Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

Abstract

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus to founder in order to escape and express itself. This paper takes a different view, arguing that the transformation of Soviet citizens into the self-regulating, entrepreneurial subjects of liberal democracy and the market economy was no less impressive a feat of social engineering than the transition from state-owned to private property and unfettered business competition. Maintaining that mass entertainment was one of the critical means employed by the new post-Soviet business elite for preparing Russians to embrace an unregulated model of capitalism and a consumerist culture, we offer a multi-faceted analysis of one of the ideological apparatuses of the post-communist condition – the Russian adaptation of the television game show, Wheel of Fortune – which were mobilized to dismantle and reshape a complexly overdetermined system of values, beliefs, and attitudes in the process of what we call the production of the capitalist subject.

Notes

1. From S.G. Lapin, ‘TV’, an article in the Big Soviet Encyclopedia, http://bse.sci-lib.com/diletter2006.html.

2. An exception to this rule, however, is advertising, the impressive explosion of which has attracted the critical attention of some Russian scholars, including Ekaterina Salnikova, whose groundbreaking monograph, The aesthetics of advertising: Cultural roots and leitmotives (2001, 147), points out that, in addition to providing information, ‘advertising played a tremendous psychological role for the vast television audience. They perceived commercials as a new, spontaneously developing ideology. It consisted of the values explicitly proclaiming the priority of personal welfare and success, individual comfort and intimate pleasures’. Salnikova is unusual among scholars of contemporary Russian mass culture in stressing its discontinuity rather than its continuity with Soviet culture.

3. Almost 20 years later, Channel One retains its leading position in the field of privatized Russian TV, which now comprises 17 channels: Channel One attracts 81.5% of the Russian viewing population on a weekly basis, ahead of Channel Russia with 72.3% and NTV with 59.5%. See the website of the central advertising agency for Russian TV: http://www.brandmedia.ru/serv__idP_51_idP1_68_idP2_2425.html.

4. Weber's classic work, The Protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism, demonstrated how the Protestant ethic rendered Christianity compatible with capitalism while retaining its humanitarian core, encouraging Protestants to be entrepreneurial in fulfilling their duty to God and presenting wealth not as an obstacle on the road to eternal life but as a condition for more fully embodying the idea of the Creator. Protestantism has never enjoyed more than a tenuous foothold in Russia, either before or since the Bolshevik revolution. Today, only 1.5% of the Russian population is Protestant, although many of the missionaries now operating in the country are from Protestant denominations. See the US Department of State's International Religious Freedom Report, 2006: http://www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/irf/2006/71403.htm.

5. The first two decades of the twentieth century became known among Russian philologists of the 1960s as the Silver Age of Russian literature; they viewed it as an exceptionally creative period comparable with the Golden Age a century earlier.

6. As Chrystia Freeland, the Financial Times' Moscow bureau chief during the 1990s, observed in her monograph Sale of the century: Russia's wild ride from communism to capitali1sm, ‘Russia was robbed in broad daylight, by businessmen who broke no laws, assisted by the West's best friends in the Kremlin – the young reformers’ (2000, 97).

7. The direct adaptation of the American show entitled ‘Russian Roulette’ (2002–3) was much less successful and short-lived (it was broadcast in Russia for a little over two years – from April 2002 to August 2004).

8. See http://au.youtube.com/watch?v = xCaJIgQRI5A.

9. The details of the survey can be viewed on the Public Opinion Foundation website: http://bd.english.fom.ru/report/map/gvozdeva/ed023028.