Post by The Russian Review

COVER IMAGE FOR THE 85/3 JULY 2026 ISSUE Our cover features a photograph of the “March of Millions,” a Moscow protest against Vladimir Putin’s inauguration to a third presidential term on May 6, 2012. The image shows a demonstrator holding a sign that reads, “Flying Spaghetti Monster, cast Putin out!,” a parodic reference to global pop culture combined with an allusion to the line “Mother of God, Virgin Mary, cast Putin out!” from Pussy Riot’s Punk Prayer, for which the group had been put on trial two months earlier. The “March of Millions” was the culmination of the 2011 to 2013 protest movement known as the Bolotnaia protests, one of the most major public expressions of discontent with the government since the 1990s. The suppression of these protests marked a turning point in the Putin era when hopes for Russian integration into the liberal world order began to fade. In this issue, Daria Ezerova’s article, “The Ideology of History and the Limits of Cinematic Realism in Andrei Zviagintsev’s Leviathan and Nataliia Meshchaninova’s The Hope Factory,” argues that the representation of filmic space in the cinema of the 2010s registered what it calls the emergent “structure of feeling” of this pessimistic mood after Bolotnaia. Source: Sergey Rodovnichenko, May 6, 2012, photograph, Wikimedia Commons, https://lnkd.in/gaip4myr