Russian Culture Under Putin

This timely text charts the metamorphosis of Russian media and culture in the 21st century. It considers how, when Vladimir Putin came to power in 2000, Russia’s media and culture industry had enjoyed nearly a decade of almost unrestricted freedom and yet, by the time he launched his illegal invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Russia’s independent media was crushed, while the few viable opposition figures were either imprisoned, exiled, or dead under mysterious circumstances.

Eliot Borenstein looks at the manufactured cult of Putin, the competing models of Russianness put forth in the media, the obsession with nostalgia and the limits on imagining the future, the rise of aggressive patriotism and the myth of ancient Russian ’traditional’ values, the significance of the fight against ’gay propaganda’, and the absurdist strategies used by the opposition in the face of increasing restrictions on free speech. Though the book’s title invokes Putin, Russian Culture under Putin does not cast the Russian leader as an all-knowing genius pursuing a master plan. The culture of the past twenty years, both official and independent, has been largely improvisational. 21st-century Russia, as Borenstein demonstrates so masterfully, has not been frog-marched into unfreedom, but has in fact lurched back and forth on a dimly-lit path.

Eliot Borenstein is Professor and Chair of Russian & Slavic Studies, Interim Chair of East Asian Studies, Collegiate Professor in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and Senior Academic Convenor for the Global Network at New York University, USA. Before coming to NYU, Borenstein directed the Fulbright Program for the Russian Federation and taught at the University of Virginia, USA. His first book, Men without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917-1919, won the AATSEEL award for best work in literary scholarship in 2000. In 2007, he published Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture, which received the AWSS award for best book in Slavic Gender Studies in 2008.

A 2009 Guggenheim recipient, Borenstein wrote Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (2019), which received the 2020 AATSEEL Book Prize and the 2020 Wayne S. Vucinic Book Prize. His other books include Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power (Bloomsbury, 2020), and Meanwhile, in Russia... Russian Internet Memes and ViralVideo (Bloomsbury, 2022).