STRANGE CASE OF A REGIONAL CULTURAL REVOLUTION: SVERDLOVSK IN THE PERESTROIKA YEARS

• Main Author: Lipovetsky Mark Naumovich
• Format: Article
• Language: Russian
• Published: Ural State Pedagogical University 2019-02-01
• Series: Филологический класс
• Subjects: perestroika; urals culture; regional culture; cultural revolution; cultural life; internal colonization
• Online Access: https://filclass.ru/en/archive/2019/2-56/strange-case-of-a-regional-cultural-revolution-sverdlovsk-in-the-perestroika-years

The article discusses the cultural revolution that took place in Sverdlovsk during the years of Perestroika and transformed rock-music, visual art, theatre, cinema, and literature. Hypothetically, these tendencies embodied not attempts to establish regional cultural identity but, on the contrary, artists’ striving to liberate themselves from regional and, more broadly, Soviet cultural models and invent new cultural languages of national and frequently global scope. The article interprets these transformations of culture as an idiosyncratic form of postcolonial development derivative of Russian internal colonization (Alexander Etkind). Resulting hybrid models were based on the conflation of the local and global, or rather representation of the local as the global. Such scenario of „entering the global culture“ turned out to be typical for post-Soviet culture in general, which explains wide popularity of the Sverdlovsk-born phenomena across Russia throughout the 1990s and 2000s. .