Mass culture and the production of the capitalist subject in post-communist Russia

Abstract

Russian economic and political reforms of the last two decades have been closely scrutinized in the West for their successes and failures, but much less attention has been paid to the psycho-cultural dimension of these reforms. It seemed taken for granted by most Westerners that inside every docile Soviet body was a free-enterprise spirit just waiting for the state apparatus to founder in order to escape and express itself. This paper takes a different view, arguing that the transformation of Soviet citizens into the self-regulating, entrepreneurial subjects of liberal democracy and the market economy was no less impressive a feat of social engineering than the transition from state-owned to private property and unfettered business competition. Maintaining that mass entertainment was one of the critical means employed by the new post-Soviet business elite for preparing Russians to embrace an unregulated model of capitalism and a consumerist culture, we offer a multi-faceted analysis of one of the ideological apparatuses of the post-communist condition – the Russian adaptation of the television game show, Wheel of Fortune – which were mobilized to dismantle and reshape a complexly overdetermined system of values, beliefs, and attitudes in the process of what we call the production of the capitalist subject.