Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev

by Adele Marie Barker (Editor)

With the collapse of the Soviet empire in the late 1980s, the Russian social landscape has undergone its most dramatic changes since the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, turning the once bland and monolithic state-run marketplace into a virtual maze of specialty shops—from sushi bars to discotheques and tattoo parlors. In Consuming Russia editor Adele Marie Barker presents the first book-length volume to explore the sweeping cultural transformation taking place in the new Russia.
The contributors examine how the people of Russia reconcile prerevolutionary elite culture—as well as the communist legacy—with the influx of popular influences from the West to build a society that no longer relies on a single dominant discourse and embraces the multiplicities of both public and private Russian life. Barker brings together Russian and American scholars from anthropology, history, literature, political science, sociology, and cultural studies. These experts fuse theoretical analysis with ethnographic research to analyze the rise of popular culture, covering topics as varied as post-Soviet rave culture, rock music, children and advertising, pyramid schemes, tattooing, pets, and spectator sports. They consider detective novels, anecdotes, issues of feminism and queer sexuality, nostalgia, the Russian cinema, and graffiti. Discussions of pornography, religious cults, and the deployment of Soviet ideological symbols as post-Soviet kitsch also help to demonstrate how the rebuilding of Russia’s political and economic infrastructure has been influenced by its citizens’ cultural production and consumption.
This volume will appeal to those engaged with post-Soviet studies, to anyone interested in the state of Russian society, and to readers more generally involved with the study of popular culture.

Contributors. Adele Marie Barker, Eliot Borenstein, Svetlana Boym, John Bushnell, Nancy Condee, Robert Edelman, Laurie Essig, Julia P. Friedman, Paul W. Goldschmidt, Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Anna Krylova, Susan Larsen, Catharine Theimer Nepomnyaschy, Theresa Sabonis-Chafee, Tim Scholl, Adam Weiner, Alexei Yurchak, Elizabeth Kristofovich Zelensky

Genres: Russia, Nonfiction

488 pages, Paperback

First published June 10, 1999

About the author

Adele Barker is the author and editor of five books on Russian literature and culture. She has taught at the universities of Arizona and Washington. Most recently, she received a UCross Fellowship for her work and a Fulbright Senior Scholar grant to teach and write in Sri Lanka.

Reviews

[Bo · Rating 4 out of 5]

So much was changing in Russia in the 1990's, it was a thrilling -and vital- time for critical theory, as all of the old Soviet myths and traditions were being subverted and overturned in nearly every aspect of life. This book deals with some of them, and shows how things like totalitarianism kitsch, graffiti, tattoos, porn, metal, queer theory, avant-theater and religious cults rushed into the void of history and culture left by the implosion of the USSR. All of this happened in an utterly fearless, creative, and exuberant manner totally unique to the Russians- of course! What other country has so fearlessly (and maybe recklessly) reinvented themselves as many times as the they have? This book is a readable and fascinating antidote to the stale, hoary tropes of 'post-Soviet Russia', (i.e. the Russian mentality, Russian subservience, Russian failure to democratize) that the media and 'experts' force down the throats of history students and foreign language students. This books helps do justice for the genius of the country's dyanmic and paradoxical culture without pushing any kind of political or ideological agenda. Brilliant book!

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the end of the Soviet era as seen not from the usual perspective of oligarchs and apparatchiks, but instead what it looked like to the artists, the musicians, the people. It was a wrenching, dislocating time, and this volume collects essays showing how people reacted to it, embracing freedom or fleeing from it. Some of this is solid scholarship--there is a thorough rendering of Russians' embrace of new religions, for example--some of it is more impressionistic. And there is the completely unexpected (the graffiti commemorating a site where Communists were supposedly executed), and the downright surreal (the use of a Mexican telenovela star in scripted programs promoting a massive Ponzi scheme). Perhaps the Ponzi struck me most of all not just because of it is such a classic and sad case of hugely successful mass marketing for a completely fraudulent product, but because of the way the scheme preyed on both the fear of the end of an era and the hopes, in the end dashed for those who "invested", for a new one.

[Shaq · Rating 5 out of 5]

Realised I can log the books I read for my thesis on here LOL. I only read the chapters relevant to my research, but I did my best to skim the entire 400+ pages (mostly because I was distracted). What I found was an exciting collection of essays that excel as primers on the manifold history of Russian sexuality and popular culture. Perhaps reflective of the state of historiography at the time of its publication, I would have liked for the 'Sexualities' section to be much longer, instead of being limited to just three paltry chapters. Glad to learn that Dan Healey, Brian James Baer, and Vitaly Chernetsky, among other scholars, have since addressed this gap in literature.

[Zack · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought this book was all written by one author before reading it, but it is actually a collection of essays. Therefore the quality is very hit and miss. I can't say I enjoyed all the essays, but the ones that were on point were simply fascinating! The article about Russian tattoos was my favorite of the bunch!

[Syroezhka · Rating 4 out of 5]

a collection of shocking articles on russian culture after the state collapse

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

A collection of articles that gives a comprehensive look at post-Soviet Russia in the 1990s. This book is not about politics -- it's about how people live.

[J.R.A. Ortiens Stratzmann · Rating 3 out of 5]

Didn't read everything, but what I read - the sexuality chapter - was interesting. Although not much new was presented to me, it was interesting to look at these topics from different point of views.