Professor Pavel Khazanov Speaks on Soviet Culture

Join us for a guest lecture, "I Want to Live in a Normal Country," by Pavel Khazanov, Department of German and Russian, Rutgers University, from 6 to 8:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 4 in Fahy Hall, Room 236. This lecture discusses television, film and the Soviet origins of modern Russian middle-class political culture. 

In 1991, Russians rose up against a military coup in the hope of founding a "normal" democratic post-Soviet state, but within a few years, their hopes had given way to disappointment. Why did the hopes of 1991 seem plausible in the first place? Did Russian liberals squander their potential because they poorly understood the Soviet origins of the post-Soviet polity? In his talk, Pavel Khazanov will discuss how Soviet mass culture appealed to an urbanized, educated audience that took shape in the 1960s and played a key role in the events of the 1980s-1990s. Drawing from his first book, The Russia That We Have Lost, he will show how a prominent strain of Soviet intelligentsia culture worked to convince its college-educated consumers that they were a latter-day aristocratic elite. He will also discuss his next book project, The New Narod, which examines how Soviet socialist ideology also worked to convince those same people that they were a new universal subject of history on the road to post-Soviet power.

This event is sponsored by the Slavic Club and Russian and East European Studies Program.

Categories: Arts and Culture