Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon
Title | Putin as Celebrity and Cultural Icon PDF eBook |
Author | Helena Goscilo |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 242 |
Release | 2013 |
Genre | Biography & Autobiography |
ISBN | 0415528518 |
During his tenure as Russia's President and subsequently as Prime Minister, Putin transcended politics, to become the country's major cultural icon. This book explores his public persona as glamorous hero--the man uniquely capable of restoring Russia's reputation as a global power. Analysing cultural representations of Putin, the book assesses the role of the media in constructing and disseminating this image and weighs the Russian populace's contribution to the extraordinary acclamation he enjoyed throughout the first decade of the new millennium, challenged only by a tiny minority.
Politics of Visibility and Belonging
Title | Politics of Visibility and Belonging PDF eBook |
Author | Emil Edenborg |
Publisher | Taylor & Francis |
Pages | 219 |
Release | 2017-07-14 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1351712942 |
In this book, Edenborg studies contemporary conflicts of community as enacted in Russian media, from the ‘homosexual propaganda’ laws to the Sochi Olympics and the Ukraine war, and explores the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community. The book examines what it is that determines which subjects and narratives become visible and which are occluded in public spheres; how they are seen and made intelligible; and how those processes are involved in the imagination of communities. Investigating the differentiated consequences of visibility, Edenborg discusses what forms of visibility make belonging possible and what forms of visibility may be related to exclusion or violence. The book maps and analyses the practices and mechanisms whereby a state seeks to produce and shape belonging through controlling what becomes visible in public, and how that which becomes visible is seen and understood. In addition, it examines what forms contestation can take and what its effects may be. Advancing theoretical understanding and offering a useful way to analytically conceptualize the role of visibility in the production and contestation of political communities, this work will be of interest to students and scholars of gender and sexuality politics, borders, citizenship, nationalism, migration and ethnic relations.
Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era
Title | Soviet Consumer Culture in the Brezhnev Era PDF eBook |
Author | Natalya Chernyshova |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 280 |
Release | 2013-06-26 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1135046271 |
After decades of turmoil and trauma, the Brezhnev era brought stability and an unprecedented rise in living standards to the Soviet Union, enabling ordinary people to enjoy modern consumer goods on an entirely new scale. This book analyses the politics and economics of the state’s efforts to improve living standards, and shows how mass consumption was often used as an instrument of legitimacy, ideology and modernization. However, the resulting consumer revolution brought its own problems for the socialist regime. Rising well-being and the resulting ethos of consumption altered citizens’ relationship with the state and had profound consequences for the communist project. The book uses a wealth of sources to explore the challenge that consumer modernity was posing to Soviet ‘mature socialism’ between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s. It combines analysis of economic policy and public debates on consumerism with the stories of ordinary people and their attitudes to fashion, Western goods and the home. The book contests the notion that Soviet consumers were merely passive, abused, eternally queuing victims and that the Brezhnev era was a period of ‘stagnation’, arguing instead that personal consumption provided the incentive and the space for individuals to connect and interact with society and the regime even before perestroika. This book offers a lively account of Soviet society and everyday life during a period which is rapidly becoming a new frontier of historical research.
Queering Russian Media and Culture
Title | Queering Russian Media and Culture PDF eBook |
Author | Galina Miazhevich |
Publisher | Routledge |
Pages | 281 |
Release | 2022-02-27 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 1000539164 |
This book explores how queerness and representations of queerness in media and culture are responding to the shifting socio-political, cultural and legal conditions in post-Soviet Russia, especially in the light of the so-called ‘antigay’ law of 2013. Based on extensive original research, the book outlines developments historically both before and after the fall of the Soviet Union and provides the background to the 2013 law. It discusses the proliferating alternative visions of gender and sexuality, which are increasingly prevalent in contemporary Russia. The book considers how these are represented in film, personal diaries, photography, theatre, protest art, fashion and creative industries, web series, news media and how they relate to the ‘traditional values’ rhetoric. Overall, the book provides a rich and detailed, yet complex insight into the developing nature of queerness in contemporary Russia.
Making Martyrs
Title | Making Martyrs PDF eBook |
Author | Yuliya Minkova |
Publisher | Boydell & Brewer |
Pages | 247 |
Release | 2018 |
Genre | History |
ISBN | 1580469140 |
Examines the ideology of sacrifice in Soviet and post-Soviet culture, analyzing a range of fictional and real-life figures who became part of a pantheon of heroes primarily because of their victimhood.
Putin Kitsch in America
Title | Putin Kitsch in America PDF eBook |
Author | Alison Rowley |
Publisher | McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP |
Pages | 174 |
Release | 2019-09-19 |
Genre | Social Science |
ISBN | 0228000394 |
Vladimir Putin's image functions as a political talisman far outside of the borders of his own country. Studying material objects, fan fiction, and digital media, Putin Kitsch in America traces the satirical uses of Putin's public persona and how he stands as a foil for other world leaders. Uncovering a wide variety of material culture - satirical, scatological, even risqué - made possible by new print-on-demand technologies, Alison Rowley argues that the internet is crucial to the creation of contemporary Putin memorabilia. She explains that these items are evidence of young people's continued interest and participation in politics, even as some experts decry what they see as the opposite. The book addresses the ways in which explicit sexual references about government officials are used as everyday political commentary in the United States. The number of such references skyrocketed during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, and turning a critical eye to Putin kitsch suggests that the phenomenon will continue when Americans next return to the polls. An examination of how the Russian president's image circulates via memes, parodies, apps, and games, Putin Kitsch in America illustrates how technological change has shaped both the kinds of kitsch being produced and the nature of political engagement today.
Building an Authoritarian Polity
Title | Building an Authoritarian Polity PDF eBook |
Author | Graeme Gill |
Publisher | Cambridge University Press |
Pages | 241 |
Release | 2015-11-12 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 1107130085 |
Argues that post-Soviet Russia was never on a democratic trajectory because dominant elites always fostered the building of an authoritarian polity.