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psychological dramas exploring the tensions of modern Soviet life. (Distri-

bution was frequently restricted to Georgia.) Otar Ioseliani, who began his

career in 1966 with Leaf fall (Listopad), a feature ﬁlm of near-documentary

verisimilitude, experienced so many problems with later ﬁlms that he eventu-

ally left for France, where he continues to work. Lana Gogoberidze, originally

a documentarist, won fame with Some Interviews on Personal Matters (Neskol’ko

interv’iu po lichnym voprosam, 1979), whose forty-something heroine ﬁnds she

can no longer juggle the complicated balls of her life and whose past – like

Gogoberidze’s – includes a reunion with a mother released from the Gulag

after Stalin’s death.

By the last years of zastoi, ‘the state’s intrusion in private life considerably

diminished, while the arena for public expression and the possibilities for pri-

vate pleasure both expanded. Culture and everyday life were, of course, still

constricted by political surveillance and economic controls, and censorship

still operated . . . But conformity in modes of behavior, public expression, and

individual identity became far less coercive, and the politicization of everyday

life, the expectation that communal or political goals shaped individual desires,

was muted and even ridiculed.’

Counter-systems – the cultural equivalents

of the black and grey markets that supplemented the stagnant economy –

deﬁed, paralleled and in a sense complemented the ‘public gloss, monumen-

talism, desiccated oratory, and relentless ritualism’ of state systems.

The

urban, topical irreverence of estrada (revue) comedy, acute commentaries on

the shortcomings of Soviet life performed most adroitly by Arkadii Raikin and

Mikhail Zhvanetskii, appealed to live audiences. And a plethora of voices –

from women, from provincial Russia, from non-Russian republics – leaked

into and thickened the ofﬁcial chorus.

New technology permitted the spread of culture – primarily, but not exclu-

sively popular culture – with a speed and on a scale previously unimaginable.

The advent of cheap audio cassettes allowed everyone from long-distance

truckers to high-school students to hear gypsy songs previously banned

from the airwaves, the immensely popular songs of Zhanna Bichevskaia, Alla

Pugacheva and Valerii Leont’ev, and the far more abrasive ones of bards like

Aleksandr Galich and Vladimir Vysotskii.(TheComposers’ Union fought back,

mandating ‘that 80% of all songs performed had to be those of Soviet com-

posers’ and establishing ‘review commissions to vet all rock groups’.

)Afew

59 Joan Neuberger, ‘Between Public and Private: Revolution and Melodrama in Nikita

Mikhalkov’s Slave of Love’, in McReynolds and Neuberger, Imitations of Life,pp.260–1.

60 Stites, Russian Popular Culture,p.149. 61 Ibid., p. 164.

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years later video technology, though accessible only to a tiny elite, permitted

the beginnings of an underground cinema movement, mainly in Leningrad.

What began as ‘an underground band of young layabouts and drunken “week-

end warriors” who started to ﬁlm their own debauched and violent free-for-

alls in the woods in the early 1980s’ went on to make the Soviet Union’s ﬁrst

horror movies, where ‘crazed “zombies” or necro-denizens wander apoca-

lyptic landscapes and commit acts of wanton cruelty, homosexual violence,

and murder’.

With the increase in the availability of VCRs, pirated foreign

ﬁlms eventually entered Soviet homes without even a token nod to ofﬁcial

channels.

Popular ﬁction during zastoi superseded in popularity if not in critical

esteem the new generation of ‘serious’ writers known variously as ‘urban’,

‘the Moscow school’, and ‘the forty-year-olds’.

It satisﬁed a reading public

that had grown substantially thanks to urbanisation, better education and liv-

ing conditions and increased leisure time. The makulatura scheme, introduced

in 1974 to solve the Soviet Union’s perpetual paper shortage, enabled read-

ers to trade in newspapers and magazines for books. ‘Large segments of the

population which had previously been uninterested in the printed word out-

side newspapers were now introduced to the idea of the book as something

valuable to be acquired; they were also encouraged to build a library of ide-

ologically neutral and highly readable literature.’

