1. Scholars such as Marlene Laruelle, Marina Peunova, Peter Rutland, and Elena Chebankova have provided excellent studies of ideational trends—from Eurasianism to conservative modernization—circulating among Russia’s elite, including policymakers, policy backers, and regime ideologues; Laruelle (2017) has recently called this “the Kremlin’s ideological ecosystems.” See “Ideology in Contemporary Russia” section below.

2. Alexander Lukin and Peter Kolesnikov account for the ways in which elite ideational thinking responds to historically stable sets of demands from society. See the section “Ideology in Contemporary Russia” below.

3. Before its release, it was downloaded and viewed by an estimated 4 million viewers. As reported by Russia’s News Agency TASS, “Leviafan v internete posmotreli okolo 4 mln zritelei,” at https://tass.ru/kultura/1728689 (last accessed September 25, 2018). Vlad Strukov, a prominent Russian film scholar notes: “Arguably, between December 2014 and January 2015, Leviathan and the political controversy around it became the most discussed culture-related topic in RF since Russia’s independence in 1991.” Strukov, Vlad, “Russian ‘Manipulative Smart Power’: Zviagintsev’s Oscar Nomination, (Non-)government Agency and Contradictions of the Globalized World,” New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 14, no. 1 (March 2016): 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. For a discussion of public political narratives under Putin, see Bacon, Edwin, “Public Political Narratives: Developing a Neglected Source through the Exploratory Case of Russia in the Putin-Medvedev Era,” Political Studies 60, no. 4 (2012): 768–86CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Lisa Wedeen identifies the uncovering of vulnerabilities in such political narratives as a hallmark of societal critiques; Ambiguities of Domination: Politics, Rhetoric, and Symbols in Contemporary Syria (Chicago, 2015). There is an ongoing debate in film studies about whether Zvyagintsev intended the film to be a critique, see the section, “A Tragic and Resonant Artistic Response,” below.

5. According to Kinopoisk.ru as of February 2016.

6. In Russian: “бесконечно длинную ленту абсурдных, безумных, циничных и необъяснимых фактов, цитат, цифр и картинок, из которых состоит новостная повестка сегодняшней России. Каждую из них можно отдельно пошерить и показать друзьям в фейсбуке или родителям в “одноклассниках” . . . они гарантированно переосмыслят свое отношение к бардаку, абсурду и цинизму, из которых состоит сегодня общественно-политическая жизнь нашей страны,” at https://navalny.com/p/5089/ (last accessed September 25, 2018).

7. We think of terrain and map here not in a geographical and physical sense, but in the sense of a necessarily simplified representation of a multi-dimensional and complex system.

8. We think of resonance largely as an empirical question: was an artistic or social critique understood and did it manage to trigger reactions by ordinary citizens, either affirming or rejecting this critique?

9. This assumption is particularly prevalent in IR scholarship that thinks of ideology as propaganda, e.g. Christopher Paul and Miriam Matthews, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model: Why it Might Work and Options to Counter It,” RAND Perspective series, Rand Corporation Expert Insights PE 198 (Santa Monica, 2016), at www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html (last accessed September 25, 2018); or Van Herpen, Marcel, Putin’s Propaganda Machine: Soft Power and Russian Foreign Policy (Lanham, MA, 2015)Google Scholar.

10. For discussions of Pussy Riot’s reception in Russia, see: Yusupova, Marina, “Pussy Riot: A Feminist Band Lost in History and Translation,” Nationalities Papers 42, no. 4 (2014): 604–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Smyth, Regina and Soboleva, Irina, “Looking beyond the Economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin’s Voting Coalition,” Post-Soviet Affairs 30, no. 4 (2014): 258CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Bernstein;, Anya “An Inadvertent Sacrifice: Body Politics and Sovereign Power in the Pussy Riot Affair,” Critical Inquiry, 40, no. 1, (2013): 220–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. A number of film scholars and film critics refer to Leviathan as a tragedy: Anton Dolin,“Tri kita. Leviafan, rezhisser Andrei Zviagintsev,” Iskusstvo i Kino, no. 7 (July 2014); Vasilii Koretskii, “Gosudarynia rybka: O chem rasskazhet i kogo sboret ‘Leviafan’ Zviagintseva?,” Colta.ru, January 15, 2015, at www.colta.ru/articles/cinema/5963 (last accessed September 25, 2018). Tragedy was also identified as a feature of Zviagintsev’s earlier films, see Condee, Nancy, “Knowledge (Imperfective): Andrei Zviaginstev and Contemporary Cinema,” in Beumers, Birgit, ed., A Companion to Russian Cinema (Malden, Mass. 2016), 569Google Scholar, and Naum Kleinman, in Nancy Condee, 572.

