Greg Afinogenov

Viewed in this way, the film’s notion of bureaucracy and institutional structure appears quite unconventional. In the classic Weberian model, bureaucracy is characterized by meritocratic values, impersonal legal norms, and a particular kind of instrumental rationality; according to popular stereotype, bureaucracies are staffed by faceless functionaries and prize process over results. Yet here, the bureaucracy is defined precisely by the personal relationships that subsist between its employees. Its fault is not that it is too abstract or too by-the-book. Quite the opposite: bureaucratic politics in Seventeen Moments of Spring is quintessentially narrow-minded and myopic. It sins, in short, by refusing engagement with abstract questions.

To a great extent, the world of these photographs, like the photographs themselves, is a creation (in that outsider-art kind of sense) of the aparát. Not the buildings, for they are, by and large, much older; and not the people, for they, like early Christians, are in the world without being of it; but the whole impersonal network of social relationships that sustains the Party and, by extension, the State; carving out the tracks along which the passersby are always so determinedly marching. There is, in other words, an inherent ambiguity here, which places this particular tentacle of the aparát in the peculiar position of being simultaneously artist and spectator.

There was a tension between these two dimensions of Internet identity. The more freedom remained to the individual to alter his own self-presentations, the more potential there was for (occasionally extreme) abuses of trust and the more difficult it was to create cohesive community ties. Most online communities developed social, rather than programmatic, solutions—formal and informal codes of behavior that limited the degree of experimentation open to their members. But a broader cultural phenomenon also emerged: a pervasive cult of unfiltered emotional rawness and sincerity coupled with an equally pervasive anxiety about insincerity and deception.