Dissertation draft

Working title:

Refashioning Russia: Emergence, Development and Representations of Post-Soviet Nostalgia

in Media in Contemporary Russia

Ekaterina Kalinina

PhD student Media and Communication Studies,

Södertörns högskola

Supervisors:

Johan Fornäs
Professor, MKV, Södertörn Högskolan

Staffan Ericson
Docent & Högskolelektor, MKV, Södertörn Högskolan

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Table of Content

1. Introduction
1.1. Background
1.2. Aim and research questions
1.3. Positioning the author and this study
1.4. Sources and methodological framework
1.5. Structure of the thesis
2. Previous research
2.1. Nostalgia: history of the term
2.2. Nostalgia for the East: Russia
2.3. Nostalgia for the East: Eastern and Central Europe
2.4. GDR Nostalgia: Ostalgie
2.5. Nostalgia: concluding remarks
3. Theoretical framework and analytical categories
3.1. Structure of Feeling
3.2. Nostalgia, Progress, Continuity and Rupture
3.3. Nostalgia and trauma
3.4. Nostalgia as medical condition and reaction
3.5. Nostalgia and memory
3.6. Time, Space and Nostalgia
3.7. Nostalgia and Identity
3.8. Nostalgia and irony
3.9. Concluding remarks
4. Price of laughing. Irony and nostalgia in Late Soviet culture
4.1. Russian conceptualism
4.1.1. Nostalgia of Ilya Kabakov
4.1.2. Nostalgia of Komar and Melamid
4.1.3. Nostalgia and trauma in Russian conceptualism
4.2. Fashioned body as artistic medium: Nostalgia in 1980s underground fashion
4.2.1. Soviet textile industry during late socialism
4.2.2. Underground fashion in the Soviet Union: nostalgia and rebellion
4.2.3. Concluding remarks
5. Nostalgia in the 1990s
5.1. Political and social dynamics of the 1990s
Concluding remarks
5.2. Remebering the USSR in the 1990s
5.2.1. History of restaurant Petrovich
5.2.2. Materialised memories in Petrovich
5.2.3. Food experiences as mnemonic practice in Petrovich
5.2.4. The Petrovichs
Concluding remarks
5.3. Remembering in theatre in the 1990s
5.4. Soviet Cultural Memories on Russian Television in the 1990s
5.4.1. Remembering the USSR in the TV-program Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha
Era
5.4.1.1. The story behind Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha Era
5.4.1.2. Analysing Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha Era
5.4.1.3. The last Soviet generation
5.4.2. Collective remembering in Staraya Kvartira

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 5.4.2.1. Staraya Kvartira in the nutshell
5.4.2.2. Time and Space in Staraya Kvartira
5.4.3. Remembering in Starie Pesni o Glavnom
5.4.3.1. Starie Pesni o Glavnom , Episode 1
5.4.3.2. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 2
5.4.3.3. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 3
5.4.3.4. Starie Pesni o Glavnom. Postcript
5.5. Structure of feeling in the 1990s
6. Remembering in the 2000s (not included)
6.1. Political portrait of the period (political tendencies, the rise of Vladimir Putin
and Dmitry Medvedev, improved social conditions and the emergence of a
middle-class)
6.2. Fashion as communication. (I introduce fashion as medium for communication
and argue why it is important to look at fashion in the relation to memory and
nostalgia)
6.3. Fashionable nostalgia and nostalgia in fashion (Analysis of three designer
brands, three different tendencies)
6.4. Nostalgia on-line. (The growing popularity of the Internet, the use of live
journals, the specifics of the medium and how it affects nostalgia)
6.5. Nostalgia on Television
6.6. Structure of Feeling in the 2000s.
7. Epilogue: Nostalgia in 2010-now

Bibliography

Cited literature
Sources
On-line sourses and Video
Films and TV programs
Interviews
Appendixes

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1. Introduction
1.1. Background

In recent years, fascination with the past has become a dominant force in popular
culture. The film industry manically remakes popular movies of earlier decades and is crazy
about styles of the immediate past. This obsession with the aesthetics of everything “old”
goes hand in hand with a rapid development of the latest technologies.
Television channels broadcast docudramas and historical documentaries, enjoying high
ratings. Similar to the late 19th and early 20th century, when theatre and film actresses became
trendsetters of new life styles, behaviour and fashionable appearances, today’s TV series’
actors and their characters become fashionable role models for the modern audience.
Nowadays contemporary television revives trends and styles of bygone eras, and makes them
the latest fashions. The American TV series Mad Men started a craze and fetish hysteria for
the 1950s and 60s style in music, interior design and fashion. The 1950s, 60s and 70s
aesthetics now prevail in advertising campaigns, while fashion designers ransack the styles of
recent epochs adored by fashionable divas, who mix and match vintage clothing with new
garments. History is consumed and employed to encourage brand recognition and association
of a product with a time period, as well as to attract subsequent economic investments (de
Groot, 2010).
Moreover, this contemporary imaginary of our recent past as well as its uses, re-uses
and abuses, fed by multiple consumption practices, are not restricted within the geographical
and symbolical borders. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, ”nostalgia” for the ”former East”
became one of the booming economies (Schröder & Vonderau, 2008). Russia was not an
exception.
It became clear that something happened in the production and mediation of popular
memory of the Soviet past in the period of 1990s and 2000s. First, being forced into forgetting
right after the fall of Communism, Soviet past started to slowly re-appear in Russian media
landscape in the mid 1990s. Contesting its place under the sun together with a glamorous
nostalgia for Russia’s Imperial past, old clothes, kitchenware and going-to-wracks furniture
started to creep in on the screens of the televisions and into restaurant interiors. Propaganda
slogans turned into advertisement campaigns, while colourful posters gave inspiration to
billboards.

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 In 2003, thousands of people came to Paul McCartney’s performance on Moscow’s Red
Square wearing t-shirts printed with the word “USSR”. That night, when Paul McCartney
sang the Beatles hit “Back in the USSR” and young people sang along, it was clear beyond
the shadow of a doubt that the USSR was back in fashion. The same year a Russian designer,
Denis Simachev, presented his fall/winter men’s collection, inspired by the 1980s’ Olympic
Games and Soviet comedy characters. The theme of this collection, as stated on the official
website, was “lyrical remembrances of the strange era of the 1980s, last decade of faded away
USSR” (Simachev, official website). 1 After the unprecedented success of this collection,
Simachev has continued to recycle Soviet culture.

Denis Simachev was not the only Russian designer who capitalised on this apparently
trendy Soviet culture in the mid 2000s. The escalating interest in the Soviet past, its utopian
fantasies, lifestyles, architecture and design, glorious victories and achievements not only
inspired Russian couturiers (including Simachev and designers such as Maxim Chernitsov,
Olga Soldatova, Antonina Shapovalova, Katya Bochavar and designer duo NinaDonis), but
also occupied Russian television channels. The old Soviet comedies and cartoons cherished
by those grown up and residing in the Soviet Union have been broadcasted regularly on
Russian television. In addition, several new TV-productions and films have reviewed,
rewritten, and re-enacted life of the Soviet citizens. Some of them represented a reflexive
critical attitude towards the past, while some clearly capitalised on fashionable theme. Deti
Arbata (Children of the Arbat, 2004, by Andrei Eshpai), a 16-part television serial based on
the Children of the Arbat trilogy by Anatoly Rybakov was aired on the Channel One network
in 2004. Set in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the series, following the plot of the novel, told
the story of Sasha Pankratov (Yevgeni Tsyganov), a student and Komsomol member from the
Arbat neighbourhood of Moscow as well as his family and friends. The series has portrayed
dramatic times of the Soviet history, presenting the growing fear in Moscow, the start of
Stalin's Great Purge in the 1930s, and the beginning of World War II. In 2008 a film-musical
Stilyagi (named Hipsters for its American release in 2008, by Valery Todorovsky) presented a
picture of the Soviet youth subculture stilyagi ("hipsters" or literally "obsessed with fashion")
of the 1950s. The film became a great success both in Russia and internationally, though
received mixed reviews on the ground of its ambiguous portrayal of the Soviet history.

1
http://denissimachev.com/content/tm_archive_mens_ss_04.html.

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 The same phenomen of digging and surfacing the past penetrated Russian on-line space.
Vkontakte, similar to the social network Facebook, used to provide its users with a function to
personalise profiles of user pages by applying a nostalgic layout. When a user switched from
“traditional” colour and language schema (Facebook’s blue and white colours, also available
as default layout in Russian Vkontakte) to “nostalgic”, the webpage took on a red background
and the image of a hammer and sickle in the corner. Even the name of the social network
changed from the original Vkontakte (“in contact”) to Vsojuze (“in union”). Users could also
enjoy a specific jargon: instead of groups there appears unions, instead of profile, dossier
(file), and instead of friends, comrades. Blogs and forums, where members of virtual
communities discussed life and childhood experiences in the Soviet Union, shared pictures
and traded memorabilia, were at the top of the ratings in 2008, and are still active. Their
frequenters discuss with tender emotions and love the movies and cartoons of their youth,
GDR’s blockbusters, drinks and food, clothing and toys.

The contexts in which the past blends into the present, ”making room for historicist
fantasy in everyday life” (Samuel, 1994) included advertising and branding. The tea brand
Indian Tea, one of those few available to Soviet customers, and well known in the Soviet
state, found its second life as the tea brand called The Very Same Indian Tea (In Russian: Tot
Samij Indijskij Chaj). The modern package features an image very similar to the one used in
the 1970s, although with some alterations. Despite the fact that the flavour and the tea bags
changed (according to those who had the opportunity to try both), the packaging, created to
build an emotional nostalgic bond with the customer, stayed the same.

Thus it has become clear that various media genres became a platform for the growing
sweet longing for the Soviet past. Individual and group memories about the most
controversial and recent past have become a commercialised and mediated phenomenon,
where one of the central roles could be easily attributed to television, film, advertising and the
Internet. However, this phenomenon has not only been confined to media environments, but
also flourished in fashion, cuisine and interior design.

Indeed, in the early 2000s a Moscow visitor could find many restaurants that invited
guests to dive into an atmosphere of Soviet kitsch, which materialised in rather vulgar and
pretentious interiors, usually having a popular and sentimental appeal. Similar places popped
up in many Russian cities and provincial towns. The bars and cafés decorated in Soviet style,
such as “Lenin’s Mating Call”, “CCCP”, “Propaganda” and “Revolution” in St. Petersburg or

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the cafe-bar “CCCP” in Nizhny Novgorod sold Soviet gourmand experience with varied
success. Moscow Club Petrovich took a flight back into the Soviet 1950s and 60s, offering
everything from traditional home made drinks, like the tart berry mors drink, to the thick
Russian bliny pancakes. The owners claimed that this restaurant-club was not only a place to
meet friends, good cuisine, and dance, but also a home to which everyone wants to come back
(Petrovich, official website). 2

In 2010 pro-Kremlin the young fashion designer and activist of a pro-president youth
organisation Nashi, who earlier had declared through fashion designs her support for Vladimir
Putin, introduced a new fashion collection called Pobeda 22 (Victory 22, in English), which
suggested a new reading of the Great Patriotic War and was called to become a means of
political propaganda among Russian youngsters. All of a sudden an ironic and non-political
attitude towards the Soviet past has become coloured by political messages and taken on
board by the ruling party as an ideological tool.

