Russia's New Fin de Siècle: Contemporary Culture between Past and Present

By Birgit Beumers

Russia's New Fin de Siècle brings together a range of texts on contemporary Russian culture – literary, cinematic and popular – as artists and writers try to situate themselves within the traditional frameworks of past and present, East and West, but also challenge established markers of identity. Investigating Russian culture at the turn of the 21st century, scholars from Britain, Sweden, Russia and the United States explore aspects of culture with regards to one overarching question: What is the impact of the Soviet discourse on contemporary culture? This question comes at a time when Russia is concerned with integrating itself into European arts and culture while enhancing its uniqueness through references to its Soviet past. Thus, contributions investigate the phenomenon of post-Soviet culture and try to define the relationship of contemporary art to the past.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Release date: Jul 1, 2013
• ISBN: 9781783200863

Book preview

PART I

Written Discourse

Chapter 1

The Function of the Soviet Experience in Post-Soviet Discourse

Maria Litovskaya

The ‘Soviet’, whether we understand it as ideology or concrete social practice, is obviously a major cultural component of the contemporary social space in Russia. Twenty years have passed since the disintegration of the USSR. During this time, society at large and the individual who makes it up have gone through periods of euphoria, disappointment, hope, bewilderment and discontent. A new generation has grown up that has never seen Soviet rule. Many people who embodied the previous era have died. Many aspects of everyday life have drastically changed and the social structure has changed. However, despite these changes, Russia is still often referred to as a ‘post-Soviet’ society. This definition is symptomatic, because nobody in 1936 would have called Soviet society post-Tsarist or post-autocratic. The term ‘Soviet’ alone was quite sufficient, while the history of imperial Russia was the subject of academic interest, and used for propaganda purposes or personal memoirs.

If in the middle of 1990 Russian citizens (at least publicly) were divided distinctly into those who mourned and those who hated everything Soviet, while – gripped by the realities of a new life, actually little was said about the Soviet experience, then in modern Russia we witness the heyday of the recent past. It is sufficient to go into any Russian bookshop to see racks of books about the events of the Civil or Second World Wars, the collectivization or the space project or the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev era. The radio and television programmes of the ‘serious’ channels are full of transmissions (both neutral and also admittedly controversial) about the Soviet past. Their number increases before significant historical dates for Soviet society, such as the 65th anniversary of the Victory over Fascism or the 50th anniversary of the first space flight. Finally, the popularity of historical (Soviet) themes in society and the ambiguity of their coverage are indirectly confirmed by the fact that the falsification of history has been declared a state problem,¹ obviously in the first instance concerning recent Soviet history.

Simultaneously with the quantitative growth of texts about the ‘Soviet’ experience, the range of evaluations of this past changed.² Today, even superficial surfing across sites of the Russian Internet shows the popularity of forums, blogs and bloggers,³ who quite professionally, i.e., with an understanding of the opportunity of various interpretations of the facts, discuss aspects of Soviet history. An important factor of published academic works and sites is the description of Soviet practices and politics, whether this concerns the relationship between ideology and the everyday, the designing of rules and norms or the functioning of memory of the Soviet experience in a contemporary space.⁴ As a result, on the one hand, these general efforts show the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon; on the other, there is a consecutive deconstruction of Soviet practices, which ultimately strips the Soviet experience of its demonic qualities as well as the conspiracy-charm inherent in its image, for example in ‘dissident’ literature.

Values, stereotypes, texts and images of Soviet culture are the subject for reflection of a broad layer of the population, and also for analysis not only of social scientists (researchers and academics), but also – in the Russian tradition – by social scientists-turned writers, artists or film-makers. The list of books which have received literary awards in 2009 makes apparent the increasing tendency of ‘historicization’.⁵ At first sight, such a tendency can be attributed to nostalgia. But even at first sight it is clear that it would be difficult to unequivocally assess this phenomenon in post-Soviet culture as an interpretation – even sympathetic – of the Soviet past just as ‘nostalgic’. This phenomenon requires differentiation, because texts of different types are characterized by a varied zeal for diverse approaches to Soviet history and its modern interpretations.