12. See discussion of literature on civil society in section 2.

13. Waller, Michael, “The Environmental Issue in the East of Europe: Top-Down, Bottom-up and Outside-In,” Environmental Politics 19, no. 5 (September 2010): 831–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Marlene Laruelle examines different Russian nationalist and Eurasianist narratives: In the Name of the Nation: Nationalism and Politics in Contemporary Russia (New York, 2009); Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington DC, 2009); and “The Three Colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian Nationalist Mythmaking of the Ukrainian Crisis,” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no.1 (2016): 55–77. See also Peunova, Marina, “An Eastern incarnation of the European New Right: Aleksander Panarin and New Eurasianist Discourse in Contemporary Russia,” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 16, no. 3 (2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Chebankova, Elena, “Contemporary Russian Conservatism,” Post-Soviet Affairs 32, no. 1 (2016): 28–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See Peter Rutland’s work on economic narratives, most recently, “The Place of Economics in Russian National Debates,” in Pal Kolsto and Helge Blakkisrud, eds., Russian Nationalism Before and After Crimea: Nationalism and Identity, 2010–2017 (Edinburgh, 2018). Peter Pomerantzev sees state-sponsored ideology primarily as disinformation; see his Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible: The Surreal Heart of the New Russia (New York, 2014).

15. Lukin, Alexander, “Russia’s New Authoritarianism and the Post-soviet Political Ideal,” Post-Soviet Affairs 25, no. 1 (2009): 66–92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Kolesnikov, Peter, Russian Ideology after Crimea (Moscow, 2015)Google Scholar.

17. Part of why we embrace this notion of ideology is that there is no clear boundary between “elite” and societal narratives, and elite narratives are not unified. Laruelle’s (2015) study of three overlapping ideological strands of the concept of Novorossiya illustrates this nicely.

18. Eagleton, Terry, Ideology: An Introduction (London, 2007), 112–23Google Scholar. Eagleton discusses the nuances that differentiate the writings of Antonio Gramsci himself from subsequent strains of Gramscian interpretations of ideology. Specifically, Eagleton stresses that, while subsequent Gramscian studies of ideology have discussed ideology as dominant hegemony and false consciousness of the masses, Gramsci himself was attuned to the difference between hegemony and ideology, on the one hand, and the relational nature of ideology, on the other (122). Eagleton writes: “Gramsci normally uses the word hegemony to mean the ways in which a governing power wins consent to its rule from those it subjugates . . . hegemony is also a broader category than ideology: it includes ideology, but is not reducible to it . . . Ideology refers specifically to the way power-struggles are fought out at the level of signification; and though signification is involved in all hegemonic processes, it is not in all cases the dominant level by which rule is sustained” (113). Original emphasis.

19. Ibid., 46. Emphasis added.

20. Scott, James C., Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven, 1990)Google Scholar.

21. Ibid., 20; 90–92.

22. Eagleton, Ideology, 11.

23. Dorzweiler, Nick, “Popular Culture in (and out of) American Political Science: A Concise Critical History, 1858–1950,” History of the Human Sciences 30, no. 1 (2017): 138–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. See Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London, 1989)Google Scholar, and Benhabib, Seyla, The Claims of Culture: Equality and Diversity in the Global Era (Princeton, 2002)Google Scholar. Notable examples of studies on art and politics are Goldstein, Cora Sol, Capturing the German Eye: American Visual Propaganda in Occupied Germany (Chicago, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Chari, Anita, A Political Economy of the Senses: Neoliberalism, Reification, Critique (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

25. Eagleton notes that Lenin himself saw culture as a “dense network of civil institutions,” which the latter thought was severely lacking in tsarist Russia and, ironically, made revolution-cum-hegemonic overthrow possible (Ideology, 114). For an analysis of the artistic critique of socialist realism under the communist regime, see: Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times, Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York, 1999); Stites, Richard, Russian Popular Culture: Entertainment and Society since 1900 (Cambridge, Eng., 2000)Google Scholar.

