«Post-Soviet Emptiness» and «Russian Emptiness»: Comparative Analysis

The purpose of the study was to solve the problem of insufficiently clear conceptualization and comparison of the concepts of "russian" and "post-Soviet" emptiness in terms of the participants of the thematically corresponding aesthetic online-communities – "Russian Emptiness" and "Panels" VKontakte. The methods used are media space analysis and quantitative content analysis. Based on the theoretical foundations of the work and the results of the analysis, conceptual schemes denoting a set of definitions of the studied concepts and their relationships with each other were constructed. The "Russian emptiness" reflects the non-anthropogenic state of space, which encourages a person to physically and emotionally colonize it. It is understood both through everyday experience and through mystical images, religious meanings, artificial worlds, possessing a nostalgic character of perception and positive semantics. The "post-Soviet emptiness" is based around panel buildings and the urban landscape. The community functions as a photo album, which contributes to the emergence of certain forms of personalized perception of content. The "russian" and "post-Soviet" emptiness are not interpreted by community members as exclusively products of capitalist crises. An unambiguous connection between them and the deuralization/deurbanization of space is not identified. They have many overlapping characteristics, while not becoming the synonymic and interdependent. Members of aesthetic online-communities resort to various instruments that allow them to formulate their affinity for the shown content, and through this assign themselves a certain experience. These communities become a space for articulating and comprehending sociocultural experience, but not in order to ‘live’ this experience, but to explain the phenomenon of emptiness and define it.