In The Politics of Fantasy, Eliot Borenstein examines contemporary Russian culture under Vladimir Putin through the original and productive lens of J. K. Rowling’s globally influential Harry Potter series (1997–2007). Treating the franchise as a “meta-cultural event” (8), Borenstein uses fantasy to illuminate the cultural logics of power, imagination, and political belonging in post-Soviet Russia. Rowling’s Wizarding World, he contends, brings into relief two opposing yet interconnected phenomena: the enormous influence of mass culture, with its capacity to “push the boundaries of acceptability, good taste, and conventional mores” (6), and a strong conservative backlash that casts Harry Potter as a threat to traditional values, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), and normative sexuality. Fully transmediated across books, films, television, the internet, comics, and video games, the franchise has also generated a robust fan culture that situates fantasy characters within Russia’s own political realities. Because fandom tends to be liberal and inclusive, Borenstein suggests, it became politicized in the Russian context by providing an inadvertent yet relatively safe space for queer expression—an implicit challenge to the state’s and the ROC’s increasingly obscurantist homophobic policies.
The book is organized into seven chapters. The first traces Harry Potter’s arrival in Russia at a moment when parents, educators, and librarians were already anxious about the decline of children’s reading, particularly of “serious” literature, amid the influx of translated western genre fiction—detective stories, fantasy, science fiction, horror, and mysteries. Throughout the book, Borenstein places contemporary debates within a broader historical and political framework, without which the peculiarity and intensity of Russian officials’ hostility toward Rowling’s novels are difficult to grasp. This chapter impresses with its breadth and detail, surveying media debates about western children’s literature and its allegedly corrosive values, the role of translation quality in shaping reception, and even the misogynistic rhetoric directed at Rowling herself.
The second chapter turns to the surprisingly limited role of fantasy in Soviet children’s and young adult literature. Earlier western franchises such as The Lord of the Rings and Star Wars, when they appeared in the USSR at the end of the Cold War, were viewed with suspicion as potential “cultural weapons” (38). Harry Potter, by contrast, entered Russia during a more politically neutral moment and at the height of global “Pottermania.” Its success was overwhelming and sparked a wave of derivative works, or “cheap knock-offs” (48), the most notorious being Dmitry Yemets’s series about the girl wizard Tanya Grotter. Chapter 3 examines these Russian adaptations, revealing how they simultaneously parodied Rowling’s franchise and testified to its profound impact on post-Soviet children’s literature.
The rise of fandom, explored in Ch. 4, marks a crucial turning point in the book’s analysis. Russian multimedia fan culture, much like its western counterpart, became “culturally meaningful and politically fraught” (94). Fans relentlessly localized the Wizarding World, inserting its characters into recognizably Russian settings and using them to comment on social problems such as corruption, alcoholism, and substandard living conditions. Most significantly, fan culture “celebrated diversity” (94) through the production of slash fiction. Borenstein maintains that Harry Potter slash fiction emerged as a platform for writing about sex in youth culture—an explicitly post-Soviet phenomenon—and for articulating queer identities otherwise marginalized or silenced in public discourse.
The following two chapters chart how the liberal ethos of Harry Potter fandom comes under sustained conservative scrutiny. Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 marks the onset of intensified culture wars characterized by anti-gay propaganda laws, the promotion of traditional family and religious values, nationalism, militarization, and the revival of Soviet-era moral frameworks. Within this climate, Harry Potter—with its emphasis on fantasy, magic, and resistance to evil authority—is recast as profoundly un-Russian and denounced as promoting occultism, Satanism, and LGBTQ values.
The final chapter explores how popular culture increasingly mobilizes Harry Potter imagery to satirize Putin himself. Over time, Putin is variously reimagined as the house-elf Dobby and, more recently and more pointedly, as Lord Voldemort, especially following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Like the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” Harry Potter functions as a vehicle for voicing uncomfortable truths about power. In this subversive humor, Borenstein discerns a “community-building tradition” (149) inherited from Soviet-era practices of oppositional culture.
Throughout The Politics of Fantasy, Borenstein elucidates how political and ideological power is negotiated and contested within contemporary Russian popular culture. By turning to children’s literature, he demonstrates how Rowling’s imported franchise was “assimilated into Russian cultural discourse” (159), generating a carnivalesque, multimedia universe that runs counter to Putin’s political vision. Engagingly written, theoretically astute, and rich in detail, the book makes a meaningful contribution to Slavic studies, cultural studies, and scholarship on popular culture under authoritarianism.