The rehabilitating approach to the Soviet past is, above all, characteristic for the policies of state television channels. The state policy on the representation of the Soviet past is more or less clear. In the modern (not only Russian) world the demand for a return to the past has become the source of a rapid growth of the ‘heritage industry’, that well-developed sphere of media activity which aims at the effective visualization of history, allowing it to be turned into some kind of consumer good. In Russia such a theatricalization of ‘our past’ is generated regularly on the level of advertising, serials, television shows such as Kakie nashi gody/These Were Our Years, where a certain ‘glamourization’ of the Soviet past is achieved through one-sided reduction (see Shaburova 2009: 33–44).

The television channels offer the modern Russian spectator above all a well-censored idealized version of the past, where blemishes (or shortcomings, depending on the script) of the Soviet system are resisted by collectivism, mutual responsibility, patriotism, spirituality and heartfulness. Such texts reconstitute patriarchal relations, which society has considered lost but genuine and worthy, thus creating the basis for a regulated and predictable (with all its shortcomings) world of the past. Paradoxically this happens even with the scripts of serials built around the exposures of the official Soviet version of history (e.g., V kruge pervom/In the First Circle; Deti Arbata/Children of the Arbat, Moskovskaia saga/Moscow Saga), not to mention texts obviously based on the idealization of the ‘communal’ past (e.g., Sinie nochi/Blue Nights, Gromovy/The Gromovs). Socially weak characters who have not lost their humanity despite the complexities of Soviet history form the basis for a nostalgic perception, and thus manipulate and stimulate the direction of nostalgia. This allows the spectators, who identify with the heroes, to experience afresh the feeling of belonging to the Soviet experience, perceiving their contemporaries as post-Soviet people without a feeling of shame.

At the same time the history of the Soviet period conceals many explosive themes, which give rise to a different sort of exposure and the formation of a ‘repressive history’ of Russia. This version, almost absent from television because of the ‘falsification’ component, is developed first of all in the space of Internet publications and non-fiction literature. It focuses on several themes connected with the problem of Stalinism. A similar – criminatory or revelatory – use of the Soviet experience is, on the one hand, characteristic of historical essays devoted to the disclosure of new secrets of Soviet history; on the other hand, it is typical of journalistic and publicistic essays, which see all the problems of modern Russia precisely in its Soviet heritage and instil in the country’s population a sense of guilt for the past.

Although on the level of popular culture the attitudes to the Soviet past remain polarized, even this sphere of cultural activity sees ambivalent attitudes.⁶ The further Russian society moves away from 1991, the less frequent become one-sided references that accuse or ridicule the Soviet experience. This also concerns research texts devoted to the deconstructive description of Soviet cultural policies and the rewriting of Soviet cultural history. The reference to the recent past more and more frequently includes both the representation of the negative experience and the attachment of a certain symbolical capital to the Soviet concept.⁷ We mean here not the Soviet past and its research as such, but the use of facts or images concerning this experience in order to regulate certain moods in modern Russian society.⁸ At the same time, the sense that the Soviet experience is prone to oblivion is omnipresent in society, including the demand to record its details, which is implemented in particular in numerous Internet-projects, such as sovietlife, sovietsongs and other sites on the Soviet everyday.

These tendencies are connected with the specific position of the Soviet past in post-Soviet space. One may argue that the Soviet past is a past like any other. The popular biographies of Boris Pasternak and Bulat Okudzhava written by Dmitrii Bykov, of Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Mikhail Bulgakov written by Aleksei Varlamov, of Leonid Leonov written by Zakhar Prilepin at first sight differ little, say, from the biography of Anton Chekhov by Donald Rayfield, but the disputes around them are of a personal nature, where ‘big history’ corresponds to family and autobiography. Valerii Todorovskii’s film Stiliagi/Hipsters (2008), made in the style of a musical, did not surmise a dispute about the credibility of Soviet reality of the second half of the 1950s which it represented, but precisely this aspect was most heatedly discussed among audiences and critics.

