Culture, Retrotopia, and "Tilde". And what is the Result of this Juxtaposition in the Context of Russia's War with Ukraine

Abstract

The article is a short essayist contribution to the study of the culture of Russia and critical media analysis. It is supposed to be a propaedeutic recognition of the main issues. It is not a methodical review. 

Authors start with an overview of the relationship between culture and war especially in the context of nazi totalitarianism and post-colonial thoughts of Joseph Conrad: culture often serves as an excuse to plunder someone else's land. War and propaganda always, and this is also a case recent in Russian-Ukraine war, are strictly interrelated: one of Putin's most important ideological stories is the restoration of the Tsarism with the tsar as the savior of the world. (Cf. Snyder 2018). Ivan Iljin is the main figure from Russia's past who is restored and venerated by the Putin regime. The "real men" ideology supports this ideological construct. 

The authors of the essay refer to the notions of "turning points history" and "counterfactual history" by Nial Ferguson and Nassim Taleb. This concept can be subordinated to the symbolic graphic representation in the tilde sign, discussed in the context of the culture of Putin's regime in Critical Quarterly by Condee, Prokhorov, Prokhorov 2021. 

According to the authors of the essay, these old-new cultural phenomena, including the present war, are also accompanied by nostalgia and the phenomenon of retrotopia described by Zygmunt Bauman. Svetlana Boym (1995) wrote about nostalgia in the context of breakthroughs in Russia as early as 1995, which, moreover, is mentioned at the beginning of Bauman's last book (2017; see Bauman 2018). 

The role of retrotopia in contemporary Russian culture, based on the popularity of filmic retro-series of the last decade, was analyzed and described by Mark Lipowiecki (2021). The authors point to several new examples of this retrotopic shift in Putin's culture in Russia.