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Consuming Russia: Popular Culture, Sex, and Society since Gorbachev

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This book has the rare quality of being a classroom text as well as a report. Today's Russia. Pyramid schemes, religion, rave parties,rock music, detective stories, cinema, pets, porn, graffiti, tattooing... the carnival of crazy New Russia to be read overnight. A shock.

Going to Russia? Buy it. Interested in reading about contemporary Russia beyond what the newspapers tell you? Buy it. Taking a class on Russian culture? Buy it. I really can't recommend this book enough for specialists and novices alike. There's something to please everybody here.

This is requisite reading for anyone seeking meaning into the collapse of the Soviet Union and the cultural artifacts left in its wake. The Russian consumer, once a vessel of the state is now liberated and roaming freely across the nation's Savannah, so a group of Russian Area studies academics takes note and tracks its evolution. Their conclusions are stunning.

Discover how public and private domains are reinvented in the new Russia, how Soviet ideology and myth making compare favorably and unfavorably to Western marketing and how consumers fall into the perilous trap of being both its producers and end users.

Learn how artistic kitsch of Stalinist culture inspired a revolt by high art and culture in the 60's and '70s, only to succumb to the soap operas and pulp fiction of today.

How did yesterday's cultural elites become today's taxi cab drivers and yesterday's taxi cab drivers become today's elites? How did Soviet ideological symbols evolve from post-Communist kitsch to symbols of cool? Why is pornography more than just a means to sell products, but also a marker for a "private space" revolt against the public domain?

This is a remarkable collection of cultural essays, defiant to anybody who insists that understanding the Soviet collapse and post-Soviet milieu is possible only through political and economic narrative.