This comment was written by Emma Larson on 3 Mar 2024.

Remediating Protest Blog

Response to Octavia's Blog Post 2

I really enjoyed Octavia's blog post for our second section of class readings. I thought she did a wonderful job of connecting the tactics of over-identification to Kurekhin's "Lenin was a mushroom" broadcast. Indeed, the event is truly an example of how over-identification, through its extremity, forces audience members and/or participants to question the ideologies underlying an otherwise widely-held and unquestioned belief. It is clear that audience members would have felt deeply distrustful and disturbed after realizing how quick they were to believe that Lenin was a mushroom after the false nature of this narrative was made explicit by the Leningrad Regional Party Committee Galina Barinova.

One addition that I would make to Octavia's otherwise fantastic post is to make more explicit what exactly Kurekhin's "Lenin was a mushroom" broadcast" was overidentifying with, namely the kinds of scientific language and lexicon that dominated the Soviet-era discussions of anything and everything related to academia. Indeed, Kurekhin used "rapid-fire evidence" and "evidence-focused argumentation" specifically to draw attention to the futility of this kind of discourse and suggest that the Soviet Union could be using this style of language to make claims equally as ridiculous as the one he aimed to make. It would be interesting to compare Kurekhin's work with another example from the Soviet academic milieu.

I also wonder if there is additional room for Octavia to consider the potential role that skaz plays in Kurekhin's performance. As I understand it, Kurekhin is employing skaz in as far as he is drawing from the same register and adopting the same language as a character he aims to critique.

Thank you for the thought-provoking post, Octavia!

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