
- 144 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Russian Culture under Putin
About this book
This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia's media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia's independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances. Eliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian 'traditional' values, the significance of the fight against 'gay propaganda', and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech. Though the book's title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Half-Title
- Series
- Dedication
- Title
- Contents
- Preface: Boiling the Frog
- Acknowledgments
- Note on Translations and Transliteration
- Introduction: Meaning Less or Meaning More
- 1 Where Does the Motherland Begin?
- 2 Sing a Song of Putin
- 3 Everybody Hates Russia: Russophobia and Conspiracy Theory
- 4 Capturing the Imagination
- 5 Inventing Ancient Russian Values
- 6 Don’t Say Gay
- 7 I Am Groot, or, How to Protest When Words Are Meaningless
- Notes
- Works Cited
- Index
- Copyright