Another component that links current Russia to zastoi a bit is the cavalier attitude to community and social responsibility, including blatant disregard for rules (expressed or just implied socially) and even reason. On my first trip there an old friend picked me up in Pulkovo. We smoked in the car on the way and then I asked where the ashtray was. He told me to toss it out. Instead, I did find the ashtray (full of ash but no butts) and but out the cigarette there. Next thing he pulled the ashtray out and dumped it outside. Just a minor example I saw repeating over and over. Amount of trash surpasses even San Francisco’s Market Street.

No matter that lots of us were kitchen dissidents during zastoi, in general, even more advanced and critical never ventured beyond ideology of left leaning social democrats. The West used to think (and still does now) that unanimity was/is a product of ballot rigging and fraud. It was born off ideological homogeneity and to me that is the cultural zastoi I see in contemporary Russia. Pop-culture wise, Russia is so hip, Any Warhol отдыхает.

Russia has many vibrant cultural sectors:

Music – including their own version of American Idol, political rapper Ka4
Television – Nasha Russia; Dom 2, which is the longest running “reality” show in history; Soldaty, a kind-hearted, family series
Radio – Echo Moskvy, better than many of our stations
Internet – very active blogosphere
Film – good pop movies like Zhara, Piter FM

What makes this all the more laughable is that “culturally stagnant” was written by a person who heads a hip/edgy/cutting/whatever magazine about Russian culture!!!

Speeches about the well-being of the Soviet people were delivered from the tribunes and people resentfully listened to all of this at empty refrigerators in Soviet kitchens.

Anyone who has been to Russia recently knows that this is an absurd comparison.

Most Russians would consider equating the current period with the Brezhnev period to be a compliment to the former. It is widely considered to be a golden age.

Speaking of Leonid Ilych, I have a copy of his memoirs (actually Novaya Zemlya, Slovo o kommunistakh, and some other stuff). I wonder if he actually wrote them.

As far as “passing” for Russian, I think the key to getting the accent down is learning the language before age 13-15 and using the language consistently. After that age it is very hard to get the accent down and be able to “pass” in any conversation involving more than a few phrases; and there are some re-pats who have issues with recognizable accents because, even though they learned Russian at an early age, they un-learned the accent at some point during their lives in a non-Russian environment.

By the way, it looks like Idov is not the only one for whom the zastoi comparison has contemporary resonance:

The gap between the rhetoric and real life is now so great that it even seems to me bigger than in the Brezhnev times, when speeches about the well-being of the Soviet people were delivered from the tribunes and people resentfully listened to all of this at empty refrigerators in Soviet kitchens.

Most salespeople in kiosks think I’m a Serb, so my accent is pretty obviously nonnative.