Insides Made Public: Talking Publicly about the Personal in Post-Soviet Media Culture (The Case of The Fashion Verdict)

In this chapter we draw the reader's attention to a public style of speaking about one's private life that is new for Russian culture and is being formed in the sphere of the post-Soviet media, namely the therapeutic language based on popularised postulates of psychology and a psychologised interpretation of interpersonal relationships and the emotional life of the personality (Matza 2009; Salemenniemi 2010; Lerner 2011; Salemenniemi and Vorona 2013). This language is emerging in the post-Soviet period together with the assimilation of a global therapeutic culture (Rieff 1987; Furedi 2004; Illouz 2007) with its patterns of life and technology of social intercourse, which are being imported into Russia or re-invented here.