26. See Jonson, Lena, Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia (New York, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Beumers, Birgit, Etkind, Alexander, Gurova, Olga, and Turoma, Sanna, eds., Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

27. Maria Semendiaeva made this point in her commentary on Pavlovskii’s “Lubyanka’s Burning Door” performance: “this image gives birth to the ideas and feelings in our minds and forces a lot of people to express their opinions about it.” Semendiaeva, “Pavlenskii—Eto tochno iskusstvo? Voprosy pro aktsionizm, kotorye stydno zadavat΄,” Meduza (November 10, 2015), at www.meduza.io/feature/2015/11/10/pavlenskiy-eto-tochno-iskusstvo (last accessed September 27, 2018).

28. Strukov regards the state’s participation in and subsequent manipulation of the debates surrounding Leviathan as reflective of a new, “post-propaganda” trend in the Putin-Medvedev regime’s use of soft power. Interestingly, he points out the complex way in which state officials sought not to hegemonically “silence” critiques or assimilate these voices into “official discourse,” but rather to bring critical voices into direct and antagonistic contact with official discourse for the purposes of achieving a kind of manicured global visibility—in short, to use narrative contestation as an opportunity to promote the state’s “ideological position.” This analysis of the state-society dynamics around the Leviathan debates supports our narrative, dialogic, and reflexive approach to ideology and similarly suggests a move beyond Gramscian notions of “propaganda” that were influential in twentieth-century conceptions of ideology; Strukov, “Russian ‘Manipulative Smart Power’,” 39–45.

29. Lipman, Maria, “Russia’s Nongovernmental Media under Assault,” Demokratizatsiya: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization 22, no. 2 (2014): 179–90Google Scholar. See also Hale, Henry, “The Myth of Mass Authoritarianism in Russia: Public Opinion Foundations of a Hybrid Regime,” Europe-Asia Studies 63, no. 8 (2011): 1357–75CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30. Chebankova, like many others, has argued that Putin’s conservative project “is largely a reaction to . . . the impoverishment, suffering and moral collapse of the 1990s, and the gradual economic recovery of the 2000s.” Chebankova, “Contemporary Russian Conservatism,” 29.

31. White, Hayden, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, 1973)Google Scholar.

32. White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, 1987), 72–73Google Scholar.

33. Bernhard, Michael and Kubik, Jan pointed out for the post-Socialist context that “remembering the past is always a political process,” in Bernhard, and Kubik, , Twenty Years After Communism (New York, 2014), 3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

34. Howard, Marc, The Weakness of Civil Society in Post-Communist Europe (Cambridge, UK, 2003)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and “Postcommunist Civil Society in Comparative Perspective,” in Demokratizatsiya 10, no. 3 (2002): 285–305. See also Henderson, Sarah, “Civil Society in Russia,” Problems of Post-Communism 58, no. 3 (May-June 2011): 11–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35. Henderson, “Civil Society in Russia.” Henry Hale classifies Russia as a statist model of state-society relations, in “Civil Society from Above? Statist and Liberal Models of State-Building in Russia,” Demokratizatsiya 10, no. 3 (2002): 306–21.

36. Ljubownikow, Sergej, Crotty, Jo, and Rodgers, Peter, “The State and Civil Society in Post-Soviet Russia: The Development of a Russian-Style Civil Society,” Progress in Development Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): 153–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Hemment’s, Julie work: “Nashi, Youth Voluntarism, and Potemkin NGOs: Making Sense of Civil Society in Post-Soviet Russia,” Slavic Review 71, no. 2 (Summer 2012): 234–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

37. In Henry Hale’s terms: “although the statist model has led to some local successes, . . . for the most part it has tended to facilitate arbitrary abuses of power by state authorities . . .” Hale, “Civil Society from Above?” Laura Henry reaches a similar conclusion in “Complaint-Making Political Participation in Contemporary Russia,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 45, no. 1 (2012): 243–54.

38. For more on these debates, see Rutland, Peter, “Putin’s Path to Power,” Post-Soviet Affairs 16, no. 4 (2000): 313–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lukin, “Russia’s New Authoritarianism and the Post-Soviet Political Ideal”; Lee, Moonyoung, “Nostalgia as a Feature of ‘Glocalization’: Use of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 27, no. 2 (2011): 158–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39. That these battles are an important aspect of civil society is explicit in White, Eagleton, and Scott, and is also present in the work of scholars of civil society in democratic contexts; Craig Calhoun argues that “lively, diverse and innovative” engagement and public debate are an essential dimension of civil society, in “Civil Society and the Public Sphere,” in Michael Edwards, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Civil Society (Oxford, 2011), 311–23.

