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Reading russia, vol. 3

 | 
Damiano Rebecchini
, 
Raffaella Vassena

Part IV. Towards the Digital Revolution

From Print to Pixel: Reading in the Perestroika, Post-Soviet, and Present Eras, 1986-20171

Birgit Menzel

Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1   An abbreviated version of this chapter was published in German in OSTEUROPA, 1-2 (2019), 119-137. (...)
  • 2   This slogan most likely became a popular autostereotype during the Brezhnev era of the 1970s. Wes (...)
  • 3   “46 percent of the adult Russians do not read books any more.” See B. Dubin, N. Zorkaia, Chtenie (...)
  • 4   For Germany, see the study “Buchkäufer – quo vadis?” for 2017. Between 2013–2017, 17.8% less peop (...)

1In the past three decades, reading in Russia has undergone fundamental changes. If Russians once appeared as “the most reading people of the world,”2 today almost half of the adult population has turned away from reading books altogether.3 The loss of books as a cultural value is a general trend which cannot be separated from accelerating digitalization and global commercialization; indeed, the effects of such developments in Russia are comparable to those seen in similar industrialized countries of the West.4However, in Russia these changes have taken on specific features, both in terms of their quantity and in terms of their lack of a historical precedent. Within three decades, the era of Soviet reading culture has moved from its peak time during the Perestroika years (1986–1991) into a long and agonizing decline. That culture has now almost disappeared, although its shadows are still visible in the present day. This era was characterized by a specific system of symbols and values in which the sacerdotal nature of books and literature remained a distinct feature. At present, the ongoing erosion of this reading culture—with its agents and state-control, deep-rooted in the nineteenth century—can be observed on all levels: book production and trade, reading audiences, habits, content, institutions, and media. Recent efforts have been made by the Russian government to re-establish a national, primarily culture of print reading. They point back to the Late Soviet 1970s, even as key problems for the post-Soviet period still remain to be solved: the reproductive institutions of literary communication, channels of distribution, various types of public libraries and an educational system to prepare young people for reading activities, and diverse functions of reading in an open society. While the book market has become part of the ongoing mechanism of global capitalism, reading Russia has turned into a continent of silent, passive-adaptive stagnation, with occasional segments of the culture leaping into a new digital age with new production forms, habits and material of (social) reading.

  • 5   The term is used here in a descriptive sense, but as it also carries a normative meaning as a spe (...)

2This chapter offers an overview of such changes with a focus on key areas of writing, reading, and selling literature: the book production and publishing business; institutions, agencies, and media of literary communication; reading audiences and habits; reading material (“who reads what where and how?”); and the educational system. It is structured both chronologically and systematically along four different time periods. Each part opens with a general outline of this period, and then addresses all the abovementioned aspects of reading culture.5 The following four different periods can be distinguished, primarily in accordance with political developments:

  • 1986–1991: the years of Glasnost and Perestroika, with a boom of print-matter and the peak of Soviet reading activity on a mass scale;
  • 1991–1999: a landslide of reading, in which the fall of the Soviet Empire and the privatization of the formerly state-governed culture in Russia resulted in a process of chaotic dissolution, agony, and crisis alongside a meteoric rise of popular culture;
  • 2000–2008: under the new regime of president Putin, political power was transferred to the secret service and economic power concentrated in the hands of a few loyal oligarchs with their companies (including the main natural resources oil and gas). This was backed by features of state power and conveyed an impression of political and economic consolidation to the people. It was accompanied by a process of mass cultural adaptation to popular culture, an unprecedented increase of book production, and a rapid rise of the Russian Internet (Runet);
  • 2008–2017: after the financial crisis, reading activity steadily declined, which fueled the final period of Soviet reading culture, especially since 2014 with the new economic sanctions. In this past decade, state control was re-established over the media, in particular television—the dominating national medium of public communication—but also over the educational system. On the other hand, the general public entered the digital age, and with the spread of social media, as well as diversification of independent Internet-based communication, entirely new roles and channels for writing, reading, and selling literature have emerged. With a new generation of post-Soviet digital natives, the cultural gap between generations has deepened. The effects of this on modes of reading and attitudes towards media, as well as state political reading programs in the future, are as yet unpredictable.

1. 1986-1991: Perestroika – The Age Of Mobilization

3Retrospectively, Perestroika represented a brief period of five years, during which the intelligentsia—engaged by President Mikhail Gorbachev as an ally for his reforms of Soviet socialism—became the main mobilizing force of society. Glasnost opened the gates of censorship, and an avalanche of publications coincided with political and, later, economic reforms that had the effect of accelerating the overall decomposition of the Soviet system. One of the basic foundations of this system was the Soviet reading culture. Before focusing on Perestroika itself, the most significant features of this culture should be reviewed:

  • 6   V. Nevskii, “Iz zapiskoi knizhki bibliotechnogo instruktora, 2. ‘Entsiklopediia’ ili ‘Spravochnik (...)
  • 7   This was especially the case since the 1970s, a decade which was dominated by a book shortage in (...)

- Literary centrism: authorities were represented by writers, criics, librarians, and literary journalists, who all served as political agents. Books were defined as primarily educational, i.e. having a cognitive and/or moral function, rather than serving as mere entertainment. In 1923, one librarian vigorously defended the task of Soviet libraries: “The reader should be given not what he wants but what he needs. Does a doctor or therapist prescribe medication according to the patient’s taste or wish? No! It is given to him for an objective purpose.”6
A centralized system consisting of a limited number of state-owned publishing houses which determined the production and business of print-matter.
The distribution of print-matter throughout the country. Books, magazines, and newspapers, promoted the authoritative texts to be read; the majority of readers shared similar topics, books, and texts.
A homogeneity of reading groups: the two metropoles, big cities, and small towns occupying the vast periphery of the empire all shared the same reading material. Literature, political journalism, and literary criticism coexisted side by side.
Intellectuals were considered to be “vlastiteli dum” (masterminds) educating the masses and transmitting their knowledge to the average and mass readers.
Since the 1930s, a strong, established canon of texts ruled homes, schools, universities, and indeed the whole educational system.
While a great number of intellectuals were socialized by way of their home libraries,7 the majority of readers were bound to use public, so-called “mass libraries.” Since the 1970s, the book-shortage (defitsit) had become intentional policy, so that books were considered a status-symbol. Censorship and state-controlled book-production caused a gap between supply and demand, and limited access to on-demand availability in both bookstores and libraries; this led to a black market where (primarily in the two metropoles) print-matter of samizdat (texts from the underground illegal press), and also tamizdat origin (texts printed abroad and smuggled into the country), were traded.

  • 8   K. Clark, Moscow the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture (...)
  • 9   “Komfort nasiliia” is an expression invented by the literary scholar Marietta Chudakova which all (...)
  • 10   Stel’makh V., “Otnoshenie k knige sil’no izmenilos’,” (Interview) in Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial: Pro (...)
  • 11   For an analysis of the culture of TV in Late Soviet Russia see E. Mickiewicz, Media and the Russi (...)

4As Gorbachev’s reforms and call for mobilization took on momentum, the intelligentsia was encouraged by hopes that the masses, after the fall of censorship, would turn to the suppressed legacy of Great Russian Literature (velikaia russkaia literatura), ranging from Mandelshtam and Nabokov to Solzhenitsyn, as their preferred reading matter. Most members of the older generations experienced Perestroika as their second historical opportunity for liberal reforms, after the end of Thaw and subsequent years of stagnation had strangled their hopes and drove them to internal emigration. Perestroika culture was dominated by representatives of the Soviet intelligentsia. It was their peak time and simultaneously the beginning of their long farewell. The Soviet humanitarian intelligentsia, which had developed in the 1930s.8 by incorporating and transforming prerevolutionary historical traditions, saw itself as a placeholder for enlightenment, a speaker for the silent people, charged to express and end all suffering. Some of their distinct features now characterized public discourse: the pathos of the mission to spread universalist values; becoming part of a world-culture of intellectuals; mythologizing moral authority and science as a place of freedom and objectivity. But there was also a culture of debate with high vulnerability and low tolerance for criticism, in which criticism was taken as personal insult and easily turned into a means of verbal warfare. What had most shaped the non-conformist Russian and Soviet intelligentsia was its fundamental moral opposition to any official power and ideology, and corresponding preference for a radical attitude over action and practical responsibility. This now got confused. The intelligentsia was called by the power itself to help mobilize the masses for reforms and act against the enemies of Perestroika. Their privilege, the “comfort of violence,”9 was shaken off, and they could no longer symbolically profit from the book shortage. But with the intelligentsia’s public mobilization—its shift from reading to acting—had impressive effects. The general public (even people in far-flung regions where reading was still one of the main forms of leisure activity and into which samizdat or tamizdat publications had not penetrated) swallowed the histories, novels, and information which had been withheld from them for decades. Even if journals and magazines were the most popular media, books were part of the pastime of reading: in the mid-1980s, about 40-50 million (20-30%) of the estimated 161.2 million readers in the Soviet Union were “active” readers (i.e. they read between 1 and 7 books per month); 50-60% of the adult population read at least one book per month.10 Even though TV had become a much more dominant medium than the ideologically censored, sociologically-inclined research on the soviet reader was allowed to admit or provide evidence for,11 Glasnost triggered an enormous amount of reading activity in the country.

  • 12   Grigorii Baklanov became chief editor of Znamia, Sergei Zalygin of Novyi mir and Vitalii Korotich (...)

5After 1986, thanks to the courageous efforts of intellectuals, artists, writers, critics, and editors—most of them shestidesiatniki, i.e. from the older Thaw generation of the 1960s—more and more formerly suppressed works of literature, philosophy, film, and music were published; censorship and ideological control were lifted; and nonconformist intellectuals were championed and, in many cases, reinstalled into positions of cultural prestige and authority.12 The peak time of reading can be exemplified by the fate of the thick literary journals. They experienced an unprecedented boom, which brought leading journals, such as Novyi mir (The New World), Druzhba narodov (The Friendship of Peoples), and Znamia (The Banner), to average monthly circulations of more than a million. In 1990, Novyi mir, in which Solzhenitsyn’s major works were published, sold 2.7 million copies. In the same year, the weekly paper Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette) was sold 4.2 million times.

  • 13   B. Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte. Die Literaturkritik der Perestrojka (Köln, Wien, 2001), 46; Idem (...)

Nm = Novyi mir (New World); Dn = Druzhba narodov (The Friendship of Peoples); Zn = Znamia (The Banner); Zv = Zvezda (The Star); Mo = Moskva (Moscow); Ns = Nash sovremennik (Our Contemporary); Ok = Ogonek (The Spark; Lg = Literaturnaia gazeta (The Literary Gazette); Vl = Voprosy literatury (Questions of Literature).13

1986 1988 1989 1990
Nm 415,000 1.15 m 1.55 m 2.7 m
Dn 160,000 800,000 1.1 m 800,000
Zn 250,000 500,000 980,000 1 m
Zv 120,000 150,000 310,000 340,000
Mo 500,000 750,000 770,000 450,000
Ns 220,000 240,000 313,000 488,000
Ok 175,000 252,000 385,000 335,000
Lg 4.2 m
Vl 15,000 16,000 16,000 26,000

6These figures illustrate a hunger for information and knowledge about the country’s cultural heritage. In the first period of Perestroika, a unification of culture was envisioned and welcomed by many intellectuals. Homogeneous only in hollow slogans, in reality, that culture had long been divided into many different spheres (official, unofficial, underground, émigré, etc.)

  • 14   Wallpapers existed, after being introduced top-down in the 1920s, for instance rather horizontall (...)
  • 15   Thick literary journals in the nineteenth century included also sections on natural sciences and (...)
  • 16   L. Gudkov, B. Dubin, “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion,” Druzhba narodov, 2 (1988), 168 (...)
  • 17   E. Dobrenko, “Vse luchshee – detiam (Totalitarnaia kul’tura i mir detstva),” Wiener Slawistischer (...)
  • 18   See Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte, 133.

7Perhaps the institutions of Soviet reading culture are best exemplified by the thick literary monthly journals (TLJ). Although there were other, less centralized fields of reading culture,14 TLJ were representative because they embodied a literary culture that was distributed by the intelligentsia from the metropoles via postal service to the peripheries. Although they had a much longer history dating back into the middle of the nineteenth century, these journals, since the 1920s and then again the 1950s, published a specific mix of literature, literary criticism, and political journalism which was different from preceding tradition.15 The majority of new literary texts appeared first in thick monthly journals, including voluminous novels (published serially), and only after their successful publication in periodical form were they published as separate books. Partly due to the long process of censorship, a book’s average time-to-publication was several years long. This bulky system of production and distribution had been established in the early 1930s and, thanks to the more backward technology operating in printing houses, basically never changed until the 1980s.16 A system for ordering books in bookstores, and thus a national system of book storage, did not exist and was never intended to do so. The political directive was that all published books should leave the printing press and local stocks within three months whether they were sold out or not. Thus, monthly journals (literary, popular-scientific, or children’s) were pre-financed by annual subscription and distributed equally among Moscow and Leningrad households and smaller cities and villages throughout the whole Soviet Union alike. Together with the standardized programs of school-reading and the strongly canonized system of literary authorities, official literary culture created the “Soviet reader” via a process which Evgenii Dobrenko has called “infantilization.” Dobrenko described the “ideal of Socialist Realism” in its totalitarian period as an “adult child.”17 After Stalin’s death, state-controlled culture gave way to more diversification. While in the early 1950s, only four thick monthly journals had survived the earlier period, seven new ones were founded after 1956; they included new profiles addressing young readers,18 and, as the grip of censorship was loosened during the Thaw, unofficial spheres of reading emerged.

