Abstract

An account of an informal post-Soviet sociality and transcultural group identity of Russian creative youth emerging in and around INRUSSIA.com, an English-language
online publication based in Moscow as of 2016. Survey of cultural politics and economic development in contemporary Russia given the conditions of a media platform’s production. The complexity of (sub)cultural becoming in a (post)socialist context is addressed given the vexed relationships between creative classes, countercultural forces, and economic elites in the country. New methodologies are used to study online spaces, uncommon to research in Anglophone cultural studies. The textual and visual analysis of an active digital archive is contextualized by ethnographic research, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. The analyses of cultural dynamics, political, and economic conflict (i.e. Euromaidan crisis), posits INRUSSIA.com as a contested political site, constituting a cultural “alternative” crucial to local neoliberalizing and gentrifying processes. Emergent cultural politics of an underground arts scene in Russia, on/offline, express marginal and alternative aspects. A nuanced engagement with Soviet past, genealogy of electronic music, queer performance, and combative geopolitics, fore-front regional arts collectives formed across the class and ethnic lines of the ex-Soviet bloc. An overlooked community’s contradictory alignment with the values of mainstream official policies in Russia, such as neo-nationalism post-Crimean referendum, underscores neoliberal ideologies and privatization practices, upheld by the oligarch funding sources leading cultural assemblages in Russia today. INRUSSIA.com, born of informal practices, is a part of the country’s economic formalization, attending to the state of amateur creative entrepreneurship in an alternative cultural scene in Moscow. A broad take on cultural transformations in and around Moscow via a specific case tackles pressing concerns in media studies: regional and global approaches, formal and informal cultural economies, creative industries, digital media objects, and methods of analysis in cultural studies – responding to the absence of English-language scholarship on contemporary Russian media and culture.