Flushing Out the Soviet: Common Places, Global Genres and Modernization in Russian Television Serial Productions

Abstract

The widespread use of Soviet-era tropes and iconography remains a constant feature of new Russian television series, both locally produced and remade from globally circulating narratives. Combined with Putin-era television’s propensity for nostalgia this pattern raises justified concerns over “re-sovietization” of the Russian media. This article argues that despite new serial shows’ frequent reliance on Soviet mythologies, both their narrative function and their consumption by the audiences negotiate between traditional Soviet/local and new capitalist/global meanings and tastes. The article analyzes melodramatic and comic uses of Soviet tropes and topoi in three highly successful serialized productions of the past decade, The Brigade, My Fair Nanny and Be Not Born Beautiful. Using Svetlana Boym’s concept of “common places” — stable and shared ideas about the Russian identity, the article discusses representations of the community in transition and the integration of new ideologies of social mobility, private life and personal success with the de-ideologized Soviet “common places.”