  • 19   Stel’makh, “Otnoshenie k knige sil’no izmenilos’.”

8But after the Thaw period, many titles disappeared from public and academic libraries: between 1969-1979, 8,000 books by 600 authors were removed from their collections. In the largest library of the country, Moscow’s Lenin Library, as recent as 1983 as many as 1,131559 titles were locked away into special safes (spetskhrany), 80% of them titles of foreign literature. Each year, an average of 33,000 more titles were added.19

  • 20   G. Wilbert, “Entwicklung und Perspektiven der sowjetischen Lesersoziologie,” in P. E. Dorsch, K. (...)
  • 21   G. P. Iakimov, “Chernyi knizhnyi rynok v defitsitarnoi situatsii,” in Kniga i chtenie v zerkale s (...)

9While 85% of the reading population had access to printed literature only through public libraries, intellectuals began to establish alternative, private home libraries in the early 1970s—a period in which only about 10% of all published books could be obtained by public libraries.20 People were informed by samizdat and tamizdat literature or by access to books which had previously been restricted by the intentional shortage. Texts circulated outside of the official publishing system, mostly among intellectuals of the two metropoles and some urban provincial cities. By the mid 1980s, 68.4% of all readers obtained their books on the black market. In 1987, 347 (21.2%) of all the 1,632 newly published literary books were exclusively available on the black market.21

10After 1986, censorship was finally abolished; within just one decade, all of the previously forbidden texts and writers could be published and read by all readers. The privilege of restricted access to knowledge as symbolic capital—and with it, the formerly exclusive status of the Soviet intelligentsia—came to an end. At the same time, decades of ideological conflicts which had developed and existed in a dormant state now erupted, especially after 1990/1991, when all state subventions suddenly ended and the cultural sphere was forced to stand on its own feet economically. Unprepared for the opening of all borders, the boom of “returning” and new literatures from the West (i.e. Russian high literature as well as foreign pulp fiction), unprepared also for privatization, but thrown into market conditions almost overnight, most intellectuals were swept into a state of existential crisis.

2. 1991-1999: Dissolution, Decline, Erosion

  • 22   S. Shvedov, “U knizhnogo razvala. Optimisticheskie zametki,” Druzhba narodov, 1 (1992), 212. Also (...)

11After the exuberant expectations of the early Perestroika years, the sudden unexpected end of the Soviet Union and dissolution of the Soviet state caused an avalanche of chaos in the cultural field and massive disillusionment among the intelligentsia. A surfeit of exciting reading material of all kinds entered the market from inside and outside of Russia. What followed was disorientation and, soon after, a deep economic, social, and moral crisis. In 1992, the sociologist Sergei Shvedov stated that when people were asked about the current state of literature, they gave extremely different impressions: “Catastrophic visions about the downfall of culture, speculations about the taste of mass readers are widespread and range from ‘nobody is reading literature any more today’ to ‘readers pick the wrong stuff, just pulp fiction’.”22 What is expressed here is a trend towards separation and polarization of reading audiences. This trend developed both in the field of literary production and reception, and still continues into the present.

  • 23   One should consider that the stated numbers of copies were often inaccurate; for various ideologi (...)

12After the end of the communist system, not only social and economic conditions, but all traditionally defined roles of literary communication—writing, publishing, distributing, and reading—experienced fundamental changes. The boom of reading ended abruptly after 1991, and a precipitous decline in reading has followed ever since. This development is reflected in the average number of copies distributed by the thick monthly journals:23

1991

1993

1995

Nm

200,000

60,000

28,600

Dn

200,000

45,000

18,000

Zn

419,000

73,000

36,300

Zv

130,000

35,000

22,200

Mo

150,000

35,000

17,100

Ns

311,000

92,000

25,000

Ok

242,000

60,000

29,000

Lg

302,500

Vl

13,000

4-17,000

9,100

  • 24   In the late 1980s, more than 60% of all printing machines in the country were more than sixty yea (...)

13Let us look at the most important changes in social and economic conditions, not least of which are the results of shock privatization. In the early 1990s, all institutions of Soviet literary culture abruptly began to dissolve. The new press law (June 1990) ended the state monopoly in the field of publishing and allowed the founding of private businesses in the cultural sector. All financial support for publishing by party and state was eliminated. Prices for paper, subscriptions, and ultimately for all products related to publishing were removed from state regulation and began to float on the not-yet-established “wild” market (1990–1992). As a result, prices for producing print-matter skyrocketed. Printing houses, printing presses, and large parts of the paper industry broke down after decades of failed modernization and lack of maintenance.24

  • 25   From the late 1980s on, projects aiming at creating private libraries have never been able to sur (...)
  • 26   B. Menzel, “Der sowjetische Leser als Thema der Forschung. Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse der (...)

14Commercialization was followed by political dissolution: writers unions separated and split, consumed by ideological feuds or (more often) fights over liquidation and heritage. State-run publishing houses and thick literary journals, once key transmitters of literature, went into existential crisis or collapsed. The educational system, too, was deeply affected. Libraries experienced a dramatic decline in the 1990s. Different from most other countries, public libraries in Russia were almost exclusively state-run.25 During the 1970s, 120,000 public libraries in the Soviet Union had 90 million registered readers in 1995, only 55,000 such institutions and 59 million registered readers remained. The latter number equaled 21% of the population.26

15One of the most disastrous consequences of privatization after the implosion of the Soviet Union was the collapse of the traditional distribution system of print-matter, which coincided with the rapid decline of its main medium, the monthly literary journals. What once had created the abovementioned homogenous Soviet reading population, i.e. the continuous flow of texts and communication about literature that had connected millions of people, was now interrupted or ended altogether. People could not afford the annual subscription prices, or simply did not have or take the time to read journals any longer, or postal delivery to the peripheries of the country stopped. The centralized system of producing books and journals collapsed.

  • 27   This widely quoted expression was first used by Vladimir Vigilianskii (Ogonek, August 1988), late (...)

16This process was accompanied by an outbreak of ideological fights within the literary community (a “civil war in literature”)27 among writers, critics, and scholars with different political views about the evaluation of the past and future perspectives for Russia and its role in the world. The background of these struggles was certainly the question of who gets power and influence over the huge material heritage of Soviet literary funds and real estate after its privatization/denationalization. Among the readers and writers articulating their views in public (critics, scholars, journalists), some promoted liberal, pro-Western models of reforms and clashed with nationalists who, as the decline proceeded, more and more frequently allied with their former adversaries. Religiously orthodox, anti-communist Russian nationalists unified with “neo-Bolshevist” Soviet patriots on a common basis of anti-Westernism/anti-modernism and the continuous endeavor to educate the reading public. Self-involvement kept the members of the literary and cultural field, especially the ones of the middle (semidesiatniki) and older generations (shestidesiatniki/ Sixtiers), from focusing on long-term problems and possible solutions. The crash of the Soviet literary system was perceived in apocalyptic terms and paralyzed the majority of its members for many years.

  • 28   Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia: vozvrashchenie gosudarstva?”; A. Chernykh, M. Polous, (...)
  • 29   See the paragraph on the Soros foundation below in this chapter.

17However, until the late 1990s, the total collapse of thick literary journals as well as the library system was prevented by massive financial support from abroad. A key role in this was played by several private foundations, in particular the foundation Open Society (Otkrytoe obschchestvo), funded by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros, and the foundation Open Russia (Otkrytaia Rossiia), funded by the ex-Komsomol leader and new entrepreneur-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovskii; these served as a buffer between radical privatization without a proper legal framework and led to a low-level consolidation from the year 2000 on. With the support of Open Russia, the cooperation of 1,000 publishing houses with libraries was initiated, and 15,000 libraries were able to obtain more than 15 million new books. The thick monthly journals were able to survive in the 1990s thanks to this foundation.28 Numerous private persons and public institutions, associations, and philanthropists from abroad helped to keep these institutions from collapsing,29 such that most of the traditional ones survived into the digital age. This process began in 1995/96, when the portal Zhurnal’nyi zal (http://magazines.russ.ru/​) was founded to make many thick monthly journals available online through open access, in parallel to the (from that point forward) meager print edition.

Table 1: Book titles produced annually in Russia 1990–2017

Table 1: Book titles produced annually in Russia 1990–2017
  • 30   Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte, 47; russ. edit., 31-40.
  • 31   А. Il’nitskii, Knigoizdanie sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow 2002).
  • 32   After 2000, trying to survive in an accelerating process of re-monopolization, intellectual publi (...)

18How did this chaos, all these changing conditions, affect the book-production which was supposed to provide reading material for the people? How did publishers react to the challenge of this chaos? In terms of quantity, the number of newly produced titles, which had been amazingly stable in late Soviet book production from 1961-1985, plunged by 30-40%. For instance, the publishing house Sovetskii pisatel’ produced an average of 68 titles per year between 1973–1986; in 1991, it published only 10 titles. The total number of journals dropped to 1/12 of its highest production, i.e. from 5.010 m copies per year to 411 m.30 What sold on the market, whether old or new, was often published hastily and in a disorganized manner. One and the same new book or even collected works by one and the same author were published in different versions, with different covers by different publishing houses, which mushroomed in Moscow and St. Petersburg within a few years. During the first half of the 1990s, not even the obligatory copy of each book published in Russia was given to the State Russian (previously Lenin) Library in Moscow and the other Libraries officially collecting each publication; consequently, the publishing of actual books, and not only the figures thereof, cannot be fully accounted for in this period. Forced to navigate for both popularity and economic success, larger publishing houses began to focus on series in their book production. Serialization became an important trend, not only for large, primarily commercially-oriented ones with a focus on genre literature (detective novels, science fiction, fantasy, etc.), but also for small publishers producing texts for the intellectual elite. Within four years, 220 book series in 1993 multiplied to 1,200 in 1997.31 Publishers of intellectual and avant-garde literature produced series dedicated to various types of literature (translated, historical, philosophical, psychological, esoteric, memoir, etc.) or new, award-winning titles.32

19The locations where people found and bought books changed: vending places ranged from tables in subway stations and boulevards, to specialized intellectual bookstores hidden in subterranean basements or backyards, to large supermarkets and bookstore chains. This diversification of place and setting also reflected the changes in people’s reading-habits, methods of finding reading materials, ways to consume them, and—in case of the small intellectual bookstores—practices of communicating about literature.

  • 33   In the early 1920s, there had been more than 2000 publishing houses in Russia. Gudkov, Dubin “Lit (...)
  • 34   Among the new intellectually avantgarde publishing houses were, for instance, “Ivan Limbakh,” “Ak (...)

20But, just as all times of collapse and radical change in history also gave way to something new, the 1990s became a pioneering and even somewhat flourishing period for different types of private publishing. In the late 1980s there were only 250 publishing houses in the whole Soviet Union, a number which dropped down to 150 by 1991. In 1994, there were already 4,342, and in 2018, the Russian Federation had between 5,500-6,000 registered publishing houses. More than 10,000 licenses were given out for more planned publishing houses to be founded.33 During the 1990s, many small publishers experimented with new models of private business. What naturally came along with this experimentation was a great diversification of both agents and models in the field of publishing and the book-production itself. Clear standards had not yet been established, such that neither national or international authors’ and copyright laws nor translation standards were considered. As mentioned before, a wild market with many parallel publications emerged, and naturally many small publishers had to close soon after their founding. But others survived and developed their own profiles.34

  • 35   See B. Menzel, “Entmythisierung in der russischen Literatur am Beispiel von A.I. Solschenizyn,” i (...)

21Together with the harsh new social and economic conditions for living and reading, the 1990s also brought a decline of traditionally defined literary and cultural authority: the traditional image of the writer as a moral and spiritual leader vanished. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn can serve as an example here. His return from American exile was planned as a glorious reinstallation of the “Great Russian Writer” (“Velikii russkii pisatel’”), but in fact turned into a long process of demystification and deconstruction of the writer-prophet.35

3. The Rise of Popular Culture

  • 36   M. Iampol’skii, “Rossiia: kul’tura i subkul’tury,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 1 (1993 (...)

22After the political frontiers fell, while culture and the publishing business was being privatized, Russia experienced a massive rise of popular literature and culture. Commercialization ended the long-term book shortage and with it the black market shadow economy which had turned books into status symbols. The variety of available printed material greatly increased. Book production and periodicals were forced into following the rules of the market instead of the interests of party and state, whose representatives abruptly refused to take responsibility in the field of culture. Nor did the market follow the interests of the intelligentsia who cultivated the values of classicism or Silver Age. Mikhail Iampol’skii stated in 1993 that mass culture served a more complex function in late and post-Soviet Russia compared to Western countries. While the rise of mass culture in the West was a result of commercialization processes that began in the mid-nineteenth century and were closely connected to the development of the literary market, Soviet conditions of total unification and ideological state monopolization had paradoxically turned twentieth century mass culture in Russia onto a path to diversification: money-driven markets now also channeled differences, individual dreams and desires to the people that had been formerly suppressed.36

  • 37   Some of these authors had begun to publish their novels before the Perestroika. Prokhanov’s first (...)

