Questions for discussion:

What vision of Russia’s present and future is put forward by Vladimir Putin? How do the legacies of the Soviet past shape Putin’s Russia?

Set reading (to be prepared for class discussion):

Source: Vladimir Putin, ‘Russia at the Turn of the Millennium’, in Vladimir Putin, First Person: An Astonishingly Frank Self-Portrait by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin (New York: Public Affairs, 2000), pp. 209-219.

Helena Goscilo, ‘The Ultimate Celebrity: VVP as VIP Objet d’Art’, in Helena Goscilo and Vlad Strukov, eds., Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2010), pp. 29-55.

Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: Adventures in Modern Russia (Faber & Faber, 2015). Extracts from Part 1, ‘Reality Show Russia’, pp. 3-35.

Selected further reading:

Samuel A. Greene, Moscow in Movement: Power and Opposition in Putin’s Russia (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2014). E-book.

Anna Politkovskaya, Putin’s Russia (Vintage Digital, 2012).

Richard Sakwa, Putin: Russia’s Choice (New York: Routledge, 2007). E-book.

Richard Sakwa, Putin and the Oligarch: The Khordokovsky-Yukos Affair (London: I. B. Tauris, 2014). E-book.

Valerie Sperling, Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).