SUMMARY:

Mark Lipovetsky reconstructs the transformation of the trickster – the central cultural figure of Soviet-era nonconformism and resistance – into the cynic in modern Russia. After becoming a normative social type in the 1990s, by the 2010s the cynic had made cynicism the main ideology of Putin’s political system. The conflation of the cynicism of the powerful and the powerless after 2012 has produced a “cynical consensus” according to Lipovetsky, who illustrates this transformation using the example of the most prominent mass culture artifacts in modern Russia. In the absence of a rigid system of political and moral values, the trickster loses its emancipatory potential and becomes purely performative and strategically immoral. Russian Nazism – “Rashism” – is a product of the rise to power of the societal cynical consensus and the immoral tricksters. The only way to counter them is to oppose economic, political, and intellectual corruption. In the latter case, this means that toxic cynicism should be replaced with the analytically responsible deconstruction of holistic and hence arbitrarily manipulative entities such as “people,” “historical fate/mission,” and “civilization.”