Crime ﬁction burgeoned,

both the home-made versions produced by novelists like Arkadii Adamov, Lev

Ovalov and Arkadii and Grigorii Vainer, and the imports: ﬁfteen works by

Agatha Christie alone appeared in Soviet journals between 1966 and 1970.

Iulian Semenov’s thrillers fed the hunger for escapist popular ﬁction, as did

Valentin Pikul’ ’s piquant novels of the diplomatic, aristocratic and dynastic

life of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Russia. The state, eager for its share

of the proﬁts, authorised print runs in the millions (that sold out immediately)

and screen adaptations. The prestigious Moscow-based journals like Novyi mir

62 Jos

e Alaniz and Seth Graham, ‘Early Necrocinema in Context’, in Seth Graham (ed.),

Necrorealism: Contexts, History, Interpretations (Pittsburgh: Russian Film Symposium,

2001), p. 9.

63 Sally Dalton-Brown, ‘Urban Prose of the Eighties’, in Arnold McMillin (ed.), Reconstruct-

ing the Canon: Russian Writing in the 1980s (Amsterdam: Harwood, 2000), pp. 282–3.

64 Stephen Lovell and Rosalind Marsh, ‘Culture and Crisis: The Intelligentsia and Literature

after 1953’, in Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd (eds.), Russian Cultural Studies: An

Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 78.

65 Catherine Theimer Nepomnyashchy, ‘Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem: Aleksandra

Marinina and the Rise of the New Russian Detektiv’, in Barker, Consuming Russia: Popular

Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev,p.165.

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and Znamia did not need such material to keep their circulation high, but

provincial journals like Volga, Sel’skaia molodezh (Rural youth) and Ural’skii

sledopyt (Urals pathﬁnder) relied on detective novels and/or science ﬁction to

attract subscribers, and the legal journal Chelovek i zakon (Man and the law)

came out in enormous print runs because it published Georges Simenon’s

Maigret novels and Semenov’s 6 Ogareva Street.

The Brezhnev regime’s ﬁnal spasm of cultural repression occurred in 1979,

with its refusal to publish a ‘literary almanac’, Metropolis (Metropol’). Metropo-

lis contained poetry, essays, drama and short ﬁction by twenty-six writers,

famous and obscure. Its editors – Vasilii Aksenov, Viktor Erofeev, Andrei Bitov,

Fazil Iskander and Evgenii Popov – justiﬁed Metropolis as an effort to combat

‘the dreary inertia which exists in journals and publishing houses...thecon-

dition of stagnant, quiet fright’.

Deliberately fostering a pluralist approach

by including aesthetically diverse material, the editors tried – and failed – to

publish via legal channels. The authorities blocked the intended ‘book launch’

at a downtown caf

e (literally: they sealed off the block and closed the caf

efor

‘sanitary’ reasons). The Writers’ Union expelled ﬁve contributors, including

Erofeev and Popov, slandered Aksenov and Akhmadulina, intimidated others;

several, including Aksenov, emigrated. In the paralysis that ensued, and that

persisted until 1986, Soviet culture bifurcated into its ofﬁcial sphere, ‘total

marasmus, total decay, supercretinism’, in Popov’s words, and an active, even

‘tumultuous’ literary underground whose members – mainly born between

1945 and 1955 – had virtually no hope of publication.

The fact that our generation was immediately confronted with a kind of con-

crete wall meant that we were forced to go in another direction . . . [We] never

identiﬁed with Sovietpower, absolutely never. . . Whereas that generation, the

‘sixtiers’, had identiﬁed with it, they’d gone through the romance of joining the

YCL [Komsomol, Young Communists’ League] and hearing all these myths

and stories about good communists. They’d been seduced by this subtle lie . . .

