Cultural Capitalism

Cultural Capitalism is a long-term research project that examines the rise of the book market in post-Soviet Russia in order to understand the development of capitalist aesthetics and the effects of capitalist thinking on cultural production. The project includes a number of article publications as well as the forthcoming book Cultural Capitalism: Literature and the Market After Socialism (Cornell University Press, 2025).

One aspect of this project was compiling, a data set of all the titles listed in Russia‘s first bestseller lists. Over the course of several years, I compiled a full set of the “best sellers of Moscow“ lists published in the industry periodical Knizhnoe obozrenie (or The Book Review). In 2022 and 2023, I worked with two research assistants at Georgetown University, Amelia Benjamin and Nina Armstrong, to extract the data from these lists into a usable data set. Some of that data appears in the book. But I also wanted to present it here in a more dynamic form than a book publication would allow.

To get started, take a look at this bar chart race of the best selling authors of 1990s Russia parentheses push play in the bottom left hand corner.

Bestselling Fiction Authors by Ranked Points*, Nov. 1993–Jun. 1999

To learn more about what this bar chart means, check out a series of blog posts about these bestseller lists: Bestsellers of Moscow Part I, Part II, and Part III.

If you’re interested in digging further into the Cultural Capitalism project, here are some places to start:

• Read about the Russian bestseller lists in an article that appeared in Slavic Review.
• Read about post-Soviet literary prizes in an article that appeared in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie (in Russian).
• Download the open source data set of all the 1990s bestsellers published in the central Moscow bestseller lists.
• And of course, pre-order the book.

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