Authors

Gulnaz Sharafutdinova¹;  ¹ King’s College, London, UK

Discussion

This paper will entertain new answers to the puzzle of Russia’s lost post-Soviet transformation by inquiring into the dominant ideas, beliefs and values shared by the reformers and the public in the 1990s. These intangible structures resulted from the overlapping of cultural predispositions characterizing late Soviet society and the new ideology associated with market-driven capitalism. This analytical frame will enable envisioning the economic and cultural elites in their ordinariness (as opposed to exceptionalism) and explain the political trajectory that resulted in the defeat of the liberal and reformist agenda under the current Russian government. The paper will rely on the recent debate about the nineties initiated by the Anti-Corruption Foundation and their documentary “Traitors” to demonstrate some of the main observations. It will conclude by discussing the need to examine the values and norms needed to transform society if the agenda of a new transition ever comes to the table again in Russia.