Goatibexization: A Modernist Satire of Collectivization

It is a historic irony that the Bolsheviks, who had demolished the decrepit empire, were the only force able to reconstruct it. In order to survive, the empire needed a new sign by which to justify the new energy of its unificatory yoke.[1]

The contemporary return to authoritarian politics and neo-imperial conquest in the twenty years since Soviet collapse has generated an urgent call to attend to what Abkhazian novelist Fazil Iskander described as the “new sign” of the Soviet Union’s “unificatory yoke.” Under this “new sign,” Iskander exposed the imbrication of communist anti-imperial campaigns with the history of the Soviet reannexation, occupation, and extraction of resources from former Russian imperial territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia, as well as its developmentalist ambitions across the Global South. The formation and collapse of the Soviet Union crucially foregrounds a persistent theoretical gap in scholarship on (post)coloniality expressed in the dissonance between anti-colonial Marxist scholarship produced in the west and Marxist-Leninist discourses of empire and Soviet development across the Global South.[2] It calls for attending to the shifting signification of historical discourses of anti-imperial resistance from the collapse of the Cold War multi-power system and formation of post-Soviet nationalisms to the new right’s weaponization of anti-imperial rhetoric to neo-imperial ends.[3] Iskander’s fictions represent the particularities of Soviet imperialism through an aesthetic interest in modernism and satire. In so doing, he also upends a Cold War geopolitical binary that counterposed a vision of Euro-American political and aesthetic modernity to the “socialist” or “magical realist” aesthetic imaginations of the Soviet and (non)aligned literatures of the Global South.

This article considers, in particular, Iskander’s 1966 novella The Goatibex Constellation (Sozvezdie kozlotura) as a satire of Soviet progressivist development in a modernist key. It exposes the Soviet instrumentalization of discourses of Eurasian ethnic hybridity, the modernizing technologies of collectivization, and the cultural assimilationist strategies that formulated the “new energy” of its “unificatory yoke” and its federative structure as an “empire of nations.”[4] Hybridity was precisely this “new sign” by which the Soviet Union justified its sovereignty. In On the Threshold of Eurasia (2018), I argued that Eurasian hybridity played a central role in formulating early anti-imperial discourses that ideologically justified the reannexation of former imperial territories in the Caucasus and Central Asia into the new Soviet multinational empire. Following this framework, I argue that discourses of hybridity remained a central modernizing technology at pivotal moments of economic and political liberalization that accompanied the formation and collapse of the Soviet multinational empire.[5] Soviet invocations of discourses of Eurasian hybridity, in turn, expose efforts to integrate the non-Slavic “Eastern” republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia into its “unificatory yoke” as well as its developmentalist strategies that extended the cultural Cold War into the Global South.[6]

The Goatibex Constellation (Sozvezdie kozlotura), a Russophone Abkhazian satirical science fiction novella was first published in 1966 in the journal Novyi Mir (New World), which featured many important works of Soviet “world literature” including the famous science fiction novel by the Kyrgyz author Chingiz Aitmatov, A Day Lasts Longer than a Hundred Years (I dol’she veka dlitsia den’). The objective of such journals thus included the translation and assimilation of literatures from the Caucasus and Central Asia into a Soviet Eurasian world literature.[7] Both Aitmatov and Iskander were also notable figures in the Soviet Afro-Asian developmentalist initiatives, at once promoting anti-imperial communist ideology in the Global South alongside a vision of Eurasian hybridity, through which they conjured a more nuanced portrait of the Soviet Union’s and Russian empire’s intertwining legacies of imperialism. These processes included the Soviet empire’s reannexation of the former imperial territories of the Caucasus and Central Asia during the Civil War, the Stalinist purges of writers and intellectuals for “national deviation” in the 1930s, Soviet Russia’s stoking of wars in the region, and Soviet mid-century Cold War liberal development across the Global South. Iskander’s satire of  “goatibexization,” with its sideward glance at Eurasian hybridity, offers an opportunity for widening the field of vision in which modernist studies is situated, not only to decenter the hegemony of the European literary canon, but more crucially to consider the ways in which the intertwining cultural, economic, and political dimensions of Soviet empire challenge the Cold War bifurcation of communist federation and capitalist empire and their attendant mapping onto modernist and socialist realists aesthetics. [8]

