ABSTRACT
This chapter engages in a cultural reading of class by looking at how contemporary Russian self-help literature represents, explains and legitimises class divisions and distinctions. It draws upon an on-going research project examining self-help technologies in contemporary Russian and Finnish societies. The project analyses bestselling self-help books published during the 2000s and, drawing upon focus group and one-to-one interviews as well as website discussions, explores how readers engage with this literature and what kind of meanings they attach to it. The chapter examines the writings of two Russian bestselling popular psychology self-help authors, Nataliia Pravdina and Valerii Sinel'nikov. Sinel'nikov's and Pravdina's writings construct a normative model of self culturally coded as masculine: it is a khoziain, a master of one's life. The disintegration of the Soviet Union prompted not only a restructuring of social and economic institutions, but also very importantly, a re-evaluation of the Soviet value system.
