Change of Ideas About the Political Community in the Ussr During the Cold War and Their Influence on Soviet Culture[Изменение Представлений О Политическом Сообществе В Ссср Времен «Холодной Войны» И Их Влияние На Советскую Культуру]

History of the Cold War is obviously connected with tendencies of isolationism, especially if speaking of the USSR. However, one may suppose that there is an important but underresearched aspect of the Soviet isolationism: namely, how it influenced cultural dynamics in the USSR and what were its mental foundations taken for granted; particularly, one needs to discuss what were the main similarities and differences between “cold war” isolationism and policy of a “besieged fortress” that was realized in the USSR starting with the late 1920s. This paper is focused on the traits and historical evolution of the Soviet isolationism basing on the two methodological approaches: studies of governmentality and study of imagined community’s discursive borders, in other words, the Soviet isolationism is studied here as a specific type of social and political imagination. If revisiting the Soviet practices of isolationism on this level, one can see that mental structures caused by the Cold War considerably informed Soviet social imagination and remain to be influential in the post-Soviet culture. This conclusion is founded with a short discussion on Sergey Lukianenko’s series of fantasy novels on “Watches” (1998--2004), one of the most successful projects in the post-Soviet mass culture.