1.2. Aim and research questions

The overarching aim of this dissertation is to study how the representations of the
Soviet past and symbolically mediated constructions of Soviet-nostalgic identities emerged,
developed and were communicated through different media forms in post-Soviet Russia from
1991 until today.
This study seeks to answer several questions. (1) When did the fascination with Soviet
culture start? (2) How was Soviet culture mediated and represented? (3) When and how have
the representations of Soviet culture and past changed from 1991 to 2013? (4) What forms of
nostalgia can be found in the representations of the Soviet culture? (5) What do the various
forms of nostalgia for the Soviet past tell about contemporary Russian society?

1. 3. Positioning the author and this study

Placing my research in the hermeneutics tradition, I believe that thinking is always
rooted in a given cultural context, which is historically developed. Therefore I see the
production and mediation of so-called post-Soviet nostalgia as deeply rooted in the Russian
cultural landscape and in global cultural developments. At the same time, I believe that my
2
http://www.club-petrovich.ru/rus/, last viewed 17.11.2010

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own thinking about the subject is affected both by the cultural context I originally come from
and by the one I write my dissertation in. Thus, this thesis becomes an attempt to understand
myself through exploring history and its recycling within a given context. The process of
understanding the fashion built on past cultures and various uses of memory is based on the
analysis of a particular case, with a reflected awareness of my own role as a researcher in this
process. Thus, the process of understanding this phenomenon of nostalgia as a whole and the
collected data was hermeneutical, where my thinking constantly travelled back and forth
between the particular case study and the overarching tendencies (hermeneutic circle).

Within the hermeneutic tradition, I was inspired by French philosopher Paul Ricoeur,
who fused aspects of both Gadamer’s and Habermas’ positions on hermeneutics and argued
that the hermeneutic act must always be accompanied by critical reflection, while the field of
tradition and historical texts should not be left behind. Ricoeur emphasised “how the text
itself may open up a space of existential and political possibilities. This dynamic, productive
power of the text undermines the idea of reality as a fixed, unyielding network of authoritative
patterns of interpretations” (Ramberg & Gjesdal, 2009).

So, why would I fall under the spell of the Soviet past? A possible answer is that I
cannot escape yearning both for the country I had left years ago, when I moved to Sweden,
and a country I was born in, which disappeared from the world map eight years after my birth
and left me with my personal memories entangled with memories of people around me.

In a way, I could reflect upon myself as being one of those exiled struck by nostalgia
described by Svetana Boym (2001). My first migration (when I was still a child) from the
USSR to Russia happened without my conscious participation and I could not influence the
events in any respect. Then, my migration from Russia to Sweden was not a forced one, but
rather a self-imposed exile, and therefore I should be free from ties with Russia. However,
this is not quite true. In Russia, more than in Germany, for example, children were raised (and
I believe still are) with strong feelings of patriotism for their own country. The idea that the
collective good and prosperity should always be placed above all individual needs and desires
is cultivated by school education, films, books, and in family circles. However, the degree of
indoctrination and pressure may vary from case to case. The general tendency was to
convince people to strive for the greater good of the country, and those who managed to
escape to the West would be looked upon (not without a tint of envy, though) as lazy selfish
individuals for whom their own economic wealth is more important than serving their nation.

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Although I would like to note that despite many people and public officials voicing such
opinion, it is not the only point of view, and a plurality of positions exists. Nevertheless, such
explicit patriotic sentiments among my countrymen made me reflect upon my own position.
At the same time, this growing patriotism in Russia made me more attentive and alert during
the process of writing this thesis. Going back and forth between my material and
contemporary debates around the heritage left after the fall of Communism, and looking back
to when the longing for the lost home started to unfold, I started to regard the 1990-2010
period differently. Observations made in 2012 brought a totally new dimension into my
understanding of the phenomenon.
Svetlana Boym, exploring “imagined homelands” of Soviet exiles who never returned
home, said that “at once homesick and sick of home, they have developed a peculiar kind of
diasporic intimacy, a survivalist aesthetics of estrangement and longing” (Boym, 2001: xix).
Catching myself buying and collecting traditional souvenirs from Russia, I still resisted
acknowledging myself being similar to those Russian emigrants in New York whom Boym
described. I do not participate in circles of Russian diaspora in Stockholm, but only
communicate with my Russian colleagues at the university. It is a both conscious and un-
conscious choice. I keep myself to the international or global community, which includes
people of various backgrounds and origins. In that sense I consider myself being a product of
globalisation, and this standpoint affects the analysis of my material and will be reflected in
this dissertation.
But there is from a critical perspective something else at work in the obsession with the
past and a lost home. In times of globalisation and alert issues of migration, the seduction by
memories of illusory non-controversial and easy life as well as the longing for an imagined
happy past have never been stronger. Nostalgia, memory and history are abused nowadays by
right-wing extremists and nationalists pursuing their reactionary agenda. Longing for the lost
home, which was stolen by undesired immigrants or in the course of integration into
supranational and European communities, becomes the contested ground for the current
battles over national identity. In this respect, the Russian case in all its complexity does seem
to contribute to the global tendencies, especially regarding Russia’s growing problems with
the national question. Thus, coming back to what was said in the introductory section above,
the Russian case can be seen as symptomatic of a more general contemporary craze for past.

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1.4. Sources and methodological framework

To investigate the possible change in production and mediation of Soviet nostalgia

during the period 1990-2010 I turn to Critical Theory for theoretical and methodological
inspiration. In order to examine the change in production and mediation of memory of the
Soviet past, I combine sociological research with interpretations of symbolic expressions and
texts in media.
I apply a hermeneutic approach to the mediated forms of Soviet nostalgia to bring out
the meanings of a text from the perspective of its author, and of the interpretive communities
that in a given period encountered the text and unfolded its meaning. This thus entails
attention to the social and historical context within which the text was produced and used.
That is why I collected and analysed contextual data, including magazines and newspapers
articles. I examine this material in terms of the social-historical moment, which involves an
examination of the producer of the text, its intentional recipient, its referent in the world (what
it refers to), and the context in which the text was produced, transmitted and received
(Ricoeur, 1976; 1981).
To collect data I have employed a multi-method approach, which included elements of
urban ethnography, qualitative interviews and a survey of press articles. In addition to the
interviews and the mapping of Russian press, I have made some small case studies, analysing
in detail several TV-programmes and fashion design brands, applying elements of
interpretative analysis. The examples of how the Soviet past is mediated in contemporary
Russia, which I treat as case studies, are by no means representative of the whole complex
phenomenon. These case studies, TV-programmes and fashion designs I treat as, les lieux de
mémoire, using Pierre Nora’s terminology. “A lieu de mémoire is any significant entity,
whether material or non-material in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time
has become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” (Nora 1996:
XVII). These sites of memory, I believe, illustrate important developments and perspectives
on the past, notably several trends which, being set into the political and social context, help
to understand the complex process of production and mediation of memory. To answer
questions of representation and mediation of Soviet past within certain socio-economic
settings I apply a thick description approach to the collected material.
I started collecting and selecting relevant source material in 2010. In order to define the
circle of material for the analysis, I surveyed available online journal and newspaper articles
by using search engines. Based on my previous research experience (Kalinina, 2012), I

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selected key search words and phrases: nostalgia (nostalgia), Denis Simachev, Sovetskoe
proshloe (Soviet past), Sovetskaya nostalgia (Soviet nostalgia), (post-) sovetskaya moda
((post-) Soviet fashion), pamyat’ o sovetskom proshlom (memory of Soviet past). As a result,
I found newspaper and journal articles and blog entries where relevant issues and subjects
were discussed; TV programmes and films that represented Soviet past; and names of people
who potentially could become key informants.
Second, I divided the period of twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union into two
decades, corresponding to the change of presidents: the era of Boris Yeltsin (in office 10 June
1991 – 31 December 1999), and the era of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (Vladimir
Putin in office 31 December 1999 – 7 May 2008; Dmitry Medvedev in office 7 May 2008 – 7
May 2012). Being rather sceptical about strict periodisation, I nevertheless believe – on the
basis of my first observations – that political developments dramatically contributed to the
outlook on Soviet legacy and heritage and influenced the dynamic of changes in production
and mediation of nostalgic sentiments. I treat the mediated representations and political
developments as closely related and mutually influential. In each period I identified the key
sites of memory through which nostalgic memory of the Soviet Union was produced and
mediated.
In order to study the first period I started with a visit to the Moscow restaurant Petrovich.
Among many “nostalgic” restaurants, such as Pokrovskie vorota (Moscow), Stolovaya # 57
(Diner # 57), and Lenin’s Mating Call (St. Petersburg), opened in the 1990s I have chosen
Petrovich, because I consider this place as space with the most concentrated net of memories.
I believe that the trends started in Petrovich transferred into other places. It was the first
restaurant-club, decorated in “nostalgic fashion” and serving “good old” food, initiated in
1993 and finally opened in 1997. This restaurant, comparing to many other, still exists. Its
owner Andrey Bilzho is identified in the media as one of the main actors in production of
memories of the Soviet period. What interested me in Petrovich is how the Soviet past was
produced and recycled in its interior, music selection and cuisine. Having identified my main
analytical categories – space, time, object, value and bodily experiences – I moved on to the
remembering and re-construction of the Soviet life experiences in TV shows. In three highly
rated and award-winning shows, namely Namedni: Nasha Era, Staraya Kvartira and Starie
Pesni o Glavnom, I investigated different outlooks on the Soviet past and how memory
worked. As television became the main mass media in Russia during that period, my main
focus was on the mediation of memory on television in this period. Looking at the main
categories identified in the analysis of Petrovich, I investigated the production of space, time

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and value in these programmes. In order to find parallels in the processes of
remembering/forgetting of the past, I took a brief turn to look at two theatre plays Pesni
Nashego Dvora and Pesni Nashey Kommunalki (director Mark Rozovsky) that were running
during the same period in the Moscow theatre u Nikitskikh Vorot.
In the period of the 2000s, I focused on two new media through which nostalgia was
mediated. Although television continued to keep its dominant role within the mass media, the
Internet and fashion industry also contributed to the process of mediation of memories. I have
chosen three fashion brands, illustrating different commercial use of the memory. My
selection of brands (Denis Simachev, NinaDonis and Antonina Shapovalova) is justified by
their popularity, media attention, and their different use of the Soviet heritage. I also believe
that these three fashion brands correspond to the trends I spotted in the television programmes
produced in the 1990s. If Denis Simachev is considered to be the most successful of them,
NinaDonis approaches the Soviet past from a more intellectual and reflexive point, while
Antonina Shapovalova, a politician and designer, uses the Soviet past as propaganda tool of
the Putin regime. By introducing fashion, I added another important analytical category – the
body. From this period I analysed the TV series Selano v SSSR (Made in the USSR),
concentrating on the same categories of time, space, objects, and value. The choice of this
TV-series among others is justified by both its content, and access to the producers and script
material. During this period, Internet archives and on-line communities, where visual
imagery, films and TV programmes produced during the communist era, as well as individual
memories of those born in the USSR, rapidly flourished. Due to this reason I have chosen to
introduce Internet as one of the important media contributing to the phenomenon of nostalgia
production. Among many on-line resources tickling nostalgic sentiments of its users I have
selected the Internet project 1976-1982 Encyclopedia Nashego Detstva (Encyclopedia of Our
Childhood) (http://www.76-82.ru/.), which won the first prize in the nomination of the
“Archive of the year” and “POTOP” 2007, the professional award of Runet (Russian-
Language Internet).
Interviews with media producers and a pool of experts consisting of journalists and
music critics constituted a great part of my source material. The purpose of the interviews was
to acquire detailed information about the studied phenomenon, including the experts’ personal
point of view and perception of their own activities related to the production of mediated
representations of the Soviet past, and also to get contacts with other experts.
According to Gadamer, “We never know a historical work as it originally appeared to
its contemporaries. We have no access to its original context of production or to the intentions