23The majority of readers turned away from high literature to popular reading materials. Western pulp fiction boomed, and with it, new genres arrived. Hard-boiled detective novels, historical novels, romance, fantasy, mystery, and occult novels were first imported from Western editions. In the latter part of the 1990s, more home-grown Russian literature of this type emerged and flourished, especially the hard-boiled detective novel genre (boevik). Novels about the recent wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, or just about the mafia wars of 1990s-era Russia, brought a wave of popular fame to authors (Daniil Koretskii, Aleksandr Bushkov, Aleksandr Prokhanov).37 Female detective novels (Dar’ia Dontsova, Iulia Shilova, Alexandra Marinina, Polina Dashkova) and Slavophile fantasy novels (fentezi by Iurii Nikitin, Mariia Semeneva) introduced readers to not only everyday crime and formerly tabooed topics such as prostitution, human and drug trafficking, domestic violence, but also fashion, brands, and lifestyle patterns. Such genres established themselves and acquired a new, post-Soviet national flavor. Some of these writers were translated and made their way to an international audience. Others were made into films; such was the case with Nightwatch (Nochnoi dozor), Sergei Luk’ianenko’s fantasy-detective novel which became a blockbuster movie in Russia and also saw release abroad. In some West European countries, these works served as a source of information about the Russian “Wild East.” Series were established by large publishers, drawing from books by both classical (world classics, Russian classics etc.) and popular authors, covering a variety of genres and topics.

  • 38   For an analysis of book covers in this “wild-market” period see B. Beck Pristed, The New Russian (...)
  • 39   S. Zimmer, “Der Mythos von der Macht des Marktes,” in B. Menzel, C. Friedrich (eds.), Osteuropa i (...)

24Freedom came along with disorientation for the readers. Even as they had a wealth of titles to choose from, absent legal framework concerning authors’ rights and the vicissitudes of printing and publishing business complicated those choices. Bestselling novels and books by postmodern elite writers had the same dustjackets.38 Often one and the same writer published his works in several publishing houses with different book covers and designs, often due to a lack of communication between publishers. The book market was utterly chaotic, filled with hastily composed editions, unprofessional translations; publications financed from abroad also appeared, and the market was flooded with what many perceived as “foreign trash.” The 1990s saw an extreme increase of decentralization without the rules of market, without a balance between demand and supply. Thus, wild, unpredictable markets flourished even as—at least during the first half of the 1990s—the idea of the market was mythologized as a self-regulating system.39

4. 2000–2008: Commercialization and the Long End of Russian/Soviet Book Culture

  • 40   B. Menzel, L. Rudova (eds.), “Glamorous Russia,” Kultura, 6 (2008); Strukov, Vlad, Goscilo, Helen (...)

25After the traumatic experience of the 1990s, the Putin administration of the early 2000s set about achieving political and economic consolidation. For the first time, moderate wealth was accessible to a large part of the population thanks to economic growth based on the export of oil and gas, and a glamour wave grasped the country.40 Since 2000, the book market and publishing business have observed the rules of commercialization: both the principles of publishing and roles of decision making have changed considerably. Decision making has shifted from publishers and editors (and often writers and critics) to chiefs of publishing houses, sales managers, and marketing leaders. Book production peaked in 2008, but fell rapidly thereafter. A change of media took place. While print journals and newspapers slowly continued to die, online versions of printed texts came into being, often in parallel editions, without replacing the traditional print-culture altogether. And with political re-centralization and the re-establishment of a state monopoly on the politics of culture—which a limited number of powerful, loyal oligarchs helped to maintain—the former heterogeneous (if chaotic) landscape of the publishing business disappeared. Decisions were made with the aim of achieving a maximum increase of profit in a minimum amount of time. Therefore, much of the book selling business concentrated on serialized forms of publication (“illustrated fiction,” dictionaries, manuals, and hand-books). The visual appearance of books had become part of mass media, including TV public relations, and market technology design., including TV public relations.

  • 41   For films see Gloss (Glianets) by Andrei Konchalovskii (2007); for TV show The Rublev Highway (Ru (...)
  • 42   For the figures, see ROSBIZNES Konsalting and TNS Gallup Media. On Glamour in Russia see Menzel, (...)
  • 43   Iampol’skii, “Rossiia: kul’tura i subkul’tury,” 66.

26In the early 2000s, a fascination with glamour manifested on all levels of society. The changes from a society of distributors to one of consumers, from a text-oriented culture to an image-oriented culture, from ideological to commercial slogans, became most obvious again in the medium of periodicals. Glossy magazines entered the market, many of which were international publications now licensed in Russia (such as Glamour, L’Étoile, Cosmopolitan, Celebrity, GQ, and Hello); others, such as, Karavan and Slon, were newly founded in Russia. Genres of glamour-pulp fiction as well as anti-glamour pulp fiction (glamurnoe chtivo, anti-glamurnoe chtivo) came into being, and with them films and TV series.41 With an annual growth of 13%, periodicals became one of the most dynamic segments of the new Russian economy; in 2006 alone, it represented a 37.5 billion rouble market (equivalent to 1.4 billion US dollars).42 The reading of glamour literature and glossy magazines promoted and offered a civilized lifestyle and liberating sensuality in an upwardly mobile society now less constrained by norms. Glossy magazines represented—alongside TV series, fashion and celebrity talk-shows, and popular literature—the most notable means of cultivating glamour, making it the dominant aesthetic mode of the early 2000s. As Iampol’skii had stated, popular genres served for many readers as a means to reinterpret history, to process formerly tabooed realities such as crime, prostitution, and war, and to express collective desires for a more hedonistic life.43

  • 44   B. Dubin, N. Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008. Tendentsii i problemy (Moscow, 2008).

27As for book production in general, the number of titles (of books, journals, and newspapers alike) kept growing considerably and steadily since 1991, while the number of copies was now dramatically reduced. The number of book titles from 1990–2007 grew by a factor of 2.6 (with a record high of 127,000 individual titles in 2008). If between 2000–2007 the number of titles of newly printed books alone has doubled, the average number of printed copies went down by more than 25%.44

  • 45   According to the representative Levada study Chtenie v Rossii–2008 from 2008, Komsomol’skaia prav (...)
  • 46   In 1990, there were 3,681 journals in Russia, in 2006, it was already 5,429. Dubin, Zorkaia, Chte (...)

28Especially in the early 2000s, most of the smaller ambitious book publishers of the 1990s were swallowed up in the drive towards re-monopolization. Journals and periodicals also experienced change, with traditional periodicals particularly affected by the shift of media. Newspapers with a nationwide popularity almost disappeared, with the exception of TV guides and scant few central papers. One such case is the daily newspaper Komsomol’skaia pravda, which, after a long, loyal Soviet past and 1990s shift towards promoting liberal reforms, chose to adopt a profile somewhere between infotainment and yellow-press journalism in the early 2000s; it has since turned into a mouthpiece for the Putin administration’s nationalist ideology.45 At the same time, numerous new journals and magazines have appeared on the market. In 2006, the income from journals was 37.5 billion roubles (1.4 billion US dollars), i.e. 13% higher than the year before.46

29How did the shift in media correspond with the renewed institutional consolidation of reading culture? And what effect did the political re-monopolization have? As regards the public library system, an ongoing decline, dating back to at least the 2000s, can be observed. Of the 62,600 existing public libraries in 1990, only 48,300 were still functioning by 2006. In 1990, these libraries were used by 71.9 million readers; in 2006, by only by 57.8 million readers. As mentioned before, the number of library goers had already gone down dramatically during the 1990s, especially in larger cities and in the two metropoles (albeit much less in rural areas). Between 2000 and 2008, most foundations which had supported the libraries in the 1990s and helped prevent the total collapse of the system were forced out, and the state regained almost total control over the library system.

  • 47   83% of the population of the Russian Federation watches an average of three to four hours TV ever (...)

30Along with the abolition of pluralism in the media came the rise of a unified national TV culture, one that exhibited characteristic features of the centralized formats and content of the Soviet past. In the 2000s, state control resumed over the public communication sector after the new Putin administration eliminated the power of the media oligarchs Vladimir Gusinskii and Boris Berezovskii. This re-centralization included efforts to regain control over the printing business and the system of public libraries. Watching TV, now reduced to a few central stations, has become Russia’s main leisure-time activity and, at the same time, the main source of information for the majority of the population throughout the Russian Federation.47 In a situation of growing societal disintegration, when basic values like solidarity or communal responsibility seem to have vanished, TV has become the main instrument of national unification.

  • 48   For the intelligentsia, TV was a medium of official and popular (‘low’) culture as opposed to the (...)

31Even though television had already a much stronger impact on society than both official Soviet-era cultural politics and the intelligentsia would have conceded (both promoted the image of the “most reading country of the world”),48 the massive popularity of rival media in the of TV series, talk shows, and news stations since the 1990s and especially the 2000s has probably been a major factor in the decline of Soviet reading culture. Next to popular TV shows like the reality show “House-2” (“Dom-2”) with the “polit-entertainer” Ksenia Sobchak and the Starcult TV series like “Rublevka Live!,” book series were released under the title “glamour-pulp.” Numerous classical Russian and Soviet novels became opulently reproduced as serialized TV films. After Vladimir Bortko’s series of Dostoevskii’s The Idiot (2003) and Bulgakov’s Master and Margarita (Master i Margarita) (2005), new editions of classic series were published. Such television productions represent the only exposure that many younger people have of those novels. However, as we shall see further down in the following period, generational factors also play a role in this development.

32If we take a closer look at the impact of these changes on literary communication, the general trend towards fragmented reading audiences becomes more obvious. As for the best-selling books of popular literature, hard-boiled detective novels with a high profile of explicit violence continue to be most popular. As sociologist Boris Dubin explains, they offer images of empowerment and moral orientation, especially for male readers. Other genres, like romance novels, operate more on the social periphery and attract primarily female readers.

33With the collapse or change of former hierarchies, institutions, media, and cultural authority, the channels for transmitting literature have also changed. Literary criticism has almost completely disappeared from the public sphere into niches of Internet-based communication and specialized media for metropolitan intellectuals. New reading material is now transmitted much less frequently by the thick journals, libraries, and bookstores as it was in the past; now, recommendations by friends or popular TV stars on talk-shows tend to give books their exposure. In 2001, a “National Book Union” was founded as a non-governmental organization, publicly accessible as an online-platform (https://bookunion.ru/​), which has initiated a number of programs, competitions, and mobilizing projects on both the regional and national level, supported by the government and civil society alike.

  • 49   See the Russian Wikipedia-article on “Literaturnye premii Rossii” and the roundtable-discussion “ (...)

34The literary community has reacted to these changes by developing new ways to publish, channel, and promote different levels of literature. Meanwhile, a very diversified system of literary awards demonstrates an ongoing transition from the old Soviet award system to new awards. Prizes differ in terms of their founders (federal state, regional, or local; non-governmental or private; literary organizations or media ones; etc.) status, function, and content (monetary, symbolic). They range from honoring literary quality (Andrei Belyi, Triumf, Book of the Year, Bol’shaia kniga) to national bestsellers (Natsbest) and international visibility (The Booker Prize), from promoting outstanding first publications (Debiut) to works published within one journal (Znamia) or in certain genres (Poet). In sum, there exists a wide variety of prizes, all offering distinct means for readers to orient themselves in the literary field.49 At the same time, book series and new editions, which distinguish themselves in terms of the literary quality or aesthetic outlook, seek to promote specific profiles (authors, genres, topics) and offer readers additional means of orientation.

  • 50   In 1994 the mathematician Maksim Moshkov founded the first online library http://lib.ru., and ano (...)
  • 51   V. Strukov, The (Im)personal Connection: Computational Systems and (Post-)Soviet Cultural Histor (...)
  • 52   See Schmidt’s “Virtual Shelves, Virtual Selves” in the present volume.
  • 53Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2017. Sostoianie, tendentsii i perspektivy razvitiia (Moscow, 2018), 61ff (...)

35Probably the most fundamental change was introduced by the rise of the Russian Internet (Runet). Its effects date back as far as the mid 1990s when the first electronic libraries were founded,50 but its impact on the culture of reading became significant only in the 2000s, when the number of Internet users—especially in the two metropoles and in major cities—increased considerably.51 The rise of the Internet has brought about a shift in reading matter and new media trends, and has influenced reading habits.52 Along with the other social, cultural, and political changes, recent years have witnessed a rising percentage of non-readers compared to the Soviet epoch. According to empirical research conducted between 2016–17, 54% of the entire adult population in Russia today does not read journals at all.53 If we compare today’s situation with the 1980s and 1990s, it becomes clear that what used to be the Russian intelligentsia has fallen more or less into silence during the 2000s. The gap between center and periphery, between metropolitan intellectuals and residents of the periphery, has widened. On the other hand, online libraries and resources for literature are gaining frequency. This is certainly part of a global trend as many old favored journals and online sites fall to the wayside and go out of business, while Facebook, VKontakte, and other such online communities become the leading businesses.