We never felt that. Our only hope was that we might get away with it just a bit,

cheat the system a bit, maybe publish a few things. That was our rather mini-

malambition...Noneofthiswasunbearable,unbearableisn’ttheword...

but it was simply melancholy, very melancholy, watching what was happening

around us,communismand more communism,andwondering whenonearth

it would end. In fact mostly it seemed it would never come to an end . . . We

66 Viktor Miasnikov, ‘The Street Epic’, Popular Fiction, ed. John Givens, Russian Studies in

Literature 38, 3 (Summer 2002), (M. K. Sharpe): 14. (‘Bul’varnyi epos’, Novyi mir 11 (2001),

trans. Vladimir Talmy.)

67 Cited by Robert Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose (Oxford and Providence, R.I.: Berg,

1994), p. 27.

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felt that for evermore and eternity there’d be a portrait of Brezhnev hanging

there on the wall and someone singing some communist rubbish on the radio.

So however much we laughed at Gorbachev, we should all remember very

clearly that he played an absolutely enormous role.

Glasnost’ and the post-Soviet decade, 1985–2000

When Gorbachev came to power he hardly intended the end of the Soviet

state, with its concomitant dismantling of political, economic and cultural

institutions, the resulting need to adapt to altered economic circumstances,

cycles of inﬂation and devaluation that impoverished signiﬁcant portions of

the population, the success of an emergent entrepreneurial class and a myriad

of other changes. Initially, glasnost’, coupled with perestroika, promised hope,

and for some time it delivered on the promise that many men and women,

themselves products of Khrushchev’s Thaw (the ‘sixtiers’ to whom Popov

refers), felt had been deferred for twenty-ﬁve years or more. Throughout 1986,

1987 and 1988, excited, amazed gasps greeted every manifestation of freedom:

historical-political rehabilitations, literary and cinematic discoveries and redis-

coveries, artistic revelations. Although wary about the durability of those gains

without fundamental institutional reform, artists and cultural consumers alike

fervently welcomed the recovery of their national pasts, the removal of polit-

ical boundaries that had banished into oblivion

emigr

e culture, the exposure

of lies that had shaped Soviet life for so long and the opportunity to write and

read, produce and watch, compose and listen without supervision. For more

than sixty years the Soviet state had controlled the creation and distribution

of cultural products; beginning in 1986, that domination disappeared.

Theatre and ﬁlm unions supported Gorbachev rapidly and energetically,

partly because they hoped that the absence of censorship would stimu-

late a revamped repertoire with which to lure dwindling audiences. They

blamed political and bureaucratic interference for the system’s inefﬁciency,

and believed that independence would resolve many of their problems. They

swiftly divested themselves of old-style political appointees in favour of those

who had accumulated ‘moral capital’ by suffering from state repression.

new Union of Theatre Workers replaced the All-Russian Theatrical Society,

with the aim of ‘freeing theatres from the close, pettifogging tutelage of the

68 Laird, Voices of Russian Literature,pp.124–5.

69 Katherine Verdery, What was Socialist, and What Comes Next? (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1996), pp. 107–8.

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Ministry . . . enabling theatre companies themselves to take all the essential

decisions and manage their own affairs’.

Between January 1986 and 1988,

the number of theatres in Moscow increased by 50 per cent, and amateur

and semi-professional groups multiplied, including fringe companies offering

more experimental productions.

In a parallel process, members of the Cinematographers’ Union voted out

two-thirds of the board in May 1986, electing in their stead ‘uncompromised’

directors (most of whom had entered the industry in the 1960s) like Elem

Klimov, Eldar Shengelaia and Andrei Smirnov. Cinema studios converted to a

ﬁnancially self-supporting system (khozraschet) that permitted virtual auton-

omy over script selection, budgeting, casting and hiring, though it offered

no solutions to the obstructions posed by entrenched interests, the lack of

hard currency and the difﬁculty of gauging popular taste. In 1988 ﬁlm studios

gained the right to distribute their libraries of ﬁlms directly, bypassing the

ofﬁcial government export agency.