The turn to the past happens for different reasons, mostly because the original cult of the past is an organic consequence of the progress of modernity. The constant change of the conditions of life, which has become a normal condition of societies of the modern times, evoke in people the desire to return to more habitual and ‘organic’ past times, which can be described as ‘good, old’ and even ideal. But, as Etkind remarks, even in the ‘ideal’ case

modernization is a painful and traumatic process; some lose, others gain, almost everybody simultaneously loses and gains [...] People respond to traumas with fantasies, nostalgic and other, which should be understood and not condemned […] This convenient and large, global narrative blurs distinctions between the feelings of the Russian intelligent, whose father was killed in the Gulag and whose children became alcoholics during the stagnation, whose savings disappeared during perestroika and, at last, whose culture – making sense of these events, was destroyed in the last decade, and the feelings of an Indian peasant, a French townsman, and an American house owner, who cannot hold at bay the global competition, lose their usual sources of income […] Everybody is bad off (but when was it good?); but for everybody it’s bad in different ways […] The economy is irreversibly globalized, while culture answers with particularisation; whence arise problems that differ everywhere. The originality of the post-Soviet moment lies in its Soviet past.

(Lipovetskii and Etkind 2008)

The Soviet past can hardly be called ideal: few Russians would contest that. Endemic to texts of different sizes and genres about the Soviet experience created by former Soviet citizens with a greater or smaller degree of expressiveness are the authors’ attempts first ‘to get even’ with the personal experience, i.e., to give an estimation of the country leaning on the experience where they lived and where their heroes lived; and second, to offer their version of the general concept of interaction between man and the Soviet state.

As Slavoj Žižek remarks, the interest in the past in modern post-socialist societies is usually explained by the ‘immaturity’ of the expectation of people who dreamt of ‘another life’, without imagining what, for example, capitalism meant: the inhabitants of the socialist camp wanted the capitalist democratic freedom while simultaneously preserving the guaranteed stability of socialism. When the people in the countries of Eastern Europe protested against communist regimes, the majority dreamt not of capitalism as a form of social organization, but about material prosperity and equity. They wanted to live outside rigid state control, beyond the primitive ideological brainwash and hypocrisy. When the lofty ideals of the Velvet Revolution were dispelled by a new reality, people reacted in different ways. The most natural expression of post-communist disappointment has been nostalgia for ‘the good old times’, which we should not take too seriously, since the desire to return to the grey and poor socialist reality is hardly genuine. Rather, ‘it is a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past’ (Žižek 2009). However, in the case of Russia, the mourning is complicated by an understanding that the Soviet experience – deprived of some of its important features – continues to exist.

On the one hand, a significant portion of modern post-Soviet society is composed of people who have spent part of their life in the USSR. In the state that exists no longer, they underwent their socialization process, and they became – many not of their own will – citizens of another country with essentially different rules and living conditions. For the majority, the massive changes implemented by the state were traumatic, and the condition of modern Russian society is in many respects the result of this trauma. Moreover, ‘that country’ (as Russia is called by its citizens) – did not enthuse many, and for quite different reasons.⁹ On the other hand, according to Leonid Parfenov

before our eyes a certain third state has emerged: not the Soviet Union, of course, but also not Russia in the historical sense. We live in a country that should correctly be called post-Soviet Russia. In fact, the majority of people consider only the Soviet past its own. We have no mental link with imperial Russia. Well, just figure who of our compatriots would distinguish Alexander II from Alexander III?! The majority of Russians today serve in the army in Soviet style, they receive their education in institutes in the Soviet way, they are treated in hospitals in the Soviet way, they choose those in power, watch television and do lot of other things.

(Parfenov 2009: 4)

Addressing the same theme, Dmitrii Bykov emphasizes the paradox of the Russian perception of past and present:

The Fatherland has got used to failures and to the contrary, and we willingly weep for them. We are a very nostalgic people. We look, stooping our old shoulders, like the three-rouble sausage, like The Pub ‘13 Chairs’ of the stagnation era¹⁰ – and we weep, but back then we all spat! Where else can people despise and spit on something one day, and turn it into a gem the next? Either our life gets worse, or we do not like ourselves as we are: but life without a nostalgic flair always reminds us of the plague. We are sick of everything. But very soon, we might be weeping for everything.

(Bykov 2009)

The understanding that modern Russians live inside Soviet heritage and that this induces them to correlate an often contradictory knowledge of history with family and personal memory has gradually become a common phrase and enriches the notion of emotional links to previous epochs. Those who left Russia, in turn, construct their narrative about the ambiguous reasons that led them to make their choice. The first decade of the new millennium, when the first emotions about the disintegration of the Soviet state had subsided, saw a wide consideration of the Soviet experience not only through groundless denial or, to the contrary, absolute acceptance of the Soviet past, but also through the realization that condemnation/nostalgia are not the only emotions that arise during its representation and comprehension.

