiki.
The “dead counters,” he pointed out, “are entirely useless.
People have become absolutely numb to the fear of death.
It is life without a driver’s license that scares people. They’d
do better to tell us the number of people whose licenses
were taken away on this road!” The prospect of precarious
life in carless social indignity, says Maksim, is both scarier
than death and intimately connected to it.
This thought echoes a distinction made by Judith
Butler (2006), who pitted the common “precariousness”
(i.e., mortal vulnerability) of human life against its political
“precarity.” In the deathly politics of terrain, political pre-
carity and bodily human precariousness are hardly sepa-
rable. Power and status are built into bodies and objects.
Stories of crashes in the media and in everyday conversa-
tion meticulously compare the cars’ relative physical tough-
ness by identifying the brands: “He ran into a Mazda, and
he was driving a Škoda . . . . Škodas, you know, are flimsier
than Mazdas. A girl died in his car.” Škodas versus Mazdas,
Ladas versus Toyota Land Cruisers—these comparisons be-
came self-explanatory tropes that reminded the drivers how
the extreme income inequality of today’s Russia leads to the
unequal distribution of privatized risk. A commoner drives
a “flimsier” (khlipkii) light passenger car (legkhovushka),
a Japanese, French, or domestically produced model; the
“statesman” (chinovnik) or the “boss” (nachal’nik) drives a
powerful, foreign-made four-wheel-drive vehicle or a par-
ticularly large Mercedes. The latter, a popular brand with
466
Russian elites, became a veritable symbol of the demonic
union between car, state, and corporate power after 2010,
when a Mercedes carrying a powerful official from a large
oil corporation ran head-on into a Citroën that carried two
women.6 The details of this story, as told and retold in the
media and by my interlocutors, fall along the familiar lines
of negotiating stateness. It mattered that one of the women
was a mother; that one of the women was a doctor, a pro-
fession in itself indexed as liminal by its proximity to bod-
ies and death; that the material tank-like power of the Mer-
cedes destroyed the flimsy Citroën while keeping its driver
and passenger perfectly safe. There was reason to believe
that the Mercedes was violating traffic rules or driving in the
oncoming lane to bypass one of Moscow’s infamous traffic
jams. The circumstances of the accident are still contested,
and no one was charged.
Liminality, “the” state, and “an” ontology:
Uneasy translations
Russian car talk exemplifies the everyday work of a political
ontology. In this ontology, the uncontested commitment to
developmentalist modernization meets with the moral ac-
ceptance of absolute power and the historical large-scale
nationalization of material property. For anthropologists,
this ontology should demonstrate how biased or limiting
can be the state-related vocabulary that is too often de-
rived from explicitly or implicitly liberal-democratic or anti-
statist traditions (Smith 2010). The classical approaches of
“blurred boundaries” of the state in the works of Akhil
Gupta (1995), and “the margins” of the state in that of Veena
Das and Deborah Poole (Das and Poole 2004), provide bet-
ter conceptual tools for understanding the working of the
simultaneously strong and weak (post)-Soviet state. Gupta,
however, still assumes a positive phenomenology of state-
lessness on the part of his interlocutors: where there is no
state, there is some other form of identity or social orga-
nization. For Russian drivers who look from the center to
the margins, the state does not have a “boundary,” however
blurred, but only degrees of presence. Das and Poole ar-
gue that the very negotiation of what constitutes “marginal”
or “excluded” vis-à-vis the rational and legal state colos-
sus is the foundation of the state’s work and power. In the
ethnographic examples of their edited collection, however,
the marginal somehow gets predecided by the choice of the
ethnographer. In addition, “the ontology of the state” ap-
proach may also not be entirely productive. When every sig-
nificant piece of infrastructure and every inter/subjective
disciplinarian (in a Foucauldian sense) effort direct imagi-
nation to the centralized state power, one is given to think
of the “state as ontology” rather than “the ontology of the
state.”
The politics of terrain led me to believe that some
of anthropology’s own tradition should be reappraised.

Automobility in Russia points to a variety of ways that the
classical imaginaries of the liminal continue to be socially
and symbolically central (Martı́nez 2015; Tutorsky 2016).
People habitually negotiate the lines separating the human,
the bodily, the vulnerable, and the mundane from the pow-
erful and the political. They assert that the world is brutally
material and that all humans are vulnerable in their emo-
tional and physical makeup. Roman daydreams of enticing
close friends to drive away and build a small community in
the middle of nowhere, and Batyr, now a Jeep owner, dreams
about going “very, very far away in the forest where you
are alone and there is no one around for a thousand kilo-
meters.” They call on ideologies of vigilance and down-to-
earth pragmatism to cope with the rush to survive and get
somewhere in time, to produce the high one gets from be-
ing close to the state’s limit, to moralize about the “war” of
roadside interactions, and, ultimately, to deal with the lethal
precariousness of driving itself.7
Considering how these liminal imaginaries and nego-
tiations point to and illustrate the imbalances of power and
the injustices of the social order in a vocal and conspicuous
manner, it is hard to see them as either “depoliticizing”
(Ferguson 1994) or merely pointing to some clandestine,
academically debated sacred underbelly of the political
(Agamben 1998). The intersection of automobility and the
state in Russia may have the disruptive potential, already
partly realized in the politics of automobility, to get close
to some ideals of “civil society” and liberal democracy. In
Russia, tragic life-changing personal experiences, includ-
ing road accidents, are often the springboard for formal
political activism (Clément 2015; Sidorkina 2015). The
emergence of the Society of Blue Buckets (Obschestvo
Sinikh Vederok) exemplifies how the ideational and ma-
terial liminality of automobility turned it into a political
agora (Argenbright 2008; Sherouse 2018; Sidorkina 2015).
