Editing Openai/6874b524-4134-8013-b5e6-0601c853d841 (section)

=== Assistant: Excellent. ===
Excellent. From 2008 to 2018, Russia under Vladimir Putin transitioned from a managed democracy to a fully entrenched neo-authoritarian regime rooted in selective memory, cultural nationalism, and an increasingly confrontational posture toward the West.

In this period, the Gershovitz legacy—once silenced by Stalin, later commodified by capitalists, then reclaimed by memory activists—was now caught between two competing forces:
# The official state narrative, which sought to weaponize cultural figures as symbols of national greatness and moral resilience.
# A fragmented, globalized resistance of artists, scholars, and independent curators struggling to maintain the complexity and ambiguity that had always defined the family.