In the eyes of witnesses, the Soviet experience loses more and more of its palpability. The Soviet authorities have left no accessible corpus of objective data; even official information on the incomes of the population, on prices, living standards and medicine was either classified or falsified. The basic source of data lies in memoirs, in biased evaluations by Soviet citizens. In this story about the Soviet past, gaps cannot be avoided; these must be filled in a fragmentary manner, underlining the reliance on the imagination, on mythologizing on the basis of previous cultural experience and in the vein of new concepts.

The need for fantasies on the theme of the past is aggravated during periods of major social reorganization, when man loses sense of who he is and what rules he lives by. During the twentieth century, Russia has seen at least two major state reorganizations, each with not only global geopolitical consequences but also leading millions of people to a new self-definition. One of the consequences of the first ‘revision’ was the literature of the Russian Abroad with its powerful nostalgic pathos. But while we are inclined to justify the longing for an imperial Russia today, the grief for recent Soviet past, whose deficits and defects have been part of those living today, seems much less sound.

The analysis of lost/remaining, value/harm, necessity/uselessness of a more open conversation about those feelings that are experienced in relation to the Soviet past, of a recognition of the importance of these feelings which is still a topical and unresolved problem today, of course remains a subject for representation in literature: first, and most obviously, at the level of problems and themes; and second, at the level of formal, above all generic and stylistic, preferences.

Soviet figures may organically fit into new forms of mass culture. In Mikhail Shprits and Aleksei Klimov’s film script Pervyi otriad/First Commando the story about sacred events of the Soviet past – the Leningrad siege or the deeds of pioneer-heroes – is fitted into the genre of modern mass culture, of a trash espionage novel or the Manga comics; then, Anna Starobinets takes the plot of First Commando as starting point for her adventure quest novel Pervyi otriad: Istina/First Commando: The Truth. Each new work in its own way links the Soviet past with the post-Soviet present, but a growing number of authors try to explain their vision of the Soviet experience. The fact of recognizing oneself as a former Soviet citizen is a theme for literature. Here again several strategies can be discerned.

At one end of the scale, there is the connection between private (personal, family) and state history, which demonstrates clearly the divergences between state policy and the private life of citizens. Aleksandr Arkhangelskii wrote the book 1962 about the events that occurred in the world, in the USSR and in his family during the year of his birth, showing their profound inner connection. Autobiographical books about the ‘resistance of the weak’, of private people with dramatic lives who, nevertheless, do not consider themselves victims of the century (Podstrochnik/Line-by-line Translation by Liliana Lungina, Christened with Crosses by Eduard Kochergin, or Asistoliia/Asystole by Oleg Pavlov) enjoy popularity among the broad readership.

At the other end of the scale there are phantasmagorical demonstrations, on the one hand of the absurdity, on the other of the unexpected efficiency of old Soviet practices. Mikhail Elizarov’s Bibliotekar’/The Librarian about the war that flared up around a Soviet writer’s books, which suddenly appeared vital to all those at a loss about post-Soviet life. His Mul’tiki/Cartoons represent the absurdity of Soviet education, transferred onto a new epoch where the best teacher is yesterday’s re-educated murderer. In his novel GenAtsid/GenAcide Vsevolod Benigsen dwells on the inclusion of specific Soviet practices of the dissemination of culture, in particular the introduction of reading lists that are obligatory for the entire population. As a matter of fact, the author reviews not the qualities of society or literature, but that hypertrophied role which was invariably allocated to literature in Russian, and later Soviet, society. In VITCh Benigsen explores the image of Soviet dissidents, exiled by the Soviet authorities to a ‘closed’ city and – deprived of opportunities to express themselves publicly – without any interest in creative or political activity: they are simply not ready for an encounter with post-Soviet life.

Between openly autobiographical and phantasmagorical texts we find a number of ‘ideological’ novels, where problems connected with the Soviet experience drive the plot and are directly addressed by the characters in the body of the text.

