Entrepreneur As a Hero of Russian Cinema in the First Half of the 1990s: the Adoption of a New Stereotype

Abstract

The essay discusses, via the analysis the Soviet and Russian cinema
of the first half of the 1990s, the problem of adoption of a new socio-ethical
stereotype — the positive moral stereotype of an entrepreneur, a businessman
and a private property owner — in post-perestroika Russia. The scholarly novelty
of the presented study consists Pointing out that films of that period have been
mostly evaluated in a fragmented and ambiguous manner, the author analyzes
them in the context of the formation of mass representations (stereotypes and
frames) of one of the period’s most characteristic social figures. The actuality
of the study analysis is evidenced by the ongoing discussions about the ethical
background of entrepreneurship in contemporary Russia and about the nature
of the 1990s. Considering this problem on the basis of a comprehensive analysis
of representative films (Genius, Confessions of a Kept Woman, Limita, Ryaba My
Chicken, Love the Russian Way, and others), the author concludes in 1990–1995
Soviet/Russian cinema, inspired both by the inertia of the former Soviet ideas
about business and businessmen and the dramatic collisions of the first five
years of the post-Soviet era, did not provide the viewer with sufficient artistic
arguments for the ethical rehabilitation of entrepreneurship and, therefore,
failed to fix new stereotypes and instructional representations/frames in the
mass consciousness.