40. The “legacy” school argued that civil society is organizationally weak, because of apathy and mistrust towards social organizations, i.e. because of ideational legacies inherited from the Soviet period. See Howard, “Postcommunist Civil Society in Comparative Perspective” and Henderson, “Civil Society in Russia.”

41. Hemment is a critic of the legacy school, arguing that apathy is partially a dynamic response by post-Soviet citizens, rather than a static legacy, see Hemment, “Nashi.”

42. Greenberg, Jessica, “‘There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About It’: Participation, Apathy and ‘Successful’ Democratic Transition in Postsocialist Serbia,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 41–64CrossRefGoogle Scholar. She argues that western actors sponsor groups that fit with their own ideology of how post-socialist countries should transition and lack an understanding of their own normative compass.

43. Sundstrom, Lisa McIntosh, “Foreign Assistance, International Norms, and NGO Development: Lessons from the Russian Campaign,” International Organization 59, no. 2 (2005): 419–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Waller, “The Environmental Issue.”

45. See for example, Kappler, Stefanie and Richmond, Oliver, “Peacebuilding and Culture in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Resistance or Emancipation?,” Security Dialogue 42, 3 (2011): 261–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Greenberg, , “‘There’s Nothing Anyone Can Do About It’,” Rivkin-Fish, Michele, Women’s Health in Post-Soviet Russia: The Politics of Intervention (Bloomington, 2005)Google Scholar.

46. Stubbs, Paul, “Civil Society or Ubleha,” in Rill, Helena, Šmidling, Tamara, and Bitoljanu, Ana, eds., 20 Pieces of Encouragement for Awakening and Change: Peacebuilding in Former Yugoslavia (Belgrade, 2007), 215–28Google Scholar.

47. State-sponsored doctrines under Putin have in fact been remarkably flexible; see Rutland, “The Place of Economics.”

48. This exceptional sense of disorder stemmed from multiple sources of rapid change: the decay or disappearance of Soviet-era institutions and norms, the unrestrained and destabilizing influence of market liberalization, and the (unexpected) difficulties in building new institutions to regulate social, political, and economic life.

49. Rutland cites Putin as referring to the state as “the source and guarantor of order” in the aftermath of the “excessive costs” associated with the “experience of the 90s.” Rutland, “Putin’s Path to Power,” 343.

50. It is interesting to note that these same themes and emplotments run parallel to those emphasized in the history textbooks sanctioned by the state that take part in the rehabilitation of Josef Stalin—a historical rehabilitation in which the Putin regime has taken a guiding interest. See Nelson, Todd, “History as Ideology: The Portrayal of Stalinism and the Great Patriotic War in Contemporary Russian High School Textbooks,” Post-Soviet Affairs 31, no. 1 (2015): 37–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

51. Vladimir Putin, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly of the Russian Federation” (April 3, 2001), at en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/21216 (last accessed September 27, 2018). And Vladimir Putin, “Annual Address to the Federal Assembly” (April 2, 2007), at en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/24203 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

52. Over the first decade of the 2000s, terrorism took the place of the “threat” and disorder, but Putin continues to refer back to the threats of the 90s: “We know what the aggression of international terrorism is. Russia faced it back in the mid-1990s, when our country, our civilian population suffered from cruel attacks. We will never forget. . . . These tragedies took thousands of lives. . . . We almost succeeded in expelling terrorists from Russia, but are still fighting the remaining terrorist underground. This evil is still out there.” Vladimir Putin, “Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly” (December 3, 2015), at en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/50864 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

53. We bring Hobbes into the discussion here for two reasons: first, because Zvyangintsev’s Leviathan draws on Hobbes, and secondly, because Russia’s state-sponsored narratives on the origins, nature, and role of the sovereign hews remarkably close to readings of Hobbes that stress the “heroic” quality of Hobbes’s theory, see e.g. Sheldon Wolin, Hobbes and the Epic Tradition of Political Theory, Andrews Clark Memorial Library Seminar Papers (Los Angeles, 1970). See also Shlapentokh, Vladimir, “Hobbes and Locke at Odds in Putin’s Russia,” Europe-Asia Studies 55, no. 7 (2003); 981–1007CrossRefGoogle Scholar, or Volkov, Vadim, Violent Entrepreneurs: The Use of Force in the Making of Russian Capitalism (Ithaca, NY, 2002)Google Scholar, and Oleg Kharkhordin, “Andrei Zviagintsev kak zerkalo russkoi evoliutsii,” Vedomosti, February 11, 2015, at www.vedomosti.ru/newspaper/articles/2015/02/11/russkii-mir-nastoyaschii-leviafan (last accessed September 27, 2018).