In Anton Utkin’s novel Krepost’ somneniia/Fortress of Doubt, which structurally reminds of the late Iurii Bondarev’s ideological novels, the heroes, who live on the threshold of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries indefatigably and verbosely argue about the specificity of Soviet/post-Soviet societies, offering a range of explanations of the USSR’s disintegration. As many others who write about the USSR, they call it empire, placing the stress, however, not on the multinational state, but on its size and the multilayered social structure subordinated to a single will as a result of persistent efforts of Russian governors.

What in this past excites the contemporary, financially well-off character who has only benefitted from the new conditions of life? First, the secret of the USSR’s disintegration, the ‘state power that attracted both by a mysterious force and a sudden geriatric weakness’ (Utkin 2010: 274). The instant and – as it seemed – painless collapse of the country incites one of the heroes to cautiously think of the future: ‘He already had to learn how books become history, and with confusion he picked up an atlas. Those countries had already ceased to exist. There are other countries in their place […] And here on the empire stands USSR, while it is the Russian Federation, but soon it will fold into a stack of newspapers and we don’t yet know what will become true’ (Utkin 2010: 82). The recognition of the greatness of the USSR at the cost of Soviet history, the unwillingness to reconcile with Russia’s changed role in the modern world leads the heroes to attempt at least in their minds to change the history of the country’s disintegration, but their reasoning leads them to the inevitability of such a disintegration, which repeats itself.

The destruction of Soviet ideology does not elicit pity in the heroes, unlike the pity for the loss of the huge country, of which they feel they are a part. On the one hand, the empire poses a threat to the individual compelled to subordinate his life, which continues in the established order – despite everything. ‘In the central squares an unbridled minority challenges these, but in the side-streets and suburbs life continues in its usual flow: soups are made, children with satchels on their shoulders return from school, making their way along fences [...] and trains run according to schedule, and only the train drivers, digging their day through coal and cheap cigarettes, swear when they have to cross the front line’ (Utkin 2010: 73).¹¹ At the same time, the imperial idea allows the character to feel himself as a part of some greater purpose, beyond the personal, which makes it easier to organize life within a certain framework. The specific ‘convenience’ of such an existence is particularly noticeable against the background of the amorphous Russian present. The destruction of the Soviet experience along with the imperial idea suggests the creation of a new purpose: ‘There was a certain system of coordinates. Now – and he could see this very clearly – there was no such system at all. And when he thought about that, he would imagine that it might be a good thing, and useful: let them all forget, forget to the point of absurdity and then, maybe, something could be worked out’ (Utkin 2010: 153).

In Drawing Lessons Maksim Kantor considers the development of the post-Soviet state as a special case altogether, satirically representing how, once again in world history, the revolutionary-minded Soviet intellectual-dissidents inevitably praise ‘the civilized empire’ after a shift of power (Kantor 2006: 2). At the same time the hero-narrator gives a geopolitical explanation for the events that have occurred and are occurring in the country.

Terekhov’s The Stone Bridge (2009) reproduces in subject-matter and composition the modern Russian world view superimposing the traumatic and nostalgic. The novel’s protagonist is our contemporary, a former agent of the Federal Security Bureau FSB (Federal’naia sluzhba bezopasnosti), a collector of Soviet toy soldiers, who – together with his colleagues – investigates a murder committed in Moscow on the Stone Bridge (Kamennyi most) in 1943. The investigation is quite meaningless, as the case has long been closed; there are hardly any witnesses left, and to understand the reasons which led a teenager from a stately Soviet family to shoot a girl of his circle is practically impossible. However, the book, written as an investigation novel from the perspective of the inspector, is not about solving a crime, but about interpreting the historical clues.

The real problem of the heroes is the immersion in the past. Having collected all the evidence, they – in a fantastic turn of the author’s imagination, symbolically designating the limited readiness of the detectives to disclose the secret – are ready to participate in the court case which took place in 1943. Newspapers, magazines, letters of that time, confused statements of witnesses – all these help to reconstruct history and find here a hidden ‘truth’ which, however, as the hero admits, is not final. But the story that extends back into the past grips post-Soviet people: they really live only in it and for it, satisfying only their physiological needs in the present world, where they suffer from emptiness and