Perestroika brought an end to censorship and lifted the Iron Curtain, and in the 1990s, led to the introduction of the long-awaited market. Money, which up till then had, strictly speaking, meant nothing, now meant everything. And the high priests of this cult of cash were the engineers of the 90s: the gangsters and the \u201cNew Russians.\u201d Both groups were mobsters, really\u2014the latter were just a touch more humane and refined: instead of Adidas trainers and raspberry-red jackets, they wore black Calvin Klein jeans. Russia suddenly switched from a position of \u201ceverything is forbidden\u201d to \u201cnothing is off limits:\u201d one sixth of the world\u2019s surface found itself in a state of actual anarchy. The government reacted only to the day-to-day political agenda, and all the rest was just left to its own devices, with the mantra being \u201cgrab as much as you can\u201d.<\/p>\n
Every Sunday night, as many as 180 million Soviet television viewers\u2014children and adults\u2014tune in Walt Disney\u2019s cartoons. From Odessa to Vladivostok, teenagers switch on their radios each week to hear the U.S. Top 20 counted down by a disc jockey from Wyoming who speaks fluent, if accented, Russian. And up to 70% of the films showing in Moscow movie theatres are from Hollywood. Now, in the centre of Moscow, over the head of the statue of the greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, is a huge Coca-Cola sign. Russia\u2019s greatest cultural father is doomed to stare straight at McDonald\u2019s. Rock\u2019s founding fathers, like Elvis Presley, are as popular as the heavy metal groups Bon Jovi and AC\/DC. Margaret Mitchell\u2019s \u201cGone with the Wind\u201d and James Dean dress-alikes abound, as do Madonna wanna-bes. Many peddlers wear baseball hats, T-shirts and sweat shirts with logos of U.S. sports teams, universities, or even the U.S. flag. Teenage girls with long, stringy hair and hippie-style clothes eat Baskin-Robbins ice cream as they stroll the mall. A Dixieland band plays tunes as Soviet couples dressed in Levi\u2019s or fluorescent warm-up suits wander by. \u201cElvis is my idol,\u201d says a man, 45, whose long curly hair is streaked with gray. He sees Presley as a rebel. \u201cI\u2019m trying to dress like him because he thought for himself,\u201d \u201cHe always did what he wanted to do, no matter what the authorities said. When I was young and these clothes were in fashion in America, the police would give us hell if we dressed like this.\u201d But now, \u201cwith my clothes, I want to show the independence of the Russian people from the socialist ideology of our Communist Party bosses. It\u2019s my way of protest. The 22-year-old Nikolai Baranov sells Russian souvenirs to tourists\u2014but he looks more like an advertisement for America. With short-cropped blond hair, a U.S. flag bandanna around his neck, black Levi 501 jeans and Reebok high-tops, Baranov could fit in on any Midwestern college campus. \u201cI have an American flag above my bed,\u201d says Baranov. \u201cI like everything American\u2014American philosophy of life, American politics, the American work ethic. Maybe it\u2019s because that\u2019s where I really want to be.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
main\u00a0exhibitions:<\/b>
\n<\/b><\/p>\n
2024: #Good morning bro<\/i>, Gallery Inda, Budapest (curator: Zsolt Kozma)<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Perestroika brought an end to censorship and lifted the Iron Curtain, and in the 1990s, led to the introduction of the long-awaited market. Money, which up till then had, strictly speaking, meant nothing, now meant everything. And the high priests of this cult of cash were the engineers of the 90s: the gangsters and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":363,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-361","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=361"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":375,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/361\/revisions\/375"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/363"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=361"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=361"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/szaszlilla.hu\/hu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=361"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}