The developments in Russian official symbolical, cultural and social policies as well as the contradictory trajectories of important cultural, social and intellectual trends in Russian society after the year 2000.

Contents Notes on Contributors Introduction: Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia  Niklas Bernsand and Barbara Törnquist-Plewa Part 1: Cultural Policy and Ideological Movements 1 Russia: Culture, Cultural Policy, and the Swinging Pendulum of Politics  Lena Jonson 2 ‘Middle Continent’ or ‘Island Russia’: Eurasianist Legacy and Vadim Tsymburskii’s Revisionist Geopolitics  Igor Torbakov 3 Eduard Limonov’s National Bolshevik Party and the Nazi Legacy: Titular Nations vs Ethnic Minorities  Andrei Rogatchevski Part 2: Memory Politics 4 Constructing the “Usable Past”: the Evolution of the Official Historical Narrative in Post-Soviet Russia  Olga Malinova 5 Dying in the Soviet Gulag for the Future Glory of Mother Russia? Making “Patriotic” Sense of the Gulag in Present-Day Russia  Tomas Sniegon 6 Memory Watchdogs. Online and Offline Mobilizations around Controversial Historical Issues in Russia  Elena Perrier (Morenkova) Part 3: Popular Culture and Its Embeddedness in Politics 7 “Your Stork Might Disappear Forever!”: Russian Public Awareness Advertising and Incentivizing Motherhood  Elena Rakhimova-Sommers 8 Fashionable Irony and Stiob: the Use of Soviet Heritage in Russian Fashion Design and Soviet Subcultures  Ekaterina Kalinina 9 Humour as a Mode of Hegemonic Control: Comic Representations of Belarusian and Ukrainian Leaders in Official Russian Media  Alena Minchenia, Barbara Törnquist-Plewa and Yuliya Yurchuk 10 The Cosmic Subject in Post-Soviet Russia: Noocosmology, Space-Oriented Spiritualism, and the Problem of the Securitization of the Soul  Natalija Majsova Index