ABSTRACT
Chapter 5 investigates neomedieval memory politics as reflected in post- Soviet fiction and films featuring the oprichnina. While popular culture plays a crucial role in reshaping the memory of the oprichnina into mobmemory, it is also an arena where mobmemory may be challenged. The intertextual dialogue between supporters and adversaries of the oprichnina encompasses, among others, Mikhail Yuriev’s The Third Empire: Russia As It Ought to Be (2006), Vladimir Sorokin’s Day of the Oprichnik (2006), Maxim Kononenko’s Day of the High Achiever (2008), Alexander Prokhanov’s A Symphony of the Fifth Empire (2007), and several films. The public debates and political activism triggered by these works have prompted the polarization of public opinion and leveraged the celebrity culture, a prime mechanism of mobmemory formation. Exploring the changing attitudes to slavery in post-Soviet neomedieval cultural products, this chapter demonstrates that, the political stances of their creators notwithstanding, all those novels and films envisage state terror and inherited social inequalities, including slavery, as unavoidable aspects of the Russian future.
