@article{ref1,
title="Serializing national cohesion: Channel 1's Shkola and the contradictions of Post-Soviet consensus management",
journal="Russian review, The",
year="2013",
author="Hutchings, S.",
volume="72",
number="3",
pages="470-491",
abstract="Parliaments rarely debate television serials. Such, however, was the controversy surrounding Valeriia Gai-Germanika's 69-part &quot;Shkola&quot; (&quot;School&quot;), shown on Russia's Channel 1 in 2010, that several Duma Deputies called for its banning. Filmed with hand-held cameras and unknown actors, &quot;Shkola&quot; offered an uncompromising insight into problems afflicting Russian schools: racism, corruption, casual sex, suicide, drug-taking, self-harming, bullying, bribery, violence, and unremitting disorder in classrooms characterised by unimaginative teaching. &quot;Shkola&quot; posed unprecedented challenges to the boundaries of the permissible. This article, however, evaluates the serial's capacity to foster national cohesion, not in the &quot;top-down&quot; manner characteristic of state media events such as Victory Day, but through a multi-levelled dialectic of centre and periphery. Drawing on Jesus Martin-Barbero's mediation theory, the article traces the dialectic through the serial narrative's split structure: its oscillation between a naturalistic aesthetic based on metonymic displacements from society's centre to specific conflicts at its margins, and a melodramatic sentimentalism suited to the metaphoric modelling of that centre and the articulation of a discourse of universal empathy. The dialectic facilitates a mutual engagement of voices (official patriotic, Soviet nostalgic, nationalist extremist, liberal oppositionalist, vernacular racist) in which each contaminates or revitalises the other and in which Gai-Germanika's preferred universalist stance fails to prevail. The article includes an assessment of the broader implications of &quot;Shkola&quot; for public discourse in Russia. © 2013 The Russian Review.<p /><p>Language: en</p>",
language="en",
issn="0036-0341",
doi="10.1111/russ.10701",
url="http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/russ.10701"
}