The subtitle of this study on contemporary Russian media politics, “Television, Cinema, and the State,” does not do justice to the real breadth of the material covered. In addition to television miniseries, talk shows, and feature films, Mariëlle Wijermars has included print media, documentaries, monuments, and even video games. The book's particular highlights, however, result from the seriousness with which fictional narratives are treated. Analyses of their content, production, marketing history, and reception are complemented by a discussion of academic and journalistic discourses on historical subjects, including some pseudo-intellectual fringe media. Such a broad perspective reflects the existing variety of viewpoints, always keeping in mind the decisive role of institutions such as the Ministry of Culture in the outcome of debates. Thus, the book diversifies the common simplistic dichotomy “state (‘the Kremlin’) vs. media” by including a wide variety of non-state actors along the political spectrum. Wijermars's main focus is the image of Russian statehood past and present, an image that the Putin administration has actively sought to shape.

Following the introductory discussion of the subject—governmental and non-governmental memory politics—in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 outlines the scope of the study and the methodological principles applied. At the center of the book, in Chapters 3–6, are four case studies devoted, respectively, to Petr Stolypin, Aleksandr Nevskii, the Time of Troubles, and Ivan the Terrible and the Oprichnina. The final chapter (7) offers a brief analysis of the talk show “The Trials of Time” (Sud vremeni) and the transformations it underwent.

What unifies the four historical cases is the existential drama resulting from the instability of the Russian state, which, in each case, was either overcome or ended in a fiasco. Because the post-Soviet Russian state has been perceived as facing similar predicaments as its predecessors, the statist interpretation of historical antecedents has been vital for cultural interferences on various levels, from funding popular authoritarian narratives to highly publicized monuments and celebrations. Regarding the assembled cases, it would be easy to come up with a list of viable alternatives, but the author makes convincing arguments for each of her choices. Unlike earlier studies on memory politics, Wijermars's focus is not so much on continuity or discontinuity in respect to Soviet, particularly Stalinist, historiography and cultural memory, but on the reasons why certain subjects have become so essential to the Putin administration's historical sensitivities. Of the four case studies, the analysis of recent discourse on Stolypin is particularly fascinating because it is the most understudied historical subject and an initiative that ended in failure. This is remarkable given that Stolypin's example is essential for current oligarchic capitalism; alas, the official efforts in establishing a new patron saint for post-Soviet Russia were not persuasive enough.

Among the purposes of governmental interference in building and shaping historical and cultural memory, self-legitimization is primary. Looking at the intensity of its involvement in historical discourses, Wijermars concludes that for the Putin regime, “having founded its legitimacy on historical narratives, controlling the past has become vital to its survival” (226). Whether discrediting the current opposition is really a central aim of these initiatives, as the author charges, is up for debate. A more fundamental goal seems to be systematic adjustments to the legacy of Marxist-Leninist education, retaining those historical figures and narratives who still seem useful in the official pantheon, eliminating anachronistic ones, and adding some who were interpreted in a diametrically opposite way in the Soviet era.

The current cultural and media environment includes countless artifacts of the past, such as the popular historical movies of the 1930s–50s, which, consciously or unconsciously, are present in the minds of many viewers. Thus, the government is forced to act with caution in all matters of cultural memory. While not entirely unified in its conceptualization of national history, one of the establishment's main targets is the radical perestroika revisionism that had questioned the legitimacy of practically the entire Soviet historical philosophy. Perestroika revisionists are now regarded as relativist, defeatist, or even treasonous. This underlying intention of the post-2000 historical debates would have merited more attention in the book. Regrettably, the role of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn as a precursor to the reconceptualization of Russian history for a post-Soviet society is not mentioned at all. Likewise worth including would have been the activation of the classical literary canon on television with strong political overtones, as, for example, in two adaptations of Fedor Dostoevskii's The Demons. But these final remarks are not so much criticism as an expression of hope that the analysis of memory politics laid out in this exemplary study will inspire further research along similar methodological lines.