Reactivating Sloika: Ilya Khrzhanovsky’s DAU and the Logic of Post‐Soviet Atompunk

This article draws on the structure of the Soviet nuclear bomb known as the Sloika (“layer cake,” from sloi meaning “layer”) to trace an epistemic logic for processing the Soviet past in Khrzhanovsky’s experimental project DAU. I suggest that the layered logic of the sloika paradigm shows how contemporary engagement with reconstructed technologies reactivates the entanglement between Soviet science and state power. This process generates a signature aesthetic that I call “post‐Soviet atompunk,” which is an analytic category adapting the inventive engagement of steampunk with period technology to the context of the Soviet atomic age. By combining a media‐archaeological lens with Karen Barad’s diffractive methodology, I examine how the stratified logic of Khrzhanovsky’s method fuses the atom with the punk, exposing the connection between period technology and state control and offering the participants and spectators a position of entangled observers within this apparatus. As I suggest, DAU invites its characters and viewers to adopt a sloika mode of thinking, offering them a chance to reconfigure their relationship to the Soviet past. To test whether this layered epistemic logic enables a reparative rethinking of Soviet scientific history, I draw on the insights from the interviews I conducted with the scientists of DAU—mathematician Dmitry Kaledin and physicist Nikita Nekrasov. Building on their reflections, I consider how the sloika mode of thinking reconfigures agency and opens up productive venues for reflecting on the subject’s ethical entanglement with the military and technocratic power of the Russian state amid the ongoing war in Ukraine.