12
of its author”. 3 Even though I have interviewed producers of TV-shows, artists, designers and
theatre directors, I realise that their opinions are coloured by the contemporary context in
which they lived when these interviews were made. Thus, the understanding of and nostalgia
for the past are always in a process of constant production and development. It is not only the
past handed over to future generations through the complex and ever-changing fabric of
interpretations that gets richer and more complex with time, but also the interpretations of the
interpretations of the past with time become more complex, since the reception history
(Wirkungsgeschichte) of past texts and events continually add further layers of interpretation
and meaning. If history according to Gadamer is always effective history, then nostalgia is
always effective nostalgia.
Based on the mapping of the mass media sources I distinguished several key
informants. During two research trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg I conducted around 40
interviews, of which some 30 turned out to be useful for my study and are referred to here,
whereas the others merely offered background knowledge. The circle of informants consisted
of two groups: one comprising the content producers (editors of the TV programmes, artists,
theatre director, designers) and another consisting of experts and trendsetters (journalists,
music critics, writers, shop owners, fashion week organisers, publishing house owners). The
majority of informants (60 percent) were male, middle aged (40-60 years old) representatives
of the Moscow and St. Petersburg middle class, engaged in intellectual activities. They all
appeared to know each other, and were involved in collaborative projects from time to time.
40 percent of my informants were young females (20-30 years old, two of them around 50
years old), who lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and also knew each other. Thus, this
group of people, identified through the media survey, turned out to form an informal network
of intellectuals and business-minded creative individuals.
One of the major difficulties I had in the interviewing process was gaining access to the
major players. Slowly, using snowballing technique, I managed to get in touch with my key
informants, who had a wider network of media professionals and artists and supplied me with
the further contacts I needed. As a result I managed to get access both to the informants I had
identified by mapping newspaper and journal articles, and also to a circle of people that was
new to me, and which, as I learned later, comprised the main players who greatly contributed
to the mediation of the post-Soviet nostalgia.

3
Quoted in Bjørn Ramberg and Kristin Gjesdal, "Hermeneutics", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
(Summer 2009 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
(http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2009/entries/hermeneutics/).

13
 The snowballing technique proved successful. My interviewees were eager to share
their contacts with me. However, despite of its obvious advantages, such as the possibility to
reach out to interesting potential informants, this method also had some disadvantages. There
was a risk of running into a situation where the selected informants were dominated by one
circle of friends, who mainly pointed at each other, hence elevating their own contribution
and cultural status, and possibly excluding and even hiding competing actors in the field.
Some potential contacts could have been kept from me due to some personal reasons. Being
prepared to this unfolding of the process, I tried all the time to balance the information
received from my informants by identifying experts and influential people in the field through
media surveys.
The length of the interviews with experts during two research trips in 2011 was usually
between one and two hours. The interview with the artist Alexander Petlura was exceptionally
long – 4 hours. All informants were very eager to contribute and share information as well as
other types of data (books, films, screen plays), which has enabled me to build up a collection
of rich materials.
To conduct interviews with designers became a problem. They never returned e-mails
and phone calls or were constantly unavailable. Usually PR managers made me understand
that designers were too busy and were not interested in activities that did not lead to any
commercial profits. Trying to get into direct contact with the designers I attended two fashion
weeks: one in Moscow and one in St. Petersburg, trying either to approach participating
designers, or after establishing connection with fashion week organisers or dedicated
journalists ask them for contacts with designers. As it turned out none either knew closely
enough the designers I was interested in or wanted to share their contacts. During one of the
interviews, a female designer from St. Petersburg even refused talking to me and explained
her decision by stating that she “does not want to share any confidential information with
those who betrayed her country and now work for the Western money”. She also claimed that
while any activity must have “some great and glorious idea”, she could not see anything great
in writing a dissertation no one will read.
I have conducted individual interviews, which mainly took place in private settings:
either in the home or in the studio of the interviewee. These interviews were the most
informative with the interviewees eager to talk. Some few interviews I had to conduct in
public spaces, such as a cafe or an exhibition hall. Only in one case, I think, did the public
environment and stressful atmosphere of an exhibition space negatively influence the length
of the interview as well as the depth and width of the information the person shared with me.

14
 I designed my interviews as open conversations, with the interview agenda only for my
own orientation. My intention was to make the interviewee talk about the topics without my
(more than occasional) interference. I decided to always ask the main questions, while the
subsequent questions were only asked if they tied in with the conversation. I also asked
comprehension questions to understand the meaning of the interviewee’s statements and key
terms. Interviews consisted of three main parts: a warming up, where the interviewee was
asked to talk about her/himself and her/his activities; a general history of nostalgic
phenomena in Russia, where I asked them to identify main actors and representations; and the
future scenario, where the interviewee was asked to come up with how this phenomena will
develop in the future. This question was asked to see whether my respondents saw any sign of
development and could predict if any changes would happen. Most of them either did not
answer the question or answered it shortly by stating that they do not really know where the
situation leads and only time will show.

1.5. Structure of the thesis

In Introduction I presented briefly background information, aim and research questions,

Disposition, my position as the author and this study, sources and methodological framework.
In chapter 2 I briefly outline previous research on nostalgia.
In chapter 3 I present theoretical framework I am going to use in this dissertation.
Chapter 4 illustrates the function of irony in the art works of artists Komar and
Melamid, Moscow conceptualists and artists concentrated around Moscow and Leningrad
squats in the 1980s. In order to understand the cultural references of the designers, operating
in the mid-2000s, as well as to analyse the appropriation of Soviet symbols in perspective,
was vital to return to the period of late socialism (Yurchak, 2006). This chapter was mainly
built on secondary sources.
Chapter 5 narrates about tendencies in the 1990s, during the presidency of Boris
Yeltsin. Starting with the fall of the Soviet Union, I write about the key events that have
contributed to the process of remembering a bygone era. Starting with a visit to the Moscow
restaurant Petrovich, initiated in 1993 and finally opened in 1997, I am analyzing the
production and recycling of the Soviet past. Having identified my main analytical categories –
space, time, object, value and bodily experiences – I move on to the remembering and re-
construction of the Soviet Union in TV shows. I am investigating different outlooks on the
Soviet past and memory work in three television programmes. As television became the main

15
mass media in Russia during that period, my main focus is on the mediation of memory on
television. Among many programmes broadcast during this period, I have selected three
highly rated and award-winning shows, namely Namedni: Nasha Era, Staraya Kvartira and
Starie Pesni o Glavnom. Looking at the main categories identified in the analysis of
Petrovich, I investigate the production of space, time and value in these programmes. In order
to find parallels in the processes of remembering/forgetting of the past, I take a brief turn to
look at two theatre plays that were running during the same period in one of the Moscow
theatres. I intend to argue (work in progress) that informal networks in Moscow contributed to
the flow of ideas between the main actors in the process of production and mediation of
nostalgia. This chapter is based mainly on primary sources: television programmes,
interviews and urban observations in Moscow. I conclude that in the 1990s there were three
main trajectories of the use of the Soviet past: reflexive (Staraya Kvartira, theatre plays, the
Petrovich restaurant), ironic and reflexive (Namedni. Nasha Era), and ironic and superficial
(Starie Pesni o Glavnom). Towards the end of this period, it became clear that nostalgia can
be profitable, and slowly patriotism starts to play an important role in the production of
contemporary Russian identity.
Chapter 6 investigates the process of mediation of post-Soviet nostalgia during the
presidencies of Putin and Medvedev (2000 – 2010). Starting with a brief outline of the main
political and socio-economic changes in Russia, I introduce two new media, through which
nostalgia is mediated. Although television continued to keep its dominant role within the mass
media, the internet and fashion industry also contributed to the process of mediation of
memories. I will give a brief summary of the major trends and events (for example the launch
of the journal Nostalgia) and focus on three fashion brands, illustrating different commercial
use of the memory. My choice of brands (Denis Simachev, NinaDonis and Antonina
Shapovalova) can be justified by their popularity, media attention, and their different use of
the Soviet heritage. If Denis Simachev is considered to be the most successful of them,
NinaDonis approaches the Soviet past from a more intellectual and reflexive point, while
Antonina Shapovalova, a politician and designer, uses the Soviet past as propaganda tool of
the Putin regime. By introducing fashion, I add another important analytical category – the
body.
From this period I analyze the TV series Selano v SSSR (Made in the USSR),
concentrating on the same categories of time, space, objects, and value. During this period,
Internet archives and on-line communities, where visual imagery, films and TV programmes
produced during the Communist era, as well as individual memories of those born in the

16
USSR, rapidly flourished. I have chosen to look at the Internet project 1976-1982
Encyclopedia Nashego Detstva (Encyclopedia of Our Childhood) (http://www.76-82.ru/.),
which won the first prize in the nomination of the “Archive of the year” and “POTOP” 2007,
the professional award of Runet (Russian- Language Internet).
It becomes evident that Soviet nostalgia developed into a more commercialized and
glamorized phenomenon. It was suddenly “cool to be born in the USSR”. A new generational
cluster of those born in the 1970s and 1980s were willing to spend time and money in
glamorous clubs and restaurants and to purchase fashion brands at inflated prices. By the end
of the period a noticeable tendency had emerged: nostalgia for life and youth in Soviet Union
was used for political purposes in order to instil a sense of patriotism.
In Epilogue. Nostalgia in Russia 2010-now I reflect upon the recent political changes in
Russia in the relation to post-Soviet nostalgia. I connect the processes of forgetting and
remembering with contemporary political and cultural changes in Russia. In this chapter I
conclude that reflexive, commercial and aesthetic forms of nostalgia transformed into
restorative nostalgia (Boym, 2001).

2. Previous research

This thesis is a contribution to the research on nostalgia, memory and representations of

the past. During the last decades the number of studies focusing on various aspects of
mnemonic processes in different parts of the world increased dramatically (Boym, 2001;
Enns, 2007; Lindstrom, 2006; Cooke, 2005; Peleggi, 2005; Bach, 2002; Grainge, 2002: 2003;
Todorova, 2011a; 2011b; Raynolds, 2012 Pickering and Keightley, 2012). Explorations of
Holocost memories (Young, 1990, 1994; Linenthal, 2001), memories of the Second World
War (Capelletto, 2005, Suleiman, 2012) and the Vietnam War (Sturken, 1997; Tran, 2010;
Hagopian, 2011), remembering Communism (Scribner, 2003; Todorova, 2012), nostalgia for
Yugoslavia (Velikonja, 2002) and the GDR (Rechtien, Tate, 2011; Hodgin, 2011; Clarke,
Wölfel, 2011; Simine, 2005; Berghahn, 2005; Gries, 2004; Bach, 2002) range from
investigations of memorials to films.
Usually, in academic research and popular media articles, the kaleidoscope of
approaches towards the past and its use is believed to vary from nostalgia (usually understood
as a bittersweet longing for things, persons or situations of the past) to retro (a fashion

17
reminiscent of the past); from recycling (an act of processing used or abandoned materials for
creating new products) to revivalism (a desire or inclination to revive what belongs to an
earlier time). American Russian-born scholar Sergey Oushakine, having written extensively
on Russia, pointed out that “in the scholarship on cultural changes in postsocialist countries it
has become a cliché to single out nostalgia as an increasingly prominent symbolic practice
through which the legacy of the previous period makes itself visible” (Oushakine, 2007).
Mapping cultural landscapes of post-Socialism not only in scholarly work, but also in mass
media, I have identified a prominent trend of labelling various, sometimes contradictory and
ambiguous, attitudes towards the Soviet past as well as different appropriations of the Soviet
past in popular culture and art – nostalgia for the Soviet times. At first sight, it seems as if the
whole nation was and still is nostalgic for the most controversial times in Russian history: the
times of purges, wars, deprivations and fear. However, on closer inspection it becomes
evident that either this cultural phenomenon is much more complex and does not boil down to
nostalgia only, or the existing narrow definition of nostalgia should be modified to reflect the
complexity of the phenomenon. Thus, placing the term nostalgia in the beginning of my long
way of unfolding the complexity of representations of the Soviet past in Russian popular
culture, I want to find out whether nostalgia as a term is indeed applicable, and if so to what
extent it can be used.
In this chapter I present just a fraction of the countless articles and books that are
written on various modalities of nostalgia. First, I start with the history of the term and the
most used definition. Then I move to different aspects and geographies of nostalgia, paving
the way for the theoretical framework on nostalgia and representations of the past that is
presented in the next chapter.