As a work of science fiiction, the novel stages an intervention in the Soviet enlightenment project as one that aimed to assimilate Abkhazia into a modern Soviet whole. Iskander, a Russophone writer born to an Iranian father who was deported during the Stalinist purges and an Abkhazian mother, wrote under the doubled minority status of a Russophone Abkhazian Muslim living in both the Georgian SSR, from which Abkhazia only held brief independence from 1921-1931, and on the “periphery” of the Soviet empire. Indeed, Abkhazia occupies a further precarious position in the present post-Soviet moment following the Georgian Abkhazian war of 1992-1993, the Russo-Georgian war of 2008, and the Chechen wars (1994-1996;1999-2009). While distancing himself from Abkhazian successionist movements in the 1980s, Iskander continued to refer to himself as both Russian writer and Abkhazian bard.[9] Goatibex highlights its author’s minoritarian position through its rehearsal of an archetypal Soviet colonial narrative that became popular in the beginning of the twentieth century, in which a young Muslim intellectual travels to the Russian metropole to continue his studies and struggles to reassimilate upon returning home to the Caucasus (Feldman, On the Threshold of Eurasia). Upon returning home, Iskander’s narrator takes a job as a journalist, covering the story of a scientific experiment in the collective farming industry in Abkhazia to promote a new initiative to hybridize goats and ibexes. Iskander’s satire exposes the early failures of the destalinizing late Soviet political economy through the inability of the goatibex to reproduce. Often read allegorically as a critique of collectivization and imperial assimilation, the novel also crucially parodies Soviet discourses of hybridity, drawing on a non-linear narrative to upend its vision of imperial futurity.

Like much of Iskander’s work, particularly his most acclaimed novel Sandro of Chegem (Sandro iz Chegema, also serialized in Novyi Mir in 1973), his prose is errant, defying linearity or the cohesive plot conventions of the socialist realist hero-novel through often fantastic portraits of Soviet life in the Caucasus. The archetypal Soviet hero-worker novel follows the allegorical production of proletarian consciousness through the hero’s journey to overcome a great task, harnessing the instruments of Soviet technology to build a bright progressive future.[10] While Goatibex alludes to this formal structure, it also leads its readers astray, challenging the allegorical reading of the socialist realist canon and its vision of a progressivist future. Goatibex’s non-linear meandering narrative, since its first translations into English in the 1970s, was received as magical realism, and compared widely with pre-Soviet Russian symbolist writers such as Nikolai Gogol and international authors from Gabriel García Márquez to William Faulkner. The animal husbandry plot at the center of Goatibex builds on the tradition of Soviet science fiction and fantasy. As Anindita Banerjee argues, Soviet modernist experiments in narrative time and space drew on the histories of technological development from the electrification campaign and the revolutionary techno-utopianism of the 1920s to the space and nuclear race of the 1960s and fantasies and fears of both planetary destruction and intergalactic communications in a boundless cosmos.[11] Iskander presents a non-linear plot saturated with extra-verbal gesture. He embraces a narrative and gestural excess that exceeds both its Russian language of inscription and the Soviet scientific-economic plot at the center of the narrative.[12] This refusal of linear narrative in particular underscores his satire of Soviet modernity, as Goatibex renders visible the organicist conceptions of linguistic-cultural evolution that contributed to a totalizing vision of Soviet culture. The feeling of failure, which pervades much of the novel, also upends the progressive futurity promised in the evolutionary project.

The central story revolves around the novel’s narrator, a Moscow-trained journalist, who returns to his native Abkhazia to promote a new initiative to hybridize goats and ibexes as a national economic plan, that is, in a local Soviet bureaucratic initiative in service of the central economy. The hybrid animal, which boasts larger wool and meat yield, promises to distinguish the “small but charming” Abkhazian national agricultural industry and the Soviet collectivization project on the imperial periphery, a frame that also underscores Abkhazia’s lack of sovereignty as an autonomous republic within the Georgian Soviet Socialist Republic. Iskander’s satire of collectivization, which centers around the goatibex hybridization project, thus exposes the failures of collectivization alongside the developmentalist efforts of the Soviet empire and its localized national bureaucracy. In addition to its most obvious portrait of the Soviet agricultural administration, the hybridization project more broadly embodies Soviet developmentalist strategy in the southern republics.

