Introduction

The present collection of papers is the first attempt to juxtapose the late Soviet and Putin eras in Russian nonconformist culture. The contributors examine shifts as well as zones of transition along the axis between conformity and nonconformity from the 1960s to the present. This focus on the exchange between the unofficial and official responds to the growing claim in recent scholarship, that it is necessary to approach late socialism and its countercultures as larger interacting discursive fields, and thus to complicate the previously assumed dichotomies. Moreover, the investigation of the hybridity of late socialism in the first part of the issue allows us to explore and understand the nuanced and even contradictory nature of (non)conformity after 2000 in the second part.