Russia at Play: the Social Role of Commercial Culture in Post-Soviet

Russia at Play : The Social Role of Commercial Culture in Post-Soviet Russia Louise McReynold s University of Hawaii The National Council for Eurasian and East European Researc h 910 17th Street, N.W . Suite 300 Washington, D.C . 20006 TITLE VIII PROGRAM Project Information :* Contractor : University of Hawaii Principal Investigator : Louise McReynold s Council Contract Number : 813-09g Date : November 9, 1998 Copyright Informatio n Individual researchers retain the copyright on their work products derived from research funded through a contract or grant from the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) . However, NCEEER and the United States Government have the right to duplicate and disseminate, in written and electronic form, reports submitted to NCEEER to fulfill Contract or Grant Agreements either (a) for NCEEER's own internal use, or (b) for use by the United States Government, and as follows: (1 ) for further dissemination to domestic . international, and foreign governments, entities and/or individual s to serve official United States Government purposes or (2) for dissemination in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act or other law or policy of the United States Government granting the publi c access to documents held by the United States Government . Neither NCEEER nor the United State s Government nor any recipient of this Report may use it for commercial sale . The work leading to this report was supported in part by contract or grant funds provided by the National Counci l for Eurasian and East European Research, funds which were made available by the U .S. Department of State unde r Title VIII (the Soviet-East European Research and Training Act of 1983, as amended) . The analysis an d interpretations contained herein are those of the author(s) . From Soviet to Post-Sovie t When Mikhail Gorbachev initiated his program of glasnost ' in the mid-1980s, Western observers applauded the increased tolerance for intellectual expression. Famed dissident Andrei Sakharov was released from his internal exile to Gorkii (now . Nizhnii Novgorod) . Georgian director Tenghiz Abuladze's film on the purges in his region_ "Repentance," was taken off the shelf and played to packe d movie houses around the country. The rehabilitation of poet Nikolai Gumilev, who had died fightin g against the Bolshevik Revolution, signaled the changed status former intellectuals non gratis . Within a few years, even Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Nobel Prize-winning exposes of the Stalinist concentratio n camps would be sold openly in paperback . The West celebrated glasnost ' with those Soviet citizens with whom it had long enjoyed common political cause . the intelligentsia . or intellectual elite who have traditionally-- dating essentially from th e reign of Catherine the Great in the second half of the eighteenth century--served as the semi-officia l opposition to the succession of non-democratic regimes . President Jimmy Carter, for example, called Sakharov before he did Communist Party boss Leonid Brezhnev . What Westerners did not pay serious attention to, though, in the later headiness of the glasnost' era and the euphoria of August. 1991, when the system crashed with the finality of Humpty Dumpty, was that popular culture in general enjoyed a n unprecedented topical openness . An article in Leningradskaia pravda (The Leningrad Truth) just weeks before the attempted coup reported an alarming rate of persons claiming to have had contact with UFOs . ' Psychiatrists recognized in this phenomenon the growing fears of being engulfed in political chaos . but it was also reflective of th e popular taste for fantastika, or science fiction . ' Moreover. it crudely anticipated the terrific popularity of the American television show "The X-Files," the success of which has often been attributed to th e psychological need for a new enemy when the Cold War ended . ' Russians were developing significantl y different fears; the notion that they should worry about war with the United States had disappeared fro m the list.4 of major anxieties b y 1994 Western academics have neglected Soviet, and subsequently Russian, popular culture at their ow n peril. With the exception of Richard Stites's introductory textbook, Russian Popular Culture : Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge University Press, 1992), studies of Russian/Sovie t culture have privileged that produced by the intelligentsia for political as well as aesthetic reasons. Because in the Soviet era anything produced for mass consumption had first been vetted by the stat e censorship, it was dismissed as a false reflection of popular tastes . Even were that the case, the situation no longer holds true in the postsoviet era . The movies, books. and television shows that attract the widest audiences today can offer many more valuable insight s than those offered by the now disenfranchised intelligentsia . Television ratings, for example, san k Solzhenitsyn's brief career as a Moscow talk show host. The same intellectuals who had sought western contacts