ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses a “cultural revolution” in Sverdlovsk (renamed Ekaterinburg in 1992) of the perestroika period. Affecting different cultural media (literature, film, theater, visual art), participants of this process subsequently significantly contributed to Russian culture at the national level. This intense but short-lived phenomenon (approximately from 1987 to 1993) is interpreted as an example of internal “post-coloniality” characterized by in betweenness and hybridity. The Urals perestroika-period culture conflates the local and global, or rather presents the local as the global, and vice versa. This self-presentation releases the regional culture from the obligatory attachment to local themes and certain (also constructed but presented as “authentic”) local stylistic palette. At the same, the vision of the global created by Sverdlovsk cultural activists proved to be rather homogenous, leading toward both European modernism and postmodernism, on the one hand, and the iterations of imperialist “all-inclusive” nationalism in the 2000s–2010s, on the other.
