Authors

Maria Engström¹;  ¹ Uppsala University, Sweden

Discussion

A defining feature of Russia’s conservative turn, is the normalization of the civilizational narrative (Mjör and Turoma 2020), which casts doubt on the universality of the liberal world order and affirms the possibility of non-Eurocentric cultural and political subjectivities. The 2010s saw the formation of conservative civilizational discourse, which acquired the status of a state ideology after the beginning of the war in Ukraine in February 2022 (Snegovaya, Kimmage,McGlynn 2023). Regarding the intellectual and cultural components of the conservative turn, we may delineate three coexisting civilizational narratives: Russia-as-Europe, Russia-as-Eurasia and Russia-as-Russia. These civilizational projects are united by their illiberalism and the critical relationship to the cultural and political hegemony of the west; but, amongst themselves, there are a number of significant differences. My paper focuses on how the third narrative - Russia-as-Russia - is visualized in contemporary Russian popular culture (films, TV-series and music videos). In this narrative, Russia is imagined as a pariah and a bearer of great potential; she cannot be inscribed into any extant typology and slips away from all readily accepted categorizations, as she is a dark spot or a shadow cast by the future.