ABSTRACT
Publishing activity for obvious reasons was concentrated in Russia's two major industrial and cultural centers: Moscow and St. Petersburg. Both cities were swamped by an abundance of intellectual publications, while the rest of the enormous country was still without books or periodicals. All those literary clubs, bookshops, salons, and literary prizes, when taken together, constitute a forum of intellectual ideas and a base for a new cultural strategy. Cultural magazines of every stripe were springing up like mushrooms after a rain, and some were astoundingly bold and original. The most amazing aspect of this is that in post-Soviet Russia—despite the development of glasnost, freedom of speech, and the independent mass media—the structure of cultural thinking has survived intact. The strong entrepreneurial activity elicited stormy debates within the stunned cultural community—talk of the shadow economy, criminal business dealings, and other matters about which the intelligentsia had little comprehension.