54. Nikolay Petrov, Maria Lipman and Henry Hale have described the order-and-prosperity-for-acquiescence exchange as a “non-intrusion pact,” with the state providing “steady economic growth, Russia’s perceived return to global leadership, a sense of stability, nonintrusive government, and a feeling that the country is being guided by a strong and capable leader” in return for their abstinence from politics. See Petrov, Lipman, and Hale, “Three Dilemmas of Hybrid Regime Governance: Russia from Putin to Putin,” Post-Soviet Affairs, 30, no.1 (2014): 1–26.

55. Skinner, Quentin, Hobbes and Civil Science, Visions of Politics 3:3 (Cambridge, UK, 2002), 198Google Scholar.

56. For natural man “can create ‘that great Leviathan’ which ‘is of greater stature and strength’ than natural man.” See Wolin, Hobbes, 23.

57. White, Metahistory, 8–9.

58. Among Peter Pavlensky’s most well-known performances are the “Seam” (the artist sewed his mouth shut in support of Pussy Riot) and “Lubyanka’s Burning Door” (the artist set on fire the door of KGB headquarters in Moscow). Other societal voices include Dmitry Bykov’s “Grazhdanin Poet” project, a number of oppositional blogs; e.g. Valerie Sperling’s account of the feminist activist blog “Feministki” in Sex, Politics, and Putin: Political Legitimacy in Russia (New York, 2014), 247. Fabrizio Fenghi points out that the National Bolshevik Party has roots in an artistic critique, see his “Making Post-Soviet Counterpublics: The Aesthetics of Limonka and the National-Bolshevik Party, Nationalities Papers 45, no. 2 (2017): 182–205.”

59. For the band’s critique of Putin regime and the hope they place in individualism, see band member’s closing statements in N+1 Magazine, at https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/pussy-riot-closing-statements/ (last accessed September 27, 2018).

60. Gessen, Masha, Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot (New York, 2014), 73Google Scholar. Pussy Riot’s “Punk Prayer” (2012) explicitly criticized Vladimir Putin’s exploitation of the aesthetics and symbolic power of the Orthodox Church.

61. Sperling, Sex, Power and Politics. See also Bernstein, “An Inadvertent Sacrifice” (2013) on the Russian response to Pussy Riot.

62. Leviathan won several film prizes, in Russia as well as internationally, in 2014. While clearly perceived as critical, it was well-known (and indicated in the film’s opening credits) that the film received substantial financial support from the Ministry of Culture. What this tells us is that “the state” is not a coherent actor: the Ministry’s decision-makers must have initially assessed the film as a valuable artistic contribution, either not objecting to or not anticipating the film’s provocation.

63. Zvyagintsev: “[Цель фильма была] . . . рассказать о правде, пристально посмотреть на то, что происходит между нами, между социальными слоями, то есть—человек и власть, человек и родня.” See “Zviagintsev ne planiruet otkazyvat΄sia ot “ekzistentsial΄noi beznadegi” v svoikh novykh fil΄makh,” TASS (January 28, 2005), at https://tass.ru/kultura/1728833 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

64. Julian Graffy, “Andrei Zviagintsev: Leviathan,” Kinokultura 48 (2015), at www.kinokultura.com/2015/48-r-leviafan.shtml (last accessed September 27, 2018), and Nancy Condee, “Knowledge (Imperfective)” (2016). Vasillii Koretskii similarly rejects an overtly political reading of the film, arguing that this comes at the expense of Zvyagintsev’s intentions to tell a broader story, see “Gosudarynia rybka.”

65. In an interview with Ksenia Sobchack, Zvyagintsev insisted on the plot’s universal applicability; at the same time, he admitted that Russian realities were indeed reflected in the film, see “Andrei Zviagintsev—Ksenii Sobchak o pobede “Leviafana”,” Sobchak Zhivyem/TV Rain, YouTube video, 58:17, posted by TV Rain, March 6, 2015, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRtBoFzzEfU (last accessed November 16, 2018).