Officially formed in 2010, the same year as the Mercedes-
Citroën collision, the society fueled public outrage at the
accident’s lack of consequences. The name of the organiza-
tion is telling: “blue bucket” refers to the flashing blue lights
on the roofs of the cars of powerful state and corporate offi-
cials, a symbol of high position in Russian state capitalism.
A blue bucket is also a children’s toy, a symbol of the un-
remarkable, ordinary reality of family life, cleaning chores,
and children’s play. The society’s activists play up the moral
economies of terrain, disguising what could be a discourse
of civil rights with imaginaries of muzhiki solidarity, mutual
help, and what should be the equalizing (childlike) vulner-
ability of human life. As one of the slogans of the Society
of Blue Buckets says, “In the bathhouse and on the road,
all are equal [v bane i na doroge vse ravny].” The road and
the bathhouse are (or should be) the liminal but positive
spaces of communitas, where lives and bodies are (or
should be) equal in the nakedness of the body and bareness
of life.
Driving in terrain  American Ethnologist
At the same time, the state that uses scare tactics to
counteract the loss of life and emergency politics to justify
austerity also refers to the ethos of terrain. Ideologies
of pragmatic stoicism and legitimate if temporary state
absence work well for contemporary technocratic poli-
tics. Marxist ideals of nonalienated, anticonsumerist, and
transformational modernity become instrumental to legit-
imizing and normalizing the contemporary Russian “gov-
ernment of indifference” (Matza 2010, 29), and they make
Russia in many ways more “neoliberal” than countries that
actually have had a history of liberal governance. Similarly,
the most recent “conservative” turn in Russian politics
may not represent a return to Soviet times but instead an
attempt to build a more identitarian and less volatile Euro-
pean political ontology. Today, one can choose to be a “con-
servative” or “traditionalist,” and thus support nationalism,
religion, and homophobia, or a “progressive,” and believe
in science, human rights, and cosmopolitanism. From the
point of view of a Kremlin-aligned “political technologist”
(or think tank operative who organizes political cam-
paigns), both the conservative and progressive tendencies
may be preferable to the deeply rooted anti-elitist, unruly
communitarian ethos. As a result, imaginaries that are
outside the state may be filled with possibilities of freedom
and alternative ways of sociality (Broz and Habeck 2015),
but they remain for the most part unrealizable dreams.
Both Roman and Batyr reach instead for the freedom of
driving, often fueled by alcohol and the stress of precarious
life, which make one ever and always “spin around”—and
speed up.
Notes
Acknowledgments. The research for this article was made pos-
sible by generous funding provided by the University of Toronto,
the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada,
Ontario Graduate Scholarship, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation
for Anthropological Research. Financial support from the basic re-
search program of National Research University Higher School of
Economics is gratefully acknowledged. A Russian Foundation for
Basic Research grant (No. 19-09-00126, “Personality and Collec-
tive in Provincial Russia”) gave me the time to finalize a draft. I
am grateful to Donna Young, Bruce Grant, Jeremy Morris, Thomas
Bierschenk, Konstantin Gaaze, Brian Donahoe, Roman Abramov,
Lili Di, Vadim Radaev, and other readers for valuable critique. My
special thanks to Michael Lambek, whose unwavering support in-
spired the project, and Niko Besnier, whose patient feedback al-
lowed me to finish it. I also thank Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov, the mem-
bers of the anthropology discussion club in St. Petersburg, and
anonymous reviewers for helpful comments. My biggest debt is to
my friends in the field, who made it all possible by agreeing to share
their lives and their stories with me.
1. Scarcity is aggravated by auto loans with double-digit interest.
Many people must take out these loans to buy and maintain the
now indispensable cars, as is the case among poor people in the
United States (Lutz 2014).
2. I conducted part of my fieldwork during the economic crisis of
2009–11; the Russian economy shrank by 8 percent in 2009 alone.
467
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
3. All personal names are pseudonyms.
4. Here and below, I italicize words in my interlocutors’ speech
that, in my interpretation, signal the symbolic proximity between
the poles of, respectively, high/low, modern/nonmodern, and
state/stateless.
5. According to a popular adage, one’s life is in itself a terrain
rather than a biography: “To live a life is not like walking across a
(smooth, two-dimensional) field” (zhizn’ prozhit’—ne pole pereiti).
6. Noize MC, the rapping voice of the millennial generation in
Russia, produced a song titled “Mercedes 666” specifically dedi-
cated to the accident. The video portrays the suspected culprit as
the Antichrist. “Мерседес S666 (Дорогу колеснице),” YouTube video,
2:18, posted by Noize MC, February 28, 2010, https://www.you
tube.com/watch?v = XX5NPcg FxE.
7. According to WHO (2015), there were 53.4 fatalities per
100,000 vehicles in Russia in 2013, which accounted for 18.9
deaths per 100,000 inhabitants. In the considerably more motor-
ized United States, the figures are 14.2 and 12.4 respectively.
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