One of the novel’s explicit targets is the biologist Trofim Lysenko, broadly identified through references to the work of the Michurian biological school. Lysenko argued for a non-Darwinian evolutionary model in which heredity patterns could evolve through learned traits, such as for example the notion that wheat crops could learn to grow in spring, a model Lysenko argued was compatible with Marxist-Leninist evolutionary progress. Perhaps most famously, Lysenkoism was responsible for Khrushchev’s failed corn hybridization project, which caused a massive bread shortage in the late 1950s. Lysenko, who gained prominence during the early failures of collectivization under Stalin represents the Soviet enlightenment’s utopian idealism. Iskander, in turn, maps Lysenko’s biological model onto the Soviet nationalities project, subverting a vision of Abkhazian agriculture as the ideal space for Soviet modernization, collectivization, and hybridization campaigns. The failure of collectivization thus also targets the multinational vision Eurasian ethnic hybridity as the unifying ideology of the Soviet empire. The cross-breeding of the goat and ibex to create the new biological organism and linguistic term the goatibex thus foregrounds the novel’s critique of Soviet modernization in the Caucasus, as well as the allegory of the narrator’s own Soviet assimilation. The hybridization project aims to join the wild mountain ibex with the domestic goat, both emphasizing the domestication inherent to state sponsored animal husbandry, and to the civilization project implicit in this frame story. The novel’s further confusion of biological and linguistic evolutionary models critiques the Soviet sciences that instrumentalized ethnology in the process of double assimilation.

As historian Francine Hirsch’s work on Russian and Soviet orientalist scholarship clarifies, the Soviet multinational empire was formulated on the basis of Russian imperial ethnology, which blended linguistics and ethnography. While this imperial legacy remained a prominent influence, under the Soviets ethnology was instrumentalized as part of its assimilation policy. While the imperial system had stressed direct assimilation through the process of russification, the Soviet system generated a double assimilation policy whereby ethnographers identified diverse peoples as historically determined groups, which could be formulated as nations, and in turn assimilated into a greater Soviet people, an empire of nations (Hirsch, Empire of Nations, 63-97).[13] This model of a multinational empire relied on the notion of the historical evolution of peoples, narody, based on their designation as nations, natsii, through a connection forged between land and way of life. Hirsch also notably distinguishes another term, ethnos, which was used to describe a linguistically inflected ethnosocial formation that evolved over time, in comparison to narodnost’, which instead captured a people at a single moment on the evolutionary timeline.[14] Soviet ethnology, broadly speaking, emphasized a romantic Herderian conception of a vitalist ethnos as the basic measure of ethnic classification. Framed in opposition to western race science, ethnos was then conceived as primarily culturally (linguistically) determined and mapped onto a historical materialist evolution from primitive and feudal societies to communism. While collectivization, economic centralization, and agricultural hybridization remained crucial for Soviet modernization, as Terry Martin also describes, the Soviet state relied on linguistic and educational developmentalist programs through korenizatsiia policies of Latinization, educational campaigns, and the shaping of national elites cadres to modernize the “cultural backwardness” (kul’turno ostalnost’) of its “non-western” peoples, namely all those except Russians, Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Jews and Germans.[15]

Iskender’s novel not only exposes the artificiality of this double assimilationist, evolutionary model through an allegory of the failures of goatibexization, but also challenges the power of Soviet collectivization at the level of the novel’s narrative structure. The story links the spread of goatibex propaganda in the media to the animal’s inability to breed due to climatic conditions. Iskander presents the interrelation between biological and linguistic hybridization through the transformation of the animal into a verbal form, goatibexation (kozloturizatsiia), which as the narrator describes, leaves its linguistic imprint on the space of the city. The narrator notes the erection of a goatibex pavilion whose sign beams down on the inhabitants like a message from the heavens. The failure of the goatibex project, in turn, leads to a larger critique of propaganda. The name lingering on the pavilion sign continues to produce artificial significance for local intellectuals. Iskander writes:

While the sign on the pavilion was quickly put in order, the old name “Goatibex Watering Hole” shone for an entire month, its neon lights brazenly winking. It seemed thus that the watering place was frequented by ibexes during the day while at night the goatibexes persisted. Some local members of the intelligentsia came for the purpose of staring at the neon sign. For them it seemed to contain a sign of the liberals’ struggle against something or other, while at the same time proof of the dogmatists’ vicious tenacity.[16]

