Report on “Common Resentments, Diverging Plots” workshop

Author: Katharina Kelbler (Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

From June 18 to June 20 2025, the Leibniz Center for Literary and Cultural Research (ZfL) in Berlin hosted the international workshop “Common Resentments, Diverging Plots: Forms and Functions of Popular Conspiracy Culture in Eastern Europe,” the third as part of the project “Adjustment and Radicalisation”1 on contemporary popular cultures in Eastern Europe. This workshop was organized in cooperation with the ERC project “Conspirational Memory”2 led by BORIS NOORDENBOS (University of Amsterdam), which deals with conspiracy culture, conspiracy theories, and the culture of memory. The discussions addressed how conflicts, mistrust, stereotypes, and resentments condense into conspiracy theories, which are often exploited by popular influencers, populists, artists, and intellectuals for their respective political agenda. At the same time, we discussed how popular cultural formats can also serve as a medium to adjust or question widespread fears, prejudices, and everyday myths through exciting and entertaining stories and images.

ELIOT BORENSTEIN3 (New York) opened the workshop with a lecture on “Speak of the Devil. The Putinist Crusade against Satan at Home and Abroad.” He examined the rise of Satanism in the contemporary political discourse in Russia, which he linked to the growing influence of the Russian Orthodox Church since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Under Putin’s rule, accusations of Satanism increasingly serve as a projection screen for fears and resentments against the West as the source of anything evil and seductive. Threat scenarios staged under the pretext of protecting minors and traditional values can be arbitrarily exploited for political purposes in propaganda discourse in order to outlaw undesirable behavior. Here, according to BORENSTEIN, it makes no difference if the initiators of this crusade really believe in it or not: “You don’t have to believe [in Satan] to be afraid of — if you do, it’s an extra.”4

TODOR HRISTOV (Sofia) followed up on these considerations with the example of the Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga (real name: Vangelia Pandeva Dimitrova, 1911-1996). He conceptually explored the connection between belief, knowledge, truth, and conspiracy theory, arguing that popular belief in secret truths must be taken seriously in order to understand the phenomenon.5 Hristov used US and Bulgarian intelligence documents from the Cold War era as well as the enormous popularity that Vanga’s prophecies enjoyed in the socialist and post-socialist world to demonstrate the fascination exerted by these “parrhesiastic acts” (Foucault 2001), no matter how vague or inaccurate. This desire to know hidden and supposedly forbidden truths (as is characteristic of conspiracy theories), which was widespread throughout popular culture, cannot simply be dismissed as fake news or fantasy. According to Hristov, it must rather be analyzed as an example of the psychoanalytic mechanisms of “disavowal.”

THOMAS MAIER (Basel) and GUNDULA POHL (Hagen) argued how state and state-affiliated actors use popular social media and television channels to spread political messages and conspiracy theories. Maier focused on the Neo-Nationalist Futurity movement, “The New Scythians,” which was initiated primarily by Pavel Zarifullin and disseminates its positions on econationalism and ethnofuturistic urbanism through various YouTube channels and blogs. This retro-utopia combines esoteric, folkloric, modernist, and ecological elements with retro-Soviet and anti-colonial facets to form a Russian identity discourse enforced by global conspiracy theories. It generates its suggestive power primarily by their alleged proximity to government circles and by staging its fantastic future scenarios with impressive aesthetic images. Pohl examined the documentary film “The ‘Germany’ Parallel: How Are the Atrocities of the Fascist Occupiers Similar to the Protests in August 2020?” (2022)6, which was broadcast on Belarusian state television. By combining documentary footage of Nazi Germany’s genocide against the Belarusian population (1941-1944) with reports on the 2020 protests in Belarus, the film insinuates that today’s wave of protests represents the same imperial threat from the collective West as did the Nazi occupation. The politics of memory and cultural trauma are instrumentalized for propaganda purposes in order to legitimize one’s own authoritarian power through simplified and emotionalized conspiracy theories.

