This cluster of articles is dedicated to the Russian pop-rock band Leningrad whose viral video content and status of mass cultural phenomenon defined and represented the gray zone between “official” and “oppositional” in popular culture under Putin in the 2000s–2020s. Imbued by modulations of postmodern and postsocialist irony, Leningrad’s appeal championed radical ambiguity, refusing to join any form of oppositional platform. This tactic, often disguised as a critical stance, was co-opted by the Russian mass and state media to drive populist and nationalist agendas throughout the 2010s, leading to the apotheosis of authoritarian militarism in the 2020s. Leningrad’s most recent work employs the signature apathetic stance, offering implicit acquiescence to the Russian aggression in Ukraine within the current political climate. Tracing Leningrad’s evolution from a rebellious punk-band into a reactionary project, the cluster examines its work in a variety of contexts, such as the late-Soviet rock tradition, Soviet and post-Soviet tricksterism, imperial and civilizational discourses, and contemporary celebrity culture. Yet rather than conclude that Leningrad’s current incarnation reveals its longstanding complicity with state ideology, we view it as a case study in the baseline conditions and dominant subject positions of postsocialist post-modernity during the first two decades of the century, in Russia and elsewhere.

Tatiana Efremova received her PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2022 and is Assistant Professor of Russian at the George Washington University. Her current book project, Beyond Nostalgia: Remediating the Soviet Body in Russian Culture under Putin (2000–2022), looks beyond the state monopoly on the Soviet past in search of alternative ways of processing the Soviet downfall in contemporary film, fashion, multimedia, and performance art.

Focusing on Sergei Shnurov’s inheritances from and intertextual references to the Soviet rock tradition, this article examines Leningrad’s engagement with the legacy and image of Viktor Tsoi, the icon of late-Soviet countercultural sincerity. Since Tsoi in many ways personified perestroika-era Soviet rock and its underground youth sub-culture, the present discussion aims to probe Shnurov’s intertextual, historical, and ideological relationships to Soviet-era rock music, its major themes, and its defining personalities. Relying on the historical figure and mythology of Tsoi, whose short life serves as a Soviet historical time capsule untarnished by the commercialism of the free-market economy that defined the post-Soviet nineties, Safariants argues that the trajectory of Shnurov’s musical celebrity is rooted in an anxiety of influence, which nostalgically reveres yet ultimately fears its Soviet past. The inherent paradox of the historical legacy of Soviet rock music as discursively foundational yet inherently threatening can explain Leningrad’s shift from the irreverent punk aesthetic of its early work to the stylistically variegated and ideologically ambivalent musical product that has become the band’s trademark in the wake of Russia’s neototalitarian turn.

Rita Safariants is Assistant Professor of Russian in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultures at the University of Rochester. Her research interests include Soviet and post-Soviet cinema, literature, popular music, and performance culture. Her book Soviet Rock on Screen: The Life, Death, and Resurrection of a Film Genre is forthcoming at University of Wisconsin Press in 2025

This article contextualizes Leningrad in relation to the Soviet tradition of cynicism with its gallery of trickster characters. At once embodying a cynical mind and criticizing social cynicism, tricksters are able to both articulate and subvert the hypocrisy of dominant ideologies. In Leningrad’s videos produced simultaneously with the first phase of Russia’s war against Ukraine and the West (2014–2022), the trickster characters expose a cynical consensus between the authorities and society. While cynicism is an unlikely tool for radical critique, its variety of ambivalence appeared to retain critical political potential while retaining the critical potential. The article registers the symptomatic waning of trickster characters in Shnurov’s most recent work, released since the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine—the cynical consensus becomes the foundation for the new regime of repressions leaving no room for ambivalence.

Mark Lipovetsky is Professor at the Department of Slavic Languages, Columbia University. He is the author of ten monographs and editor/co-editor of twenty collections of articles on twentieth- to twenty-first-century Russian literature and culture. Subjects of his publications include Russian postmodernism, New Russian drama, and the trickster in Soviet culture. Lipovetsky is also one of four co-authors of the Oxford History of Russian Literature (2018) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024). He is the winner of the AATSEEL award for the outstanding contribution to scholarship (2014) and the Andrei Bely Prize for his input to Russian literature (2019).

