Conceptualising the Period: the Logic of Intemporality

The period under analysis – the Putin era – started somewhat unexpectedly on 31 December 1999 when Boris Yeltsin, the first President of the Russian Federation, without prior notice, in a televised speech on New Year's Eve, announced his resignation and appointed Vladimir Putin as his replacement. The period finished – in a more deliberate fashion – in December 2011 when, following elections to the Russian Parliament, a process which many Russian observers found flawed, protests erupted in Bolotnaia Square in Moscow and in other cities. The ensuing events – the re-election of Putin as president in March 2012, the Sochi Olympics in February 2014 and the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 – designate a new historical period for Russia and the Western world. The enacted succession of power from Yeltsin to Putin transformed the perception of recent history and, generally, of time, which suddenly emerged as something serendipitous, esoteric and lacking popular agency – something which, ten years later, the protestors in Bolotnaia Square wished to challenge. One of the ideological symbols of the decade had been the so-called ‘vertical of power’ [vertikal’ vlasti], or Putin's attempt to exercise greater political and administrative control over the regions by disbanding local government elections. The federal government wished to use the ‘vertical of power’ as a metaphor for the country's stability and as a projection of new, upward aspirations. However, the economic and financial crises of 2009 and 2014 completely invalidated such skyward trajectories. The ‘reversal’, this arcane zigzag, became, in my view, a marker of a completely new development.

The first decade of the century can be characterised as a distinct period at the micro-level. For example, the Russian segment of the internet, the Runet, emerged as a new economic tool, and as a social and cultural practice, proclaiming the arrival of the post-industrial era in all its socioeconomic and cultural manifestations. In the cultural arena, the Putin era marked the victory of the society of spectacle when, to borrow from Viktor Pelevin's novel Empire V (2006), ‘glamour and discourse’ dominated social and political life as well as cultural production. On the one hand, digitally enabled networks contributed to the promulgation of glamour as a government-sponsored ideology (Goscilo and Strukov 2010);…