2.1. Nostalgia: history of the term

Nostalgia, as “a painful yearning to return home” was first discussed in Johannes

Hofer’s medical dissertation in 1688. “La Maladie du Pays” as the cause of medical condition
was associated with illness among troops fighting far away from home. Based on a study of
Swiss soldiers serving in the armies in Belgium and France, he concluded that the soldiers’
poor condition could be due to homesickness. Later, that emotional upheaval associated with
nostalgia was no longer associated with homesickness, but more with a “bitter-sweet yearning
for things, persons or situations of the past” (Guffey, 2006: 19). Gradually, nostalgia has

18
come to be viewed as more a sociological phenomenon that helps individuals to adopt during
the major life transitions. Thanks to Fred Davis (1979), who considered nostalgia as an
“adaptive mechanism” in turbulent times of transition, nostalgia was at least seen in as a
productive attitude in more or less positive light. Thus, individuals going through dramatic
changes in their lives would be more prone to nostalgic experiences. For example, people
moving into a “mid-life crisis”, retirement, change of career path, or coping with divorce or
personal losses might experience nostalgia.
Davis identified two dimensions in which nostalgic or similar experiences may differ:
first, the personal vs. collective nature of the experience and, second, the basis of the feeling
in direct vs. indirect experience (Davis, 1979). If personal experiences are grounded in
memories that are specific to the individual and differ significantly across society, collective
experiences originate in cultural phenomena that members of a society share. “Direct
experience refers back to events in the individual's own life, while indirect experience results
from stories told by friends or family members or from information in books, movies, or other
media” (Davis, 1979, quoted in Havlena and Holak, 1996a). Havlena and Holak, building on
this division, proposed a fourfold classification of nostalgic experience: 1) personal nostalgia
(direct individual experience); 2) interpersonal nostalgia (indirect individual experience); 3)
cultural nostalgia (direct collective experience); 4) virtual nostalgia (indirect collective
experience) (Havlena and Hovlak, 2007:650).
This approach is not unproblematic, as people’s memories are socially constructed in
such a way that it is rather difficult to distinguish where there was a collective direct or an
indirect experience, or where to draw the border between personal and impersonal
experiences.
Russian-born literature scholar, novelist and media artist Svetlana Boym gave one of the
most cited definitions of nostalgia in her groundbreaking Future of Nostalgia (2001). She
pointed out that the word “nostalgia” originates from Greek nostos (return home) and algia
(longing), and means a longing for a home that does not exist or perhaps has never existed
(Boym, 1995: 284; 2001: xiii). This nostalgic longing is directed towards temporal and spatial
distance between the longing subject and longed for object, with the loss of the object being
the primary condition for nostalgia to be experienced by the subject.
Boym first initiated a discussion of nostalgia in her book Common Places: Mythologies
of Everyday Life in Russia (1994), which is built around the concept of common places:
understood as both shared and banal. She distinguished between “two kinds of nostalgia:

19
utopian (reconstructive and totalizing) and ironic (inclusive and fragmentary)” (Boym, 1995:
285).
Some years later, Boym expanded the topic of nostalgia and elaborated more on these
two distinct kinds. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001) she called these two types the
restorative and the reflective: “restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a trans-
historical reconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longing
itself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately” (Boym, 2001: xviii). If
restorative nostalgia thinks of itself not as nostalgia but as truth and tradition, and protects a
kind of absolute truth, reflective nostalgia calls truths and traditions into doubt, leaving space
for contradictions. Boym argued “restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national and
religious revivals, it knows two main plots – the return to origins and conspiracy” (Boym,
2001: xviii). In contrast, reflective nostalgia “allows us to distinguish between national
memory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consists
of collective frameworks that mark but do not define the individual memory” (Boym, 2001:
xviii).
Media scholar Zala Volčič suggested different categorisations of nostalgia,
distinguishing three types of Yugo-nostalgia: 1) revisionist nostalgia, which is a political
phenomenon that utilises the past as part of a political program of reunification, involving the
rewriting of history according to contemporary political priorities; 2) aesthetic nostalgia,
which is a cultural phenomenon calling for the preservation and worshiping of a unique past
and its culture as something special, but not exploited for political or commercial purposes;
and 3) escapist or utopian nostalgia, i.e. a commercial phenomenon that celebrates and
exploits the longing for an idyllic past. This type of nostalgia has a tendency to be the most a-
historical, as it avoids historical narratives, relying instead upon commodified symbols of
identity.
Volčič assumed that Yugo-nostalgia could be an important tool in opening up many
possibilities for coming to terms with the past. She pointed out that yugo-nostalgia has not
created premises for construction of unifying identity, but on contrary divided the former
Yugoslav republics. She noted that transformation of Yugo-nostalgia into mainstream
entertainment, with its reduced “microcosmic” perspective and illusory version of the past did
not promote historical understanding. Instead producers shifted focus away from the real
historical tensions to conflicts between individuals. She concluded that nostalgic
representations produced by media fail to raise important political issues and address the
damaging features of nationalist discourse and the “divisive memories of the wars of the

20
1990s” (Volčič, 2007: 34). According to Volčič, the danger of nostalgia lies in its benign
form, which allows various social actors to rewrite and repackage for sale the Yugoslav past,
as well as “to continue to deny responsibility for the wars and their aftermath” (Volčič, 2007:
34).

2.2. Nostalgia for the East: Russia

Concerning post-Soviet or post-Socialist memories, scholarship on cultural changes in

post-Soviet countries, and especially in Russia, usually singles out nostalgia as an
“increasingly prominent symbolic practice through which the legacy of the previous period
makes itself visible” (Oushakine, 2007). Scholars who have examined post-Soviet nostalgia in
Russia tend to point to the illusory aspect of the current longing for the glorious Soviet past,
which may or may not have existed (Ivanova, 2002; Smith, 2004; Beumers, 2004). Sergey
Oushakine has critically reviewed the scholarship on this topic and pointed out that the major
criticism against nostalgia stressed the “profound gap between the sanitized nostalgic
reproductions and the actual traumatic history”. (Oushakine, 2007: 452). As a result, the
scholars explain nostalgia for the Soviet Past as a deliberate or implicit denial of the present.

But it also is often perceived as a revisionist project of rewriting history, as a

postcommunist censorship of sorts aimed at making the complex and troubling past more
user-friendly by reinscribing its reformatted version in the context of today’s entertainment.
Some critics trace this disassociation back to a rather simplistic belief of the early 1990s,
when democratization in Russia was directly associated with the idea that “the past could
be quickly forgotten or overcome.” Others see in postsocialist nostalgia a therapeutic
mechanism called upon to alleviate the material, moral, and physical despair that became
so characteristic in the lives of many people in postsocialist Russia. Yet others perceive the
“rehabilitation” of Soviet aesthetics as a specifically postsocialist reaction to market
dominated changes. As the argument goes, the “idealistic and romantic” imagery of Soviet
film and music are meant to provide in this case a moral antidote for the persistent assault
of capitalist advertising. (Oushakine, 2007: 452) 4

4
See Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, “Sotsiostrukturnyi aspekt transformatsii rossiiskogo obshchestva”, Sotsiologicheskie
issledovaniia, 2001, no.8:10; Boris Dubin, “Vozvrashenie ‘Bol'shogo stilia’? Staroe i novoe v trekh
teleekranizatsiiakh 2005 goda”, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006, no. 2:275; Kathleen E. Smith, “Whither
Anti-Stalinism?”, Ab Imperio, 4 (2004); and Birgit Beumers, “Pop Post-Sots, or the Popularization of History in
the Musical Nord-Ost”, SEEJ 48:3 (2004): 378–81. See also Semen Faibisovich, “Vozvrashenie” and Kirill
Kobrin, “Devianostye: Epokha bol'shikh metafor”, both in Logos 5/6 (2000): 45–52 and 38–44, respectively;
David King, The Commissar Vanishes: The Falsification of Photographs and Art in Stalin’s Russia (New York,
1997); Sarah Mendelson and Theodore P. Gerber, “Soviet Nostalgia: An Impediment to Russian
Democratization”, Washington Quarterly 29:1 (2005): 92–93; Jean-Marie Chauvier, “Russia: Nostalgic for the
Soviet Era,” Le Monde Diplomatique (March 2004); Nina Khrushcheva, “‘Rehabilitating’ Stalin’”, World Policy
Journal (Summer 2005):67–73; Oleg Kireev, “Neo-hippizm i drugie metody zavoevaniia avtonomii”, pH 2
(2003) ( http://ncca-kaliningrad.ru/index.php3?lang=ru&mode= projects&id_proj=17&id_art=60&ld=ok).

21
 The majority of research on nostalgia or nostalgia-like attitudes to the past consists of
analyses of media products. Cultural Studies scholar and literature critic Natalya Ivanova
(2002) mapped Russian popular culture in the 1990s, paying special attention to television,
advertisement, Soviet branding in consumption culture, monuments and official public
holidays. She found reasons for nostalgic sentiments in the traumatic experiences of the
1990s: when the intelligentsia lost its position and influence in society, people were deprived
of the past they knew and lost belief in the future. She viewed much of the “nostalgic” content
on Russian television in the 1990s in negative tones, not giving the audiences any possibility
of a critical approach to it. She blamed the entertainment establishment for imposing nostalgia
on people (Ivanova, 2002: 84-85). Ivanova explained the high popularity of Soviet television
and video content by its potential to create a positive utopian myth in times when reality was
harsh and frightening. She invented a term to describe nostalgia for Soviet times, for the Big
Soviet Style: nostalyashee (nostalgia-present) – life lived in nostalgia for the Soviet. This
nostalgia, she concluded, with its reference game with Soviet symbols, both lead to and
became a symptom of survival of the Soviet culture in young Russia in the beginning of the
2000s (Ivanova, 2002: 92).
Russian media researchers Novikova and Dulo, after looking at Russian television,
concluded that the interest in the Soviet past could be viewed as a manifestation of
glocalisation, a cultural trauma that has not been overcome and a protest against globalisation
and imported Western values. Having presented their ethnographic work on Russian
documentary programmes, films and talk shows, they explained the multilayered phenomenon
of nostalgia as a reaction against the negative view of reality and the Soviet past that
dominated in the 1990s. They pointed out that politicians and television heavily exploited the
“nostalgia-for-the-past-syndrom” with its inclination for escapism and glamour (Novikova
and Dulo: 2011).
The popular outlook on nostalgia as a phenomenon in Russia is rather negative, and
these two pieces of research confirm that established point of view. Despite of being rich in
ethnographic observations and presenting valuable data, both of these works draw their
conclusions on a limited and not so detailed analysis of media content.
A big area of research on post-Soviet nostalgia comprises examinations of public
opinion and attitudes towards the fall of the Soviet Union. These studies are very important
when talking about the reception and uses of nostalgia or drawing conclusions on its harmful