5. 2008–2017: State Control and The Digital Age

  • 54   One of the problems, pointed out by some sociologists, is that statistics still make no distincti (...)
  • 55   Such control is accompanied by an active politics of language, as expressed in the new Law of Jun (...)
  • 56   H. Schmidt, N. Konradova, “VKontakte,” Dekóder 8 (2016); accessed at https://www.dekoder.org/de/g (...)

36Since the late 2000s, two factors have pointed to more significant changes in the near future for the book-market and the culture(s) of reading in Russia: the re-establishment of ideological and state control of the political leadership as an authoritarian regime, and the digital revolution. These became the dominant features of Russia’s new media age, even though some features of a more liberal cultural politics became noticeable during the four years (2008–2012) of Dmitrii Medvedev’s presidency.54 Political programs have been introduced to shape and control the culture of reading in the country.55 From now on, scholarly analysis must distinguish between reading printed books and reading online texts. At the same time, new agents and social networks have appeared since 2006/07. Massive changes have occurred in private and public communication, both in Russia and in the whole post-Soviet territory.56 New perspectives and formats for reading, writing, and publishing have only begun to open up.

Table 4 here: Number of copies printed 1990–2017

Table 4 here: Number of copies printed 1990–2017
  • 57   In 2008, 123,336 new titles of books and brochures were produced, and 20,138 of them were literat (...)
  • 58   N. D. Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed”: sostoianie i tendentsiia razvitii knizhnogo rynka Ross (...)

37The year 2008 marked a peak, and at the same time, a turning point in Russian book production. Notwithstanding the global financial crisis, book production in Russia peaked after several years of sustained growth; the industry witnessed highs in terms numbers of titles and number of copies produced.57 Russia held the third position in the world’s book production, following the USA and China. Even the number of translated books increased considerably. 11.5% of all national book-production in 2008 consisted of translations. Naturally, English was by far the most translated language (accounting for almost 2/3 of the total), followed by French and German. For the first time in many years, the average number of copies increased. These positive figures should not, however, disguise the fact that about 75% of all books were printed in less than 5,000 copies, or that the greatest diversity of titles is to be found in the two metropoles where the market is most heavily concentrated. Thus, 57% of all titles and 85% of all copies were being produced in Moscow.58 But after the peak came a turning point. In 2014, Russia was not among the world’s leading book producers any longer, and did not even rank among the first six nations. One possible reason for that turning point was the rise of social reading. Following the example of similar initiatives in the United States (Goodreads.com), new e-reading platforms such as Livebook.ru, Livelib.ru (“zhivaia kniga,” or “the living book”), and Book-Mix.ru were founded in 2007–2008 (see Beck Pristed “Social Reading in Contemporary Russia” in this volume). Maybe encouraged by the first years of President Medvedev’s liberal politics, a number of start-up e-publishers entered the market. Independent publishing business opened a new chapter of e-commerce on the bookmarket.

Table 2 and 3: Number of bookstores in Russia 1991–2017 and Annual revenue from selling books in Russia 2013–2017

Table 2 and 3: Number of bookstores in Russia 1991–2017 and Annual revenue from selling books in Russia 2013–2017
  • 59Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed.” For comparison, in 1898 there were about 5,000 bookstores in (...)
  • 60   In this paragraph my source is Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed.”
  • 61   I. V. Bondarev, “Sovershenstvovanie organizatsii i upravleniia sferoi knizhnoi torgovli v sovreme (...)

38After 2008, both printed book production as well as reading activity have dropped on all levels, and this trend continues into the present day. The economic situation has tightened, not the least because of the sanctions on Russia, which have been in place since 2014–15. Between 2008–2012, book prices increased by an average of 35%. In 2011, the largest company in the country that stored and distributed books (top-knigi) went bankrupt.59 Within a few years, 600 bookstores throughout the country, many of them independent smaller businesses—they comprise about half of the private booktrade —had to close. Certainly, this corresponds not only to a general global trend from print to digital formats, but also with the rising competition of the online trade, which also began to boom in Russia during these years. Companies like ozon.ru (https://www.ozon.ru/​), the first and leading Russian online retailer (since 1998), and LitRes (https://www.litres.ru/​), a major competitor (since 2006), lead the market. Competing with bookstores are also free online resources for accessing literature (for example, www.proza.ru, and “Wikisource” [“Vikiteka”] at https://ru.wikisource.org). As small- and medium-size publishing houses disappeared, the monopolization trend continued. Of all 5,775 publishing houses operating in Russia in 2017, only 50 had a national profile and a leading position in the market. In June 2012, EKSMO, one of the four giants in the Russian publishing business (next to “Prosveshchenie” and “Drofa” for educational publications), took over AST, which had run 700 bookstores, the majority in the regions. As a result of this fusion, 300 more bookstores had to close, and the closing of 200 more was to be expected as of 2014.60 In 2012, Russia held just the 10th position in the world in terms of title production, and in volume of printed copies, it dropped to the 30th position.61

  • 62   A. O. Chubar’ian, “Znachenie knigi i biblioteki – neprekhodiashchie!,” Bibliotekovedenie, 5 (2001 (...)

39Scholars expressed alarm and called for help from the Russian state as the gap between reading audiences, center and periphery, and different generations all widened. Many scholars saw traditional Russian culture, which they identified first and foremost as book culture, as endangered. The position of Aleksandr Chubarian, one of the authorities of Russian historiography, was shared by many scholars: “Books today are an absolutely necessary attribute of life. Without them, humans can have neither history nor culture nor any idea of the future.”62 The majority of intellectuals sees printed books as the basis of national culture in Russia. From the times when illiteracy was effectively abolished, book culture was thought to guarantee respect for language, specifically in form of the printed word. New textforms and reading activities in different media, as well as novel reading habits, were perceived by many people as a danger to national culture rather than welcomed as a process of diversification of taste.

  • 63   See Volkov, Goncharov, Rossiiskii medialandshaft. Osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2017.

40Returning to the question of media consumption after 2008, we can see that generational factors made books, TV, and the Internet into rivals for people’s attention. As media studies of the Levada-Center in the years 2011–2017 have shown, young people watch 2-2.5 times less television than older generations. At the same time, the percentage of young people between 18 and 24 who get their news and information from the Internet,has been growing steadily since 2014; in 2017, it stood at 60-80%, even though still 60% of this age group watches news on TV as well.63

41The political leadership reacted to cries of alarm about these trends. Managers of public policy integrated this alarm into the generalized big-scare rhetoric of the 2010s: Russia was being threatened by the outside world, including by global slide into decadence. Since Putin has declared his policy to be a fight for basic values and culture, the decrease of reading as a central cultural activity is framed as a “fatal loss of the ability to compete” with the rest of the world (i.e. America and Western Europe); thus, maintaining the culture of reading has become a deadly serious matter, one that requires the mobilization of the entire population. Since the mid 2000s, the political leadership has been raising concerns about the state of public libraries, and their recovery became one of the priorities of cultural politics on the agenda for 2030. The Federal Council and President Putin himself addressed the crisis of libraries in his annual speech to the nation in April 2007:

  • 64   V. V. Putin, Poslanie Prezidenta RF Federal’nomu Sobraniiu ot 26.4.2007 ; accessed at http://www. (...)

In our country a unique system of public libraries was once established, one comparable to nothing else in the world. However, as this system has been underfinanced for many years, we have to acknowledge that it has collapsed. It is necessary to revive libraries in our country on a contemporary level.64

42In 2007, a new state program to develop the national reading culture was promulgated: the National Program for Support and Development of Reading.65 This program has triggered a large number of central, regional, and local initiatives, as well as organizations, awards, competitions, and new institutions like the “years of literature” (2018), including the establishment of a unified national e-library network.66 The same year, 2007, was also remarkable in the global digital age. The smartphone, a small portable telephone with an integrated personal computer, was commercialized and rapidly began to flood the market. The new generation of portable tablet computers marked a new stage in the digital revolution of communication technology. Putin’s National Program aims at overcoming what was seen as a “systemic crisis” by “mobilizing the interest of the masses to read printed literature.” Public libraries are advised by political administration not to be neutral any more, but to acquire books according to a national social and political program which aims at patriotic education, environmental enlightenment, shaping a positive image of Russia, and recruiting for election campaigns. The Public Chamber of the Russian Federation was also advised to make up a blacklist of book titles which are purportedly harmful to the basic interests of society and should not be tolerated. To achieve Putin’s stated goals, and bring school reading materials into line with these new programs (as well as facets the official language policy), a new “Presidential Library System,” named after Boris Yeltsin, has been founded throughout the Russian Federation, with a federal center as well as regional and local branches.67 Libraries receive funding to fill and update their collections again, to restore old buildings, build new ones, and at least begin to modernize their technological system into the electronic age.

  • 68   Menzel, “Der sowjetische Leser als Thema der Forschung.”
  • 69   Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia.”

43Experts like Valeriia Stel’makh, the former head of the Reading Section of the State Lenin Library, are not optimistic about such programs’ ability to elevate levels of reading activity among the population and instead see more negative aspects in this new political agenda. It aims to preserve old book collections rather than institute reforms in the ways that would be necessary for a digital, twenty-first-century transformation. According to Stel’makh, its main goal is providing ideological directions and instituting a new state censorship apparatus; indeed, the program seems more similar to that observed in the Soviet 1970s—one ideology for all.68 A blacklist of books which must not be obtained by public libraries has been established by the Public Chamber of the Russian Federation; since none of these books will be publicly available in libraries anymore and, like in the Late Soviet era, are kept only in closed collections of certain libraries with limited, controlled access, this represents state censorship in all but name.69 The majority of the regional and local apparatus is still stagnating. Unlike the full-scale re-establishment of state control over public TV and radio, which today considerably shape the ideological and cultural mass consciousness of the population in Russia, neither the state’s attempt to regain control over the printing business nor its oversight of the public library system has had any serious effect on the masses’ reading attitudes. Another sign of the new state program’s ineffectiveness in encouraging and developing cultures of reading is that they are almost unknown to average readers. In 2008, 90% of the population did not know of the program’s existence. This might change, however, if obligatory reading will be institutionalized and the digitalization of libraries progresses.

44In January 2012, in a speech on the “National issue” (Natsional’nyi vopros) which (then Prime Minister) Putin gave before seeking a third presidential term, he expressed his core political agenda: the goal of establishing a “unified cultural code” in Russia. Putin directly appealed to the public for a program of a normative patriotic education with clear, obligatory reading lists, excluding titles blacklisted by censors. Blacklists of reading matter have a long tradition in Russia, going back to the pre-revolutionary Russian empire in the nineteenth century.70 Taking as his model US universities’ efforts to create a Western literary canon, Putin suggested establishing a list of 100 books which should become obligatory reading for every student in Russia. The pride of the “reading nation” should be re-established by way of “subtle cultural therapy” and ultimately molded into “one historical process.” Concourses and competitions were to be organized along guidelines provided by these reading programs. In tracing the Russian nation back to its linguistic and literary roots in the Russian Primary Chronicle (i.e. the Nestor Chronicle) and indexing Dostoevskii’s idea of a Russian mission to the world, Putin made it clear that reading should become a pillar of his national resurrection-of-values program: “The citizens’ task in the education system is to give each and every one an absolutely obligatory amount of humanitarian knowledge which builds the foundation of popular self-identification.” Thus, the path back to a strong canon—a norm to which Soviet citizens had been subjected for five decades under the doctrine of Socialist Realism—was reopened. In 2012, a list of 100 obligatory books for schoolchildren in Russia followed.71

  • 72   M. V. Zagidullina, “Podrostki: Chtenie i Internet v povsednevnoi zhizni,” Sotsiologicheskie issle (...)
  • 73   Volkov, Goncharov, Rossiiskii medialandshaft. Osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2014.
  • 74   L. Borusiak “Kakie by knigi v spisok ni voshli, oni ne budut prochitany,” Troitskii variant, 113 (...)
  • 75   For the suggested list see https://echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/921868-echo/ (accessed February 25, 2 (...)

45So, what can be said about the status, role, and function of reading in this period? Along with a general decrease of reading activity and the rise of social reading, there is a widening gap between center and periphery, between generations, between attitudes towards books as objects and other technological means of reading, together with a further fragmentation of reading audiences and material. While education role and gender play a meaningful part in this process, it is probable that the most significant factor is the de-sacralization of reading printed books.72 Interest in a traditional canon of books which had intellectually and morally shaped the mindsets of several generations has almost disappeared, especially in the young generation. During the first decade of the new millennium, the number of people who never read books, buy books, or even enter a library has increased considerably. While 83 % of the respondents in a representative study admit that they watch several hours of TV per day, another study from 2014 shows that, since 2003, 59-67% of all adult readers never read any journal with political or economic content.73 According to studies conducted by the Levada Center, the number of non-readers increased from 19% to 36% between 2000 and 2009; 60% (previously 30%) never buy a book or even take books from friends; and about 90% of all population never enters a library or orders books online.74 As much as Russian culture has traditionally been defined as “book-culture” and the function of reading has been framed as educational, this new abstinence from reading print books can be understood as a reaction against authoritative norms, even when the influence of the digital media is accounted for. After Putin’s suggestion of establishing a canon of 100 must-read books, many organizations, journals, and even the Moscow radio station “Ekho Moskvy” sent out calls to the population for nominations to this list. The response was massive and often enthusiastic. “Ekho Moskvy” received 2,000 letters with 2,700 suggested books. However, journalists concluded that these letters were mostly sent by members of the intelligentsia, who still maintained that reading was a sacralized activity, the fulcrum of culture and the main—indeed, the only—way to change one’s life. Hence, the decline of book reading would mean the end of culture itself.75

  • 76   This is based on a study (conducted by Liubov’ Borusiak from the Levada Center in 2009–2010) of 5 (...)

