ABSTRACT

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, essentialist understandings of gender and rigid divisions of male and female roles, characteristics and skills have been widely discussed and frequently overtly promoted in the Russian media and in the rhetoric and behaviour of a range of public figures (Sperling 1999: 73-80; Kay 2000: 26-33). Trends which began in the late 1970s were given free reign by the demise of communist ideology and the removal of a need to pay even lip service to notions of gender equality in the early 1990s. Many of the debates which began to gain authority in the late Soviet period have been rekindled with a new gusto in post-Soviet Russia, and appear, outwardly at least, to favour men, as examined in more detail below. Yet media discourses which support rather stereotypical views of male and female capabilities and characteristics do not necessarily imply that representations of what it means to ‘be a man’ in post-Soviet Russia are universally positive. Indeed, men have been strongly criticized in much media debate and where positive images of men are presented, these may, nonetheless, be constraining rather than liberating. This chapter will look in more detail at the ways in which men have been represented in popular media discourses and at how these media images were reflected and responded to in men’s experiences of and comments on life in post-Soviet Russia. This research has focused particularly on those representations which are likely to reach men in provincial areas of Russia. Many of the new glossy magazines and fashionable ‘men’s press’ publications now available in the capital cities are not on sale in Russia’s smaller towns or provincial cities. The media sources discussed here, therefore, are primarily those aimed specifically at a provincial audience, such as the monthly magazine Sel’skaia nov’, or local newspapers and publications collected in Barnaul and Kaluga Region during fieldwork for this study.