GLEB KORAN (Gothenburg/Berlin) dealt with left-wing communist YouTube influencers such as Dmitriy “Goblin” Puchkov and their media franchise. These influencers were extremely critical of the neoliberal policies of Putin’s reign and articulated resentment towards the government, but also towards Ukraine as a “failed state,” using various means of rhetorical exaggeration and defamation in their videos. Members of a loose network, these left-wing influencers were united in their nostalgic view of the communist Soviet Union. It was not until the annexation of Crimea and the start of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that the scene gradually disintegrated in the period from 2014 to 2022.

BORIS NOORDENBOS (Amsterdam) and DARIA GANZENKO (Potsdam) examined the staging of conspiracy theories in the genres of melodrama and stand-up comedy. Noordenbos explored popular culture films and series about the 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl to demonstrate the genre-defining effect of conspiracy narratives. In films, documentaries, and series, the catastrophe is often portrayed not as the consequence of structural problems, but as the result of betrayal, sabotage, or foreign influence. This melodramatic victim-perpetrator scheme personalizes and morally charges collective suffering. These narratives often echoed beyond the specific case of “Chernobyl”, linking general victim discourses to the legitimization of political repression and violence. Conversely, Ganzenko focused not on the plot, but on the characters of conspiracy theories. Examining the representation of FSB agents in stand-up comedy (in Russia and in exile), Ganzenko outlined a dichotomous structure: In state-sponsored formats, they are staged as competent, clever, and effective, while independent comedy shows, especially those in exile, portray them as absurd, incompetent, and ridiculous. Both state and opposition shows thus deal with experiences of fear, mistrust, and vulnerability towards the state in a humorous way as they emphasize the efficiency of the security services on the one hand while also enabling critical reflection through satire on the other. Through the comedy format, the FSB agent figure may thus be staged as both a threat and as an object of humorous debate.

MATTHIAS SCHWARTZ (Berlin) focused on conspiracy theories in contemporary bestselling novels from Ukraine and Russia, which often contain the potential for fictional alienation and condensation of widespread resentment. Using the example of the most successful contemporary Ukrainian novel, Illarion Pavliuk’s “I See You Are Interested in Darkness” (2020), he showed how post-Soviet everyday experiences and resentments are processed into an ambiguous examination of sexual abuse, extreme violence, individual responsibility, and personal agency in the horror thriller genre. In contrast, Russian bestselling author Yana Vagner’s latest novel “The Tunnel” (2024) deals with the claustrophobic experience of a group of car and truck drivers and their passengers who are unexpectedly trapped in a car tunnel near Moscow for days on a weekend and thus completely cut off from the outside world. Not only does this fictional form address widespread resentments, fears, and prejudices, but also current socio-political experiences of isolation and separation as an existential extreme situation. As in Soviet times, the novel takes on an escapist yet also therapeutic function by transforming collective everyday experiences beyond the explicitly political into captivating stories of fascination.

LESIA KULCHINSKA (Amsterdam) examined how popular conspiracy theories on the decadent West allegedly undermining traditional values gained influence in the field of contemporary art in Ukraine even before the 2014 Euromaidan and especially afterwards. Using examples from Kiyv, Kharkiv, and Donetsk, she showed how the Moscow Orthodox Church, conservative politicians, and museum directors repeatedly scandalized depictions of nudity, even managing to prevent an exhibition of photographs by Ukrainian artist Borys Mikhailov. Soviet prudery and conspiratorial resentment against modern art as Western propaganda shaped a discourse that then found its symptomatic climax in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic (DNR) after the 2014 occupation: Artworks in the Donetsk Art Center Izolyatsia were destroyed and the building was turned into a torture prison for “enemies of the republic.”

