SUMMARY:

Artemy Magun thinks that Mark Lipovetsky nicely emphasizes the social subject that is the bearer of the hegemonic ideology of the late Soviet period. However, he approaches the ITR discourse as described by Lipovetsky as a reflection of a classical bourgeois consciousness. Magun suggests that Soviet ITRs were the result of the thermidorean embourgeoisement of Soviet society, particularly epitomized in the mass emergence of private apartments in the 1960s and reinforced through the stimulation of consumerism in the 1970s. This being said, he thinks that the social basis of late Soviet ideology should not be absolutized. Today ITRs are a thing of the past. Their place is taken by the cognitariat: educated wage laborers, mostly specializing in communications and management, who are much less secure and self-assured than the Soviet ITRs. Although their slogans are familiar from the Soviet and perestroika eras (moral opposition to the regime, and the defense of “normalcy” against the irrational corrupt mafiosi), now they no longer correspond to social reality. These values are specters of the past (Marx), an instance of false consciousness. By way of a conclusion, Magun reprimands Lipovetsky for relying on the works of “prominent representatives of the Russian liberal right” such as Lev Gudkov and Dina Khapaeva, whose pessimistic assessment of the contemporary Russian society seduces Lipovetsky to exaggerate the continuity with Soviet times. Similarly, his idealized reading of the West is based on the uncritical evocation of the “apologetic pop best seller by Richard Florida.” Magun calls for a serious consideration of the ruptures between late Soviet and post-Soviet histories and acceptance of the idea that the Soviet ITRs were “genuinely liberal, liberals of the right.”