Fenghi Review of Bernsand and Törnquist

684 The Russian Review of a positive patriotic masculine militarized identity. Moreover, there is no mentioning of what role Islam plays in the films. Despite these points, the book offers many important research results and is definitely worth reading. Katharina Wiedlack, University of Vienna Bernsand, Niklas, and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa, eds. Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia. Eurasian Studies Library, 11. Leidin: Brill, 2018. 262 pp. $134.00. ISBN 978-90- 04-36666-4. This edited collection provides an overview of some of the ideologies, political debates, and cultural policies that emerged within Russian society during the approximately twenty years of de facto undisputed rule of Vladimir Putin, from the beginning of the 2000s to the present. The essays focus on such topics as the the Russian government’s shifting attitudes toward contemporary art, geopolitical theories, and various conceptions of Russian nationalism. Other topics include on- and offline public debates surrounding sites of collective memory and commemorations of controversial historical events, political satire on Russian mainstream television, the tactics of state-sponsored pro-natalist campaigns, and the nostalgic-ironic use of Soviet or patriotic symbols within Russian fashion design. In their introduction, Niklas Bernsand and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa address some of the dominant views on Russian politics and society during the Putin era, starting with commonly accepted (although frequently exaggerated or overly simplified) notions about the transition between the chaos and “lawlessness” of the 1990s and the stability and relative prosperity of the Putin era, or— by reversing the perspective—between the new-found freedom of the first post-Soviet decade and the later relapse into backwardness and totalitarianism following Putin’s rise to power. In order to explain the widespread political passivity in Russian society during the first two decades of the new millennium, scholars have resorted to the idea of a tacit “social contract,” according to which the Russian creative intelligentsia would have mostly renounced political participation in exchange for a certain amount of personal freedom and “access to the material and immaterial benefits and possibilities of globalization” (p. 2). Others have pointed out the regime’s protean ability to cynically appropriate and co-opt a wide range of apparently incompatible ideologies and political strategies. Peter Pomerantsev, in a slightly sensationalist manner, describes Putin’s Russia as the reign of triumphant postmodernism. Marlène Laruelle defines Putin’s ideology as a form of “blurry conservatism” that can be adapted to the geopolitical and socio-cultural trends of the moment and the demands of different political factions (p. 4). This results in a complex relationship between state-sponsored or state-controlled and grassroot forms of activism, where, as Bernsand and Törnquist- Plewa aptly put it, “the grassroot level is not necessarily a site of resistance generating human rights activists but can be activated in favor of the regime, as well as opposing the regime from even more illiberal standpoints” (p. 5). Starting from these general assumptions, the volume is divided into three sections corresponding to three areas of investigation: cultural policies and ideological movements, memory politics, and popular culture. Indeed, many of the essays address the complex interactions between grassroot movements and the Russian state apparatuses. Igor Torbakov, for instance, looks at two competing geopolitical visions—the expansionist version of Eurasianism behind the concept of Russkii mir (Russian world) that has been used to justify the recent aggressive turn in Russian foreign policy, and Vadim Tsimbursky’s conception of “Island Russia,” an isolationist reinterpretation of classical Eurasianism—concluding that this second isolationist geopolitical conception might have a stronger long-term impact on Russian foreign policies than better-known imperialist forms of neo-Eurasianism. In the section on memory politics, Olga Malinova compares official historical narratives under Yeltsin—built around the concept of the “New Russia”—and those of the Putin/Medvedev-era— dominated by the model of a “thousand-year-old Russian state.” Tomas Sniegon focuses on the memory of the Gulag, the construction and management of sites of collective memory and mourning, and the public debates surrounding them. His essay reveals underlying tensions between different Book Reviews 685 political actors, including the government, the Orthodox Church, and human rights organizations. In the popular culture section, Elena Rakhimova-Sommers offers interesting comparisons between models of femininity and maternity emerging from the Soviet propaganda of the 1920s and 1930s and the somewhat tone-deaf aesthetics of recent state-sponsored pro-natalist campaigns. Finally, Natalija Majsova offers an overview of the curious phenomenon of noocosmology, a New Age-like pseudoscientific discipline developed on the basis of Russian cosmism by officers and academics close to the FSB, the main successor to the KGB, possibly with the goal of providing a spiritual foundation to the activities of the Russian intelligence or giving them an aura of mystical secrecy. In terms of variety and diversity of approaches and materials, the volume would have perhaps benefited from the inclusion of other important spheres of cultural production, such as literature, film, or the visual arts. Nonetheless, overall the essays in Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia cover a wide range of phenomena and together offer a nuanced and quite detailed picture of Russian politics and some of its main internal paradoxes and contradictions. The collection, which is part of a series published with the support of Lund University’s Centre for European Studies, also has the merit of providing the reader with a glance into current research and work in progress from several scholars working on these subjects. The chapters in the volume are all open access and available to download from JSTOR, which is quite convenient for those who want to use some of them for teaching. The introduction itself, for instance, provides a very clear and concise overview of the main theoretical frameworks in the study of Russian public culture during the Putin era. Fabrizio Fenghi, Brown University Nelson, Todd H. Bringing Stalin Back In: Memory Politics and the Creation of a Useable Past in Putin’s Russia. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2019. xiv + 167 pp. $90.00. ISBN 978-1-4985- 9152-2. Political scientist Todd H. Nelson tackles a familiar puzzle for those who have observed celebrations of World War II or who have perused the history section of any Russian bookstore, that is, how can Joseph Stalin be presented as a positive historical figure? Anecdotal evidence of Stalin’s popularity despite revelations of the monstrous repressive policies he oversaw remains a staple of reporting on Russia. Surveys also show a preference for a “new Stalin.” Nelson addresses the Stalin question by assessing the influence of a dominant narrative whose promotion he attributes to the political elite. To answer the question, “How do the political elite control the discourse on the Stalinist period and what are the implications of that control?”, Nelson examines how repressions fit into collective memory, appear in textbooks, and measure up in memorialization (p. 2). Additionally, he studies how the state has restrained civil society from purveying alternate views. Offering a concise summary of Stalin-era history as well as examples of how ordinary people invoke Stalin, Nelson lays out the prevalent interpretation of Soviet history as both compartmentalizing the purges and subordinating them to the Soviet Union’s economic and military achievements. It will not surprise Russia specialists that the narrative of victory in the Great Patriotic War leaves little room for other aspects of Soviet history. Nor is it a new phenomenon that forced labor has been whitewashed as part of an industrialization project that facilitated Russia’s military capacity. In his strongest chapter, Nelson adds to our understanding of how the educational system channels a single statist point of view. Besides assessing the content of Putin era textbooks, he reveals the financial and structural incentives behind use of the elite-preferred textbook and changes that have reduced the amount of hours in the curriculum for prewar history. His conversations with educators and students reveal a certain fatalism on the part of the former and disinterest on the part of the latter. Both are most concerned with state exams, a matter of rote knowledge, rather than independent thinking. They don’t take field trips to the memorial sites to the terror that Nelson subsequently describes..

Load more