'Post-Soviet' Masculinity. Robin-Hood Romantics, Capitalist Values, Traumatic Violence. Images of Bandits and Businessmen in Early 2000s Russian Film and Television

• In Event: Images of Transition in Post-Soviet Visual and Narrative Culture

Abstract

The Soviet hero died during perestroika at the latest. The crisis of Soviet masculinity, which became apparent at the end of the Soviet Union, meant that the "wild" nineties were marked by a vacuum of meaning. The paper examines images of emerging post-Soviet masculinity based on Russian pop culture. The hypothesis is that at the beginning of the 2000s, new images of masculinity had emerged that differed fundamentally from the classic Soviet ones (warrior-liberator, intelligent romantic or worker), but did not correspond to Western ideals either. The sources consist of feature films and especially TV series (e.g. Ulicy Razbitych Fonarej [The Streets of Thrown-in Lanterns] (1998-2019), Banditskij Peterburg [Petersburg of the Bandits] (2000-2003) or Brigada [The Brigade] (2002)), which were extremely popular in the early 2000s. The (anti-) heroes of these stories are based on the romanticization of bandits and businessmen, yet they can exist only against the backdrop of deconstructed Soviet masculinity and the collective trauma of the 1990s. The aim of the paper is to carve out the visual markers and narrative functions of the images of post-Soviet masculinity in the examined discourses.

Author

• Paul Armin Matthias Primbs, Ludwig-Maximilians-U Munich (Germany)