22
or positive effects. Long-life observations by the Levada Centre for statistical research and the
Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia brought lots of insights into popular attitudes
and behaviour practices closely connected with nostalgic sentiments and “practices of
nostalgia”. I will also use such data collected during the last twenty years in order to shed
light on the complexity of nostalgia.
Studies in different former republics of attitudes towards the end of the Soviet rule show
the dependence of contemporary opinions on both historical experiences and governmentally
orchestrated historical education. In a survey of adolescents in post-Communist Russia and
Ukraine, Olena Nikolayenko (2008) analysed attitudes toward the dissolution of the Soviet
Union. The results demonstrated a different degree of nostalgia among the young generation
in Russia and Ukraine, identifying sources of positive and negative attitudes toward the
collapse of the Soviet Union, and revealing cross-national differences in the relationship
between Soviet nostalgia and national pride (Nikolaenko, 2008).
The rapid growth of the number of nostalgic-themed restaurants and bars has attracted
researchers to studies of Post-Soviet nostalgia from a culinary perspective. Melissa L.
Caldwell, for instance, investigated “the intersections of food and travel in Russian by
focusing on the phenomenon of culinary tourism as a mode of experiencing the foreign
Other” (Caldwell, 2006: 98). She concluded that these corporeal aspects of culinary tourism,
which are simultaneously imaginary and real, have left the inhabitants of Moscow “with acute
feelings of homesickness that are satisfied by a good serving of nostalgia cuisine” (Caldwell,
2006: 98). She believed that this time travel through nostalgia cuisine aimed to bring the
Muscovites back to certain earlier periods of time, both in the distant and the recent past.
The phenomenon of nostalgia has also attracted the attention of market researchers. In
the 1990s very little work was done on the use of nostalgia as an advertising tactic. For
example, Holbrook and Schindler noted “nostalgia has received relatively little attention from
academicians in general and from scholars devoted to the study of consumer research in
particular” (Holbrook and Shindler, 1991: 330). There was later a certain advancement in this
field, as research focused on nostalgia proneness (Holbrook, 1993), the emotions produced by
nostalgic advertisements (Holak and Havlena, 1998), and the consequences of its use in
advertising (e.g., attitudes toward ads, brands, etc.; Muehling and Sprott, 2004; Pascal et al.,
2002). These investigations have shown that nostalgia preferences occur for a wide range of
product categories (Schindler and Holbrook, 2003), that advertisements with a nostalgic
theme are capable of producing nostalgic reflections (Muehling and Sprott, 2004), and that
nostalgic advertisements create more positive attitudes toward the ad, the product and the

23
brand (Muehling and Sprott, 2004; Pascal et al., 2002).
Susan L. Holak, Alexei V. Matveev and William J. Havlena (2006, 2007) investigated
nostalgia in post-Socialist Russia from a consumer behaviour perspective. They researched
nostalgia proneness as a personality trait among Russians and discussed specific stimuli and
advertising content in the Russian marketplace designed to evoke individual and collective
nostalgia. Their research showed that the major nostalgia themes – specifically, the break-up
of the Soviet Union, nature and food – identified in the Russian responses were related to
advertising and marketing for Russian products. Content analyses of consumer practices
identified several cultural factors that may shape personality and nostalgic responses in
modern Russia. The most frequently mentioned subjects were the ones that related to the
recent history of the USSR and Russia: 1) the transition to a market economy, 2) the loss of
security, 3) the breakup of the Soviet Union, 4) former Soviet political holidays, and 5) nature
and food.
The ironic dimension of Russian nostalgia has been emphasised by some scholars.
Svetlana Boym in her earlier work of 1995 identified ironic nostalgia (which later was
renamed as reflective). Canadian literature scholar Linda Hutcheon, well-known for her work
on irony, has emphasised the importance of paying attention to the ironic dimension of
nostalgia phenomena (1995). Russian born American scholar Alexey Yurchak, advancing
studies of the last decades of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decades after the fall of the
Soviet Empire, describing the Russian art world in 2008, noted that an increasing number of
artists turned to Soviet topics and aesthetics. Despite of admitting that some elements of this
trend have something in common with post-Communist nostalgia, he is careful to denounce it
as inadequate. He explains artists’ interest in the Soviet past by their attempt to engage with
the past, not to nostalgically gazing at it. Working with notions of stjeb and irony, he
identified that within aesthetic forms of that decade the dominant was the one of sincerity or
new sincerity (Yurchak, 2008: 258). This post-Soviet phenomenon, according to Yurchak, is a
particular brand of irony – sympathetic and warm – which has allowed artists to remain
committed to the ideals they discussed and at the same time being ironic about it (Yurchak,
2008).
As I have already mentioned, many practices of remembering are treated negatively
because they are believed to encourage consumerist attitudes and present the past as
entertaining. There is a belief in the press that when consumed by young audiences, who have
neither personal memories about the past being re-cycled and represented in an entertaining
light, nor profound knowledge of history, these traumatic aspects of Communist history

24
threaten to trivialise tragic aspects of history and obstruct the process of coming to terms with
the Communist past.
Romanian scholar Diana Georgescu called for “the analysis of the critical potential of
irony to challenge mainstream memory discourses” (in Todorova and Gille, 2010: 156). She
explored the political and social consequences of irony and the interactive and critical
potential of verbal, visual and aural irony in advertisements and music. She suggested the
term “counter-memory” to indicate that these memories are not being included into the master
narrative but instead function as a disruption of widely accepted discourses. These alternative
memory practices are casted in ironic modes. Being ironic does not prevent those who
remember from being serious.

2.3. Nostalgia in the East: Eastern and Central Europe

The anthology Post-Communist Nostalgia presents a substantial set of studies on

various aspects of nostalgia found across Eastern and Central Europe (Todorova and Gille,
2010). This post-Communist nostalgia, as conceptualised by the contributors, is not only a
longing for stability, security and prosperity, but also a sense of loss of a specific form of
sociability. Both those who lived in opposition to the dominant ideology and younger
generations have experienced a longing to and an interest in the recent past, learning about it
or reinvesting in it and giving it fresh meanings. Contributors to the volume analysed the
impact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences and political
orientation. In line with previous research of the last decade they argued that post-Communist
nostalgia should not be seen as restorative, using Boym’s terminology, but instead be
recognised as belonging to a healing process that strives to come to terms with both the
Communist past and the “transitional” present. Among the questions their volume addressed
were those of agency, content and genres of representation. The authors gave a wide overview
of memory genres and feelings evoked by the past in six post-Socialist countries, ranging
from “self-irony and mockery to melancholy, grief, alienation, depression, anxiety, and
trauma” (Todorova and Gille, 2010: 278). The studies presented show that nostalgia does not
mean the same for everyone. Not only the totalitarian Socialist past with its severity limits
“individuals’ memory work however subjective the experience that memory is based on may
be”, but also the realities of past and present influence the boundaries and emotional
colouring of memory work. Several authors drew attention to conflicts in the recollection of

25
the Socialist past between generations and social groups. These conflicts surfaced highly
contradictory memory practices, which are often labelled as nostalgic. Themes such as the
commodification of memory, the loss of innocence and the turn to political nostalgia are
brought up in that same anthology.
In the anthology Remembering Communism (2010) Maria Todorova, drawing attention
to the existing vast field of institutional approach to the East German past as well as a
substantial scholarly work done on the questions of resistance and opposition to the regime,
called for a larger research in the field of social, cultural and everyday history of Eastern
Europe “under the overall formula of ‘remembering communism’” (Todorova, 2010: 11-12).
She favoured the term “remembering” over “memory” because the former “emphasizes lived
experience but one inflected by the exigencies of the moment at which the act of recollection
(remembering) takes place” (Todorova, 2010: 13). Contributors to the volume, dedicated to
various genres of representations of the process (institutional discourses, archives and
memoires, textbooks and visual memories), made the mediated nature of Communist
remembering explicit. However, most of the authors did not directly engage in the analysis of
the mediation process as such.
Zala Volčič (2007) studied the mediation of nostalgia in processes of remembering and
forgetting in Yugoslavia. She explored media and other cultural practices, which in former
Yugoslav countries have attempted to re-create a shared cultural memory. She suggested that
consumer societies used nostalgia as a marketing tool for a lost, idealised past whose best
aspects might be seized through consumption. Such ironic appropriation, she explained, was
not unexpected, since the rule of Tito was marked by the prosperity of the 1970s and 1980s.
In such use devoid of negative history, the Yugoslav past has become a signifier of consumer
desire.
The author assumed that after the collapse of Yugoslavia it was precisely in the field of
culture that the Yugoslav “imagined community” was first challenged, while the media
provided a platform within which a new sense of belonging was promoted and maintained.
Then, from the 1990s, the media and other cultural forms produced a space for nostalgic
practices. Volčič suggested that the imagined community of the former Yugoslavia remained
an unfinished project, whose unity was predicated not on what it was, but what it might
become. Yugo-nostalgia is then less a longing for a real past than a longing for the desires and
fantasies that were once possible.
Nicole Lindstrom, inspired by Svetlana Boym’s distinction between “restorative” and
“reflective” nostalgia, analysed Yugo-nostalgia expressed in films, popular music and multi-

26
media. The difference between the two forms of nostalgia was in their stance towards past,
present and future. While both were based on fantasies of the past, restorative nostalgia was
fixated on the space and time of the past, whereas reflexive nostalgia looked back in search
for alternative futures. These two different forms of nostalgia shared the “symbolic
geographies of disunity” that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for the
last twenty years (Lindstrom, 2006).
Slovenian researcher Mitja Velikonja has confirmed the established understanding of
nostalgia as a retrospective utopia for a safety and stability, a fair and equal society, true
friendships and mutual solidarity. Nostalgia for Socialism embodied this utopian hope that
there must be a better society than the current one (Velikonja, 2009).

