A Russian writer traces the country’s political culture back to the films and books of the 2000s
Are the cultural artefacts of a particular place at a particular time – its films, its books – the product of its social, political and economic structure, perhaps the most faithful reflection of what it truly was, the tangible or watchable manifestations of its inner reality, or are they the cause of it all? Are they the outward forms of what Hegel called the Zeitgeist – the spirit of the times – or are they the forces shaping it? Are they object or subject?
The relationship between culture and politics has long been debated. Perhaps nowhere more so than in Russia. Opium of the masses, tool of revolutionary power, both, neither? For seventy years the imperial and imperious Communist state attempted to control the cultural sphere (sometimes through outright terror, other times cajoling its artistic cadres with prospects of advancement or exclusion). Then it all fell apart. But what replaced it? And does it bring us any closer to explaining how things are today: a kind of learned helplessness with regard to Russia’s war in Ukraine?
In an article for Novaya Gazeta Europa – a Russian newspaper which moved to neighbouring Latvia in the wake of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine – the journalist Andrey Sapozhnikov offers up an interpretation of Russian popular culture of the 2000s as – ironically, not ironically – the cause of it all. The USSR may have collapsed in the dark and dire 1990s – with all the bewilderment and grievances that decade generated for many Russians, Vladimir Putin included – but to understand Russia today, Sapozhnikov suggests, maybe it’s the glossy 2000s that really matter. The 1990s were a time of political engagement, at least, Sapozhnikov writes. That went into the deep freeze in the 2000s.
What was the meaning of the 2000s in Russia? Look at its films and books. Look at Andrey Konchalovksy’s film 2007 Gloss (Глянец) which follows a provincial seamstress on her journey to Moscow who dreams of marrying, as she puts it, “an oil rig”. Or consider the runaway popular success of Oksana Robsky’s novel Casual – 270,000 copies sold in six months – with its extravagant sketches of the decadent life of a so-called “Rublyovka wife”, named after a Moscow district beloved of Russia’s new rich, full of Bentleys and large neo-Palladian villas. (Sapozhnikov calls the plot of Casual “predictable”; in-depth Translator research shows the English version of the book has a current average rating of 2.63 on Goodreads). Or look at a book co-authored by Robsky and Ksenia Sobchak which has a chapter associating different types of oligarch with different types of animal. Or listen to the club hits of the 2000s appearing to celebrate the figure of the oligarch who owns an oil well.
Sapozhnikov cites cultural artefacts from the 2000s which appear to run against this tendency: the film Spiritless (Духless) from 2006 or a book of poetry Someone Else’s Life (Чья-то чужая жизнь). But these, he says, “while criticising the consumer society of the 2000s, provide no alternative to it”.
The fact that everyday Russian life of the 2000s was so far removed from the capitalist fantasy artefacts of its popular culture has, in Sapozhnikov’s view, left a poisonous legacy: a willingness to ignore society’s patent contradictions, a notion that one should consume and carry on, a post-modernist turn which has inured the population to anything and everything.
Sapozhnikov notes that Novaya Gazeta itself published an article in 2001 by a local politician which described Putin as a “post-modernist president”. A habit of “arranging” reality has become Russia’s normal. Sapozhnikov cites Peter Pomerantsev’s excellent work on the through-the-looking-glass world Russia had become. Ironically, one of those whose words he also cites to explain the psychological import of the 2000s belong to Ksenia Sobchak, one of the symbols of that era.
In the 1990s, it seemed to some that Russia was following a European path. It might seem a touch absurd, but why could Russia not at some point become like, say, Switzerland.
But these days, who is following whom?
That question is beyond the scope of Sapozhnikov’s article, and perhaps it’s wrong to take its implications too seriously. But it’s not hard for Translator to see an awful possibility. Vladislav Surkov, one of Putin’s key political manipulators, the man who personifies the post-modern political aesthetic Sapozhnikov describes, wrote recently that he looks around the world and sees other countries “cosplaying” the Kremlin. These days, he writes, “Russia is surrounded by its doubles and its imitators”.
Is the surreal becoming real?
The full original article by Andrey Sapozhnikov was published in Russian on 31 January 2025.
It is available here: ‘Возможность Рублевки’, Novaya Gazeta Europa
Novaya Gazeta Europa is a Russian newspaper now published outside Russia, including some articles in English