46However, attitudes towards reading and reading activity among intellectuals remains highly ambivalent.76 While men read much less, the cultural code of reading is still strongly defended by women, and more so in the provincial middle class than in the metropoles. In online discussions (populated mostly by young, primarily female parents) concerning the uses and problems of reading, it is often suggested that classical literature, including Pushkin, Tolstoi, Lermontov, etc., is written in an alien style not understood and therefore no longer accepted by children. Three different attitudes among parents can be distinguished. One group of parents continues to read regularly and convey their love and value of high literature (including Russian and foreign classics as well as contemporary literature) to their children. Another group has, for a long time now, not read for themselves, but continue asserting to their children the importance of reading as an educational necessity, treating it like a bitter medicine. Some of them express shame about this, especially when they helplessly face conflicts with their children’s opposition to their own normative, hypocritical behavior. The third group of mothers openly, sometimes even aggressively, desacralizes reading. They declare book culture a thing of the past and dismiss reading books and literature as an odd legacy of the Soviet age which should be overcome. Sometimes the topic even shifts from culture to medicine, as these mothers consider reading to be damaging to their children’s health. There are young wives, who defend ways of life without reading: “My husband has a successful career without reading any book!” The majority of women in these blogs, however, belong to the second group with ambivalent attitudes.

  • 77   Borusiak, “Kakie by knigi v spisok ni voshli, oni ne budut prochitany.”

47A different perspective is offered when we look at attitudes and preferences of the younger generation itself, attitudes expressed mostly on the Internet. Several studies of blogs and VKontakte (the Russian equivalent of the Facebook social media platform) offer information about the extent of the youth’s abstention from books and literature, attitudes towards and preferences of reading activity, and reading habits and content.77 An ever-growing number of young people has come to prefer communicating online. But does social reading help to promote books, or does it tend to replace them? We do not yet know.

  • 78   The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide Study by the OECD to evalu (...)
  • 79   O. Karpenko, M. Bershchaskaia, Iu. Voznesenskaia, “Mezhdunarodnoe issledovanie PISA i problemy ra (...)
  • 80Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2018: 16. For children’s reading see Kolosova, “Chtenie rossiiskikh detei (...)

48What we do know is this: the educational system, especially in the form of schools, seems to play a crucial role in the young generation’s rejection of book reading. Even if there is a general quantitative decrease in reading among families, the vast majority of children still grow up observing some degree of reading activity—mostly being reading aloud to by female family members (mothers and grandmothers), and later by themselves. The international PISA Study78 of 2005 confirms that Russian children learn to read faster, more readily, and love to read more than Western European children.79 Here, it is remarkable how stable the canon of children’s literature remained through the turmoils of the 1990s and 2000s. Kornei Chukovskii is still, in the long term, the most popular children’s writer in Russia today.80 But the situation changes significantly when young people enter high school and college. Outside of obligatory school reading, leisure-time reading for the majority of young people ends altogether. Some of Glasnost’s banner inclusions to school curricula, such as Solzhenitsyn’s documentary novel The GULag Archipelago (Arkhipelag GULag) and George Orwell’s dystopian science fiction novel 1984, sought to establish the liberatory power of reading and the oppressive nature of censorship; although these texts remain obligatory on school syllabi, the younger generation’s generally negative attitude about reading literature seems to prevail over the stirring content matter of such texts.

  • 81   L. Borusiak, “Liubimye avtory, liubimye knigi: chto chitaet sovremennaia molodezh’. Po dannym ana (...)
  • 82   For comparison, some results from earlier studies: In 1991, 48% of youth responded that they read (...)
  • 83   Vasil’ev, “Istoriia knigi i knizhnoi kul’tury. Ot tipografskogo iskusstva k knizhnoi kul’ture”; I (...)
  • 84   E. V. Krylova, “Knizhnaia kul’tura segodnia. Podkhody k opredeleniiu i soderzhanie poniatiia,” Ve (...)

49Liubov’ Borusiak’s representative analysis “Reading of the Russian Youth,” based on a 2012–2014 study by the Levada Center, sheds some light on the context.81 Only 20% of all young people in these blogs responded that they read regularly, while 43% said that they read only sometimes, and 37% never read any literature at all.82 The column “My favorite reading” in the online personal profile card was filled only by 9% of the users. More remarkable are the numerous explicitly critical statements in this column, such as “I don’t read!” “I hate reading!” and “I’ve had enough of these books!” As for material that is actually read, foreign fantasy literature and horror genres tend to dominate. There does not seem to be much difference between the preferences expressed by those in the metropolitan centers and the periphery. Conclusions about the relationship between off- and online reading activity among the younger generation (age 11 and up) remain controversial. Some people, like the scholar of book history Vladimir Vasil’ev and the poet Iuri Kublanovskii, see in the Internet a threat to book culture and hold it responsible for the general decline in (offline) reading activity,83 while other, often younger scholars, such as E. V. Krylova, Elena Kolosova, and Marina Zagidullina,84 paint a more complex picture; they see youths who have adopted positive reading habits and attitudes and make more specific and distinctive use of the Internet to enrich the information about or context of their reading experience. According to some of these younger scholars from the Moscow Higher School of Economics, the youth prefer (inter-)active forms of reading. They would rather be co-authors instead of passive receivers of educational, intellectual, and moral instructions or messages. Being readers and viewers at the same time, by films—often books turned into movies, both in movie-theatres and on TV –, they see reading as an entrance into alternate realities. Russian and most Soviet classics are alien to them not only because of the texts’ language and style, which they often find strange and inaccessible, but also because they cannot establish any personal connection to the narratives and stories that they encounter in these texts. For many, reading is a way to deliberately escape actual reality. For others, it is an access to an alternate world which serves their wish to be free, to imagine, and communicate personal matters.

  • 85   Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008.

50But what can be said about the people who still continue to read books, literature, and contemporary literature offline? Their number has massively shrunk compared to the 1990s and before, but qualitative studies show that these readers make distinctive choices, derive much more intense satisfaction from their reading experience and often communicate as much to a small circle of like-minded readers.85 The most active—if not the most numerous—readers today in Russia have become the young, even youngest citizens. The subgroups of readers who engage in reading consume not only newspapers, textbooks, pragmatic material (i.e. encyclopedias and dictionaries), and literature, usually find what they look for and are quite satisfied with this experience.

  • 86   According to the study of 2008, 51% of the adult male population never reads a book versus only 4 (...)
  • 87   Regular readers of books today are more female than male, and typically number among the young, u (...)

51According to current empirical studies, active readers (i.e. people who regularly read books in print or/and on the Internet) are to be found today mostly among urban, metropolitan, highly educated youth and women between the ages of 30-40. Women generally read more often than men (and quantitatively more, though different material) in the provincial regions than in the metropoles.86 Since readers can choose whatever they want to read, the most active readers have expressed great satisfaction with their reading experience. Of the approximately 25% of people who read books on a regular basis,87 many pass along recommendations, and there is a wide-spread communication about reading and books in private circles and communities. Thus, it comes as no surprise that the main channels by which readers encounter new reading material have become recommendations by friends and family, followed by texts advertised in bookstores and recommendations by public figures on radio and TV talk shows.

  • 88   Borusiak, “Liubimye avtory, liubimye knigi,” 93.
  • 89   Pelevin was ranked 37th among leading authors, Vladimir Sorokin 295th, Eduard Limonov 435th. Boru (...)

52If we look at online-based evidence of the reading audience (which applies more to the younger generation), there are about 50,000 closed groups—often very small—of people dedicated to literature and reading on the VKontakte platform.88 When it comes to these users’ favorite authors, any sense of a homogeneous canon has vanished. In the abovementioned study, 1,516 authors and 4,757 books were selected as favorites. While contemporary foreign authors are among the most favored, contemporary Russian writers are among the least, as is poetry and most literature from before the nineteenth century. Only 3% of the users mention contemporary literature, including authors such as Pelevin and Akunin.89 Authors of the Soviet era, both of the official and the unofficial canon, are practically absent in users’ list of favorite authors; few exceptions, such as Venedikt Erofeev and Sergei Dovlatov, exist. The one overall favorite author of all readers is Mikhail Bulgakov, whose novel The Master and Margarita provides the frequently posted quotes from all literature (specifically the mantras “To each man it will be given according to his beliefs,” and “Never ask for anything! Never for anything, and especially from those who are stronger than you”). The second favorite author as indicated by these online users is Paulo Coelho, the Brazilian best-selling writer, and his novel The Alchemist is often cited specifically. His image among professional critics is often negative, but Coelho remains very successful on an international level (and in Russia is favored more by female than by male readers). The third favorite author is Fedor Dostoevskii, followed by Lev Tolstoi, J.K. Rowling, Steven King, and John Tolkien, all who are listed before Aleksandr Pushkin, which ranks only on the 8th position.

  • 90   Bondarev, “Sovershenstvovanie organizatsii i upravleniia sferoi knizhnoi torgovli”; Perova, Sukho (...)

53Among all posts regarding users’ favorite readings, there is one remarkably unanimous exception. Among all users of the VKontakte platform, the top-ranked author is the German writer Erich Maria Remarque. Metropolitan, highly educated, and provincial users alike all name this author as one of their most favorites. He is among the top-translated authors of foreign literature, and the online-group on Remarque has 200,000 members. Thanks to his anti-fascist novel Three Comrades (1936), this author was one of the leading foreign authors of the official Soviet canon, appearing on obligatory school reading and recitation lists from the 1930s on. According to online evidence, Remarque ranks even before George Orwell and Hermann Hesse. Thus, we might conclude that some continuity in literary authority has survived the Soviet era, both from the official and from the unofficial canons.90

6. Consistent Traditions, Hybrid Forms, And New Developments

54So, despite political efforts to counteract the desolation of the public library system, the three basic problems of the post-Soviet book market and the culture(s) of reading, which have been described above, remain at present unsolved and suggest a problematic persistency of traditions:

  • the insufficient and ineffective distribution of printed matter and books throughout the country stand in the way of a demand-based book market economy (remember the bankruptcy of one of the largest distributors, “Top-knigi,” in 2011);
  • the widening gap between, on the one hand, a very small sector of printed books and material with a maximum diversity of titles available to a highly educated minority that interacts with a global reading culture; and, on the other hand, a huge segment of non-metropolitan, non-highly educated readers, i.e. the majority of the population, for which rates of illiteracy have unfortunately been rising and for whom the stock of accessible titles is becoming more and more reduced;
  • the weakness or absence of literary cultural institutions, channels of distribution, various types of public libraries, and an educational system that inadequately prepares young people for a variety of reading activities.

55But as a growing number of culturally and technologically advanced intellectuals become aware of these problems, more innovative and interesting paths to non-traditional solutions are likewise opened. The digital age will certainly continue to have an effect on the structure of publishing, bookstores, and libraries in Russia, but also on the production of literature itself, and indeed on the whole process of literary communication. While prices for electronic publishing have begun to drop since the 2000s, book production becomes ever more expensive. Apart from mass-produced bestsellers, as mentioned before, available copies of most given titles tend to be dropping. The journalist and literary critic Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii predicts, on the one side, an upcoming division into printed book production with a minimal number of copies (1,000-5,000) for a variety of readership niches, and on the other, a more robust e-book production providing pulp fiction for the mass reader and contemporary literature for the more highbrow reader. He sees some new opportunities connected with this transformation for the Russian book market. A tabula rasa of sorts allows for a more radical break with traditional institutions and could help create new structures. What can already be observed in the metropolitan cities is that this situation speeds up the process of creating a new, young generation of digital native readers. Another feature is that authors’ rights have not been as strongly regulated in Russia as in other European countries, which allows for experimentation with new models of publishing. New opportunities are likewise available for authors themselves. They can now directly communicate with their readers or even sell their books online. Traditional intermediary institutions for the production, promotion, and distribution of literature such as publishing houses, journals, libraries, and organizations will eventually diminish or even lose their basic functions. This should have an effect even on the contents and poetics of literary texts and on the future role of the author in society.

  • 91   Arkhangel’skii states that there has been a certain tradition in Russia: whenever new technologie (...)
  • 92   Since 2010, the writer Linor Goralik, for example, collected money for several children’s book pu (...)

