At the intersection of globalization and ‘civilizational originality’: cultural production in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACT

This special issue originates from a transnational collaboration of scholars in philology, comparative literature, social theory, sociology, anthropology, ethnography, and media studies. The collection strives to advance a research agenda built on the nexus of three intellectual and academic domains: post-Soviet ‘Russian cultural studies’, the research paradigm put forward by Cultural Studies, as well as empirical methods developed in sociology. The collection illustrates the importance of expanding the experience of Cultural Studies beyond its established spheres of national investigation, while it also speaks to the necessity to re-evaluate the hegemony of the English-language academic and cultural production on the global scale. The collection offers insights into the gamut of cultural practices and institutional environments in which Russian cultural production happens today. It shows how cultural industries and institutions in Russia are integrated into the global marketplace and transnational communities, while they also draw on and contribute to local lives and experiences by trying to create an autonomous space for symbolic production at personal and collective levels. Through diverse topics, the issue sheds light on the agency, i.e. practitioners and participants, creators and consumers, of Russian cultural production and the neoliberal practices implemented on creative work and cultural administration in Russia today. The Introduction outlines the development of academic studies on Russian cultural practices since 1991; describes main political developments shaping the cultural field in Putin’s Russia; and, finally, identifies the Cultural Studies debates the editors of the collection find most productive for investigations of Russia, i.e. the instrumentalization of culture and culture as resource. Relocated in an analysis of a post-socialist society, these conceptualisations seem increasingly problematic in a situation where local and federal policies governing cultural and creative work focus simultaneously on marketization and on nationalism as the main tools of legitimizing the federal government.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• institutions
• creative industries
• cultural policies/politics
• cultural globalization
• culture as resource

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Sanna Turoma is Academy of Finland Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Finland). She is the author of Brodsky abroad: empire, tourism, nostalgia (University of Wisconsin Press, 2010) forthcoming in a Russian translation. She has also co-edited Empire de/centered: new spatial histories of Russia and the Soviet Union (Ashgate, 2013) with Maxim Waldstein, and a Finnish-language textbook History of Russian literature (Helsinki University Press, 2011, rev. ed. 2015) with Kirsti Ekonen. Her most recent co-edited volume is Cultural forms of protest in Russia with Birgit Beumers, Aleksandr Etkind, Olga Gurova (Routledge, 2017) and a special issue on politics of religion and patriotic production of culture with Kaarina Aitamurto for Transcultural studies: journal in interdisciplinary research (Vol 12 No 1 2016).

Saara Ratilainen works as Postdoctoral Fellow at the Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki (Finland). Her research interests cover contemporary Russian culture and media, digital culture, cultural institutions, social media, gender studies and cultural globalization. She has published previously in Feminist media studies, Scandinavian journal of hospitality and tourism, Ekonomicheskaya sotsiologiya, and in numerous collective volumes focusing on Russian culture and society. Her latest article is ‘Besides you, 120 other bloggers have already been to Thailand’: The Symbolic Economy of Russian Travel Blogging (Studies in Russian, Eurasian and central European new media, digitalicons.org, 2017).

Elena Trubina is Professor of Social Theory at Ural Federal Universty (Ekaterinburg, Russia), where she is also the Director of Center for Global Urbanism. Her research addresses a broad set of topics in social and urban theory, including the intersection between cultural memory and built environment and the interaction between urban space and subjectivities. Her current research project examines the relationship between neoliberalism, neopatrimonialism, creativity discourse, and the state in several Eastern European countries and Russian provinces with a focus on international and mega-events.

Notes

1. Myzei sestior Tsvetaevykh v Aleksandorve v opasnosti! [online], n.d.

2. Marina Tsvetaeva fled the Bolshevik Revolution, lived in poverty in Prague and Paris ostracised by the émigré community, then returned to Russia, where, after the arrest of her husband and daughter, she committed suicide in anticipation of a Nazi invasion in 1941. Once excluded from the Soviet literary canon, Tsvetaeva regained fame in the perestroika years, and the house where she stayed when visiting her sister Anastasia in 1915–1917 has become a site of literary pilgrimage and poetic gatherings.

3. For our take on neoliberalism, see below, especially, note 20.

4. The letter with signatures can be read on the website of Russia’s Ministry of Culture: http://mkrf.ru/m/471859. For the news about the letter in Russian media, see Izvestiia 2014.

5. On the initiative of the Bishop Tikhon Shevkunov and the Council of Culture of the Russian Patriarchy with support of the President Putin, 20 thematic historic parks ‘Russia – my history’ were opened in the fall 2017 across Russia. The Ministry of Education recommended schools make advantage of these parks in history teaching. The progressive Russian historians in their letter to the Minister of Education Ol’ga Vasil’eva objected to the contents of the parks and raised the questions about one-sided (paternalist) version of the Russian history that the parks present, namely, the glorification of all Russian tsars and silencing or condemnation of the rebellions, etc. See the open letter by the ‘Free Association of Historians’ (Vol'noe obshchestvo istorii) in Volistob 2017.

6. To make the distinction between Cultural Studies and Russian cultural studies (see below) clearer, we use upper case for the first and lower case for the latter.