The play on the animal’s transformation from agricultural product to brand highlights the interrelation between linguistic and economic resources as structuring principles for Soviet development, namely the overreliance on linguistic modernization to cope with failing economic programs. It also illustrates how Soviet collectivization adapted liberalizing strategies during destalinization, when the novel was penned in the 1960s. The goatibex, as comic and cosmic master ideology—emptied of meaning—crucially supplies support for both dogmatist and liberals. Goatibexation, in turn, reflects how repetitions of orthodox ideological forms resignified meaning or emptied form of all content, creating mobile signifiers.[17] Like the pavilion sign, which Iskander describes from celestial authoritative heights winking down on the inhabitants, the title refers to a scene in which a star constellation named after the goatibex appears to distract the narrator. As much a satire of the empty authority of late Soviet propaganda, the extension of goatibexization to the naming of the constellation also offer a sidewards glance at the romanticist vision of predestination so often linked to organicist visions of Eurasian hybridity from the first part of the twentieth century in the work of Eurasianist thinkers such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy as it does to the expanding Soviet space program.[18] The winking constellation offers a satire of the modern technologies of an inter-imperial constellation—both reflected in the Cold War race to the cosmos and toward efforts to bolster the economy through scientific bio-engineering and new marketing styles.

As a Russified Abkhazian Soviet subject, the narrator is presented as a hybrid figure, both a native Abkhazian and a Soviet bureaucrat. His arrival at the kolkhoz (collective farm) is imagined, reminiscent of nineteenth century writer Nikolai Gogol’s satirical portrait of the failing imperial bureaucracy in Government Inspector, as the arrival of a foreign and official investigator. The farm director assumes the narrator’s foreignness based on his position, addressing him only in Russian and often making side remarks to workers in Abkhazian, assuming the narrator cannot understand them. Indeed, the narrator links his own identity to the goatibex project. He distinguishes his youthful connection to goats with the Soviet advent of goatibexation, linking his own personal transformation with the animal’s hybridization: “And yet here I am after all these years, once again about to come face to face with these same goats who, like myself, have come up in the world and are now transforming themselves into goatibexes” (Iskandar, Sozvezdie Kozlotura, 47). The narrator’s association with the collective farming initiative insinuates the novel’s portrait of economic development onto an assimilationist vision of ethnic hybridity.

This evolutionary project, however, fails. The goatibex himself refuses to reproduce due to the incompatibility of “climatic conditions,” perhaps another jab at early twentieth century Eurasianist organicist connections between culture and geography, such as Nikolai Trubetzkoy’s vision of Eurasia as a geographical and anthropological whole (Trubetzkoy, Nasledie Chingiskhana, II; Trubetzkoy, The Legacy of Genghis Khan, 165). One of the newspaper’s editors, Platon Samsonivich, whose dedication to the project’s ideals does not escape the allegorization of his name, is indeed so invested in the project that its downfall is reflected in his family life. The editor describes this shift: “‘The separation from the economic needs of our collective farms gradually led to a separation from his family,’ the editor summarized, ‘and this is natural because having lost all criterion of truth he became arrogant’” (Iskandar, Sozvezdie Kozlotura, 163). Iskander locates the truth of Soviet modernity in the failing collective economic model and Soviet ideological project more broadly. In this sense, both Platon Samsonivich’s commitment to the ideal of goatibexation and to the regulatory force of the economic project are reflected in his private family life. The public and private worlds of the goatibex campaign collapse the distinction between state and family patriarchy. This is a particularly marked moment, highlighting the distinguishing features of the novel’s critique of the totality of Soviet central authority, as it takes aim at Soviet efforts to reorganize forms of life—biological, economic, social, familial, and linguistic during the post-Stalinist thaw.

The Goatibex’s failure to reproduce and the problems in Platon Samsonivich’s family life are also echoed in the structure of the narrative, driven by the goatibex project but subject to the errant transgressions that mark the non-linear folk or oral quality of Iskender’s writing style. While much of the plot focuses exclusively on the propaganda and subsequent anti-propaganda of the goatibex, the narrator’s own journey back to the Caucasus is framed by two failed love stories in which the narrator is ultimately rejected by his Russian female companions. Iskander summarizes the logic of failure as central to both the narrator’s writing and life, in which failure culls the driving force of rage. He writes:

I have a theory that any failure contributes to fortune, but one must know how to use failure skillfully. I have had experience with failure, so I learned to use it well. The main thing is that righteous, but barren rage, which grips you with failure. This rage appears in its purest form, as failure itself casts it out, and as it seethes in your blood you must employ it in the right direction so as not to be distracted by trifles, which unfortunately happens to many . . . Where are you, noble rage? As I was lost in these reflections, the door opened and once again the girl from the mail department walked in (121–122, 124).