56Radical changes in the production of printed matter in Russia have already taken place in the 1990s, when the whole system collapsed. The scale of challenges and changes that correspond with the digital revolution are similar. At present, this effect is still much less noticeable in the United States, but it is already more palpable in Russia than in other European countries. The first ones to explore new strategies and ways to shape this future book market and culture(s) of reading were those writers who took the process of writing, publishing, and even selling books into their own hands.91 In 2011/12, the popular science fiction writer Sergei Luk’ianenko began to sell some of his novels himself online—an experiment Stephen King had first made in 2010 with some success. In spite of the moderate economic result and the fact that 90% of the books were downloaded illegally and began to be circulated via Internet-piracy, this experiment served as a breakthrough and inspired more to follow. In 2012, Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii published his novel first electronically and immediately afterwards in print. Moreover, the electronic publication was accessible both through contracts with electronic publishers and bookstores throughout the country and directly online for individual readers who paid a voluntary price. A third experiment was made by Boris Akunin, the popular author of historical detective novels who, in 2012, sold one of his novels in two different editions online directly to the readers, one for a low price and another version for a higher one, depending on design and illustrations. Since 2012, videoclip trailers have been introduced in Russia which promote new books, a form of advertisement not meant for TV nor public places but exclusively designed for online trade. Writers can produce and design their own commercial packages for selling their books. Some writers have begun to finance certain typographically ambitious publications through crowd-funding.92 This multimedia format will probably also further diminish the distance between textual and visual presentations of literature. New generations of readers might call for a much more multimedia-based production and presentation of literature, a process which may bring writers, artists, and directors into a much closer relationship with each other.

57These few experiments allow us to cautiously sketch some predictions on the effect of the digital revolution on the future cultures of books and reading in Russia:

  • 93   The number of texts on these portals has grown into several tens of millions and became a success (...)

58The possibility to publish literature online will diminish, if not abolish the strict division between professionally and independently/individually produced, published, and distributed texts. But perhaps self-publishing and professional publishing, as two co-existing models, will, in the long run, reinforce each other, just like samizdat coexisted with state-run publishing in the late Soviet period. The first type may become a niche defined by low download numbers, while the second grows exponentially, as projects such as “stihi.ru” and “proza.ru,” where people can upload their own poetry and prose, have shown.93 However, while the mass of texts will drown in the online ’pit of graphomania,‘ long-acknowledged, canonical literary texts will appear only in the form of printed publications which, in this process, would regain prestige. Some young authors who began on the ’graphomania platforms‘ and whose texts were eventually published in thoroughly edited printed books—and, what is more, translated into several languages—have confirmed this.

  • 94   Arkhangel’skii, Opyt izdaniia i rasprostreneniia elektronnoi knigi.
  • 95   Perova, Sukhorukov, “Knigoizdanie v Rossii v 2017 godu”; Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed,” ass (...)

59One of the most promising innovations for the Russian book market is the print-on-demand business model. Together with online bookstores and the distributors which began to establish themselves in the first years of the 2000s, as well as the transfer of central literary periodicals to online portals and the establishment of online libraries, related Internet-based phenomena have come into existence. For example, the platform www.ridero.ru, established by a team in Ekaterinburg in 2014, presents an interesting solution for the problem of distribution: any author can place a text into a variety of layouts, upload it to the site, and sign contracts with Internet bookstores in Russia or abroad to secure authors’ rights. Together with the online-publication and distribution of literature, readers anywhere in the country can order print-on-demand versions of the books which will then be sent to them by mail.94 Although this segment of the market is growing fast, it is still relatively small and brings up a host of legal problems.95

  • 96   See https://нэб.рф/about/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

60Finally, the library sector, which has primarily been discussed here as an institution in decline with a mountain of barely solvable problems, has likewise profited from the digital revolution. As part of the National Reading Program, the “National Electronic Library” (NEL)96 was founded by the Russian Ministry of Culture in 2008 with the goal of creating “a unified space of knowledge.” All public, academic, national, regional, and special libraries are being digitized to provide open access online. This amazing innovative step offers the entire Russian population open access to the country’s largest body of printed matter. It is also a great achievement for the international scientific community. The project of the National Electronic Library initiated by the state, together with some of the private publishing entrepreneurs discussed here, permit the cautious prospective that, realized on a large scale, Russia might solve many current problems by leaping right into the next technological generation.

Conclusion: The Long Shadow of Soviet Book Culture and Some Sparks of New Beginnings

61The few years of Perestroika, with their unprecedented boom of reading, highlighted the cache of the Russo-Soviet intelligentsia one final time, turning them into an ally of the leader for political reforms and using them to mobilize the masses. People hungered for previously suppressed information and literature. Hundreds of thousands of periodicals, thick literary journals, and illustrated magazines passed through the hands of readers around the country, and the intelligentsia once again hoped to realize their historical mission of bringing high culture to the masses. But with privatization, commercialization, and the downfall of the Soviet Union, the boom of reading abruptly ended.

62Some achievements were made and remain in effect, however. The Soviet system of censorship was abolished, and even if new cases of censorship have occurred since then, it is incomparably less onerous than in Soviet times. The notorious book shortage of the planned economy ended, making it possible for readers to purchase the books they really wanted to read, provided that they had the money and access to an online or physical bookstore. The number of newly published books has been continuously growing ever since the early 1990s, and has now long surpassed the Soviet records both in terms of sheer numbers titles and copies produced. In 2008, more book titles were produced in Russia than ever before.

63Nevertheless, after 1991, fundamental changes to the book industry occurred, and a long decade of dissolution began. The whole system of traditional literary communication—public libraries, schools, universities, literary criticism, journals, the system of distributing printed matter—collapsed. This was followed by a massive devaluation of the intelligentsia and an erosion of Soviet reading culture. Former institutions of literary culture not only lost their high symbolic value and authority, but also their previous role as organizers of literary and cultural life and modelers of literary reception and interpretation.

64What changed along with the historical conditions was also the material that people read. In the past few decades, the culture of reading has been shaped by two interests: obtaining pragmatic information and knowledge (in handbooks, encyclopedias, dictionaries, etc.) and acquiring entertainment. People of all social strata, genders, ages, and regions have turned primarily to recreational reading. Popular genre fiction now dominates reading activity. Foreign fantasy and detective lead the way, regardless of readers’ age, region, social status, or level of education. More than anything else, genre fiction and materials on fashion have become decisive reading trends. Middle-aged and aged readers mainly use literature to escape from the reality of everyday-life, especially women and readers in the provincial regions.

  • 97Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2017, 51-65.

65Over the past two decades, as the number of books produced kept increasing, the number of actively reading people has continuously and significantly fallen. Today, half of the population has stopped reading books altogether. This includes printed periodicals, either purchased individually or accessed through public libraries. In speaking about reading here, we mean the traditional reading of printed texts, not the reading activity as such, which may have even increased considering the time people now spend in front of monitors, smartphones, and screens. Certainly, the Internet and the whole shift in media which digital technology brought along with it, has had a major impact on this development. This can be observed particularly after 2007, when portable digital media entered the mass market. The Internet has not yet been able to compensate for this loss or to significantly shape the general culture of reading.97 Scholars and critics have correlated the general collapse of reading with a general loss of basic moral values, with the increase of nihilism in society, with the ever more prevalent impact of the Internet, and with the negative influence of mass-culture generally.

66However, a closer look at reading audiences, habits, and preferences has revealed a more complex picture. One of the characteristics of Russian society in the 2000s is the absence of general authority in culture, including literary culture. Disorientation and disillusionment go hand in hand. As Internet-based communication about reading has shown, children and young people especially have little access to the traditional canon of literature, both classical and Soviet. This literature has become largely alien to them due to its language, style, and content. But many young people also show little interest in contemporary Russian literature. The younger generation has embraced changes in technologies of reading, and their abstention from the printed book has been explained as a general opposition to the sacrosanct status of books in Soviet and post-Soviet culture and to obligatory reading for purely educational reasons, as mandated by authorities, school, and state, rather than the family. Reading books outside of the obligatory syllabus at school seems to be met by many with silent rejection of cultural authority and the Soviet past, which is another reason behind the general abstention from literature among young people.

  • 98   In a demand-based book market economy, the publishers would be the ones to blame.

67A National Program for the Support and Development of Reading was launched in 2007 by President Putin in order to mitigate the alarming decline of public libraries, raise the reading activity among the population, and proceed with the centralized digitization of printed matter. But given the patriotic intention at work in the creation of a unified space of culture and new obligatory reading lists, much of this program clearly aims at re-establishing the Soviet past—and in this respect, it fails to capture the interest of the young generation of digital natives. Thus, to a certain extent, both the state and several generations of the educated intelligentsia might be held responsible for their failure to meet the challenges of transforming the culture(s) of reading.98

68The main groups of active and regular readers in the population today, outside of children, are middle-aged women and highly educated urban youth. It seems that reading activity (including the reading of literature) continues only when young people were socialized in families with home libraries, where the love of books and reading could be passed on to the next generation. These readers are more satisfied with their reading experience, and adopt open, cosmopolitan attitudes and reading habits and often exchange recommendations with others. In-groups of readers independently navigate both the book-market and the Internet, choosing for themselves what they want to read, but rarely stepping outside of their circles.

69Several problems of the culture(s) of reading in Russia still remain unsolved. Almost half of all books produced do not reach readers throughout the country. For smaller towns and villages, new books often remain entirely inaccessible. Consequently, the number of copies has considerably been reduced, while the number of public libraries, which represented the most popular place to obtain reading matter in the late Soviet period, has dramatically been reduced. In print communication—books, journals, newspapers—there has been a clear fragmentation of readerships, a break-up into various small groups and segments of readers that practice almost no communication with each other.

70The fragmentation of reading audiences has caused a widening gap between social and cultural groups, between various communicative communities (center versus periphery, more versus less educated groups, more versus less successful professionals, leading versus rank-and-file workers, etc.). At the same time, a national pseudo-unification has emerged. As cultural activity in public space has decreased over the course of the 2000s, for the majority of the population, the act of reading books, journals, and newspapers has been replaced by watching TV, a medium which has been taken over by, and is now again fully controlled by, the state. Compared to the late Soviet period, the years of Perestroika, and the 1990s—that is, a wide-ranging period defined by systematic projects seeking to transform Soviet society—contemporary Russian society treats culture and reading quite differently. Both the social fragmentation and, paradoxically, popular unification into a “society of TV watchers” should be seen, however, as related phenomena. If we compare attitudes toward reading alongside the general leisure time activities from the late Soviet period until the present, we locate a general trend among the population of the Russian Federation since at least 2000: a tendency towards passive adaptation to social changes, to private communication in closed small circles, and to the avoidance of active communication with people outside these circles of relatives and friends.

71We can conclude that both the definition and the idea of reading have drastically changed during the past three decades: from the inviolable, sacralized union of reading and the printed book as a defining aspect of Soviet culture, which was preserved and inherited from the prerevolutionary intelligentsia—to a number of unspecified modes and reading formats printed on paper or projected on screens. While reading used to be a standard part of literary and societal communication, for the contemporary public, reading is primarily a pastime, and everything beyond that pastime is determined with reference to function. There is a self-evident trend towards the separation and polarization of reading audiences which might cause alarm, as in the reactions displayed here by some scholars, or it can be seen simply as an ongoing, not necessarily negative process of diversification of taste. However, it would be too early to answer the question of what exactly has changed: the role of reading as such, or the reading of print-literature.

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Menzel B., “Writing, Reading and Selling Literature in Russia 1986–2004,” in B. Menzel, S. Lovell (eds.), Reading for Entertainment in Contemporary Russia. Post-Soviet Popular Literature in Historical Perspective (München: Otto Sagner, 2005), 39-56.

Menzel B., Dubin B., “Literary Criticism and the End of the Soviet System, 1985-1991,” in E. Dobrenko, G. Tihanov (eds.), A History of Russian Literary Theory and Criticism. The Soviet Age and Beyond (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2011), 250-268.

Menzel B., Rudova L. (eds.), “Glamorous Russia,” Kultura, 6 (2008) http://www.academia.edu/3551416/Glamour_Russia_engl._edition_Kultura_6_2008_ed._Birgit_Menzel_Larissa_Rudova

Mickiewicz E., Media and the Russian Public, (New York: Praeger, 1981).

Mickiewicz E., Television, Power, and the Public in Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

Mjør K. J., “Digitizing Everything? Online Libraries on the Runet,” in M. S. Gorham I. Lunde M. Paulsen (eds.), Digital Russia. The Language, Culture and Politics of New Media Communication (London: Routledge, 2014), 210-230.

Natsional’naia programma podderzhki i razvitiia chteniia (Moscow, 2007) http://www.ifapcom.ru/files/News/Nats-progr-chtenia.pdf

Natsional’naia elektronnaia biblioteka https://нэб.рф/

Perova, G.V., Sukhorukov, K. M., “Knigoizdanie v Rossii v 2017 godu,” Assotsiatsiia knigoraspredelitelei nezavisimykh gosudarstv (ASKR) (Moscow, 2018), 7-14 http://www.askr.ru/herald/73.pdf [link not available]

Putin V. V., Poslanie Prezidenta RF Federal’nomu Sobraniiu Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 26.4.2007 http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_67870/ .

Putin V. V., “Rossiia – natsional’nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia gazeta 23.1.2012 http://www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html.

Reitblat A., Dubin B., “Literaturnye premii kak sotsial’nyi institut,” Kriticheskaia massa, 2 (2006) http://magazines.russ.ru/km/2006/2/re4.html.

