'Culturedness' in the Time of Culture War: Re-reading Civility, Propriety, and Class in Putin-Era Russia

• In Event: Non-Liberation, or "The Tradition of All the Dead Generations Weighs Like a Nightmare on the Brain of the Living"

Abstract

The 2010s in Russia began with a moment of mass anti-authoritarian mobilization and cross-political solidarity, and ended with the regime's total domination over a divided opposition, and society as such. One touchstone the media has used to explain the Putin’s regime increasing dominance in the past decade has been its skillful mediatization of the "two Russias" culture war. Inspired by the strategies used in the U.S. culture wars, this new imaginary pitted a liberal, cosmopolitan “beau monde” against an anti-liberal, conservative silent majority in a battle over “values” (tsennosti). Conservative and liberal activists’ bodies and patterns of conduct were closely scrutinized by each activist block, and by the media, for tell-tale signs of social deviance and dangerous radicalism. While the emerging pro-regime and anti-regime political registers were being co-constituted in contrast with one another, the activists on both sides of the polarized media ecosystem were equally invested in being the legitimate defenders of “culturedness” (kulturnost’). Did residing in a “cultured” city mean banning “sex shops” from main city streets, or did it mean the right to incorporate blasphemous imagery in a production of a Wagner opera? Was it more cultured to be clever and ironic in antagonizing your opponents, or to be “above the fray” of politics? This paper considers how both liberal and anti-liberal activists persisted in claiming “culturedness”—the Soviet-era middle-class stand-in for class—for themselves; and how the signs of “culturedness” were being pulled apart towards two different political projects. Finally, it considers why “culturedness” itself has been so inescapable, as a political value, in contemporary Russia.

Author

• Maria Sidorkina, U of Texas at Austin