Entrepreneur as a hero of Russian cinema in the first half of the 1990s: the adoption of a new stereotype

The essay discusses, via the analysis the Soviet and Russian cinema of the first half of the 1990s, the problem of adoption of a new socio-ethical stereotype — the positive moral stereotype of an entrepreneur, a businessman and a private property owner — in post-perestroika Russia. The scholarly novelty of the presented study consists Pointing out that films of that period have been mostly evaluated in a fragmented and ambiguous manner, the author analyzes them in the context of the formation of mass representations (stereotypes and frames) of one of the period’s most characteristic social figures. The actuality of the study analysis is evidenced by the ongoing discussions about the ethical background of entrepreneurship in contemporary Russia and about the nature of the 1990s. Considering this problem on the basis of a comprehensive analysis of representative films (Genius, Confessions of a Kept Woman, Limita, Ryaba My Chicken, Love the Russian Way, and others), the author concludes in 1990–1995 Soviet/Russian cinema, inspired both by the inertia of the former Soviet ideas about business and businessmen and the dramatic collisions of the first five years of the post-Soviet era, did not provide the viewer with sufficient artistic arguments for the ethical rehabilitation of entrepreneurship and, therefore, failed to fix new stereotypes and instructional representations/frames in the mass consciousness.