Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region by Scott Radnitz (review)

Reviewed by: Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region by Scott Radnitz Eliot Borenstein (bio) revealing schemes: the politics of conspiracy in russia and the post-soviet region Scott Radnitz Oxford University Press https: //global. oup. com/academic/product/revealing-schemes-9780197573549? cc=de Print, 32. 99 There is something profoundly unsettling about reading the fourth book on Russian conspiracy theories to come out in English over the course of four years. Not because the book in question, Scott Radnitz's Revealing Schemes: The Politics of Conspiracy in Russia and the Post-Soviet Region, is unsettling, though it is—it is about conspiracy theories, how can it not be? And certainly not because of any disappointment in the book itself, which is an excellent addition to this burgeoning field. No, what is unsettling is the recognition that conspiracy is not merely having a moment: conspiracy has swallowed up the first two decades of Russia's political discourse, with no end in sight. As the author of the second of these four books (Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism 2019), I am perhaps too close to the material. If conspiracy is not my middle name, that is only because the Illuminati tampered with my birth certificate. And besides, in the circles we are talking about, with a last name like "Borenstein, " "conspiracy" is kind of a given. In any case, my book came out on the heels of Ilya Yablokov's Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World (2018) and just before Keith A. Livers's Conspiracy Culture: Post-Soviet Paranoia and the Russian Imagination (2020). Radnitz is that much-needed Fourth Horseman of the Russian Apocalypse: Deception, Discourse, and Delirium are now joined by Data. Fortunately, Radnitz's book contains enough insight and information to more than justify another investigation of post-Soviet conspiracy theorizing. Revealing Schemes is obviously the product of years of research of the most exhaustive and exhausting kind: Radnitz, after all, actually had to talk to people. Or worse, listen to them. The rest of us were rarely obliged to leave our keyboard. For a humanist, this book is an emissary from that undiscovered End Page 27 country, the social sciences, where people do terrible things to numbers—running them, crunching them, and if they are feeling particularly naughty, massaging them. Radnitz's approach to the study of post-Soviet conspiracies is ambitious and systematic; he established a database of "over 1, 500 conspiracy claims from 12 post-Soviet states (the 15 republics minus the Baltics) from 1995 to 2014" and conducted a dozen focus groups and administered surveys in Georgia and Kazakhstan that yielded two thousand responses. As a political scientist, he is concerned first and foremost with "regimes": "When do regimes make conspiracy claims? Why do some countries see more claims than others? And why do the promoters of conspiracy theories target certain perpetrators? " In his cross-cultural comparisons of conspiracy claims, Radnitz manages to highlight the specific context of a given historical and political moment, rejecting any reductive or orientalizing explanation for an "innate" tendency to promote or believe conspiracy theories in a given part of the world. He notes that explanations for a given country's apparent affinity for conspiracy theories usually point to "a history of victimization at the hands of outsiders, " but wisely rejects the "national trauma theory of history" because it "lets leaders off the hook. " And besides: "national traumas in history are the norm rather than the exception. " Instead, Radnitz argues that conspiracy claims let people in authority "flaunt their access to intelligence. " Promoting a conspiratorial narrative lets the regime "signal strength through prescience, and to avoid the humiliation of appearing oblivious. " Radnitz's reasoning is eminently sensible, as are his conclusions. Certainly, his data-driven research is a much-needed addition to the growing body of Russian conspiracy studies. But conspiracy and the analysis of empirical data have at least one thing in common: they cry out for a discussion of epistemology. What constitutes knowledge? What is granted the status of knowledge? And what are the discourses of power that this knowledge enables. . .