Chapter 4: The Russian Dream and Victor Pelevin's Generation “Π”: Ideology in Post-Soviet Russia

The political turbulence caused by the dissolution of the USSR in 1991 radically changed Russia's sociopolitical scene. Russian society was forced to get ‘modernized’ and ‘liberalized’ according to the Western model at an intensive pace, which was decided without clear democratic authorization, and without regard to the peoples' mentality and culture. The long period of reforms that followed the dissolution had a shocking effect on the population of the country and led to a major fall in the living standards of a large part of the population, as well as to social anomy and deprivation (Lovell, 2006). The shocking transition from the Soviet ‘master narrative of utopia’ (Gomel, 2013) to the dystopian post-Soviet present of the 1990s (Khagi, 2008) resulted in a deep ideological and cultural crisis that brought into question the Russian and Soviet value systems (Barker, 2012).