Can We Avoid Politics?

Can We Avoid Politics? is a series of 30 minute video essays aimed to pin down the cultural development in post-Soviet Russia, apply critical theory to it, and to answer a burning question: can we avoid politics? How did we end up in the reality where Russia is a terrorist state waging a brutal war against its close neighbor while fascist tendencies continue to rise within its own borders?

We believe that the process of Russia turning into this kind of state can be traced by studying the culture and the media landscape of the past 30 years. The comeback of imperial dreams, the hatred towards numerous groups including Ukrainians, ethnic minorities, women, queer people and many more; the belief of Russia’s supremacy, the tendency to cover state’s war crimes in the past or in the present, declarative apoliticism, and distrust towards the West: all of this was reflected far beyond the government's official propaganda.

Our aim is not to put the blame but to highlight these cultural developments, show how they went far beyond Putin’s speeches and played a huge role in forming the political landscape Russia finds itself in now. The impact that the culture had on Russia’s descent to fascism is still gradually underrated and under-analyzed, and only by rediscovering and rebuilding the connection between culture and politics in modern Russia one can truly understand how we ended up here, and, more importantly, learn how to spot fascist tendencies and not let them take root in the first place.

Can We Avoid Politics? will be a first-time collaboration between two prominent figures of Russian cultural critique: Nika Vodvud, who will also serve as a presenter and narrator, and George Birger.

Nika Vodvud is a video blogger and feminist activist with over 440k subscribers on YouTube whose videos accumulated more than 60 million views and were featured in the New York Times. Nika doesn’t stick strictly to feminism-related content but covers a wide range of topics including cultural appropriation, blackface by Russians and most recently, imperial tendencies in Russian political culture and the role ‘regular’ Russian citizens have played during the war.

George Birger is a journalist and publicist known for his work in important Russian cultural institutions such as Look At Me online magazine and Afisha magazine. Shortly after the beginning of Russian invasion in Ukraine in 2014, George became a part of Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and published several pieces on cultural development in Russia in international media: on Russian propaganda’s reaction to HBO Chernobyl series in Buzzfeed News, on Russian state’s war against its own musicians for Foreign Policy, and most recently, a story for The New York Times about Shaman, a pop-singer turned propagandist.

 
The first season of Can We Avoid Politics? consist of 10 episodes, each looking into one cultural issue of the modern Russia.