Biopolitics in Russia – Foucault vs Agamben

In this paper I would like to argue that a dominant application of the term biopolitics in current political studies on Russia is based on a very selective interpretation of Foucault's concept of biopower. What is taken to be biopolitics in Foucault's sense by the majority of Russian scholars studying state power in Russia differs radically, I would argue, from Foucault's own theory of biopower and biopolitcs. These authors study as biopolitics various types of direct state violence against the body. This includes, for instance, torture by the police, the restriction of abortions, a ban on the immigration of orphans. At times, these studies combine two different theories of biopolitics – that of Foucault and that of Agamben and he shifted the attention from governance of the population to the demonstration of sovereign power in concentration camps (Agamben, 1998). At other times, the link between an individual case and the overall question of state power is treated in these studies in a very conventional way as simply direct use of force (Makarychev, Medvedev, 2015; Stella, Nartova, 2015) . I would like instead to study Russian political corporeality, using Foucault's model of biopower. According to Foucault, this type of power is exercised in modern states through systems of welfare, which involve medicalization, birth management and a developed data base about the citizens of the nation (Foucault, 1978). Following this model, we can say that the Russian state exercises a very limited power over the life of its citizens, as its statistics are of poor quality: many indicators are not recorded, many are recorded unreliably and some indicators have not been recorded for long enough. An example is that many government decisions do not have sufficient economic justification – to take the pension reform, the number of working and unemployed pensioners are only approximately known. In Europe, the potential for state influence upon citizens is incomparably higher. We, in comparison, in the biopolitical sense, live almost in anarchy. Having established a high standard of human well-being, social democracy enforces this standard through a network of life management techniques: healthy food with state regulation of the food market, a flexible system of assistance to stimulate the birth of children, and compulsory medical intervention (for example, vaccination). In Russia, on the contrary, with its traditional political indifference to the individual, the old disciplinary mechanisms of power are still in use: to remove, punish, torture. They are much more cruel to those deemed guilty by state authorities, but – and this is the paradox – leave intact the bodies of the rest who have not crossed the borders drawn by the state. This paradox is similar to the problem of punishment addressed by Foucault (Foucault, 1975).