Almost immediately the Cinematographers’ Union undertook a review of

ﬁlms suppressed during the Brezhnev years, mainly for political transgres-

sions, and authorised their release: Aleksei German’s Roadcheck (Proverka na

dorogakh, 1971), its hero a POW suspected of collaboration with the Nazis;

Gleb Panﬁlov’s The Theme (Tema, 1979), with allusions to Jewish emigration;

Aleksandr Askoldov’s ﬁrst and last ﬁlm The Commissar (Komissar, 1968), with an

ambiguous Red Army heroine, montage reminiscent of the 1920s, and a ﬂash

forward to the Holocaust. Audiences watched these ‘recovered’ ﬁlms with

interest, but reserved their passion for the new movies portraying the Soviet

Union’s painful past and its tumultuous present, just as they devoured inves-

tigative journalism in print and on TV. All-Union television, reaching virtually

every household in the nation, broadcast a startling number of documentary

ﬁlms.

A few directors (Kira Muratova, Aleksandr Sokurov, Lana Gogoberidze) wel-

comed glasnost’ as the chance ‘to make ﬁlms that resist the overpoliticization of

culture’, rather than as an opportunity to make more openly political ﬁlms.

But the majority of ﬁlm-makers, freed from the demand to ‘construct the

future’, portrayed the reality that surrounded them, and ‘what they saw was

a bleak picture: beggars on the streets, impoverished pensioners, economic

70 Michael Glenny, ‘Soviet Theatre: Glasnost’ in Action – with Difﬁculty’, in Julian Graffy

and Geoffrey A. Hosking (eds.), Culture and the Media in the USSR Today (Basingstoke and

London: 1989), p. 81.

71 The phrase is Gogoberidze’s. Svetlana Boym, ‘The Poetics of Banality: Tat’iana Tolstaia,

Lana Gogoberidze and Larisa Zvezdochetova’, in Goscilo, Fruits of Her Plume,p.75.

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chaos, street crime, Maﬁa shootings, pornographic magazines and videos,

decaying houses and ramshackle communal apartments, and the emergence

of a new class, the New Russians. . .’.

Feature ﬁlms like Vasilii Pichul’s hyper-

realistic melodrama Little Vera (Malen’kaia Vera) and Iurii Mamin’s satiric

The Fountain (Fontan), both released in 1988 when ticket prices were still

affordable, drew huge audiences (50 million for Little Vera) and international

prizes.

Within a few years, however, audiences had had enough, preferring to

watch Brazilian soap operas and optimistic fortune-tellers on TV in their

relatively clean, safe and comfortable living rooms rather than the all-too-

familiar grim reality (or Hollywood trash) on offer in decaying dirty theatres.

Film production dropped as fast as it had risen: 300 ﬁlms were released in

1990, 213 in 1991, 68 in 1994, 28 in 1996.

More recently annual production

has stabilised at about 75, produced by small, privatised companies instead of

the unproﬁtably large studios of yore. Russia’s Ministry of Culture currently

ﬁnances fewerthantwo dozen ﬁlms annually, and studios in many of the former

Soviet republics struggle to survive, relying on help from organisations like

France’s Centre National de Cin

ematographie.

The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the ‘wholesale social displacement

of the cult of high culture’.

Entrenched attitudes compounded enormous

practical difﬁculties. During the Brezhnev years, the polarisation between

those artists whom the state favoured and those whom it marginalised

strengthened the ‘perceived connection between the moral integrity of the ﬁlm

“artist” and the social pessimism and aesthetic difﬁculty of his or her ﬁlms’. In

other words, inaccessibility denoted honesty, and entertainment meant com-

promise.

That attitude persisted well beyond the system’s demise: ‘Many

people go to movie houses just to relax and enjoy themselves – to stop think-

ing,’ commented a leading ﬁlm-maker. ‘We have to enlighten them and make

them want to think.’

