SUMMARY:

Benjamin Nathans recognizes Lipovetsky’s argument as a variation on postmodernism’s critique of modernity and more broadly of the liberal heritage of the Enlightenment. Evidence of this postmodernist stance for Nathans is Lipovetsky’s reliance on the concept of “discourse” and the corresponding treatment of liberalism as a disembodied discourse that, with the proper modifications, might serve to animate an emerging “creative class.” Nathans explains his suspicion of the term “creative class” as inaccurate and undemocratic. He notes that Lipovetsky’s approach is “highly structuralist” and leaves aside important ruptures between the late Soviet and post-Soviet periods. However, one fruitful aspect of this structuralism, that is, of Lipovetsky’s suggestion that the nature of cultural authority may not have changed so much in the transition from late Soviet to post-Soviet Russia, is that it provokes a comparative reevaluation of two major ruptures – the “Thaw” and “Perestroika.” “Did the ‘people of the sixties’ feel more estranged from the Stalin era than today’s middle-aged Russians feel from the Brezhnev era?” In posing this question, Nathans argues that Lipovetsky’s article does not pay sufficient attention to the evolution of views of its heroes, such as Andrei Sakharov. Nathans also rejects a description of the ITR discourse as antidemocratic – as if that discourse was monolithic or failed to evolve over time. He insists that late Soviet intellectuals did not operate exclusively within binaries (such an interpretation does not do justice to the variety of late Soviet intellectual and cultural life). Nathans concludes with the general statement that “the capacity to combine idealism and pragmatism is a desirable and productive trait, then as now, in Russia and elsewhere.”