when they met roadblocks along their own intellectual avenues now chafed at another aspect o f western politics: freedom of cultural choice . In the words of intelligent Yogi Berra. "It was deja vu all over again . " The Politics of Russian Culture in the Historical Perspectiv e The intelligentsia has long enjoyed special entitlement in Russian culture because of the extent t o which the latter has been politicized historically. They considered themselves a social estate, consolidatin g as a bloc rather than as a class representing an economic grouping .5 Coalescing around values, they coul d be recognized by their attitudes and behavior . The autocracy's most vociferous as well as its most articulate opposition . the intelligentsia used culture to build the foundation of civil society . Denied political institutions, they used the arts and literature to set th e terms of critique and debate about politics and society. Conferring upon Russia's culture a transcendenta l truth that validated their own position in society, they invested it with so many of their ideals that culture carried a more overt political force in the Russian than in the Western context . Denying self-interest and operating outside the government, the intelligentsia established a hegemonic authority over Russian culture because they could legitimately claim to speak on behalf of th e interests of a variety of groups, especially those who lacked the requisite skills to articulate thei r aspirations for themselves . As poet-intelligent Osip Mandelshtam, himself of victim of Stalin's purges i n the second war between the government and the Intelligentsia, observed, "The battle between the writer s and the regime was explicitly understood, on both sides, as a battle for custody of the future of thei r country."6 Symptomatically, like other successful political parties . the Russian intelligentsia's protestations of selflessness masked a political agenda that located them in the center of power, where they reape d significant benefits from their moral and intellectual prestige . They set and then defended the borders o f the notion that Russia's culture played a unique and pivotal role in its history . By offering a morally satisfying ideology, articulated in terms of guilt and redemption already familiar through Orthodox Christianity, the intelligentsia could appeal to ordinary Russians . This philosophy offered something to all social and political clusters . As Pierre Bourdieu ha s 2 argued. those who control the investments in cultural capital . which includes physical as well as intellectual access to it, exercise powerful political mechanisms because of their capacity to determine th e tastes that authenticate a system of values. Ironically, as culture itself became increasingly susceptible t o commodification. whether in the form of a book or a theater ticket, it was the Intelligentsia who fetishized it. investing it with all the value of Russia's history, past and future . When cultural studies began to examine power relationships between groups, it offered a n explanation for the leverage that the Intelligentsia employed by arguing that the dominant group exercise s its influence over the subordinate groups through its ability "to exert the power to frame alternatives an d contain opportunities, to win and shape consent, so that the granting of legitimacy to the dominant classe s appears not only 'spontaneous' but natural and normal ."8 The Intelligentsia accrued power not only through "the specific content of ideas." but also by establishing "limits within which ideas and conflicts move and (could be) resolved. "' Such was the power of this groups influence that all of Russia ' s various social groups accepted as "normal" the intelligentsia's authority in civic and cultural discourse . ' 0 The closest the intelligentsia came to establishing an institutional basis was through the so-calle d "thick" journals they edited, compendia of essays and especially literary reviews . Thus did they set up the sort of informal networks that Michel Foucault termed "regimes of truth," and Arturo Escobar "regimes o f representation." that is, powerful but supra-institutional dominions over public culture . " The cultural debates argued in the pages of these journals provided a frame of political reference as well as stocks o f common symbols in which even nonreaders found themselves enmeshed for generations . To give on e example, the notion that art and literature must rise above class or estate interests and serve a politica l function came to be accepted as truth not the self-interest of the group that propagated it .12 The Intelligentsia's position would prove to be intensely ideological in practice. yet it had becom e accepted as a component of Russia's natural historical development rather than an issue open to debate . A t the turn of the twentieth century, when some frustrated Russian intellectuals challenged the notion tha t culture must be politicized in order to realize a particular social vision, the debate could not work its way out of the cultural frame that set the terms .

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