2.4. GDR Nostalgia: Ostalgia

During the last twenty years the most extensive research has been done on so-called
Ostalgie – a combination of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’ – a reevaluation of
the history of the former German Democratic Republic and a boom of the German nostalgia
industry. This phenomenon emerged in former East Germany during the 1990s (Enns, 2007).
It entailed a “museumification” of GDR everyday life as well as the recuperation,
reproduction, marketing and merchandising of GDR products. This term has often been
associated with Communist kitsch, and been criticised for its inability to critically engage
with history and “authentic” practices of collecting and displaying life in GDR (Berdahl,
2010, Enns, 2007). Many researchers have contested this perspective. For example, some
studies of early 2000s’ ostalgia films showed that “nostalgic” films in fact criticised
Germany’s current socio-economic and political situation. Thus, understood within its
contemporary context, ostalgia can be seen as a re-examination of the utopian hopes and
expectations surrounding German reunification and a critique of a capitalist system that has
failed to adequately address current economic and cultural challenges (Enns, 2007).
Anthropologist Daphne Berdahl, known for her work on Eastern Germany, post-
Socialist Europe and ostalgia, has made a distinction between nostalgia and “socially
sanctioned commemorative practices” by investigating “social lives” of East German objects
in the context of transitional changes. She interrogated the politics of distinction between
“mere” nostalgia and socially sanctioned commemorative practices by tracing the social lives
of East German things, including their paths, diversions and recuperations. Building on

27
Appadurai’s insight that ”from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things with
significance, while from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion that
illuminate their social context” (Appadurai, 1988: 5), she elucidated “not only the social,
conditions that have produced the recent explosion of ostalgia in former GDR, but an
interplay between hegemonic and oppositional memories” (Berdhal, 2010: 49). She concluded
that ostalgia both contested and affirmed a new order:
In this business of Ostalgie, East German products have taken on new meaning
when used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of an
economy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an East
Germany that never existed. They thus illustrate not only the way in which
memory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon, but also
the processes through which things become informed with a remembering—and
forgetting—capacity. (Berdahl, 2010: 52)

Important for the understanding of nostalgia, the question of the role of the objects was
raised in the research of Jonathan Bach. In his work on Ostprodukte, former GDR products,
Bach saw ostalgia as simultaneously two forms of nostalgia: a “modernist” nostalgia (see
Jameson 1991: 19) in former East Germany and a “nostalgia of style” primarily (but not
exclusively) in the West. He wrote that the production and consumption of Ostprodukte
functioned as the “main symbolic locations for the crystalization of these two types of
nostalgia” (Bach, 2002: 548). In the case of modernist nostalgia, the consumption of
Ostprodukte appears as a form of production itself – a reappropriation of symbols that
establishes “ownership” of symbolic capital. In the nostalgia of style, Ostprodukte constituted
“floating signifiers of the ‘neokitsch’ that undermine consumption as an oppositional practice
by at once turning the consumer into the market and the goods into markers of personal ironic
expression” (Bach, 2002: 548). “Nostalgia is colloquially a form of longing for the past, but
its modernist variant is less a longing for an unredeemable past as such than a longing for the
fantasies and desires that were once possible in that past. In this way, modernist nostalgia is a
longing for a mode of longing that is no longer possible” (Bach, 2002: 548).
Paul Cook in Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization to
Nostalgia (2005) looked back towards the moment, when nostalgia in Germany started. He
examined the state-sanctioned memorialisation and the growing nostalgia for East Germany
in literature, television, film and the internet to map out the path of German national identity
during the period of the after reunification and until 2005. Inspired by postcolonial theory,
Cook argued that the East has been defined as the West’s “exotic other” and showed how this
stereotype has been challenged.
Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye Lenin! (2003) has inspired many scholars to research

28
the vast fields of ostalgia in reunified Germany. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy watched this film
through the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation and simulacra, and argued that
Becker deconstructed the nostalgic transformation and commodification of the Socialist
national past in the post-Communist age by exposing the deep collective needs to which this
style phenomenon responded. Confronted with the ideological dominance of Western
ideology after 1989, the characters in the film struggled to come to terms with their own past
by creating alternative personal and collective narratives (Godenanu-Kenworthy, 2011).
Anthony Enns (2007) in his essay about Good Bye Lenin! argued that ostalgia
represented a critique of Germany's contemporary socio-economic and political situation. He
connected ostalgia with a massive economic crisis in Germany at the time, characterised by
unemployment and severe cuts in health care and education that have only increased the
disparity between East and West. In this context, the nostalgia for the East could be seen as a
reexamination of the utopian hopes and expectations surrounding German reunification and a
critique of the capitalist system that has failed to adequately address current economic and
cultural challenges (Enns, 2007).

2.5. Nostalgia: concluding remarks

As this overview shows the perspectives on nostalgia phenomena vary from negative
and dismissive to those that argue that it has a potential for today’s generations to learn from
and critically engage with the past. Most of the research on this topic has touched on the
question of how nostalgia has been mediated, focusing on different examples and usually
confined to a rather short time period. A study of the changes in the mediation of nostalgia
production over several decades should be able to bring welcome new insights into this field.

3. Theoretical framework and analytical categories

In this thesis, the concept of nostalgia serves as a fundamental basis for analysing
cultural changes in Russia after the fall of Communism. When presenting parts of this
dissertation at academic conferences, I received scholarly criticism for using the nostalgia
concept in my analysis of Soviet/Russian culture during and after the perestroika period.

29
Some researchers who were negative about the concept believed the term was too medical and
focused too much on individuals’ melancholic and psychological conditions. They suggested
employing the term “cultural memory” instead, as this term would be more applicable to the
developments in Russia, because it covers more aspects of culture than nostalgia. Some
thought that nostalgia was an ideology imposed by mass media, which has rapidly developed
into a commercial branding strategy, and therefore has excluded a more profound notion of
melancholy as a reaction to the historical changes and contemporary conditions, which could
potentially slow down transformation and development.
One of the main arguments against using the concept of nostalgia was a denial of
nostalgic experiences by both the producers of “nostalgic” content and its consumers. When
this argument was discussed at the “Nostalgia” workshop on 12-13 November 2012 at
Södertörn University, Sweden, the majority of individuals experiencing nostalgia deny being
nostalgic. An argument that nostalgia is not a condition that one chooses to be in, but a
condition diagnosed by others, raised much positive feedback. It was claimed that nostalgia in
the East became true only after the attitudes to the past in the East were interpreted and named
nostalgia in the West. After two long days of discussion participants returned to the starting
point – the need for re-conceptualising, broadening or going beyond the concept of nostalgia
to make it more applicable to changing cultural environments, which is in fact a debate that
has been brought up long time before.
Indeed, the concept is problematic. In this thesis I see nostalgia as a complex and
multilayered phenomenon and concept, useful in the debate on cultural change and active
engagement with past. I suggest looking at nostalgia from several perspectives. Firstly,
nostalgia can be seen as an overarching attitude in society to structural changes (ideas of
progress, future, past and present). Secondly, it is a form of behaviour (melancholic condition,
reflection, active reaction resulting in the production of cultural forms). Thirdly, nostalgia is
an attitude and a behaviour that results in representations (media, politics, art, literature).
Based on this broad conceptual approach, I am going to present the aspects of nostalgia,
which, I believe can be found in contemporary Russian culture.

3.1. Structure of Feeling

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 Zeitgeist, or the spirit of times, including real factors, events and ideas, was believed to
define epochs and create premises for changes (Blumer, 1969, Nystrom, 1928; Vinken, 2005;
Sekacheva, 2006). Cultural theorist Raymond Williams has developed another concept to
characterise the lived experience at a particular time and place. The concept of “structure of
feeling” denotes the culture of a particular historical moment, a common set of perceptions
and values shared by a particular generation, which is most clearly articulated in particular
artistic forms and conventions. It was first used in A Preface to Film (with Michael Orrom,
1954), further developed in The Long Revolution (1961), and then extended and elaborated
throughout Williams’ life, in particular in Marxism and Literature (1977). Conceptualising
nostalgia as an overarching attitude, which may provide valuable input into understanding of
the specifics of spatiality and temporality of modernity, I will use Raymond Williams’
concept of structure of feeling as a theoretical framework in this thesis.
In this dissertation, aimed at studying the change of nostalgic tendencies in Russian
culture after the fall of the Soviet Union, I follow Raymond Williams’ theoretical framework
and method on the analysis of culture. Williams wrote that any adequate definition of culture
should include three categories and the relations between them: “ideal, in which culture is a
state or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute values” (in this case the
analysis of culture is the description and discovery of these values in lives and works);
“documentary, in which culture is the body of intellectual and imaginative, in which, in a
detailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded” (analysis of culture then
is “the activity of criticisim, by which the nature of the thought and experience, the details of
the language, form and convention in which these are active, are described and valued”);
social, in which “culture is a description of a particular way of life, which expresses certain
meanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinary
behaviour” ( analysis of culture in this case is “the clarification of the meanings and values
implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture”. This analysis includes
both a historical criticism and analysis “of elements in the way of life”) (Williams,
1961/2001: 57-58).
Following Williams’ theoretical thought further, I take on his standing in how he
understands art, i.e. “art, while clearly related to the other activities, can be seen as expressing
certain elements in the organisation which, within that organisation’s terms, could only have
been expressed in this way. It is then not a question of relating the art to the society, but of
studying all the activities and their interrelations, without any concession of priority to any of
them we may choose to abstract” (Williams, 1961/2001: 62). He continued with claiming that

31
even if “a particular activity came radically to change the whole organisation, we can still not
say that it is to this activity that all the others must be related; we can only study the varying
ways in which, within the changing organisation, the particular activities and their
interrelations were affected” (Williams, 1961/2001: 62). Admitting that activities can be
conflicting and controversial, the change occurring in the society will be complex, and
controversial, ambiguous and even paradoxical elements will be present in the whole
organisation (Williams, 1961/2001:62).
In The Long Revolution Raymond Williams understood the theory of culture as “the
study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life”:
The analysis of culture is the attempt to discover the nature of the organisation which is
the complex of these relationships. Analysis of particular works or institutions is, in this
context, analysis of their essential kind of organisation, the relationships which works or
institutions embody as parts of the organisation as a whole. A key-word, in such analysis, is
pattern: it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that the useful cultural
analysis begins, and it is with the relationships between these patterns, which sometimes
reveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities,
sometimes again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysis
is concerned. (Williams, 1961/2001: 63)

Williams saw the main challenge in studying culture in getting hold on a “sense of the
ways in which the particular activities combined into a way of thinking and living”, the
“actual experience” through which both Erich Fromm’s (1942) social character (“valued
system of behaviour and attitudes”) and Ruth Benedicts’ (1934) pattern of culture (“selection
and configuration of interests and activities, and a particular valuation of them, producing a
distinct organisation, a ‘way of life’”) are lived (Williams, 1961/2001: 63-64). He was
convinced that the artistic expressions must be looked into for getting a deeper understanding
of a period’s way of life, or as he called it, structure of feeling. He suggested that this term
“operates in the most delicate and least tangible parts” of human activity.

In one sense, this structure of feeling is the culture of a period: it is the particular living
result of all the elements in the general organisation. And it is in this respect that the arts of a
period, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of major
importance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often not
consciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recorded
communication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community that
makes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon. (Williams, 1961/2001: 65)

A structure of feeling, according to Williams, cannot be learnt. “One generation may

train its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or general cultural pattern,

32
but the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to have
come ‘from’ anywhere” (Williams, 1961/2001: 65). This implies, according to Williams, that
“the changing organisation is enacted in the organism”: every new generation responds in its
own way to the changing and reproducing the changes in organisation with the available at
the certain moment creative tools (Williams, 1961/2002: 65).
Williams suggested start searching for structural feeling of the past eras in the
documentary culture, which in the studied case of nostalgia in Russia includes theatre plays,
literature, architecture and interior design, television, dress-fashions, and the relations
between them all. These documents are not to be studied in autonomy, but their significance
is to be analysed in relation to the whole organisation, “which is more that the sum of its of its
separable parts” (Williams, 1961/2001: 65). Williams pointed out that documentary culture is
essential to study way of life, when “living witnesses passed are silent” (Williams,
1961/2001: 65). But even living people can fail to understand the structural feeling of their
own time. Taking this into consideration, the cultural analysis presented in this dissertation
and based both on the study of fashion design, television programs, newspaper articles and
artistic expressions, and the recorded accounts of living witnesses, will, according to
Williams, present only an approximation.
Apart of suggesting a framework for the cultural analysis, the theory of structure of
feeling is especially useful for this study because it includes the notion of selective tradition,
which is a factor that connects lived cultures of a “particular time and place and only
accessible to those living in that time and place” and period cultures, i.e. recorded cultures
(Williams, 1961/2001: 66). The notion of selective tradition implies that recorded culture is
recorded within a framework of selective tradition. This means that the selection process,
based on the questions of value and importance, starts within the period itself and reflects the
organisation of this period. After all witnesses had gone (one period includes three
generations), the lived culture will be reduced to the selected combination and (a) used as a
contribution to the general development of the society; (b) serving the purpose of historical
record and reconstruction; and (c) used as a rejection or forgetting of some aspects of what
used to be a lived culture (Williams, 1961/2001: 68). The selection process, according to
Williams, is “governed by many kinds of special interests”, including social groups or classes.

