This report challenges the claims that there is no civil society to speak of inside the Russian Federation and that most of its activists are now in exile. A significant number of independent and democratically oriented initiatives and organizations continue to operate throughout the country to address societal issues through civic engagement. These should be acknowledged. Many of their activities are not highly visible or easily mapped. Given the level of political pressure, the more politically charged initiatives have restricted their visibility or gone underground. Information about their activities is distributed in closed channels. Stating that civic activism has not ceased does not ignore the widespread and increasing atomization at all levels of society in Russia. The point is not that Russian civil society is well organized but that, despite the prevailing trends, there are initiatives worth recognizing and supporting.

The time to act is now as our opportunities to support relevant initiatives are decreasing by the month. Supporting independent journalism and civil society as future watchdogs presents a more reliable approach than engaging with what is often called the opposition in exile. Whatever future scenario is envisaged for a less threatening and more predictable Russian state, structures that foster horizontal ties among independent and active citizens will be crucial to its emergence and sustainability. When discussing exiled actors, it is important to distinguish between initiatives that provide support and build community in their current host countries and those which support and strengthen civil engagement inside the country.

We recommend that cooperation strategies in Europe and North America enhance the capabilities of regional and local information channels across the Russian Federation. These channels command a higher level of credibility due to their proximity and relevance. The lack of visibility of many civil society activities and the need for significant initiatives to remain under the radar make it essential to bolster interregional networking. Much of the support directed to civil society in Russia can be effectively facilitated through strategically selected actors in exile.

The article seeks to explore the common ground between biopolitics, fashion, patriotism and nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, I provide an insight into the modern construction of the Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion, and the Great Patriotic War become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies, I will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates people’s lives by producing narratives, which are translated (in some cases designers act as mouthpieces for the state demographic or military politics) into fashionable discourses and, with a core of time, create specific gender norms–women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses, conservative ideals become a ground for the creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these fashionable narratives, people’s bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Fashion produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force.

The proliferation and recycling of Soviet popular culture and history is a central ingredient of post-Soviet film and television production, leading to accusations that the Russian media is nurturing nostalgia. Nostalgia can hardly account for the manifold uses of the Soviet past in contemporary Russian television programming. Nevertheless, in the aftermath of the Crimean annexation, it became evident that nostalgia for a strong empire with a strong ruling hand' was part of Putin's symbolic politics for several years. Keeping these considerations in mind, this article investigates how nostalgia extends into the domain of television and becomes an element of symbolic politics, employing a case study of two documentaries produced during Putin's presidency to focus the analysis. This study also examines how contemporary Russian television uses footage and film clips from the socialist period and witness testimonies to dismantle' popular myths.

This article presents an empirical analysis and theoretical reflections on the negotiation of memories in hyperconnected memory cultures. In order to describe the conditions of memory negotiation, we suggest using the notion of ‘hyperconnected memories’, which refers to the mediatization of memory in a nexus of contingent forms of communication. By conducting a critical discourse analysis (CDA), we show how the Soviet past is negotiated in contemporary Russia and analyse how national identity is discursively constructed alongside official narratives and individual memories. We argue that an important element in this process is nostalgia, which motivates people to join mnemonic online communities but also functions as an intermediary between cultural memory and national identity by making history a personal, sentimental matter. However, we will also demonstrate that the negotiation of official history and individual memory in mnemonic online communities does not automatically lead to emancipation from state-propagated narratives.

This article investigates the Nostal'giia channel, a channel reproducing the daily schedule of Soviet Tsentralnoe Televidenie (Central Television) of the 1970s-1980s. The broadcast day comprises a flow of program reruns and a number of newly produced talk shows and documentaries. Reruns provide content flow that creates a particular experience of time passing while viewers can relive the experience of watching television in the 1980s. Meanwhile, new productions serve as commentaries on this content and connect bits and pieces into a complete picture by interpreting and providing contextual information. By doing so, the producers of the channel aim to create the feeling of historical continuity. By applying autoethnography, I investigate the experience of watching the channel and the flow of nostalgic sentiments that emerge while experiencing mediated narrations of the past. The aim is to not only explore the channel content, but also come to terms with nostalgia as a subjective experience and the difficulties that appear in the process of researching it.

The article seeks to explore the common ground between bio-politics, gender, patriotism and war nostalgia. Taking off from the Foucaldian notion of biopolitics as a control apparatus exerted over a population, we provide an insight into the modern construction of Russian nation, where personal and collective sacrifice, traditional femininity and masculinity, orthodox religion andwar become the basis for patriotism. On carefully chosen case studies we will show how the state directly and indirectly regulates peoples lives by producing narratives, which are translated into media discourses and with a core of time create specific “gender norms” – women are seen as fertile mothers giving birth to new soldiers, while men are shown as fighters and defenders of their nation. In the constructed discourses nostalgia for a war plays one of the central roles and becomes a ground of a creation of an idea of a nation as one biological body, where brothers and sisters are united together. In these popular culture narratives people’s bodies become a battlefield of domestic politics. Popular culture hence produces a narrative of a healthy nation to ensure the healthy work- and military force. The authors tackle the above-mentioned aims by conducting visual analysis of several films, where the main characters are women in contrast to the majority of films about war. (Batallion (2015), A zori zdes’ tikhie (2015)). 

Post-Soviet nostalgia, generally understood as a sentimental longing forthe Soviet past, has penetrated deep into many branches of Russian popular culture in the post-1989 period. The present study investigates how the Soviet past has been mediated in the period between 1991 and 2012 as one element of a prominent structure of feeling in present-day Russian culture.

The Soviet past is represented through different mediating arenas – cultural domains and communicative platforms in which meanings are created and circulated. The mediating arenas examined in this study include television, the Internet, fashion, restaurants, museums and theatre. The study of these arenas has identified common ingredients which are elements of a structure of feeling of the period in question. At the same time, the research shows that the representations of the past vary with the nature of the medium and the genre.

The analysis of mediations of the Soviet past in Russian contemporary culture reveals that there has been a change in the representations of the Soviet past during the past twenty years, which roughly correspond to the two decades marked by the presidencies of Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s and of Vladimir Putin in the 2000s (including Dmitrii Medvedev's term, 2008–2012). The critical and reflective component that was present in representations of the Soviet past in the 1990s has slowly faded away, making room first for more commercial and then for political exploitations of the past. Building on Svetlana Boym's conceptual framework of reflective and restorative nostalgia, the present study provides an illustration of how reflective nostalgia is being gradually supplanted by restorative nostalgia.

Academic research has provided many definitions of nostalgia, from strictly medical explanations to more psychological and socio-cultural perspectives. The present study offers examples of how nostalgia functions as a label in ascribing political and cultural identities to oneself and to others, creating confusion about the term and about what and who can rightly be called nostalgic.