From Popular Will to Popular Culture: Socialist and Postsocialist Imaginaries for the Russian Mass Polity

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Over the course of its existence, Soviet power presented itself as a product of multi-national popular will, while also appearing to many of its constituents as a hierarchized, imperial bureaucracy imposing its will on its mostly powerless citizenry. Because of this dichotomy implicit in Soviet state practice, imaginaries of narodnost– popular spirit, in the Hegelian sense of the term espoused by Soviet Marxists– motivated some in the USSR to think of themselves as frustrated pan-Soviet subjects, while also motivating others to desire USSR”s dissolution. While the events of 1989-1991 destroyed the state that had given rise to these differing collective imaginaries, it did not also destroy them along with it. Our panel will examine the ways in which concepts of popular will, which had been originally articulated in the early Soviet era, evolved throughout the late Soviet and the post-Soviet decades, and how notions of narodnost continue to shape both democratic and authoritarian discursive strands in contemporary Russian popular culture.

Sub Unit

• Anthropology, Cultural Studies

Chair

• Peter Budrin, Queen Mary, U of London (UK)

Papers

• People’s Will and Soviet Ethnographers: The Prose of Tan-Bogoraz - Anastasiya Osipova, U of Colorado at Boulder

• 'We’re the Last National Team of the Union': (Post-)Soviet Narodnost on KVN in 1992 - Pavel Khazanov, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

• Shortparis between Narodnaia and Popular Music - Tatiana Efremova, George Washington U

Discussant

• Ilya Kalinin, Humboldt U Berlin (Germany)