State and Evolution Book

This is the end of the Soviet era as seen not from the usual perspective of oligarchs and apparatchiks, but instead what it looked like to the artists, the musicians, the people. It was a wrenching, dislocating time, and this volume collects essays showing how people reacted to it, embracing freedom or fleeing from it. Some of this is solid scholarship--there is a thorough rendering of Russians' embrace of new religions, for example--some of it is more impressionistic. And there is the completely unexpected (the graffiti commemorating a site where Communists were supposedly executed), and the downright surreal (the use of a Mexican telenovela star in scripted programs promoting a massive Ponzi scheme). Perhaps the Ponzi struck me most of all not just because of it is such a classic and sad case of hugely successful mass marketing for a completely fraudulent product, but because of the way the scheme preyed on both the fear of the end of an era and the hopes, in the end dashed for those who "invested", for a new one.