Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia

Introduction: Soviet Myth in Post-Soviet Russia

Maria Engström and Aleksei Semenenko

Part I. Visual Arts

Chapter 1. Very Old Songs about the Most Important Thing: Deconstruction → Nostalgia → Affirmation

Ilya Kalinin

Chapter 2. Recycled Art? Recycling Socialism in Recent Russian Art

Klavdia Smola

Chapter 3. Dark Petroaesthetics: The Crude Ghosts of Soviet Oil

Maria Engström

Part II. Film and Television

Chapter 4. In Search of Emotional Teleology: Melodramatization of the Soviet past in Russian films 2020–2023

Mark Lipovetsky

Chapter 5. “Dumping” the Soviet myth of Russian provinces in the independent cinema of the 2010s

Birgit Beumers

Chapter 6.  Sputnik’s Ghosts: Recycling the Soviet Space-Age Mythology in 21st-century Russian Film as a Metamodernist Future-Fabulation Strategy

Natalija Majsova

Chapter 7. Inside Lapenko: Alternative Soviet Mythologies

Aleksei Semenenko

Part III. Urban Narratives

Chapter 8. Soviet Retrofuturism and the New Military Temple Architecture: Analyzing Russia’s Neo-Soviet Iconography

Masha Panteleyeva

Chapter 9. From People’s House to Cultural Cluster: GES-2 and the Mythology of the Third Place in Contemporary Russia

Ekaterina Kalinina

Chapter 10. Welcome to Leningrad: Neo-Soviet Myth in Contemporary St. Petersburg

Irina Seits

Part IV. Music and Video Games

Chapter 11. A longing with no home: Russophone post-punk and the neo-Soviet myth

Marco Biasioli

Chapter 12. Playing the USSR: Atomic Heart and Sovietwave

Maria Engström & Aleksei Semenenko

Biography

Maria Engström is Professor of Russian at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Russian intellectual history, late Soviet underground culture, queer Russian visual culture, and contemporary Russian conservatism. She coedited The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture, Oxford University Press (2024), and Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia (2015). She is coeditor-in-chief of the journal Slovo. Journal of Slavic Languages, Literatures and Cultures. Her recent research projects, supported by the Swedish Research Council and the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, examine the formation of Russian civilizational discourse and the aesthetics of neo-reaction.

Aleksei Semenenko is Associate Professor of Russian in the Department of Language Studies at Umeå University. He holds a PhD in Russian literature from Stockholm University. He is the author of Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (Stockholm University, 2007) and The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), the editor of Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and Aksenov and the Environs (with Lars Kleberg; Södertörn University, 2012). He has published works on translation, literature, semiotics, and cultural recycling.