Introduction

The present volume has arisen out of the collaborations of the Leeds Russian Centre with numerous international partners and articulates the Centre’s purpose to reposition Russia and Russian Studies in the global era. We wish to propose the concept of ‘Russia(n) in the global context’, where ‘global’ is understood more broadly than just as a synonym for ‘contemporary’. In this respect our volume is a successor to Catriona Kelly and David Shepherd’s Russian Cultural Studies: An Introduction (1998) and is similar to their study in its inclusivity and broad understanding of culture. Kelly and Shepherd laid the groundwork for the present collection by departing from the hitherto existing top-down approach to Russian culture which arose out of the conditions particular to Western study of Russia in the Soviet era and also derived from the conceptual difficulties identified by Condee (2006). They acknowledged that future studies would need to ‘have recourse to some of the theoretical agenda of contemporary cultural studies in the West, such as the study of globalization and localization’ (Kelly and Shepherd 1998: 6).