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Between Centre and Periphery: On Cultural Identity of Neoconservative Writers (Zakhar Prilepin, Vasilii Avchenko and Andrei Rudalev)
In the second half of the 2000s, a group of writers and critics emerged in Russia who not only stressed their interest in a regional dimension of actual cultural and political processes but actively opposed the dominance of liberal metropolitan elites. A main factor consolidated these authors (Z. Prilepin, V. Avchenko, A. Rudalev et al.) into a neoconservative community was an experience of the upheavals of the 1990s (the collapse of the USSR, loss of belonging to a large (imperial) community, paralysis of state institutions, and rapid social differentiation). The new conservative wave sought to speak on behalf of those who did not fit into the new world of Russian capitalism. No wonder the centre-periphery relations became a rhetorical and ideological framework that allowed these writers to discuss problems relating to different kinds of inequality and discrimination. This chapter analyzes anti-liberal undertones of the idea of “peripherality” as well as an ambivalent nature of neoconservative criticism of both the federal centre’s policy towards Russian regions and regionalist views that formed in the 1990s and early 2000s.