Based on a set of interviews and materials collected in Barnaul in 2001-2005, this article explores discursive mechanisms through which new social realities and new social identities are imagined, negotiated, and internalized in postsocialist Russia. By analyzing popular conspiracy narratives about universal lie, corruption, and manipulation, the article draws attention to the increasing prominence of images and ideas of an enclosed national community that are used to counterbalance the perceived exposure to foreign values and capital after the collapse of the (...) Soviet Union. (shrink)

The volume draws attention to the unknown and unexplored areas, trends and ways of thinking under the communist regime. It demonstrates how various bodies of knowledge were produced, disseminated and used for a wide variety of purposes: from openly justifying dominant political views to framing oppositional and non-official discourses and practices.

This article analyses 178 essays written in April 1997, in which Siberian students (15-22-year-olds) described their understandings of Soviet and post-Soviet realities. The main change between the two regimes is perceived in these essays as the change in patterns of consumption. Moreover, as the essays indicate, the new Russian style of consumption, usually associated with the style of the new rich classes in Russia, finds its fullest representation in the figure of the `new Russian' man. The article suggests that students' (...) attempts to envision unfamiliar patterns of wealthy consumption bring with them the reproduction of their own cultural dispositions and habits. Being unable to easily come up with adequate cultural signifiers that could homologically represent the distinctive economic location of the new rich, students chose to follow the path of quantitative rather than qualitative representation, expressing `the taste of luxury' in terms of the `taste of necessity'. Along with this subjective factor, that is, the students' own cultural dispositions, the prominence of the quantitative factor in their descriptions of the new Russian style of consumption is determined by the absence of a developed field of post-Soviet cultural production, which could have provided the new Russian style with distinctive status symbols. (shrink)

Based on materials collected during a fieldwork in Barnaul (Siberia, Russia) in 2001–2004, the article explores two provincial academic discourses that are focused on issues of Russian national identity. Ethnohistories of trauma address Russia’s current problems through the constant re-writing of the country’s past in order to demonstrate the non-Russian character of its national and state institutions. In the second discourse, ethno-vitalism, the struggle over constructing and interpreting the nation’s memory of the past is replaced with a similar struggle over (...) constructing and interpreting perceptions of the nation’s current experience. Produced by professional intelligentsia, these frameworks and discourses provide a useful link to understanding imaginary constructions of the national belonging in a situation where more positive ways of inventing traditions and imagining communities are unavailable or discredited. (shrink)