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Old Songs about the Most Important, or the Failure of Political Imagination in Post-Soviet Russia - Gulnaz Sharafutdinova. The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man”: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 122 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $61.00, hard bound. $17.95, paper. - Eliot Borenstein. Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. x, 192 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $125.00, hard bound. $15.99, paper.

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Gulnaz Sharafutdinova. The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man”: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 122 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $61.00, hard bound. $17.95, paper.
Eliot Borenstein. Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2023. x, 192 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $125.00, hard bound. $15.99, paper.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 June 2025

Pavel Khazanov
Pavel Khazanov*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
*
Email: pavel.khazanov@rutgers.edu
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Review Essay
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Slavic Review , Volume 83 , Issue 4 , Winter 2024 , pp. 824 - 831
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© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies.

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References

1 See Pavel Khazanov, The Russia That We Have Lost: Pre-Soviet Past as Anti-Soviet Discourse (Madison, 2023).

2 On Putinism’s ability to orchestrate approval numbers, see Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton, 2022). Note that the number “86%” was popularized in mass opposition culture by the blogs of Aleksei Navalˊnyi, who frequently referred to this number and derided its manipulative nature.

3 Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Afterlife of the “Soviet Man”: Rethinking Homo Sovieticus (London, 2023), 65.

4 Ibid., 65–66.

5 Ibid., 75–76.

6 Ibid., 88. This sensibility aligns with Sharafutdinova’s previous, longer book, which tries to explain the pro-Putin “Crimea Consensus” by showing how Putinism has deployed its fully coopted mass media machine to turn Russians’ collective memories of loss into legitimizing narrative for itself. See her The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (Oxford, 2020).

7 Roman Osminkin, in Eliot Borenstein, Soviet Self-Hatred: The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia (Ithaca, 2023), 8.

8 See Bradley Gorski, “The Statistical Turn: Public Opinion Polling and the Dream of an Open Society,” in Maya Vinokour, ed., Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s: Inventing the Post-Soviet Public Sphere (forthcoming at Amherst College Press, 2025); see also Pavel Khazanov, “A Petrovich Inside of Every New Russian: The Disciplinary Regime of the Capitalist ‘Vanguard Group’ at 1990s Kommersant,” Russian Review 82, no. 3 (July 2023): 470–85; see also Pavel Khazanov, “What is Our Life? A Game: What? Where? When? and the Capitalist Gamble of the Soviet Intelligentsia,” Russian Review 79, no. 2 (April 2020): 269–92.

9 Borenstein, Soviet Self-Hatred, 57

10 For my first approach of this issue, see Pavel Khazanov, “The Revolution of the New Narod: Perestroika, the 1991 GKChP Coup, and the Televised Post-Soviet Subject at Vzgliad/ViD,” in ed. Maya Vinokour, Media Cultures of the Russian 1990s.

11 Borenstein, Soviet Self-Hatred, 73–75.

12 Ibid., 79.

13 Ibid., 106–7.

14 See Elisabeth Schimpfössl, Rich Russians: From Oligarchs to Bourgeoisie (Oxford, 2018).

15 Borenstein, Soviet Self-Hatred, 115.

16 Ibid., 140.