SUMMARY:

Ilya Kukulin’s essay summarizes the main trends in the Russian public sphere and politics that appeared from spring to summer 2017 – from protest actions marked by unprecedently high youth participation to the recent arrest of theater director Kirill Serebrennikov. Kukulin suggests a framework for considering these and other events and tendencies that have defined the current political moment: the exhaustion of financial and ideological resources for sustaining Putin’s original “contract” with Russian citizens (particularly cultural elites), and demodernization (understood as the loss of autonomy in domains of rationality, such as art, law, and religion). The article identifies cultural strategies for overcoming this structural deficiency in the public sphere. These approaches can become vehicles of change, independence, and resistance if they are recognized and adopted by the rest of the cultural community and the new art becomes a factor of public debate.