In this article, I consider the work of Sergei Shnurov and the band Leningrad within the discourse of the “civilizational turn” in Russian culture and politics of the 2010s. In following this connection, I pay particular attention to the aesthetics of imperfection, which I propose to analyze not only as an expression of conservative politics, but also as an artistic device characteristic of the metamodernist cultural paradigm. Music videos of the band Leningrad shot between 2015 and 2018 (years of peak popularity for the group), as well interviews with Sergei Shnurov from various periods furnish the material of the study. In the first part of the article, I analyze the sociopolitical and cultural contexts of this period, in order thereafter to describe the phenomenon of aesthetic populism, as well as Shnurov’s strategies as an artist and as one of the principal figures of contemporary symbolic politics in Russia.

Maria Engstrom is Professor of Russian at Uppsala University, Sweden. Her research focuses on Russian intellectual history, late Soviet underground culture, Russian queer visual culture, and contemporary Russian conservatism. She co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Soviet Underground Culture (2024) and Digital Orthodoxy: Mediating Post-Secularity in Russia (2015). Her current project “No(w)stalgia of Modernity: Neo-Soviet Myth in Contemporary Russian Culture” (2021–2024) is supported by the Swedish Research Council.

By taking a closer look at the cinematic elements in Sergei Shnurov’s videos, this article reveals how the viral video language of Leningrad emerged as a result of deconstructing the appeal of Hollywood fantasies. Focusing on Hollywood tropes in videos by Leningrad, I examine how Shnurov’s project recycled and deconstructed Western narrative structures by immersing them into the local context. Throughout the 2010s, Leningrad articulated a critique of the Western fantasy from the position of the subject of a subaltern empire, a subject that seeks to invert the structures of domination to experience a sense of superiority. The visual language of Shnurov’s clips allowed for an ironic distancing from Hollywood cliches, providing the spectator with the satisfaction of an astute triumph over Hollywood’s illusory promises. Reflecting how post-Crimea Russia rethought its relationship with the West, this mode of recycling produced a signature structure that would routinely end with a return to the status quo. Yielding no change for its protagonists, Shnurov’s tongue-in-cheek deconstructions of Hollywood genres define the cultural zeitgeist of post-Crimea Russia with its authoritarian enforcement of the political status quo.

Tatiana Efremova received her PhD in Comparative Literature at New York University in 2022 and is Assistant Professor of Russian at the George Washington University. Her current book project, Beyond Nostalgia: Remediating the Soviet Body in Russian Culture under Putin (2000–2022), looks beyond the state monopoly on the Soviet past in search of alternative ways of processing the Soviet downfall in contemporary film, fashion,multimedia, and performance art

This paper uses a celebrity studies lens for perspective on the multiple transforma- tions in Sergei Shnurov’s celebrity persona over the last three decades. Following a biographical sketch of the Leningrad frontman, the article expounds upon the academic and popular literature on Shnurov’s oeuvre, with special attention to the evolution and eventual decline of his celebrity standing in Russia. Having successfully exploited a few stage images, from a gopnik or a gangster to a truth-speaking trickster who perpetually visits the ugliest corners of both society and human identity, upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine Shnurov retreated to a safe space of neither criticizing nor supporting the status quo. His failure to either contest or clearly endorse those in power during the nation’s most challenging times has stripped his celebrity persona of both its signature feature—ambivalence—and its carnivalesque aspect, thus violating the integrity of his image. Such unprecedented indecisiveness in the previously fearless showman, coupled with his withdrawal from the public arena and a pause in the Leningrad concerts, has disrupted his affective connection with his audience. The resulting damage to his celebrity status is evident from fans’ reception of his most recent works.

Anastasia Gordienkois Assistant Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at the University of Arizona. Her monograph Outlaw Music in Russia: The Rise of an Unlikely Genre (University of Wisconsin Press, 2023) explores a paradoxical quid pro quo synergy among Russian criminal music, the shanson, and Putin’s politics. Dr. Gordienko’s secondary interests lie at the intersection of stardom, fame, and politics, with a focus on how the concept of Slavic celebrity evolves during significant socio-political changes.