Just as the actual social situation will largely govern contemporary selection, so the
development of the society, the process of historical change, will largely determine the
selective tradition. The traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to its

33
 contemporary systems of interest and values, for it is not an absolute body of work, but a
continual selection and interpretation. (Williams, 1961/2001: 68)

Because the process of change is constant, complex and continuous, it is impossible to

predict which past works will be relevant in the future. In this process of selective tradition
it is therefore important that cultural institutions (museums and educational institutions)
preserve “the tradition as a whole”, but not some selection done in accordance with
contemporary interests. In this case, the work of preservation and resistance to the criticism
arguing for the irrelevance of certain works in a given period of time is necessary for any
society (Williams, 1961/2001:69): “in a society as a whole, and in all its particular
activities, the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection [and
interpretation] of ancestors” (Williams, 1961/2001:96). Because a society sees its past
through the lens of its contemporary experience, it makes sense, Williams suggested, not to
return to the work of the period, but “to make the interpretation conscious, by showing
historical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values on
which it rests; and, by exploiting the real patterns of the work, confront us with the real
nature of the choices we are making” (Williams, 1961/2001:70).
Therefore, in this dissertation I will analyse chosen examples of representations of the
Soviet past by actively relating it to the times they were created and interpreted, in order to
show the radical changes that have taken place in the values, attitudes and ways of life in
contemporary Russia.

3.2. Nostalgia, Progress, Continuity and Rupture

Modern societies used to idealise social change as one of improvement and progress.
The future used to be considered as more dynamic and superior to the past (Sztompka, 2000,
Huyssen, 1994). “In such thinking the future has been radically temporalized, and the move
from the past to the future has been linked to the notions of progress and perfectibility in
social and human affairs that characterize the age of modernity as a whole” (Huyssen, 1994:
8). Michael Pickering and Emily Keightly argued that these “positive valuations of present
over past were based not only on views of the inevitability of linear progress forward to an

34
improved future, but were also supported by evolutionism and historicism, and later by static
functionalist paradigms and theories of modernization” (2006: 919). When Gorbachev came
to power in the Soviet Union, many in the West and in the East believed that his liberal
reforms would bring positive changes and re-new the ageing Socialist world. Many had by
that time understood that the regime could no longer function. Still, for many the end of the
Soviet Union and collapse of the bipolar system was a sudden event.
Alexei Yurchak’s book Everything Was Forever Until It Was No More (2006) raised a
question that has puzzled many people from the former Soviet Union: “How to make sense of
the sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way of
life, in which we grew up and lived?” (Yurchak, 2003: 480). Both Western Sovietologists and
ordinary Soviet citizens were taken by surprise by the abrupt collapse of the “great empire”
and had high expectations about new independent countries, which seemingly were moving
towards democratic reforms.
Transitologists, studying the process of change from one political regime to another,
have been anticipating a progressive gradual transition from authoritarianism to liberal
democracy. In line with a belief into progressive future, many of them assumed that liberal
democracy was a single endpoint of historical development (see critique of this perspective in
Stark, 1992: 300; Burawoy and Verdery, 1999: 15; Gelman, 1999: 943; Cohen, 2000: 23;
Carothers, 2002: 7; Pickel, 2002: 108).
After a while, however, it became clear that the future imagined by transitologists
actually looked rather different. At that point, critics started to question whether the concept
transition, which implied progressive movement towards an end result, should be applied to
countries that went through political and economic crises (Cohen, 2000). The protracted and
in some cases seemingly failing process of democratisation raised an issue of

whether political systems that are no longer authoritarian regimes yet have not come to
resemble liberal democracies should continue to be classified as countries in transit, or
whether it is time to recognize that the hybrid institutions of many so-called transition
countries (italics mine) actually represent a stable equilibrium point rather than a stage on
the way to further democratization. (Carothers, 2002 quoted in Ganse-Morse, 2004: 322)

Thus, critics of transitology argued that this perspective on regime change did not
provided framework for analyzing emergence of new forms of authoritarianism in Eastern
Europe (Roeder, 1994; Way, 2003). This form of transitology, which believed in linear
historical progress, stopped scholars from thinking about post-Communist developments more

35
generally. Critics proposed an understanding of post-Communist change as “open-ended
transformation [my italics] that, by rejecting any conception of a presumed endpoint to
transition, forced analysts to focus on present events and to evaluate empirical evidence
without the bias that potentially results from the belief that a country is on a transition track to
a given outcome” (Ganse-Morse, 2004: 335). From this theoretical point, post-Communist
Russia was believed to hardly fit a transition paradigm, as a country progressing towards
liberal democracy. On the contrary, ”it looks like regression” (Cohen, 2000: 39).
The “irreversible rupture” in the historical continuum, caused by the fall of the Soviet
Union, created a deepening feeling of crisis often articulated in the reproach that after the fall
of Communism all sense of stability and foreseeable future, as well as any unifying national
idea disappeared. This disruption of normality or regularity, this disorganisation in the
orderly, taken-for-granted universe of the Soviet Union had created conditions of possibility
for nostalgic longing for the lost home and stability.
Still judging from the perspective of progressive future, being nostalgic was seen as a
conservative turning back, caused by an inability to cope with present circumstances and a
lost belief in progress. Nostalgia was believed to be the conceptual opposite of progress:

In being negatively othered as its binary opposite, nostalgia became fixed in a determinate
backwards-looking stance. This not only closed down lines of active relation to the past, but
also valorised what was set up as its single, inescapable alternative, facilitated convenient
versions of the past in favour of the present, and left the stage free for only avowedly
conservative reactions to modern times. Nostalgia became associated with a defeatist attitude to
present and future, appearing tacitly to acquiesce in the temporal ruptures of modernity by its
very assumption of this attitude. Nostalgia was also conceived as seeking to attain the
unattainable, to satisfy the unsatisfiable. If a dogmatic belief in progress entailed an ardent
longing for the future, nostalgia as its paired inversion entailed only an ardent longing for the
past. It is, then, as if nostalgia arises only in compensation for a loss of faith in progress, and for
what is socially and culturally destroyed in the name of progress. (Kethley and Pickering, 2006:
920)

Sztompka and Huyssen agreed that the trilogy of past-present-future is no longer

understood as it used to be (Sztopmpka, 2000: 449; Huyssen, 1994: 8). Huyssen believed that
modern societies are not just experiencing “another doubt of progress”, but are “living
through a transformation of this modern structure of temporality itself. Increasingly in recent
years, the future seems to fold itself back into the past” (Huyssen, 1994:8). There were a
“variety of different positions that were developed in response to the abrupt social transitions
experienced during modernity, ranging from wholesale acceptance through gradual

36
adjustment to either melancholy over unchangeable forms of social malaise or arguments for
further radical change” (Pickering, 2006: 920).
Svetlana Boym argued “in a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modern
idea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history and
turn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender to
irreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym, 2001: xv).
The question is therefore whether or how nostalgia has contributed as a productive force
to the understanding of dramatic transformations of modernity and as a means of working
through the temporal trauma of modernity.

3.3. Nostalgia and trauma

Oxford English Dictionary gives several definitions of trauma: the first one connotes
“any physical wound or injury”; the second refers to “a physical shock following injury,
characterized by a drop in body temperature, and mental confusion”; finally the third
describes “an emotional shock following a stressful event, sometimes leading to long-term
neurosis”. Borrowed from medicine and psychiatry, the concept of trauma was introduced
into sociological theory. Pitirim Sorokin, analysing the aftermath of the Soviet revolution in
his Sociology of Revolution (1967/1928), “stressed the biological and demographic damage to
the society: physical degradation of population, widespread disease, mental disturbances,
falling fertility rates, rising mortality rates, famine, etc.” (Sztompka, 2000: 450). Piotr
Sztompka extended the notion of trauma “to the damage inflicted by major social change on
the cultural, rather than biological, tissue of a society” (Sztompka, 2000: 450). He explained
the notion of cultural trauma as relevant to the theory of social change and suggested that
cultural trauma should be treated as “a link in the ongoing chain of social changes; depending
on the number of concrete circumstances, cultural trauma may be a phase in the constructive
morphogenesis of culture or in the destructive cycle of cultural decay” (Sztompka, 2000:
449).
Informed by Robert K. Merton (1938/1996) and Anthony Giddens (1990), Sztompka
described several active and passive strategies of adaptations to traumatic experiences: “A
passive, ritualistic reaction would mean turning (or returning) to established traditions and

37
routines, and cultivating them as safe hideabouts to deflect cultural trauma” (Sztompka, 2000:
461).
According to Davis, nostalgia could be viewed as a passive adaptation to cultural
trauma (Davis, 1979). For those who felt comfortable in Socialist societies, the difference
between their past and present situations might have been striking. They have interpreted the
disruption of their world and way of life as traumatic, and therefore more easily embraced a
nostalgia for Socialism. Meanwhile, for those who had not been fans of the Socialist system,
it took some time and “distance to conceptualise their emotional trauma in a way that might
validate the socialist past” (in Todorova and Gilles, 2010:36).
The sudden post-1989 socio-economic and political changes were identified among the
ones causing traumatic encounters. Crime and inflation can be seen as universal, affecting
everyone, while unemployment and degradation of status affected those less financially
successful who were deprived of both social position and economic wealth in the new
capitalistic conditions (Sztompka, 1996; 2000; Ivanova, 2002; Wieliczko and Zuk, 2003).
Cultural disorientation informed by Westernisation and Americanisation, new rules of life and
conflicts of generations, as well as a disrupted coherence and a redefinition of historical
developments and popular beliefs can be seen as some of the shifts that could turn into
cultural traumas (Sztompka, 2000). However, these disorientations do not necessarily cause
cultural traumas.

