Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia ed. by Aleksei Semenenko (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia ed. by Aleksei Semenenko Seth Graham Semenenko, Aleksei (ed.). Satire and Protest in Putin's Russia. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2021. xxxix + 197 pp. Illustrations. Notes. References. Index. £109.99; £87.50 (e-book). As its title indicates, this timely and original collection of essays by five authors examines satire as a form of cultural protest in twenty-first-century Russia. The contributions analyse a broad range of satirical texts across media, including stand-up comedy, Internet memes, TV sketch shows and journalistic 'agitainment', the competitive comedy genre known as KVN, rap music, poetry (the 'Citizen Poet' project), queer and camp aesthetics in Russian music and visual culture, street protests and humorous banners ('Monstrations'), and performance and visual art. As Semenenko (editor and author of five of the collection's ten chapters) writes in his Introduction, the book approaches its subject with critical awareness of the two broad, traditional, and purportedly contradictory explanations of political humour's main purpose: 'resistance' (i.e., to effect actual political change) and 'relief' (i.e., to provide a harmless 'safety valve' for otherwise dangerous political hostility). One of the book's strengths is its nuanced scepticism towards this supposed mutual exclusivity. The editor characterizes satirical expression in Russia as 'a process of […] reciprocal confrontation and, in some cases, assimilation and fusion of the mainstream with the opposing tendencies' (p. xix). This proves to be a productive approach, and one that allows the authors to transcend obsolete binaries ('official vs. [End Page 169] unofficial' or 'conformist vs. dissident') that have often characterized the study of cultural production in illiberal and authoritarian societies. Nevertheless, the structure of the book does reflect the dual concepts of 'relief' and 'resistance' acknowledged by Semenenko in the Introduction. Part One is titled 'Satire on a Leash' and Part Two, 'Satire as Protest'. The former includes four chapters — all written by Semenenko — on genres, media and venues that have proven susceptible to partial or complete co-optation and/or censorship by the (Soviet and post-Soviet Russian) state and those supporting the state: stand-up; memes; television satire; and KVN (televised sketch-comedy-team competitions). Semenenko's contextualization of the important recent genre of stand-up (stendap) in the long tradition of Soviet estrada — which also frequented the boundary between the permissible and its opposite — is particularly sharp and relevant. Part Two 'presents five studies of satirical protest that fully or partially managed to escape repression'. The five authors examine the use of satire in music, poetry, street protests, music, and visual and performance art. The chapter entitled 'Transgressing the Mainstream: Camp, Queer and Populism in Russian Visual Culture' by Maria Engström, particularly stands out for its original contribution to the literature not only on satire, but on the state and influence of queer culture in contemporary Russia. Daniil Leiderman's discussion of 'Monstration' — the use of absurd and humorous posters and banners in street protests — convincingly connects the practice to the tradition of Soviet conceptualism, which, he argues, was similarly provocative in its aims. In his Introduction, Semenenko usefully situates the topic of satire in the country's political history, not only pre- and post-Bolotnaia Putinist Russia, but also in the larger context of Soviet culture and its lasting influence. He also acknowledges the methodological difficulties in evaluating the effectiveness of satirical protest, admitting the near impossibility of measuring satire's 'impact on the public' and identifying 'evidence of its influence on public discourse'. In addition, the Introduction places satire alongside other 'modal' or behavioural forms of protest in late- and post-Soviet Russia such as stiob, tricksterism and cynicism, and describes how the state began to exploit these phenomena after the protests of 2011–13 to its own benefit. In addition to its considerable contribution to scholarship on contemporary Russian culture, Semenenko's comparative historical discussion makes it a valuable addition to studies of the place of humour and satire in Soviet culture by such authors as Annie Gerin, Evgeny Dobrenko and Natalia Jonsson-Skradol, and Jonathan Waterlow. This volume also fills a gap in the scholarship on Putin-era culture and cultural politics, which has tended to...