66. Nemtsov says: “Я думаю, что по этому фильму будут судить об эпохе Путина. И когда его не станет, этот фильм обнажится и станет памятником ‘путинизму.’ Фильм сильный, а сила его в том, что это честный фильм. Он резко контрастирует с ложью и пропагандой, которая свирепствует на телевидении.” He continues to say that the strength of Leviathan derives from the “honesty” of the movie, pertinent to our discussion in the section on Leviathan debates, below. Boris Nemtsov, “‘Leviafan mozhno bylo sniat΄ iv Moseitsevo” Yarnovosti, February 6, 2015, at https://yarnovosti.com/news/Leviafan_v_Moseisevo/ (last accesses 27 September 2018).

67. Dmitri Bykov, “Learn, We Are Fun!,” Novaya Gazeta, no. 2, January 14, 2015: “‘Левиафан’ мрачное и сильное кино, по которому когда-нибудь будут судить об атмосфере путинской России.”

68. Comment was published in “Ksenia Sobchak: “Leviafan”- eto kino o tom, kak ustroena Rossiia,” Argumenti i fakti, January 13, 2015, at www.spb.aif.ru/culture/person/1422816 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

69. Comment was published in “Viacheslav Kostikov: liudi khotiat byt΄v soglasii s sovest΄iu,” Argumenty i Fakti, March 24, 2015, at www.aif.by/social/nazlobydnya/item/36143-kostikov.html (last accessed September 27, 2018).

70. At www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=57959 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

71. At https://diak-kuraev.livejournal.com/718249.html (last accessed September 27, 2018).

72. Duma deputies from Tyumen, at www.newsprom.ru/news/Obschestvo/208327.html (last accessed September 27, 2018).

73. See Jonson, Art and Protest in Putin’s Russia, 51. Jonson highlights art that seeks an alternative understanding of the country’s past, future, and present against Putin’s discourse on state nationalism.

74. White, Metahistory, 9: “In Tragedy . . . the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits which occur at the end of the Tragic play are not regarded as totally threatening to those who survive the agonic test. There has been a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the protagonist’s exertions again the world have brought to pass.”

75. Nancy Condee, argues similarly, that audiences do not gain knowledge, whether “suffering . . . finds redemption,” Condee, “Knowledge (Imperfective)” (2016): 572.

76. Chebankova, “Contemporary Russian Consevatism,” 36.

77. Oleg Zintsov highlights this in his review of the film: “V chem vinovat geroi ‘Leviafana’,” Vedomosti, February 4, 2015, at www.vedomosti.ru/lifestyle/articles/2015/02/04/chelovek-kotoryj-ne-ponyal (last accessed September 27, 2018).

78. Note that the use of eminent domain to construct churches has been controversial in a number of instances in recent history, most notably the Torfianka Park conflict in Moscow.

79. Dolin, “Tri kita”: “Весь фильм показывает, как государство оттесняет человека, загоняет его в угол. Лишает не только пространства, но и союзников, пока он не останется в одиночестве и вся его земля будет ограничена тюремной камерой.”

80. Kharkhordin, “Andrei Zviagintsev,” Vedomosti.

81. In public opinion surveys, Russians have identified government noninterference and lack of crime as markers of a “normal society.” Against this background, Leviathan then paints a picture of Russian society that is at odds with both the expectations of Russian citizens and the narratives of the state itself. See Lukin, “Russia’s New Authoritarianism and the Post-Soviet Political Ideal,” 77.

82. Interviewed by Anna Arutunyan, in “In Russia, Oscar-nominated ‘Leviathan’ Opens Old Wounds,” USA Today, February 12, 2015, at www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/02/12/russia-oscar-leviathan-film/22995465/ (last accessed September 27, 2018). This concern echoes Chebankova’s recent observation that one of the “substantive questions pondered by Russian society today” is the “role of the state and societal expectations placed upon it.” She also notes that another pressing question is the “treatment of historic myths and their application to the present.” Chebankova, “Contemporary Russian Conservatism,” 30.

83. This question is widely debated by the political theory literature on Hobbes, see Skinner, Hobbes and Civil Science.

84. In this biblical story, God tests Job’s obedience and faith by inflicting suffering in the form of a monster, the Leviathan. God calls on Job to be faithful, as only those who obey unconditionally can defeat the Leviathan. A fuller discussion of the Zvygintsev biblical references is important, but outside the scope of this paper.

85. Viktor Tarasenko, see at versia.ru/semya-vidnogo-rostovskogo-politika-poluchila-zemlyu—krestyanin-lyog-v-mogilu (no longer available).

86. Marianna Maksimovskaya, quoted in Dmytro Desiateryk, “A Long Unfortunate Life: Leviathan Tells How the State Crushes a Small Man Without Obstruction,” Den΄, no. 2, January 20, 2015, at https://day.kyiv.ua/en/article/culture/long-unfortunate-life (last accessed September 27, 2018).

