Cambridge’s Department of Slavonic Studies is hosting a series of public lectures over the coming academic year entitled ‘Russia Hangs Out: Consumer Culture from the Tsars to Putin.’ The series will examine how ordinary Russian men and women have spent their leisure time, what they have consumed and how they have amused themselves - from Imperial times to the present day.

From nineteenth-century nightclubs to Soviet-era caviar and contemporary online chat rooms, the speakers will present a wide spectrum of consumer practices, and reveal an important continuity between past and present.

The newly awakened, post-Soviet desire to play and shop, to be entertained and indulged - parodied in the undiscerning, over-consuming ‘new Russian’ - is often seen as being excessive. By fleshing out the Russian consumer from Imperial Russia to the present day, this series of lectures aims to challenge this notion of newness and naivety and to reveal a longer history of Russian and Soviet consumer culture.

The first lecture in the series was held on October 7. Nancy Condee from the Slavic faculty of the University of Pittsburgh spoke on ‘Consumer Culture: Russian Paradoxes’. Her lecture explored the meaning of consumerism in a culture that is often identified as historically resistant to Western categories of capital and modernity. Condee's talk focused in particular on the Soviet and immediate post-Soviet period, when the contradictions between the category of ‘consumer’ and the fluctuating legacy of Marxism-Leninism are most pronounced.

The lectures will take place on alternate Thursdays in the Umney Lecture Theatre, Robinson College at 5.30pm.

  • 21 October ‘Caviar with Champagne. Common Luxury in Stalin's Russia.’ (Jukka Gronow, Uppsala)
  • 4 November ‘Nightscape: The Commercial Night in Late Imperial Russia’ (Louise McReynolds, Hawaii)
  • 18 Nov ‘Leisure and Consumption Strategies at the Late-Imperial Resort’ (Tim Phillips, Oxford)
  • 27 January ‘Reading Russian TV adverts’ (Hilary Pilkington, Birmingham)
  • 10 Feb ‘Russian Chat Rooms - Spaces, Distance and Exclusivity’ (Caroline Humphrey, Cambridge)
  • 24 Feb Avtorskaia Pesnia: Amateur Song as Communicative Code (Rachel Platonov, Manchester)
  • 10 March ‘Soviet Rock: Tape Recorders and the Listening Experience’(Polly McMichael, Oxford)
  • 5 May ‘From Necro-realism to Neo-academism: Aesthetics and the Body of the Absurd’ (Aleksei Yurchak, Berkeley)
  • 12 May ‘The Other Freedom’ (Svetlana Boym, Harvard)

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