Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere - Hardcover

by Maya Vinokour (Editor)

Examining Russian-language media from the "long 1990s"--the period beginning with Mikhail Gorbachev's policy of glasnost ("openness") and ending with the election of President Vladimir Putin--Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s shows how post-Soviet civil society emerged simultaneously with the explosion of new media, especially a newly liberated television and internet. A brief and contested period of media independence ensued as explosive creativity collided with rank commercialism, journalistic integrity with burgeoning political ambitions, and fringe with mainstream. By the late 1990s, however, the media landscape had succumbed to economic and political exploitation. The causes and nature of this shift, which set the stage for Putin's crackdown on independent media after 2000--as well as Russia's slide into aggressive authoritarianism--are embedded in the era's media artifacts.

Written by an interdisciplinary group of experts, this edited collection addresses the mutual influence among disparate spheres of public life that enabled the media "Wild West" of the first post-Soviet decade. As a joint platform, the volume and the associated Multimedia Sourcebook of the Russian 1990s present the decade's media cultures in a manner that reflects their historical interconnectedness and relationship to the global present.

Edited by Maya Vinokour with contributions from Bradley Gorski, Courtney Doucette, Fabrizio Fenghi, Rita Safariants, Daniil Leiderman, Thomas Keenan, and Pavel Khazanov.

Author Biography

Maya Vinokour is assistant professor in the Department of Russian and Slavic Studies at New York University and the author of Work Flows: Stalinist Liquids in Russian Labor Culture (Cornell UP, 2024). Her interests include Stalinism and Nazism, late-Soviet science fiction, post-Soviet media, and the global far right.