Wednesday lecture
18 Jun 2025 · 6.30 pm

Eliot Borenstein (NYU): Speak of the Devil. The Putinist Crusade against Satan at Home and Abroad

Venue: Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Eberhard-Lämmert-Saal, entrance Meierottostr. 8, 10719 Berlin
Contact: Matthias Schwartz
Research project(s): Adjustment and Radicalisation

The Russian state media have never been a model of rhetorical restraint, but the war in Ukraine has done away with any vestiges of decorum, not to mention secularism. How did Russia go from fighting the “Nazis” in charge of its southwestern neighbor to fighting the forces of Satan? Pre-revolutionary Russia had its own history of ferreting out the demonic, but “Satan” and “Satanism” were far from prominent in official Soviet culture. The Soviet Union was spared the American Satanic Panic of the 1980s, but the years following the collapse of the USSR saw the reintroduction of the tropes of Satanism through a combination of imported anxieties over “cults,” the resurgence of the Russian Orthodox Church, and heated opposition to “dangerous” cultural imports such as Harry Potter and Halloween. This talk traces the growing role of the discourse about Satan in Russian political and popular culture.

 

Eliot Borenstein is Professor of Russian & Slavic Studies and Vice Chancellor and Vice Provost for Global Programs at New York University. He received his PhD from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1993 and has since held various positions at New York University, including advisor for Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies since 2021 and global coordinator for East Asian Studies from 2014 to 2019. In 2020, Borenstein’s Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Book Prize.

Publications (selection):

  • Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 2024
  • Soviet Self-Hatred. The Secret Identities of Postsocialism in Contemporary Russia. Ithaca/London: Cornell University Press 2023
  • Meanwhile, in Russia: Russian Memes and Viral Videos. London et al.: Bloomsbury 2022
  • Pussy Riot: Speaking Punk to Power. London: Bloomsbury 2021
  • Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2019
  • Overkill: Sex Violence, and Russian Popular Culture after 1991. Ithaca: Cornell University Press 2008
  • Men Without Women: Masculinity and Revolution in Russian Fiction, 1917–1929. Durham: Duke University Press 2001

For more information, see www.eliotborenstein.net