7. The policy experience O’Connor describes was sponsored by Tacit, a grant-financed technical assistance program launched by the EU in 1991 to help the former Soviet republics, i.e. the Commonwealth of Independent States, as these countries were referred to then. It has been replaced by European Neighbourhood Policy and Neighbourhood and Partnership Instrument since the project O’Connor discusses.

8. On post-Soviet advertisement and TV commercials see, for example, Kelly (1998), pulp fiction and serial fiction, Goscilo (1999), Nepomnyashchy (1999); glossy magazines, Goscilo (2000); Bartlett (2006), Ratilainen (2015); and pet culture, Barker (1999b).

9. Since these initial steps, there has appeared a bulk of literature on popular culture and the everyday. Among the topics in this field of research there are sexuality and love (Tiomkina and Zdravomyslova 2002, Borisova et al. 2008), celebrity (Goscilo and Strukov 2011, Goscilo 2013a, 2013b), fan and fandom (Vozianov 2011, Samutina 2017), TV and TV series Tishler (2003), MacFadyen (2008) and Khitrov (2016), Hutchins and Tolz (2016). See also Chernetsky (2007), Borenstein (2008), Leiderman (2011), Rosenholm and Savkina (2015), and Beumers (2016).

10. These include the old Russian terms referring to individuality, lichnost’; community, sobornost’ and obshchestvennost’; and intellectual life literaturnost’; as well as the central to Soviet educational and hygiene campaigns term kul’turnost’ (Cornwell and Wigzell 1998, Kelly and Volkov 1998, Offord 1998, Barker 1999c).

11. The ‘archival revolution’ started in the mid-1980s. Long-sealed central and local party archives, as well as private collections and museum holdings, opened to public generating a stream of new historical studies on Soviet Union (Raleigh 2002).

12. See, for instance, see Oushakine (2000, 2007), Boym (2001), and Nadkarni and Shevchenko (2004).

13. Gender studies, women studies, queer studies, masculinity studies, postcolonial studies, memory studies, studies on spatiality, to mention some major theoretical frames, are well presented in the scholarship on Russian and Soviet cultural practices and discourses.

14. On the discourse of creative industries and creative class in Russia, see Neprikosnovennyi zapas (2013), Beumers et al. (2017).

15. On this, see, for instance, Turoma and Aitamurto (2016a).

16. Vladimir Putin is running for another consequent term in the upcoming Presidential Election, March 2018. Among the candidates accepted by the central Election Commission, there is no real competition to his popularity. The most prominent oppositional candidate, Alexei Navalny, was denied candidacy based on an on-going law suit.

17. When finalizing this Introduction, we learnt that president Putin has expressed a need for a new legislation to increase the state’s control of cultural production (Latukhina 2017).

18. The ballet was supposed to premier in July at the Bolshoi Theatre but was withdrawn from the program two days before the first night and later in the fall, Kirill Serebrennikov was arrested. Russian media as well as international media followed the incident closely (e.g. Sulcas 2017, Svoboda 2017).

19. Formal rules, often expressed in politicians’ speeches and official documents, ‘have the sanction of tradition and precedent’ in John Dewey’s classic definition (1938, p. 53), whereas implicit or informal rules of the game, equally important in shaping audiences’ perceptions and cultural participants’ actions, may be what people believe to be signals coming from the political elite. For more recent theoretical debates about institutions and networks, see, for instance, Powell (2007) and Scott (2001).

20. We find David Harvey’s definition of neoliberalism and its implications for cultural institutions an effective point of departure:

Neoliberalism is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade. The role of the state is to create and preserve an institutional framework appropriate to such practices. (2005, p. 11)

According to Harvey, neoliberalism has been put into active practice since the 1970s, and he, like many other commentators, includes post-Soviet countries among those that have ‘embraced, sometimes voluntarily, and in other instances as response to coercive pressures, some version of neoliberal theory and adjusted at least some policies and practices accordingly’ (p. 12). For an analysis of how neoliberal ideas entered Russian economic policies and intertwined with Russia’s oligarch-led, authoritarian developments, see Peter Rutland’s essay ‘Neoliberalism in Russia’, esp. on neoliberalism in Putin’s Russia (Rutland 2013, esp. pp. 29–39). On Russia and globalisation in a general areas studies context, see, for instance, Legvold (2011).

21. On the links between economic globalization, and the ways of incorporating cultural similarities and differences into management and strategy development see, for instance, Breidenbach and Nyíri (2009) and Venaik and Brewer (2016).

22. A number of state-led cultural initiatives strive to distance Russia from the ‘globally circulating cultural resources’ and offer an alternative to the America-led/Westernized globalisation. This attempt is actualised, for example, in Russkii Mir, the state-sponsored foundation created in 2007 to ‘popularize Russian language, which is the national property of Russia and the backbone of Russian and world culture’ (russkiymir.ru). Over the past decade, Russkii Mir has become one of Russia’s most visible soft-power tools. See Suslov (2014), Uffelman (2014), and Laruelle (2015).

23. On globalisation and Russia, see Legvold (2011).

24. For the intertwining of economic nationalism and neoliberalism in Russia, see Kangas (2013).

Additional information

Funding

This special issue was compiled under the auspices of the Academy of Finland Center of Excellence ‘Choices of Russian Modernization’.