The failures that structure the novel: the romantic missed connections, unrealized creative efforts of the narrator’s journalism, as well as the evolutionary Soviet modernization project of goatibex hybridization culminate in this noble rage that ultimately drives the narrator’s writing, and in turn, Iskander’s narrative itself. As a critique of Soviet modernization, the novel’s production of noble rage is thus the fortune of the failed forms of state assimilation and collectivization.

This critique of the failed narrative is further staged throughout the story in the narrator’s attempts to get the real beat on the goatibex project, despite the local kolkhoz chairman’s attempts to lead him astray. In a classic Caucasus interlude, the climax of the plot features a scene in which, during the narrator’s visit to the goatibex collective farm, the kolhoz chairman orders that his driver intoxicates him in an effort to thwart his journalistic efforts. Despite his better efforts to retain his sobriety, the narrator describes caving to the pressures of his cultural duty to Abkhazian conventions of hospitality, answering each reasonable toast to the long life of the goatibex and goodwill of his hosts with shots. Indeed, the narrator refuses drink several times until the driver curses him in Abkhazian. Despite pretending he does not understand, the nearness of the curse draws him out of playing Russian, forcing him to comply with local tradition and honor his company with a toast. Hours later, wasted and abandoned by his driver, he becomes distracted by an almost magical goatibex constellation in the sky. The sight of the constellation, which seems to wink at him, causes him to miss the bus and fall asleep on a park bench where he is robbed and then roused by the police. Iskander describes the narrator’s sense of wonder at the constellation: “I looked up at the sky. The bright dotted outline of the goatibex’s muzzle was swaying, now approaching, then moving away. From time to time his big eye winked. I understood that the winking meant something, but couldn’t guess exactly what” (103). The excessive toasting distracts the narrator from the story. He wakes up the next morning after being robbed of his watch, is harassed by the police, and then struggles against a series of impediments—including falling down a local farmer’s well—before he is able to return home.

The goatibex’s cosmic signifying power, thus at once thwarts the narrator’s efforts to get the story as well as Iskander’s narrative itself. [19] The intoxicated hallucination suspends the narrator in a drunken space-time in which a cosmic intervention seems to alter his existence, as well as metatextually, the plot of the story. The goatibex signs something with its wink, which the narrator as yet does not know. His only clue is the “mysterious harmony” and “perhaps even dangerous connection” that links the word for ibex (tur) to the tourist camp (turbaza) next to him (103). Dead end clues are everywhere. Despite the failure of the goatibex project, the novel ends with the revelation of Platon Samsonivich’s machinations for a new venture to promote cave tours of the geological wonders of the mountains, again evoking the pun on tur, and linguistically prefiguring the introduction of European tourism across the Caucasus following the collapse as the region’s Soviet economic export. Goatibex’s fantastic and comic science fiction agricultural allegory is thus reshaped by its non-linear detours—the failed love-story and the narrator’s unsuccessful attempts to follow the beat, leading himself and the readers astray. The novel’s errant narrative structure metatextually subverts the narrator’s own writing project, and by extension the immortalization of the Soviet project of goatibexization and the assimilation of the Abkhazian novel-allegory into a Soviet world literature project.

These linguistic affinities betray the link between the haunting predestination of the goatibex constellation, the labor of the goatibex collectivization project, the tourist cultural development, and the narrator’s own evolution from goat to goatibex, which frame the novel’s satire of the Soviet modernizing project. In this way, Iskander’s novel itself produces a noble rage in its portrait of the failure of Soviet modernization and errant refusal to assimilate an Abkhazian culture and economy into the governing structure of Soviet totality looming in the mysterious and dangerous winking stars. While the narrator is distracted from his writing—from the productive force of his own barren rage—by the seemingly random entrance of a mailwoman onto the scene, the charged emotional product of Iskander’s failed socialist heroic novel instead itself speculates a not so distant prophesy of the Soviet empire’s collapse. This essay’s inclusion in this cluster under the broad rubric of modernist studies by extension offers a provocation for considering the intertwining economic and political forces of Soviet development. Winking in the cosmic irony of Iskander’s errant prose is a powerful resistance to both the writing of late Soviet modernity and its role in structuring a binary Cold War world order.