87. For a recent overview of this tradition, see Sheetal Anand, “Changing the Psyche of the ‘Little Man’: From Pushkin to Dostoyevsky,” Russian Philology 19 (2000): 53–59.

88. Newman, John Kevin, “Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’ and the Epic Tradition,” Comparative Literature Studies 9, no. 2 (1972): 180Google Scholar; Banerjee, Maria, “Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’: An Agonistic Vision,” Modern Language Studies 8, no. 2 (1978): 47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89. Terras, Victor, ed., Handbook of Russian Literature (New Haven, 1985), 430Google Scholar.

90. Stites, Russian Popular Culture, 67.

91. Svetlana Alexievich’s work depicts an alternative reality of war, substituting “the narrative of victory for the narrative of trauma” as experienced by everyday actors, rather than military heroes. Alexievich gives voice to those who were often voiceless in the dominant narrative of war: instead of male soldiers on the battlefront, she reveals the realities of the lives of women during the war, see Alexievich, War’s Unwomanly Face, (Moscow, 1988).

92. Borenstein, Eliot, Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture (Ithaca, 2008), 13Google Scholar. The discussion of the chernukha here draws mostly on Borenstein and on Graham, Seth, “Chernukha and Russian Film,” Studies in Slavic Cultures, no. 1 (January 2000): 9–27Google Scholar. See also Lee, Moonyoung, “Nostalgia as a Feature of ‘Glocalization’: Use of the Past in Post-Soviet Russia,” Post-Soviet Affairs 27, no. 2 (2011): 158–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Skomp, Elizabeth, “Review: Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture by Borenstein, Eliot,” Slavonic and East European Review 89, no. 1 (2011): 128–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

93. Though these are the some of the defining features of the chernukha, other characteristics have changed over time, as the genre evolved in Russia’s turbulent social and cultural transformation. The chernukha of the 1980s gained popularity as a compelling counter to the utopian nature of socialist realism. Eliot Borenstein calls the genre “the apotheosis of glasnost: the rejection of enforced optimism based on lies and an insistence on uncovering long-suppressed truths,” Borenstein, Overkill, 13. The neo-chernukha of the 1990s shifted away from revealing truths to emphasizing excesses and “overkill”—a strategy that “overexposes” rather than simply reveals daily realities, ibid., 6.

94. Brigit Beumers argues that Russian film makers use obscene language and vulgarism “as a political weapon” and a way to express dissent and protest; see “Bleep and ***: Speechless Protest” in Beumers et.al., Cultural Forms of Protest in Russia.

95. Pushkin’s poem “is a ‘tale’ where the hero is not clear”—heroism could be read in Peter’s attempt to master nature, or in Evgenii’s attempt to challenge Peter, according to John Kevin Newman in “Pushkin’s ‘Bronze Horseman’,” 174–75.

96. Banerjee, “Pushkin’s ‘The Bronze Horseman’,” 47–48, 59. Banerjee showed that Pushkin’s epic poem marks a turn away from Romanticism’s glorification of Peter and, instead, contributed an “authentically tragic vision” of Peter’s historical legacy and the costliness of his rule.

97. Graham, “Chernukha and Russian Film,” 3.

98. Borenstein, Overkill, 12.

99. An interesting strand of the film’s narrative is that one of the options for Kolya is to give in to authorities and move to a flat that is closer to town. This suggests familial domesticity as a value, though it is ultimately shown to be an unviable solution to Kolya’s predicament.

100. Nancy Condee also argues this, in “Knowledge (Imperfective)” .

101. See Medinsky at https://iz.ru/news/581814 (last accessed September 27, 2018). Vadim Polupanov, “Звягинцев нарочито густо снабдил своих героев всеми возможными человеческими пороками—лживостью, подлостью, наглостью и далее по списку. . . . Предательство, коррупция, измена, подлость, алкоголизм . . . здесь на каждом шагу. В этом фильме нет ни одного положительного персонажа.”

102. References to corruption are highly political in contemporary Russia; this is especially evident in Naval΄nyi’s expositions of high officials’ corruption.

103. Rutland, “The Place of Economics.”

104. Zvyagintsev, quoted in Masha Lipman, “The Campaign Against ‘Leviathan’ in Russia,” New Yorker, January 26, 2015, at www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/campaign-leviathan-russia (last accessed September 27, 2018).