Yet ‘auteur’ ﬁlms, however gratifying the international

laurels they may accrue at Cannes, do not ﬁll seats.

72 Birgit Beumers, ‘Introduction’, in B. Beumers (ed.), Russia on Reels (London and New

York: I. B. Tauris, 1999), p. 1.

73 Ibid., p. 3.

74 Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov, ‘The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture’, in

Nancy Condee (ed.), Soviet Hieroglyphics: Visual Culture in Late Twentieth-Century Russia

(Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press and British Film Institute, 1995),

p. 141.

75 Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers,p.87. See also his analysis, pp. 122–3.

76 Elem Klimov, ‘Learning Democracy: The Filmmakers’ Rebellion’, in Stephen F. Cohen

and Katrina van den Heuvel (eds.), Voices of Glasnost: Interviews with Gorbachev’s Reformers

(New York: Norton, 1989), p. 240; cited by Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers,p.128.

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After more than a decade of negotiating between creative autonomy and

public taste, Russian ﬁlm-makers have found no magic formula. Still, a sizeable

handful of recent ﬁlms have succeeded in drawing domestic audiences into

theatres.(The construction of modern multiplex cinemas with stadium seating

and reliable heating helps as well.) Successful post-Soviet ﬁlms manipulate

generic formulae to probe contemporary concerns. Thrillers like Balabanov’s

Brother (Brat, 1997) offer amoral killer-heroes who may promise safety in a

lawless society. Comedies like Dmitrii Astrakhan’s Everything Will Be OK (Vse

budet khorosho, 1995) provide ‘escape into another world, imagined or real’. And

war ﬁlms like Prisoner of the Mountain (Kavkazskii plennik, 1997) and The Cuckoo

(Kukushka, 2001) feature attractive soldier-heroes who are abandoned by their

army and their community.

If the ﬁlm-maker ‘with a pragmatic frame of

mind and a calculating self-interest has succeeded the ﬁgure of the director

who was ostentatiously distant from material problems and fully engaged in

the problems of art’,

director Valerii Todorovskii welcomes the shift: ‘I think

it’s a feature of the new generation of Russian ﬁlmmakers that they don’t try

to educate anyone. They understand that cinema should entertain people and

give them pleasure, and, if it can, create some original, new world.’

Literature beneﬁted immediately from the steady expansion of opportu-

nity and erosion of prohibitions ushered in by glasnost’, despite a tug-of-war

between liberals and conservatives that lasted for several years.

Censorship

was formally abolished on 1 August 1990, but long before that Glavlit had lost

most of its teeth. Editors, once the ﬁrst-line censors, made decisions with little

regard for political or ideological criteria, except as they might affect circula-

tion ﬁgures. As a result of the 1990 law, formerly underground and unofﬁcial

journals gained legal status: more than 400 registered within a few months.

Most printing facilities and access to paper supplies remained in the hands of

the Communist Party, so the newly independent journals faced an abundance

of practical handicaps. For a few years, however, until ﬁnancial exigencies

forced many journals to close down, editors reintegrated into Russian culture

an extraordinary range of once-banned material, from poetry and ﬁction writ-

ten in the 1920s (Evgenii Zamiatin’s 1920 dystopian novel We (My), for one)

to novels written thirty or forty years later (Vasilii Grossman’s Forever Flowing

77 Birgit Beumers, ‘To Moscow! To Moscow? The Russian Hero and the Loss of the Centre’,

in Beumers, Russia on Reels,pp.77, 83.

78 Nina Tsyrkun, ‘Tinkling Symbols’, in Beumers’ Russia on Reels,p.59.

79 Faraday, Revolt of the Filmmakers,p.171.

80 Josephine Woll, ‘Glasnost: A Cultural Kaleidoscope’, in Harley D. Balzer (ed.), Five Years

that Shook the World: Gorbachev’s Unﬁnished Revolution (Boulder, Colo., San Francisco and

Oxford: Praeger, 1991), pp. 110–15.

