Ideology of Contemporary Russia's Regime and Paradigms of Cultural Resistance in the 2000-2020s

Catalog description

How did the ideology of Putin's regime captivate the minds of the public? And what are the goals of the new Russian ideology based on a combination of "traditional values," cynicism, irony, self-victimization, and messianic ambitions? This course examines the cultural roots of new Russian official ideology, and the strategies Russian nonconformists use to resist it. During the course we will study how literary, cinematographic, journalistic, and popular culture narratives of the 1960s-90s are used in contemporary Russian public politics as symbolic language. The aim of this course is to examine the space of politically meaningful symbolic languages in contemporary Russian society. Intermediate knowledge of Russian is required.