105. Zvyagintsev: “Почему фильм нужен стране? Это правда сегодняшнего дня. Это правда целительная. . . . так жить затруднительно если вообще возможно,” Sobchak Zhivyem, YouTube video, 58:17, posted by TV Rain, March 6, 2015, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRtBoFzzEfU (last accessed November 16, 2018).

106. Dmitrii Bykov: “Это первая за много лет русская картина, в которой есть пусть и неполный, но эмоционально внятный образ нынешней реальности.” See “Mimo,” Novaya Gazeta, January 19, 2015, at https://www.novayagazeta.ru/articles/2015/01/19/62686-mimo (accessed November 19, 2018).

107. Chaplin also suggested that this is a strategy that clearly worked, as the film won several prizes; see at rusnovosti.ru/posts/361271; www.interfax-religion.ru/?act=news&div=57959 (last accessed September 27, 2018). Note that Chaplin’s claim runs counter to our own observations, which suggest that the film succeeded in generating debates because it did not explicitly uphold western values. Rather than claiming that the film did or did not unambiguously promote western values, we argue that the tragic structure of the film leaves the answers to its many questions unanswered and unresolved, with no clear panacea offered for the tragic ills presented in the film.

108. “Татьяна Трубилина считает ленту ‘бесполезной и неправдоподобной’,” NewsRu, January 13, 2015, at www.newsru.com/russia/13jan2015/levi.html (last accessed September 27, 2018).

109. Opinion by Dmitry Olshansky, quoted by NTV: “Какая же тухлая, вялая, тягостная ложь в каждом кадре и каждом слове,” NTV, January 13, 2015, at www.ntv.ru/novosti/1287478/ (last accessed September 27, 2018).

110. See the comment by Vadim Levental΄ in the prominent daily Izvestiia, who accused Zvygintsev’s philosophy of obscurantism characteristic to the Middle Ages (по-средневековому . . . мракобесна), and called Leviathan simply a “bad” film, see “Ochen nuzhnyi i svoevremennyi fil΄m,” Izvestiia, January 13, 2015, at https://iz.ru/news/581723 (last accessed September 27, 2018).

111. Opponents of the film clearly tried to use the strategies of distancing and alienation that had worked to downplay the social critique in Pussy Riot’s performances: see statements by Zyuganov, Medinsky, Leventhal, Markov, Mamontov, Meskhiev. For Medinsky’s statement, see “Vladimir Medinskii: ‘Leviafan’ zapredel΄no kon΄΄iunkturen,” Izvestiia, January 15, 2015, at https://izvestia.ru/news/581814 (last accessed September 27, 2018). For Zyuganov statement, see NTV, at www.ntv.ru/novosti/1290780/?fb#ixzz3YtpFIRRg (last accessed September 27, 2018). For Leventhal΄, see Izvestiia, January 13, 2015, at https://izvestia.ru/news/581723. For Mamontov, see “Arkadii Mamontov: Esli by ne Putin, u nas bylo by strashnee, chem na Ukraine,” Kul΄tura, March 31, 2015, at portal-kultura.ru/articles/tv/95481-arkadiy-mamontov-esli-by-ne-putin-u-nas-bylo-by-strashnee-chem-na-ukraine/ (last accessed September 27, 2018). For Meskhiev, Dmitrii Meskhiev: Nuzhno pokazyvat΄ raznoe,” PLN, March 5, 2015, at https://pln-pskov.ru/culture/196990.html (last accessed September 27, 2018).

112. See at https://rusnovosti.ru/posts/361271 (last accessed September 28, 2018) and at www.levada.ru/07-05-2015/leviafan-vnimanie-i-otsenki (last accessed September 28, 2018).

113. Full quote by Kostikov in Argumenty i Fakty: “О губительности лжи для народа, власти и в конечном счёте для страны писали Пушкин, Лермонтов, Островский, Достоевский, Толстой, а в советские времена Солженицын, Лихачёв, писатели-деревенщики. И во все времена—русские философы и мыслители,” See Argumenty i Fakty, March 18, 2015, 12, at www.aif.ru/society/opinion/1468743 (last accessed September 28, 2018).

114. See Radio Ekho Moskvi, January 24, 2015, at https://echo.msk.ru/blog/pozner/1480220-echo/ (last accessed September 28, 2018).

115. See at https://pozneronline.ru/2015/01/10158/ (last accessed September 28, 2018): “Но более всего правдой, беспощадной, тяжелейшей правдой.”

116. Scott, Domination, 19–20.