One of the central conceptual goals of my teaching course is articulation of a description of historical past (and cultural production as well) as a space for the interaction and interrelationship of two opposed tendencies. The first of these may be characterized as the appearance of various zones of cultural autonomy — practices of self-expression and subjectification, creative work with traditions, the performative reinvention of cultural legacies, history and historical tradition — that collectively contribute to the increase in complexity and variety of available social and cultural positions. The second we may refer to as the drive to exert state control over culture (especially over cultural imaginary of historical past) in order to endure the ideological hegemony of the state and to transform culture into a resource for state patriotism and normative political, national and cultural identification. Ironically, both of these tendencies, which exist to various degrees in the cultural space of contemporary Russia, are expressed in terms of the concept of modernization. For this reason, culture becomes an arena for struggle over the meaning of this latter concept — a struggle in which cultural and political conservatism, which more and more dominates in Russia in recent years, is gaining the upper hand. My aim is to trace the characteristic features of the state’s administrative efforts in the area of cultural production back to the total infrastructural dependence of the Russian economic and social spheres on extraction and exploitation of natural resources. To my mind, the specificity of post-Soviet modernization derives precisely from this interconnection. As a material of my exploration, I will use different levels of culture and historical imagination: from official ideological discourse of Russian history to mass-culture, from contemporary cinema to contemporary literature. Schließen