Starting to write

about the psychology of deception in Russia/the USSR. I began thinking about this when writing my dissertation on the collective farm in Soviet and Russian cinema and was presented with the hyper-real depictions of country life in Pyr'ev's musicals. I then saw an exhibition about the peasant in Russian and Soviet art when I was in Moscow last year, and the gap between reality and its depiction was equally wide. Elements of this hyperreality pervade most areas of Soviet life, particularly under Stalin - one need only think of the architectural delights of the Moscow Metro, or the parades on Red Square (both of which, of course, have antecedents in imperial Russian history). I have been reading a great deal about Soviet popular culture and history recently - Epic Revisionism is a fascinating collection of essays and original source material and National Bolshevism is proving to be an excellent read. I need to read more Baudrillard to get my head round some of these postmodern concepts, but what interests me the most is the apparent complicity of the Soviet (and now Russian) populace in this deception. Most Russians (and for that fact, most nationals from former Eastern Bloc states) I have met have tended to be young, intellectual and Western-looking, vehemently opposed to the regimes they grew up under. Yet, as we see from the celebrations around Stalin to the Putin youth group with a .su domain, there must be a sizeable number of Russians who do not share this world view. Andrew Wilson's Virtual Politics, which I started to read on the Tube this morning examines the political dimension of this deception (or should that be hyper-spin) in terms of the Ukrainian and Russian elections, and traces many of the methods employed today back to the KGB, NKVD, Cheka and even earlier incarnations of the secret police. Utterly fascinating.