Mirroring American Cor****ate Media...
Conformity to the max: Russians in desperate race to become even dumber
than
Americans:
(all text below is from citation -- ClassWarz)
http://www.newsweek.com/id/128417
Dumbing Russia Down
The Kremlin has largely marginalized Russia's intelligentsia. But 'Girls
of
the Military' is a hit.
Owen Matthews and Anna Nemtsova
NEWSWEEK
Updated: 10:39 AM ET Mar 22, 2008
Is Russian intellectual life thriving or dying? Sometimes, it's hard to
tell. This week culture mavens will flock to the Golden Mask theater
festival, which will showcase the best of Russia's lively underground
drama
scene. Highlights include a satirical play by the Presniakov brothers
featuring a surreal debate between George W. Bush, Tony Blair and Vladimir
Putin. Guests of the Moscow Photo Biennale have received stacks of
invitations to two dozen openings-and those will be just a fraction of the
art shows, performances and readings scheduled for this week. Among them:
a
new play about Lenin by writer Victor Pelevin and a cutting-edge exhibit
at
a new-media gallery called the Electroboutique ViewStation.
But that's not typical. The 99.9 percent of Russians who are not on
Moscow's
high-culture circuit will have a very different set of cultural
experiences:
they can enjoy a television gala called "Girls of the Military," a novel
kind of beauty-and-talent show that promises to add tanks and aircraft to
the usual mix of bikini parades and contestants' mini-biopics. There's
also
the Russian version of the game show "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" and a
selection of shows featuring washed-out old Soviet-era singers,
interspersed
with news re****ts that feature endless coverage of President-elect Dmitry
Medvedev's daily visits and speeches.
So which is it? Cultural boom or bust? Without question, high culture is a
minority pursuit in every country-and popular television is anything but
highbrow. But in Russia, there is a breathtaking disconnect between an
artsy
fringe culture and the rigidly conformist state-controlled mainstream. On
one level, Russia's oil-fueled economy has generated a lively arts scene,
on
par with any in Europe. But at the same time, the Kremlin's
near-stranglehold of Russian media means that any kind of free political
debate has disappeared completely from popular culture. That has left
journalists, creative artists and academics in Russia feeling embattled,
argues Catherine Nepomnyashchy, director of the Harriman Institute at
Columbia University. "The government has effectively consolidated control
over the mass media, while a popular entertainment culture of soap operas
and game shows, detective novels and astrology has flourished,
marginalizing
the once respected and influential voices of the creative intelligentsia,"
she notes.
How did this happen? Russia's intelligentsia was once the arbiter of the
nation's cultural values, says Masha Lipman of the Moscow Carnegie Center.
Years ago a small group of educated, urban professionals had cultural
values
that were emphatically anti-Soviet. Thanks to glasnost, they were able
push
their radical ideas into the very heart of political debate, and for a few
heady years, dissident culture became mainstream culture in all its
chaotic
glory. Leading cultural figures like writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and
historian Yuri Afanasiyev held marathon televised debates about the state
of
the nation, and were watched by millions. As recently as a decade ago,
Russia's top-rated television programs included punchy and controversial
political magazine shows, like Yevgeny Kisilev's "Itogi."
Now in the putatively free Putin era, a new kind of censor****p has taken
hold, with the mainstream of Russian culture and ideas firmly controlled
by
the state. Cultural figures and thinkers who play by the rules are
showered
with money and acclaim while mavericks are marginalized. For instance,
veteran rocker Andrei Makarevich, of the group Ma****na Vremeni, was once a
mainstay of the Leningrad underground scene. Recently he played a concert
in
sup****t of President-elect Medvedev, and now hosts a popular TV cooking
show. Rock musician Yuri Shevchuk, from the same late-era Soviet music
scene, joined in opposition protests last year in St. Petersburg and told
the crowds that "Putin's stability is the grave of creativity." He is now
denied access to television and to sponsor****ps, says music critic Artem
Troitsky, because "no bank or business wants to risk getting on the
Kremlin's blacklist."
To many, it is an insidious system that rewards conformity. "Our nation's
horizons have narrowed; the Russian mind has closed," says former TV
anchor
Sergei Dorenko, persona non grata on Russian TV ever since he worked for
an
anti-Moscow candidate in Ukraine's 2004 elections. "Intellectuals feel
lost.
Our current leaders seek to inspire bourgeois values, but Russian
bourgeois
culture seems flat and faceless." There are signs, too, that even the
limited space allowed for speech is shrinking, as current informal systems
of control are replaced by an ever-tightening web of legislation. A 2007
law
restricting hate speech and extremism has already been used to silence
Kremlin critics. Now deeply conservative church groups have proposed a new
set of laws to clean up the "immoral" content of television programming.
Mikhail Prokopenko, spokesman for the Russian Orthodox Church Moscow
Patriarchate, said last week that it intended to use its "influence and
good
relations" with the state to "protect children from the negative
influence"
of certain TV programs that "corrupt moral values." "The state intends to
turn young Russians into zombies so that they do not have any independent
political thoughts," complains Anna Tikhomirova, director of a
Moscow-based
center for the study of teenage development.
Still, pockets of free speech and creativity remain-just as long as
artists
don't attract too wide an audience. Dmitry Bykov, one of Russia's
best-known
writers, denounces state-controlled television for creating "imbeciles"
out
of Russians. Yet his "Novoe Vremechko" cultural TV show is tolerated by
the
authorities, largely because of its low ratings. The same goes for the
often
passionately anti-Kremlin Ekho Moskvy radio broadcasts. In a nation of 140
million people, it attracts just 848,000 listeners at its peak. Meanwhile,
a
new generation of writers is starting to emerge, like Chechen war veteran
Zakhar Prilepin, who writes brutal novels and short stories about
day-to-day
life in modern Russia. The question, though, is whether writers like
Prilepin will shape Russia's intellectual future-or if it will be
determined
by a highly conformist mainstream.
URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/128417
© 2008
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