Development of Contemporary Russian Cultural Policy: from Liberal Decentralization towards Conservative Hegemony (2007–2019)

My doctoral research project focuses on the transformation of Russian cultural policy from its relatively liberal, progressive, and outward character in the 1990s to its current conservative, reactionary and inward character since around 2012. It approaches the explanation of the shift by developing a critical post-foundational framework, which draws on cultural studies, cultural policy studies and political science. Particular attention is paid to the complexity of the relationship between state rationality and administrative methods, as well as legislative proposals and institutions, which together constitute the specific state logic of cultural policy.

By locating cultural policy in the structure and organisation of the Russian state and government, my PhD explains that shift as a political transformation that aims to change the culture in Russia to support an ‘authoritarian democratic’ political regime through the production of a new ‘common sense’. In doing so, I treat the conservative phase as a part of a broader political strategy aimed at establishing Russian national unity based on essentialist notions of Russian culture and traditional values condensed in the figure of ‘the People’. Hence, the doctoral project aims to examine the recent cultural policy evolution with reference to the political, institutional and legislative context through which the policy is developed, and its political subjects are established.

I claim that the formation of cultural policy is shaped by a conflict derived from the work of Michel Foucault (2008) between a logic of sovereignty which embodies ‘the people’ in the President as the source of ‘power over’ or rule, and a logic of governmentality as the source of power to which acts on a population in order to manage and transform it. In the Russian case, these logics coexist with the sovereign becoming dominant after the empowerment of the presidential apparatus and reduction of civil rights. My argument is that Russian sovereignty relies on the apparatus of governmentality to change a population into a people. I attempt to demonstrate the contribution of cultural policy to this process which has become increasingly organised around claims for traditional values of the Russian World against Western and European cultures.

However, I argue that this is not an automatic process but a ‘hegemonic’ one. That is to say, it requires political leadership. This approach is derived from Gramsci’s (1971) theory of hegemony and its development in the work of Stuart Hall (1985; 1986) and Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (2001). These authors argue that the success or failure of hegemony is contingent and relies on the formation of a ‘common sense’ which organises relations of coercion and consent as part of the taken for granted experience of ordinary life. Culture is central to this process. Therefore, cultural policy acquires a strategic importance.

Evidence for this claim is based on analysis of the official debates around the latest legislative initiatives on culture. In my recent article (Romashko 2023), I show how the cultural policy apparatus is subdued by the hegemonic discourse of anti-western securitisation through legal reforms initiated by the Kremlin. Thus, I conclude that cultural policy becomes articulated with Putin’s conservative project and is stabilised in relations of solidarity.