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The politics of culture, 1945–2000

(Vse techet), Nabokov’s novels), from samizdat texts by authors living abroad to

texts written ‘for the drawer’ by Soviet authors who had simply waited until

circumstances changed. Contemporary authors who had published through-

out the years of zastoi now took up crusading pens (Rasputin’s Fire (Pozhar,

1985); Astaf ’ev’s Sad Detective (Pechal’nyi detektiv, 1986); Aitmatov’s Executioner’s

Block (Plakha, 1986)), and works appeared by Tatyana Tolstaya, Viktor Erofeev,

Mikhail Kuraev – writers whose ‘vision of the world evolved prior to glasnost,

even if the publication of their works did not’.

In addition, readers had access

to a bewildering array of pulp ﬁction – thrillers, romances, pornography –

lying cheek by jowl with political pamphlets and ‘serious’ literature on the

stalls outside metro stations.

As the period of Gorbachev’s rule drew to an end, writers and critics grad-

ually abandoned the time-honoured civic and social role of literature, its func-

tional utility. Viktor Erofeev, speaking for many, rejected the demand that

writers be ‘priest, and prosecutor, and sociologist, and expert on questions

of love and marriage, and economist, and mystic’.

Readers adapted more

slowly, rebufﬁng writers for ‘offering no deep thoughts, no beautiful feelings,

no attractive characters, not the least ray of hope’.

Accustomed to publicistic,

polemical and pedagogic prose that sought to expose or ridicule the system,

they spurned much of the ‘alternative’ literature on offer, mainly ﬁction ‘osten-

sibly divorced from any speciﬁc social and historical context . . . sometimes real,

sometimes fantastic’, and often outrageously explicit in its sexual references

and obscenities.

Dubbed by one Russian critic ‘post-socialist realist baroque’,

the ﬁction of

writers like Valeriia Narbikova and Valentin Sorokin is bleak and often shock-

ing, written in response to ‘an all-pervasive mass culture [originating] in ideol-

ogy, deeply permeating the language as well as the visual landscape...[Their

work] can be read as a passionate response to a society that lived on hypocrisy

and shame, combining grandiose pretensions to moral righteousness with

an almost unparalleled capacity for violence.’ Sorokin, in particular, depicts

‘a schizophrenic world in which the stock characters of Soviet literature –

solid ofﬁcials, eager young men, wry old codgers who have seen a thing or

two – turn out on inspection to be monsters and perverts, and where everyday

81 Helena Goscilo, ‘Alternative Prose and Glasnost Literature’, in Balzer, Five Years that

Shook the World: Gorbachev’s Unﬁnished Revolution,p.120.

82 Viktor Erofeev, ‘Pominki po sovetskoi literature’, Literaturnaia gazeta 17 (1990), reprinted

in Glas 1 (1991): 221–32.

83 Cited by Porter, Russia’s Alternative Prose,p.6. 84 Ibid., pp. 1–2.

85 The phrase is Nadya Azhgikhina’s, cited ibid., p. 12.

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josephine woll

Soviet language – the language of apparent sense and morality – is seen as no

more meaningful than the raving of lunatics’.

Post-Soviet chernukha (black ﬁction), published in serious periodicals,

appealed to readers because it ‘legitimized their own knowledge that such

things [homelessness, prostitution, army hazing, etc.] existed’, and its authors

spurned any and every kind of ideology in favour of ‘corporeal truth’.

In time

chernukha became ‘the chief medium for chronicling everyday life’, with ‘new

Russians’ (that is, newly and ostentatiously wealthy) replacing the heroes and

heroines drawn from the dregs of society, and material abundance – banquets,

orgies – replacing suffering and physical humiliation. For the new hero, power

alone retains meaning, and ‘all other norms that traditionally relate to morality

become absolutely arbitrary and are deﬁned by almost insigniﬁcant factors’.

