Vlad Strukov is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Russian and Slavonic Studies and the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. He was a visiting scholar at the Universities of Moscow, Pittsburgh, and London. He is a new media curator and the founding editor of Static, an international journal supported by the Tate and The Institute of Contemporary Arts, London. He is currently completing a volume on the discourses of glamour and celebrity, co-authored with Helena Goscilo, as well the Historical Dictionary of Contemporary Russia (Scarecrow Press), co-authored with Robert Saunders. Dr Strukov's research on film, animation, mass media and national identity has appeared in Slavic and East European Journal, Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal, and other publications.
After the implosion of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Russia was left with an enormous challenge to (re-)build its national identity. With nation being a historically determined concept, it is not surprising that Russian history has been rigorously re-examined and re-conceptualised on all levels, from school history textbooks to popular television shows. New digital technologies, especially the Internet, allow revisionist projects to be staged at a grand scale, involving an almost infinite number of participants. In this article, I analyse Russia's contemporary web-based project called The Name of Russia in order to explore how new media help moderate public opinions and how history and nationhood are imagined in the digital environment. This publication is the first in a planned series of works devoted to the study of The Name of Russia, and is part of the ongoing research project on the articulation of nationhood in the Russian Cyberspace.
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Vlad Strukov
The Name of Russia
Language of contribution: English
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