Satire and Protest in Putin’s Russia

Aleksei Semenenko is Associate Professor in Russian at Umeå University. He is the author of The Texture of Culture: An Introduction to Yuri Lotman’s Semiotic Theory (2012), Hamlet the Sign: Russian Translations of Hamlet and Literary Canon Formation (2007), Aksenov and the Environs (coedited with Lars Kleberg; 2012) and other works on Russian culture, translation and semiotics.

• Chapter 1. The Evolution of Censorship in Russia.- Chapter 2. The Evolution of Satire in Russia.- Chapter 3. Satire on post-Soviet TV: From “Puppets” to Puppets.- Chapter 4. KVN: A TV Show Larger than Television.- Chapter 5. Joking Apart: Russian Humor of the Digital Era.- Chapter 5. Monstrations’ and 'Shimmering': Absurdist Popular Protests , by Daniel Leiderman.- Chapter 6. Beyond Subversive Affirmation: The New Dissent Art in Russia, by Klavdia Smola.- Chapter 7. The mediality of satirical protest in Putin’s Russia: “Grazhdanin poet”, by Annelie Bachmaier.- Chapter 8. Conservative Imperfection: Satire and New Populism of Leningrad, by Maria Engström.- Epilogue. Beyond Satire, by Aleksei Semenenko.

“In addition to its considerable contribution to scholarship on contemporary Russian culture, Semenenko’s comparative historical discussion makes it a valuable addition to studies of the place of humour and satire in Soviet culture … . This volume also fills a gap in the scholarship on Putin-era culture and cultural politics, which has tended to focus on particular media (literature, film, television, art, music) or genres, rather than on more amorphous, cross-generic and multi-media modes of expression such as satire.” (Seth Graham, Slavonic and East European Review SEER, Vol. 101 (2), January, 2023)