The last two presentations dealt with fantastic forms of collective resentment. SVITLANA PIDOPRYGORA (Innsbruck/ Mykolaiv) explored the medium of the graphic novel as well as comic and superhero narratives in the Ukrainian context, specifically Vadym Nazarov’s comic series Patriot after 2014. The comic takes up well-known conspiracy themes such as the involvement of aliens, technological subversion, and historical revisionism and reinterprets them from an explicitly Ukrainian post-Soviet and post-colonial perspective. With irony, grotesque exaggerations, and absurd humor, the comic successfully satirizes the paranoid worldview of conspiracy culture as well as the theatrical nature of authoritarian powers. AGNIEZSKA HASKA (Warsaw) explored how certain plots or characters in Polish science fiction openly or indirectly reproduce anti-Semitic stereotypes. Using examples from the period of 1817 to today, she demonstrated how the genre was repeatedly used for anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, which, above all, varied the phantasm of the “Jew” who wants to destroy the Polish nation and culture. This literature is still being read en masse today. However, there are also works that break up such dominant narratives, such as Jacek Dukaj’s “Before Nightfall” (1997) or Igor Ostachowicz’s “Night of the living Jews” (2012).

The workshop emphatically demonstrated the prevalence and power of conspiracy theories and collective resentment in various media formats and popular cultural genres. Using very different examples from Belarus, Bulgaria, Poland, Russia, and Ukraine, it vividly argued how these are not just a niche phenomenon of esoteric and populist outsiders, but how popular cultural products are a site where collective experiences, traumatic caesuras, nostalgic longings, and imperial fantasies of omnipotence are captured in convincing conspiratorial plots and socially effective images of resentment. All the contributions convincingly argue how popular culture conspiracy plots—which is certainly not only a phenomenon of post-communist societies, yet particularly evident here—not only mirror collective fears and desires, but also actively shape identity attributions, power relations, and cultures of remembrance—a field that requires further systematic research.

Conference overview:

Panel I:

Eliot Borenstein (New York): Speak of the Devil. The Putinist Crusade against Satan at Home and Abroad

Panel II:

Todor Hristov (Sofia): Believing to Know: Popular Representations of a Bulgarian Seer

Thomas Maier (Basel): Forward to the Past: Pavel Zarifullin’s Neo-Nationalist Futurity and Resentful Revisionism

Panel III:

Gundula Pohl (Hagen): Parallel Narratives: On the Staging of Conspiracy Fantasies in State-Sponsored Film Productions in Belarus

Gleb Koran (Gothenburg / Berlin): Post-soviet “Structure of Feeling” – Reactivation of “Ressentiment” in Russian Left YouTube (2014–2022)

Panel IV:

Boris Noordenbos (Amsterdam): Nuclear Melodrama: Popular (Conspiracy) Culture on “Chernobyl”

Daria Ganzenko (Potsdam): The Good, the Bad and the Funny: The FSB Agent as a Stand-Up Comedy Character

Panel V:

Matthias Schwartz (Berlin): Post-Communist Phantoms: Resentment and Escapism in Recent Eastern European Popular Culture

Lesia Kulchinska (Amsterdam): Vicious Images: Fears and Fantasies of Conspiracy Behind Iconoclastic Violence in Ukraine

Panel VI:

Svitlana Pidoprygora (Innsbruck/ Mykolaiv): Clones, Robots, Aliens: Conspiracy-Laden Narratives in Vadym Nazarov’s Comic “Patriot: Attack of the Clones”

Agnieszka Haska (Warsaw): “Warsaw De-Judified”: Antisemitic Tropes in Polish Science-Fiction Literature

Notes:
1 For further information, see: https://www.zfl-berlin.org/project/adjustment-and-radicalisation.html and https://popular-dynamics.org/ (27.08.2025).
2 For further information, see: https://www.conspiratorialmemory.com/ (27.08.2025).
3 For further information, see: https://www.eliotborenstein.net/ (27.08.2025).
4 Eliot Borenstein in the Q&A of his lecture: https://www.zfl-berlin.org/veranstaltungen-detail/items/eliot-borenstein-nyu-speak-of-the-devil.html (27.08.2025).
5 In doing so, he further developed on his argument from his monograph Impossible Knowledge. Conspiracy Theories, Power, and Truth, London 2020.
6 The complete documentary film is available on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXWWSMyWQrA (27.08.2025).

Report on hsozkult.de