Schmidt H., Konradova N., “VKontakte,” Dekóder, 8 (2016), https://www.dekoder.org/de/gnose/vkontakte-soziales-netzwerk-russland.

Sdvizhkov D., Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz. Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006) http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0004/bsb00045802/images/.

Shvedov S., “U knizhnogo razvala. Optimisticheskie zametki,” Druzhba narodov, 1 (1992), 211-217.

Shvedov S., “Literaturnaia kritika i literatura chitatelei (Zametki sotsiologa),” Voprosy literatury, 5 (1988), 3-31.

Smith H., The Russians (New York: Quadrangle Press, 1976).

Stel’makh V., “Otnoshenie k knige sil’no izmenilos’,” (Interview) in Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial: Proekt Uroki istorii“ (26.8.2013), 2. Accessed at https://urokiistorii.ru/article/51818

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Volkov D., Goncharov S., Rossiiskii medialandshaft. Osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2014. Osnovnye rezul’taty issledovaniia (Moscow, 2014) http://www.levada.ru/old/sites/default/files/levada_report_media_0_0.pdf

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Wilbert G., “Entwicklung und Perspektiven der sowjetischen Lesersoziologie,” in P. E. Dorsch, K. Teckentrop (eds.), Buch und Lesen international. Berichte und Analysen zum Buchmarkt und zur Buchmarkt-Forschung (Gütersloh, 1981), 650-664.

Zagidullina M. V., “Podrostki: Chtenie i Internet v povsednevnoi zhizni,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 5 (2016), 115-123. http://socis.isras.ru/index.php?page_id=453&id=6190&jid=&jj=

Zimmer S., “Der Mythos von der Macht des Marktes,” in B. Menzel, C. Friedrich (eds.), Osteuropa im Umbruch. Alte und neue Mythen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994), 81-90.

Zvereva V., Setevye razgovory. Kul’turnye kommunikatsii v Runete, (Bergen: University of Bergen, 2012).

Notes

1   An abbreviated version of this chapter was published in German in OSTEUROPA, 1-2 (2019), 119-137. I would like to thank Manfred Sapper, Birgitte Beck Pristed, Henrike Schmidt, Rainer Goldt, Mikhail Bezrodnyi, and my anonymous reviewer for their critical comments.

2   This slogan most likely became a popular autostereotype during the Brezhnev era of the 1970s. Western correspondents promoted and kept emphatically reproducing it. H. Smith, The Russians (New York, 1976); K. Mehnert, Über die Russen heute. Was sie lesen, wie sie sind (Stuttgart, 1983).

3   “46 percent of the adult Russians do not read books any more.” See B. Dubin, N. Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008. Tendentsii i problemy, Federal’noe agentstvo po pechati i massovym kommunikatsiiam. Analiticheskii tsentr Iuriia Levady (Moscow, 2008), 21.

4   For Germany, see the study “Buchkäufer – quo vadis?” for 2017. Between 2013–2017, 17.8% less people have bought books, including 37% less of the readers from the age-group 40–49. https://www.boersenverein.de/markt-daten/marktforschung/studien-umfragen/studie-buchkaeufer-quo-vadis/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

5   The term is used here in a descriptive sense, but as it also carries a normative meaning as a specific ideologized Soviet reading culture. I will differentiate in what follows between normative “reading culture” and the descriptive term “culture(s) of reading.”

6   V. Nevskii, “Iz zapiskoi knizhki bibliotechnogo instruktora, 2. ‘Entsiklopediia’ ili ‘Spravochnik elektrotekhnika’?” Krasnyi bibliotekar’, 2-3 (1923), 22; quoted from E. Dobrenko, “Iskusstvo prinadlezhit narodu,” Novyi mir, 12 (1994), 193-213, accessed at http://www.library.ru/3/reflection/articles/dobrenko.php (Fn 52) (accessed February 25, 2020).

7   This was especially the case since the 1970s, a decade which was dominated by a book shortage in which 96% of all people had problems finding the book they wanted to buy. L. Gudkov, B. Dubin, “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion,” Druzhba narodov, 2 (1988), 170; also in Idem, Intelligentsiia. Zametki o literaturno-politicheskikh illiuziiakh (Moscow, 1995), 1-41.

8   K. Clark, Moscow the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941 (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 169-209. For a comparative historical perspective of Russian and European intelligentsia, see D. Sdvizhkov, Das Zeitalter der Intelligenz. Zur vergleichenden Geschichte der Gebildeten in Europa bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen, 2006), 139-184.

9   “Komfort nasiliia” is an expression invented by the literary scholar Marietta Chudakova which alludes to the moral self-righteousness of the Soviet intelligentsia, which was paradoxically tied to the political leadership as long as they were ennobled by their special attention. M. Chudakova, “Pochto moi drug…,” Zvezda, 5 (2010); http://magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2010/5/ch9.html (accessed February 25, 2020).

10   Stel’makh V., “Otnoshenie k knige sil’no izmenilos’,” (Interview) in Mezhdunarodnyi Memorial: Proekt Uroki istorii“ (26.8.2013), 2. https://urokiistorii.ru/article/51818 (accessed February 25, 2020).

11   For an analysis of the culture of TV in Late Soviet Russia see E. Mickiewicz, Media and the Russian Public (New York, 1981); Idem, Television, Power, and the Public in Russia (Cambridge, 2008) and B. Dubin, “Televisionnaia epokha: zhizn’ posle,” in Idem, Intellektual’nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy. Ocherki sotsiologii sovremennoi kul’tury (Moscow, 2004), 185-208.

12   Grigorii Baklanov became chief editor of Znamia, Sergei Zalygin of Novyi mir and Vitalii Korotich took over the weekly magazine The Spark (Ogonek). All three of these men had been popular writers since the 1960s.

13   B. Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte. Die Literaturkritik der Perestrojka (Köln, Wien, 2001), 46; Idem Grazhdanskaia voina slov (St. Petersburg, 2006), 34.

14   Wallpapers existed, after being introduced top-down in the 1920s, for instance rather horizontally in the peripheries and were filled from below. Tamizdat trading routes went from border regions to the center, and even samizdat routes did not exclusively go from the center to the periphery.

15   Thick literary journals in the nineteenth century included also sections on natural sciences and were more cosmopolitan, reporting regularly about developments in Western Europe.

16   L. Gudkov, B. Dubin, “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion,” Druzhba narodov, 2 (1988), 168-189.

17   E. Dobrenko, “Vse luchshee – detiam (Totalitarnaia kul’tura i mir detstva),” Wiener Slawistischer Almanach, 29 (1992), 166.

18   See Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte, 133.

19   Stel’makh, “Otnoshenie k knige sil’no izmenilos’.”

20   G. Wilbert, “Entwicklung und Perspektiven der sowjetischen Lesersoziologie,” in P. E. Dorsch, K. Teckentrop (eds.), Buch und Lesen international. Berichte und Analysen zum Buchmarkt und zur Buchmarkt-Forschung (Gütersloh, 1981), 650-664; B. Dubin, “Dinamika pechati i transformatsiia obshchestva,” Voprosy literatury, 9-10 (1991), 84-97; V. Stel’makh, “Sovremennaia biblioteka i ee pol’zovateli,” in polit.ru (2004), https://polit.ru/article/2004/03/30/library/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

21   G. P. Iakimov, “Chernyi knizhnyi rynok v defitsitarnoi situatsii,” in Kniga i chtenie v zerkale sotsiologii (Moscow, 1990), 137-150.

22   S. Shvedov, “U knizhnogo razvala. Optimisticheskie zametki,” Druzhba narodov, 1 (1992), 212. Also: “There is a large field of literature which is popular among wide readerships, but goes unnoticed by professional critics. In this field two types of works can be distinguished: screaming success with mass-readers for books which are usually based on films and TV-series […] and specialized books which critics have not even heard of. In this case we can speak of ‘unknown’ literature.” S. Shvedov, “Literaturnaia kritika i literatura chitatelei (Zametki sotsiologa),” Voprosy literatury, 5 (1988), 3-31, here 5.

23   One should consider that the stated numbers of copies were often inaccurate; for various ideological reasons, intentionally higher numbers were given. However, the general trend is still reflected in these figures.

24   In the late 1980s, more than 60% of all printing machines in the country were more than sixty years old. Gudkov, Dubin, “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion,” 175.

25   From the late 1980s on, projects aiming at creating private libraries have never been able to survive or even help create new perspectives on such a system. V. Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia: vozvrashchenie gosudarstva?” in Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 2 (94), March–April 2008, 30–36.

26   B. Menzel, “Der sowjetische Leser als Thema der Forschung. Probleme, Methoden und Ergebnisse der empirischen Literatursoziologie,” in A. Guski, W. Kośny (eds.), Sprache-Text-Geschichte. Festschrift für Klaus-Dieter Seemann (Munich, 1997), 193; Stel’makh “Sovremennaia biblioteka i ee pol’zovateli,” 2.

27   This widely quoted expression was first used by Vladimir Vigilianskii (Ogonek, August 1988), later explained by the literary critic Sergei Chuprinin. S. Chuprinin, Russkaia literatura segodnia. Zhizn’ po poniatiiam” (Moscow, 2008), accessed at https://lit.wikireading.ru/11515. (accessed February 25, 2020).

28   Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia: vozvrashchenie gosudarstva?”; A. Chernykh, M. Polous, “Chinovniki vynosiat Sorosa iz izby-chital’ni” in Kommersant (5.8.2015); accessed at www.kommersant.ru/doc/2782240.

29   See the paragraph on the Soros foundation below in this chapter.

30   Menzel, Bürgerkrieg um Worte, 47; russ. edit., 31-40.

31   А. Il’nitskii, Knigoizdanie sovremennoi Rossii (Moscow 2002).

32   After 2000, trying to survive in an accelerating process of re-monopolization, intellectual publishers followed even more ambitious series-driven projects and endeavors to win and keep their readers, such as the series “Intellectual history” (NLO), “Borges’s Library” or the “Maks Frai” project (Amfora). In 2008, 41.7% of all printed books were serialized (L. A. Kirillova, K. M. Sukhorukov, “Statisticheskie pokazateli 2008,” (Moscow, 2008), 5.

33   In the early 1920s, there had been more than 2000 publishing houses in Russia. Gudkov, Dubin “Literaturnaia kul’tura. Protsess i ratsion”; Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii, 2018, 9. See also P. Becker, Verlagspolitik und Buchmarkt in Russland (1985 bis 2002). Prozess der Entstaatlichung des zentralistischen Buchverlagswesens (Wiesbaden, 2003), 158.

34   Among the new intellectually avantgarde publishing houses were, for instance, “Ivan Limbakh,” “Akademicheskii proekt,” and “Amfora” in St. Petersburg, as well as Igor Zakharov with “Vagrius,” “Zakharov,” “Ad Marginem” and the publisher “Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie” (NLO) in Moscow.

35   See B. Menzel, “Entmythisierung in der russischen Literatur am Beispiel von A.I. Solschenizyn,” in B. Menzel, C. Friedrich (eds.), Osteuropa im Umbruch. Alte und neue Mythen (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 109-124.

36   M. Iampol’skii, “Rossiia: kul’tura i subkul’tury,” Obshchestvennye nauki i sovremennost’, 1 (1993), https://docplayer.ru/57307846-Rossiya-kultura-i-subkultury.html (accessed February 25, 2020), 66.

37   Some of these authors had begun to publish their novels before the Perestroika. Prokhanov’s first Afghanistan novel The Tree in the Center of Kabul (Derevo v tsentre Kabula) was published in 1981.

38   For an analysis of book covers in this “wild-market” period see B. Beck Pristed, The New Russian Book: A Graphic Cultural History (London, 2017).

39   S. Zimmer, “Der Mythos von der Macht des Marktes,” in B. Menzel, C. Friedrich (eds.), Osteuropa im Umbruch. Alte und neue Mythen (Frankfurt am Main, 1994), 81-90.

40   B. Menzel, L. Rudova (eds.), “Glamorous Russia,” Kultura, 6 (2008); Strukov, Vlad, Goscilo, Helena (eds.), Celebrity and Glamour in Contemporary Russia: Shocking Chic (London, 2011).

41   For films see Gloss (Glianets) by Andrei Konchalovskii (2007); for TV show The Rublev Highway (Rublevskoe shosse) (2005/06).

42   For the figures, see ROSBIZNES Konsalting and TNS Gallup Media. On Glamour in Russia see Menzel, Rudova 2008.

43   Iampol’skii, “Rossiia: kul’tura i subkul’tury,” 66.

44   B. Dubin, N. Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008. Tendentsii i problemy (Moscow, 2008).

45   According to the representative Levada study Chtenie v Rossii–2008 from 2008, Komsomol’skaia pravda is the most popular newspaper in Russia today with 32% of the news readership, with Argumenty i fakty a distant second at 11%.

46   In 1990, there were 3,681 journals in Russia, in 2006, it was already 5,429. Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008. This is my main source in this paragraph.