In Vladimir Tuchkov’s ‘Master of the Steppes’ (Novyi mir no. 5, 1998), for exam-

ple, the protagonist, a successful businessman, values Tolstoy and Dostoevsky

for precisely those episodes where evil triumphs. He constructs his own ‘ham-

let’, hires ‘serfs’ for $2,000/year, abuses them in the manner of Dostoevskian

sadists – and his employees eagerly extend their contracts, regarding their

master ‘not as an eccentric man of means but as their very own father – strict

but fair and incessantly concerned for their welfare’.

Thus the ‘morality’ of

boundless power prevails over any spiritual value system that condemns such

power.

Intriguing, but dispiriting – and hardly enticing to citizens who no longer

equate literature with culture, who rarely opt for the self-reﬂexivity and self-

parody of much current ‘high’ literature, and who much prefer books they

enjoy, like the twelve-volume series called ‘The Romanovs: A Dynasty in

Novels’, police procedurals by Aleksandra Marinina, and the escapades of

Viktor Dotsenko’s hero, an Afghan veteran known as the ‘Russian Rambo’.

The Russian Centre for Public Opinion Research concluded in 1998 that one-

third of Russians do not read at all; 95 per cent of those who do read exclu-

sively choose ‘light reading’,

mostly homegrown products. Various kinds of

detective stories – domestic and historical crime novels, female detective

86 Laird, Voices of Russian Literature,pp.141–2, 145.

87 Mark Lipovetsky, ‘Strategies of Wastefulness, or the Metamorphoses of Chernukha’ (‘Ras-

tratnye strategii, ili metamorfozy “chernukhi”, Novyi mir 11 (1999), trans. Liv Bliss), John

Givens (ed.), The Status of Russian Literature, Russian Studies in Literature, 38, 2 (Armonk,

N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, Spring 2002): 61.

88 Ibid., pp. 70–2 passim. 89 Cited by Lipovetsky, ‘Strategies of Wastefulness’, p. 74.

90 Nepomnyashchy, ‘Markets, Mirrors, and Mayhem’, pp. 167–8.

91 Published in Kommersant 4 (22 Jan. 1999); cited by Mikhail Berg, ‘The Status of Literature’

(‘O statuse literatury’, Druzhba narodov no. 7, 2000; trans. Liv Bliss), in Givens, The Status

of Russian Literature,p.37 n. 2.

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The politics of culture, 1945–2000

novels, ‘techno-thrillers’ – attract the most readers, principally because they

depict ‘genuine nobility, people of duty and honor’, and because, whatever

their time frame, they deal with contemporary concerns: ‘how to live in a

period of property redistribution, bureaucratic and criminal lawlessness, ter-

rorism, the spread of drug addiction, unsavory public relations campaigns,

corruption, loss of social status, and the destruction of public morals’.

Western societies ‘high’ literature became estranged from popular culture

half a century ago. The exigencies of politics and history artiﬁcially postponed

that rift in the Soviet Union. It is now a reality.

In lieu of a conclusion

This chapter tells a convoluted story, or rather stories, spanning ﬁve decades

and a spectrum of leadership ranging from Stalin’s absolute dictatorship to

Putin’s technocracy. It depicts a society where politics and culture have until

quite recently been intimately, indeed inextricably, intertwined, and where the

imperatives of one frequently conﬂicted with the essence of the other. Even

in today’s post-Soviet Russia, where artists grope to ﬁnd a secure footing in

the rubble of the old cultural landscape, the nexus of politics and culture has

not entirely disappeared. For better and for worse, each illuminates the other,

deepening our understanding of both. The story, then, is as complex as the

society – and like the society, with all its metamorphoses and transformations,

the story continues, its future unknown.

92 Miasnikov, ‘The Street Epic’, p. 19, 20.

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