Biopolitical practices have increasingly come to the fore in Russian political life. In only a few years, what started as a marginal series of speech acts expressing concerns about human bodies entered the mainstream of Russian political discourse. Some examples: as in Soviet times, punitive psychiatry is again in focus as one of the repressive instruments the state uses against dissenters (Nikitin 2013). Corporal discipline has become pervasive (Pavlovskii 2016). The Public Chamber has proposed to introduce a new school subject called ‘Moral basics of family life’, with separate classes for boys and girls; virginity would be promoted, and there would be regular liedetector tests of teachers concerning their morals (Chernykh 2015). In medicine, the Russian government has issued a much-discussed regulation on limiting the public release of information concerning cases of suicide among terminally ill patients (Maetnaia and Evstifeev 2015). Some politicians, including Deputy Prime Minister Arkadii Dvorkovich, have indicated that Russians eat too much in times of economic crisis (Znak.com 2015), while the mayor of Vologda has suggested his fellow citizens should ‘eat nettles’ (Gazeta.ru 2015).

Here we are dealing not with sporadic episodes, but with a new and growing trend affecting the whole system of power relations, with nation-building at its core. A possible explanation for this proliferation of biopolitical discourses lies in the dysfunctionality of other forms and practices of political subjectivities. Russia's national sovereignty cannot be based on, or express itself through, an economic rationale: modernisation, central under Medvedev's presidency, has clearly been sidelined. Contrary to what Carl Schmitt maintained (Schmitt 2005), sovereignty cannot rely solely on legal practices: corruptive unlawfulness has become a structural characteristic of power relations in Russia. Internationally, sovereignty cannot be geopolitically grounded, since Russian geopolitical preferences – with spheres of influence at their core – are rejected by most foreign partners. With the global crisis of ‘grand narratives’, national sovereignty cannot count on ideological resources, which have become largely discredited in Russia. Against this backdrop, in claiming uncompromised and undivided sovereignty, the state must resort to a depoliticised type of organicist discourse, with biopolitical categories of ‘family’ and ‘nation’ as a collective body at its centre. Biopower has become one of the most effective and feasible forms for generating bounded political roles and statuses pertinent to nation-(re) building.