47   83% of the population of the Russian Federation watches an average of three to four hours TV every day and five to six hours on holidays. Generally, in the 2000s, leisure time spent outside of the home (i.e. with sports, cultural or other activities, with visits to friends or relatives excepted) also witnessed a precipitous decline. See Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008, 29. B. Dubin, “Televizionnaia epokha: zhizn’ posle,” in Intellektual’nye gruppy i simvolicheskie formy (Moscow, 2004), 185-208. To conclude, however, that the general audience is nothing but numb, brainwashed masses, would be wrong. As Ellen Mickiewicz has shown, Russian TV viewers, unlike US audiences, were trained to be skeptical consumers of all state-controlled media from Soviet times, and now still have a generally ambivalent attitude to the news and information that they see on TV. Mickiewicz, Television, Power, and the Public in Russia. Between 2011-2017, 46% of the population expressed limited or no confidence in the mass media. D. Volkov, S. Goncharov, Rossiiskii Medialandshaft: osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2017. Osnovnye rezul’taty issledovaniia (Moscow, 2017), table 29; accessed at https://www.levada.ru/2017/08/22/16440/print/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

48   For the intelligentsia, TV was a medium of official and popular (‘low’) culture as opposed to the high culture of reading printed books and journals. Zvereva mentions the lack of a general discipline of scholarly television studies for the Soviet and post-Soviet period. V. Zvereva, Setevye razgovory. Kul’turnye kommunikatsii v Runete (Bergen, 2012), 12.

49   See the Russian Wikipedia-article on “Literaturnye premii Rossii” and the roundtable-discussion “Literaturnaia premiia kak fakt literaturnoi zhizni,” Voprosy literatury, 2 (2006); https://voplit.ru/article/literaturnaya-premiya-kak-fakt-literaturnoj-zhizni/ (accessed February 25, 2020). For a comparison with prerevolutionary literary awards see A. Reitblat, B. Dubin: “Literaturnye premii kak sotsial’nyi institut,” Kriticheskaia massa 2 (2006), http://magazines.russ.ru/km/2006/2/re4.html (accessed February 25, 2020).

50   In 1994 the mathematician Maksim Moshkov founded the first online library http://lib.ru., and another turning point was the shifting of thick journals and other periodicals to the online platform “www. Errore. Riferimento a collegamento ipertestuale non valido.” in 1995–96. After 2004 Moshkov was convicted for illegal file-sharing and began to work with the Russian Federal Agency of Press and Mass Communication. Part of the material was removed, and the catalogue was professionalized. K. J. Mjør, “Digitizing Everything? Online Libraries on the Runet,” in M. S. Gorham, I. Lunde, M. Paulsen (eds.), Digital Russia: The Language, Culture and Politics of New Media Communication (London, 2014), 223-224.

51   V. Strukov, The (Im)personal Connection: Computational Systems and (Post-)Soviet Cultural History,” in Gorham, Lunde, Paulsen (eds.), Digital Russia, 11-33.

52   See Schmidt’s “Virtual Shelves, Virtual Selves” in the present volume.

53Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2017. Sostoianie, tendentsii i perspektivy razvitiia (Moscow, 2018), 61ff., http://www.unkniga.ru/images/docs/kn-rynok-2018-1.pdf (accessed February 25, 2020).

54   One of the problems, pointed out by some sociologists, is that statistics still make no distinction between print and online-reading activity so that it is hard to describe and document such trends adequately. G.V. Perova, K. M. Sukhorukov, “Knigoizdanie v Rossii v 2017 godu,” in Assotsiatsiia knigoraspredelitelei nezavisimykh gosudarstv (ASKR) (Moscow 2018), 3-5, accessed at http://www.askr.ru/herald/73.pdf (accessed February 25, 2020).

55   Such control is accompanied by an active politics of language, as expressed in the new Law of June 2005 declaring Russian the official State Language, and by this restricting the public use of Language and criminalizing its violation. See https://rg.ru/2005/06/07/yazyk-dok.html (accessed February 25, 2020).

56   H. Schmidt, N. Konradova, “VKontakte,” Dekóder 8 (2016); accessed at https://www.dekoder.org/de/gnose/vkontakte-soziales-netzwerk-russland (accessed February 25, 2020).

57   In 2008, 123,336 new titles of books and brochures were produced, and 20,138 of them were literature. In the previous year of 2007, it was 108,791 titles. For comparison, in the Soviet period, book-production never exceeded 84,000 titles per year. In 2014, Great Britain released 184,00 book titles, and Germany 90,000. The average number of print copies for books of popular literature and educational textbooks is 50,000. See Kirillova, Sukhorukov, “Statisticheskie pokazateli 2008.”

58   N. D. Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed”: sostoianie i tendentsiia razvitii knizhnogo rynka Rossii (Tekst doklada, 2014), online.

59 Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed.” For comparison, in 1898 there were about 5,000 bookstores in Russia. In 1989, there were 8,455 bookstores, but in 2012 there were only 3,817 registered legal entities dealing with the selling of books in the country.

60   In this paragraph my source is Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed.”

61   I. V. Bondarev, “Sovershenstvovanie organizatsii i upravleniia sferoi knizhnoi torgovli v sovremennykh rynochnykh usloviiakh,” Ekonomicheskie nauki, 8, 93 (2012), 131.

62   A. O. Chubar’ian, “Znachenie knigi i biblioteki – neprekhodiashchie!,” Bibliotekovedenie, 5 (2001), 1.

63   See Volkov, Goncharov, Rossiiskii medialandshaft. Osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2017.

64   V. V. Putin, Poslanie Prezidenta RF Federal’nomu Sobraniiu ot 26.4.2007 ; accessed at http://www.consultant.ru/document/cons_doc_LAW_67870/ (accessed February 25, 2020). (translated by the author, B.M.). See also Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia: vozvrashchenie gosudarstva?,” 31.

65   Natsional’naia programma podderzhki i razvitiia chteniia (2007); accessed at http://www.ifapcom.ru/files/News/Nats-progr-chtenia.pdf See also Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia: vozvrashchenie gosudarstva?” 31.

66   See Natsional’naia elektronnaia biblioteka (https://нэб.рф/)

67   For more federal, regional, and local bylaws of this program see http://nlr.ru/prof/reader/metodsovet/dokumenty-v-podderzhku-chteniya (accessed February 25, 2020).

68   Menzel, “Der sowjetische Leser als Thema der Forschung.”

69   Stel’makh, “Rossiiskie biblioteki segodnia.”

70   V. V. Putin, “Rossiia– natsional’nyi vopros,” Nezavisimaia gazeta (23.1.2012); accessed at http://www.ng.ru/politics/2012-01-23/1_national.html (accessed February 25, 2020).

71   For more decrees following the National Reading Program see http://nlr.ru/prof/reader/metodsovet/dokumenty-v-podderzhku-chteniya (accessed February 25, 2020).

72   M. V. Zagidullina, “Podrostki: Chtenie i Internet v povsednevnoi zhizni,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia, 5 (2016), 115-123; http://socis.isras.ru/index.php?page_id=453&id=6190&jid=&jj= (accessed February 25, 2020).; E. A. Kolosova, “Chtenie rossiiskikh detei i podrostkov v transformiruiushchemsia obshchestve,” Vestnik RGGU. Seriia “Filosofiia, Sotsiologiia, Iskusstvovedenie,” https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/chtenie-rossiyskih-detey-i-podrostkov-v-transformiruyuschemsya-obschestve-1 (accessed February 25, 2020).

73   Volkov, Goncharov, Rossiiskii medialandshaft. Osnovnye tendentsii ispol’zovaniia SMI – 2014.

74   L. Borusiak “Kakie by knigi v spisok ni voshli, oni ne budut prochitany,” Troitskii variant, 113 (25.9.2012), 10. Accessed at https://trv-science.ru/2012/09/25/kakie-by-knigi-v-spisok-ni-voshli-oni-ne-budut-prochitany/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

75   For the suggested list see https://echo.msk.ru/blog/echomsk/921868-echo/ (accessed February 25, 2020).. After long discussions, the writer Dmitrii Bykov published a list of 100 titles as an alternative canon; see http://readrate.com/rus/news/100-luchshikh-knig-mirovoy-literatury-versiya-dmitriya-bykova (accessed February 25, 2020).

76   This is based on a study (conducted by Liubov’ Borusiak from the Levada Center in 2009–2010) of 5,000 blogs written by the highly educated metropolitan middle-class elite (aged between 30-40). The goal was to investigate changing cultural codes and values regarding reading attitudes (especially childhood reading) expressed by parents. Borusiak, “Chtenie kak tsennost’ v srede molodykh rossiiskikh intellektualov.” For some critical comments on this study, see B. Dubin, “O chtenii i nechtenii segodnia,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 3, 105 (2010).

77   Borusiak, “Kakie by knigi v spisok ni voshli, oni ne budut prochitany.”

78   The Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is a worldwide Study by the OECD to evaluate educational systems in member and non-member nations. PISA was first performed in 2000.

79   O. Karpenko, M. Bershchaskaia, Iu. Voznesenskaia, “Mezhdunarodnoe issledovanie PISA i problemy razvitiia vysshego obrazovaniia,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 5 (91) (2007), 38-47.

80Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2018: 16. For children’s reading see Kolosova, “Chtenie rossiiskikh detei i podrostkov v transformiruiushchemsia obshchestve.”

81   L. Borusiak, “Liubimye avtory, liubimye knigi: chto chitaet sovremennaia molodezh’. Po dannym analiza seti VKtontakte,” Vestnik obshchestvennogo mneniia, 1 (2015), 90-105. The study concentrated on the 17-23 age group.

82   For comparison, some results from earlier studies: In 1991, 48% of youth responded that they read regularly; in 2005, only 28% said the same. Posts about reading and literature on the platform VKontakte are small (less than 10%), especially when compared to posts about music and films.

83   Vasil’ev, “Istoriia knigi i knizhnoi kul’tury. Ot tipografskogo iskusstva k knizhnoi kul’ture”; Iu. Kublanovskii (interview), “Internet ubivaet chtenie,” Literaturnaia gazeta 26.4.2001, accessed at http://lgz.ru/article/-16-6595-26-04-2017/Internet-ubivaet-chtenie/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

84   E. V. Krylova, “Knizhnaia kul’tura segodnia. Podkhody k opredeleniiu i soderzhanie poniatiia,” Vestnik Russkoi Khristianskoi Gumanitarnoi Akademii, vol. 13 (3), 185-191; Kolosova “Chtenie rossiiskikh detei i podrostkov v transformiruiushchemusia obshchestve”; Zagidullina, “Podrostki: Chtenie i Internet v povsednevnoi zhizni” .

85   Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008.

86   According to the study of 2008, 51% of the adult male population never reads a book versus only 42% of the female population; among the young adults (age 18-24), 40% read only occasionally, and 42% never read any book. See Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008.

87   Regular readers of books today are more female than male, and typically number among the young, urban, and educated section of the population rather than the highly educated older generation. Dubin, Zorkaia, Chtenie v Rossii–2008, 34ff..

88   Borusiak, “Liubimye avtory, liubimye knigi,” 93.

89   Pelevin was ranked 37th among leading authors, Vladimir Sorokin 295th, Eduard Limonov 435th. Borusiak, “Liubimye avtory, liubimye knigi,” 96.

90   Bondarev, “Sovershenstvovanie organizatsii i upravleniia sferoi knizhnoi torgovli”; Perova, Sukhorukov, “Knigoizdanie v Rossii v 2017 godu.”

91   Arkhangel’skii states that there has been a certain tradition in Russia: whenever new technologies have blocked typographical or other innovations, it was writers themselves who found new ways to communicate with their readers. Pushkin’s pragmatic decision to sell his novel Evgenii Onegin as a serial novel in a periodical journal turned out to be a revolution for the book market, and had an effect on language and style, as can later be seen, for instance, in Dostoevskii’s novels. Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii, Opyt izdaniia i rasprostraneniia elektronnoi knigi. Proekt‚ Muzei revoliutsii, unpublished manuscript 2015.

92   Since 2010, the writer Linor Goralik, for example, collected money for several children’s book publications. Aleksandr Arkhangel’skii Budushchee russkoi literatury, unpublished manuscript (2016).

93   The number of texts on these portals has grown into several tens of millions and became a successful business for the founders. Arkhangel’skii, Budushchee russkoi literatury.

94   Arkhangel’skii, Opyt izdaniia i rasprostreneniia elektronnoi knigi.

95   Perova, Sukhorukov, “Knigoizdanie v Rossii v 2017 godu”; Strekalova, Uchebnyi keis “Bukvoed,” assumes that 80-90% of all downloads from the Internet violate authors’ rights and are therefore illegal.

96   See https://нэб.рф/about/ (accessed February 25, 2020).

97Knizhnyi rynok v Rossii 2017, 51-65.

98   In a demand-based book market economy, the publishers would be the ones to blame.

Table des illustrations

Titre Table 1: Book titles produced annually in Russia 1990–2017
URL http://books.openedition.org/ledizioni/docannexe/image/13084/img-1.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 74k
Titre Table 4 here: Number of copies printed 1990–2017
URL http://books.openedition.org/ledizioni/docannexe/image/13084/img-2.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 69k
Titre Table 2 and 3: Number of bookstores in Russia 1991–2017 and Annual revenue from selling books in Russia 2013–2017
URL http://books.openedition.org/ledizioni/docannexe/image/13084/img-3.jpg
Fichier image/jpeg, 122k

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