After Vladimir Putin’s re-election to the presidency in 2012, the ideological opacity of the previous two decades gives way to a putinist configuration of conservative communitarianism and populism. The translation of putinism into state policy forms the basis for the authoritarian consolidation of 2010s Russia.
For the first post-Soviet generation, who grew up in the ideologically amorphous 1990s and 2000s, this consolidation signifies the erasure of the Russia of their childhood, as well as the liberal future that had been promised to them. Young Russians whose views and/or identities diverge from official ideology have been both politicised in the state’s fearmongering about the supposed moral decay of their generation, and sociopolitically silenced by the authorities’ measures to inhibit disparate discourses. They experience this precisely as they are coming of age. While diverging opinions are increasingly displaced from official spaces of sociopolitical debate, alternate discourses move to other spaces. Consequently, young authors who do not entirely fit within the Putinist frame voice their alternative visions through word-based art.
This project aims to uncover how young Russians authors of alternate view and/or identity convey their experiences of the rapidly changing reality in 2010s Russia through word-based art. Prose, poetry and lyrically heavy music by such authors are examined with a focus on the dynamic relationship of silenceΛvoice. The theoretical frame therefore incorporates Adam Jaworski’s (1993) theory of sociopolitical silencing and Robin P. Clair’s (1998) conceptualisation of silenceΛvoice as a self-contained opposite. The analysis of word-based art by young Russian authors of different mind provides new insights into youth’s experience of and position in nascent authoritarian systems, as well as into the relations between word based-art, youth culture and (sociopolitical) silenceΛvoice dynamicity.