A traumatic sequence is started only when such maladjustments, tensions, and

clashes are perceived and experienced as problems, as something troubling or painful that
demands healing. In all these cases the shift form disorientation towards cultural trauma is
manifested by the intellectual, moral and artistic mobilization of a society, the appearance
of a particular ‘meaning industry’ (collective efforts to make sense of the situation).
(Sztompka, 2000: 455)

Trauma, as both objective and subjective condition, is usually based in some actual
events. Meanwhile, some traumas can also be rooted in “widespread imaginations” of
traumatising events. Potential traumatic phenomena “may not lead to actual trauma, because
they are explained away, rationalized, reinterpreted in ways which make them invisible,
innocuous, or even benign and beneficial” (Sztompka, 2000; 457). Cultural trauma does not
exist as long as it is not framed selectively and interpreted within a certain cultural context
(Sztompka, 2000: 456-457). Sztompka suggested three distinct ways of interpretation: “some
of the interpretations construe such events as traumatic; some construe imagine, objectively

38
non-existent events as traumatic; and some construe objectively traumatizing events as non-
traumatic” (Sztompka, 2000: 457).
Socialism was often remembered as a time of pride in production and industrialisation,
which degraded when socialism ceased to exist, while people started to feel that they live in
the “Third-World” countries. In the Russian media these days Soviet past is often presented as
a utopian paradise of heroes. One should forget that such framing of the Socialist world as a
successful economy was predominantly based on official propaganda on one side, and
dominant media representations of the past on the other. In this way, positive representations
of the Socialist advancement in today’s mass media is a double construction, based on the
propagandistic constructions of the Socialist period itself further filtered through
contemporary ideological interests of ruling powers and the mass media.
The majority in the Soviet Union was aware of the “shortcomings” of socialist
industries and valued western products more than home-produced. Nevertheless, after the fall
of Communism potential traumas of the period were overtaken by the traumas that emerged
after the collapse of the Soviet empire. It is believed that the “trauma of deindustrialisation” in
the 1990s “has brought about alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, and the feminization of
poverty” (quoted in Todorova and Gilles, 2010: 5). In this case, what is seen as the trauma
that spurs growing nostalgic sentiments towards what came before it is the period
immediately after the fall of Communism, not Communism itself. Sometimes the period of
Communism seems to be framed in popular opinion as more beneficial than the period after
the collapse of authoritarian society.
Legg suggested a different approach to the theoretical and practical linkage between
nostalgia and trauma: “While nostalgia denoted a positive attachment to a past real or
imaginary home, trauma denoted the negative inability to deal effectively with a past event.
While both conditions represent problematic engagements with the past, nostalgia often
focuses on a time and place before or beyond a traumatic incident” (Legg, 2004: 103). Within
this framework, both the destination for nostalgic longing and the traumatic event are located
in the past and feed into contested memories activated in the present time.

3.4. Nostalgia as medical condition and reaction

39
 Disrupture in continuous development becomes an essential condition of possibility for
the emergence of nostalgia. An abortive change can become a cause for cultural trauma,
which then gives rise to nostalgic sentiments. Dominique Boyer saw nostalgia in Eastern
Europe as a “regional phenomenon” (2011: 17). This phenomenon had double preconditions:
“a certain market-centred modernity, a modernity that state socialism had been straining to
resist for decades” and “Western European socio-political imagination and institutions”,
which penetrated Eastern Europe under “the banner of civilization union and redemption”
(Boyer, 2011: 17). “Staggered, reeling under this double confrontation”, Eastern Europeans
looked backwards to find stability and autonomy otherwise denied to them. “Eastern
Europeans naturally tethered themselves to recalled, also always fantasized aspects of life
before 1989 that seemed better – warmer, more human, safer, more moral – than the chaos
and devolution of life today” (Boyer, 2011: 18). This point of view on one side can be seen as
symptomatic of much research done in the 1990s and 2000s on nostalgic sentiments in
Eastern Europe. On the other side it recalls an important element of “market-centred
modernity”, which in my opinion served as an important precondition not only for people’s
emerging nostalgic feelings, but also for the commercialisation and glamorisation of such
nostalgia sentiments that were growing from below. This commercial aspect of nostalgia will
be discussed later, after some thoughts on the psychological element of nostalgia.
The theoretical perspective on nostalgia as a psychological condition is linked to its
conceptualisation as epidemic. This perspective recalls Joannes Hofer’s medical dissertation
from 1688, where he coined the term nostalgia. Originating from two Greek words – nostos,
which means “returning home” and algos “grief” – this term defined a painful pathological
condition of homesickness (Davis, 1979: 1), and return to origins: nation and fatherland
(Boyer, 2011:18). This corporeal “disease” had symptoms ranging from melancholia and
weeping to anorexia and suicide. The only cure from this painful condition was believed to be
a return to the “native climate” – literally homecoming (Boyer, 2011: 18).
Nostalgia in Eastern Europe did not necessarily mean restoration of state socialism, but
rather a “socio-temporal yearning for a different stage or quality of life”, mainly youth, and “a
desire to recapture what life was at that time, whether innocent, euphoric, secure, intelligible”
(Boyer, 2011: 18). The emotional upheaval linked to nostalgia was no longer associated with
homesickness, but more with a “bitter-sweet yearning for things, persons or situations of the
past” (Guffey, 2006: 19). In respect to the Eastern European societies, nostalgia has come to
be viewed in Davis’ terms – as a sociological phenomenon that helps individuals to adopt
during the major life transitions (Davis, 1979). Fred Davis considered nostalgia as an

40
“adaptive mechanism” in turbulent times of transition. Thus, individuals going through
dramatic traumatic changes in their lives would be more prone to nostalgic experiences. For
example, people moving into a “mid-life crisis”, retirement, change of career path, or coping
with divorce or personal losses might experience nostalgia.

3.5. Nostalgia and memory

My informants warned me for using concept of nostalgia and instead proposed that I
should employ the notion of cultural memory when characterising representations of the
Soviet past in various art and media forms. They did not want their work or attitudes to the
past to be associated with negatively charged nostalgia. Many of them saw nostalgia as a
passive condition caused by traumatic experiences, and they did not want to equate their
attitudes to a loser mentality, nor did they recognised having experienced any kind of trauma.
They understood nostalgia traditionally as a concept charged with negative connotations and
therefore remained suspicious towards it.
The concept of nostalgia has been closely connected with notions of memory, amnesia,
remembering, forgetting, and above all history. In relation to nostalgia, I see a possibility in
thinking these terms together rather than opposing them to each other.
Fascination by memory touches fundamental questions of temporality and life
experience. The modern world’s obsession with memory “functions as a reaction formation
against the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld)
in quite distinct ways” (Huyssen, 1994: 7). In the present world of speedy communication
technologies, memory

[R]epresents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution of
time in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside the
universe of simulation and fast speed information and cable networks, to claim some
anchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, non-
synchronicity, and information overload. (Huyssen, 1994:7)

The relations between memory and history are complicated. History has been seen as a
critical practice, where historians could remain independent and objective towards the past:
based on historical evidence they could oppose nostalgia for the past (Keightley and
Pickering, 2006). However, historians are not immune to memory, and at the same time
memory does not only consist of nostalgic sentiments, and therefore should not be opposed

41
(Keightley and Pickering, 2006). Some forms of memory can be seen as symptoms of
amnesia and question the vision of “the classical modernist formulation of memory as
alternative to the discourses of objectifying and legitimizing history, and as cure to the
pathologies of modern life”; other forms of memory are associated with “some utopian space
and time beyond the homogeneous empty time of the capitalist present” (Huyssen, 1994: 6).
Reinhart Koselleck explored in Futures Pasts (1985) fundamental polarity between
“space of experience” and “horizon of expectation”. Space of experience implies the totality
of what is inherited from the past, its sedimentary traces constituting the soil in which desires,
fears, predictions, and projects take root – in short, every kind of anticipation that projects us
forward into the future. But a space of experience exists only in diametrical opposition to a
horizon of expectation, which is in no way reducible to the space of experience. Rather, the
dialectic between these two poles ensures the dynamic nature of historical consciousness.
For Paul Ricoeur (2000/2006) it is history that corrects and completes (sometimes
contradicts) memory, while the whole reason in the production of the “nostalgia” is to correct
and contradict history with memory. For Ricoeur the relations between history and memory
can be analysed in three steps. First memory establishes the meaning of the past. Second,
history introduces a critical dimension into our dealing with the past. Third, the insight by
which history from this point onward enriches memory is imposed on the anticipated future
through the dialectic between memory’s space of experience and the horizon of expectation.
The material shows, that the relations between memory and history constituted differently. It
is memory not only establishes the relations with the past, but also introduces a critical to the
one’s of history position in the dealing with past or, even, opposes it. It becomes indeed
memory that enriches history, but not visa versa.
For Ricoeur history has a critical authority “that is able not only to consolidate and to
articulate collective and individual memory but also to correct it or even contradict it” (quoted
in Rusen, 2007: 11). The problem is that for many people in Russia, official history did not
have any critical authority, while memories both individual and collective could have served
this purpose. We face a problematic turn. Yurchak wrote that different positions in soviet
society influenced people’s experiences and hence memories. Thus even these individual
memories and collective memories of certain groups were not unison and constantly
contradicted each other. For some official history indeed was a critical authority, which was
supposed to bring sense into the millions of negative memories, which painted black good and
prosperous life in the late socialism.

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 To understand the relationship between history and memory, Ricoeur introduced the
linguistic medium of narrative, which memory and history both share. Memory narrative
(individual or collective) circulates in conversation and belongs to everyday discourse. It is
not devoid of critical second thoughts, since during conversation a play of question-and-
answer introduces into a concrete public space an exchange of narratives.
Memory is often conceptualised as a resistance agency and a “destabilizing force
against historical grand narratives. Memory can challenge dominant interpretations of the
past and stress the local and particular, although it must always remain dependent upon the
power-knowledge relations in which it exists” (Legg, 2004: 105). Counter memory can
function as an embryonic “public sphere” in oppressive societies by being born in oral
histories, jokes, anecdotes, and photographs (Boym, 2001: 60-61).
Andreas Huyssen believed that history was used to “invent national traditions, to
legitimize the imperial nation states, and to give cultural coherence to conflictive societies in
the throes of the Industrial Revolution” (Huyssen, 1994: 7). In comparison, the mnemonic
practices of our time seem “chaotic, fragmentary, and free-floating. They do not seem to have
a clear political or territorial focus, but they do express our society’s need for temporal
anchoring when in the wake of the information revolution, the relationship between past,
present, and future is being transformed. Temporal anchoring becomes even more important
as the territorial and spatial coordinates of our late twentieth-century lives are blurred or even
dissolved by increased mobility around the globe” (Huyssen, 1994: 7)
Cultural memory, a term widely used in scholarly writing today, was first introduced by
the German scholar Jan Assmann, developing it from Maurice Halbwachs’ theory of
collective memory. The latter first emerged in Halbwachs’ work Social Frameworks of
Memory (originally published as Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925), and was then
further developed in The Legendary Topography of the Holy Land (1941) and The Collective
Memory (1950), which was published after his death.
Halbwachs (1925/1992) had argued that individual memories depend on group memory,
and therefore the process of remembering should not be understood as a purely individual
practice. According to him, individuals could remember certain events in a coherent manner
because a society provides both the material for remembering and also a context filled in with
commemorative activities. Social groups also highlight which events an individual should
remember or forget, as well as produce shared memories, which the individual has never
experienced in any direct way.
Based on the relation to past and present, Halbwachs also made a distinction between

43
notions of collective memory, autobiographical memory, historical memory and history.
While history is conceptualised as the remembered past to which one no longer has a direct
relation, historical memory can be understood as memory that reaches individuals through
historical documents. Autobiographical memory, for Halbwachs, is a memory of events one
has a personal experience of, even thought it still can be formed by a society. Finally,
collective memory is the active past that forms people’s identities in the present.
Building on Halbwachs’ theory, Jan Assmann defined cultural memory as a “collective
concept for all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience in the interactive framework
of society and one that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice and
initiation” (J. Assmann, 1995: 126). For Assmann, cultural memory is different from so-called
communicative memory, which is based exclusively on everyday communication.
Halbwachs believed that as soon as living communication turns into texts, images,
rituals, monuments or any other form of “objectivized culture”, memory transforms into
history. Assmann instead argues that “in the context of objectivized culture and of organized
or ceremonial communication, a close connection to groups and their identity exists which is
similar to that found in case of everyday memory” (J. Assmann, 1995: 128). In other words, a
group builds its understanding of unity and uniqueness upon this preserved knowledge and is
able to reproduce its identity. Thus, he continues, “objectivized culture has the structure of
memory” (J. Assmann, 1995: 128). The distance from the everyday, as well as the availability
of fixed points (texts, monuments, sites, rituals) can characterise cultural memory, in contrast
to communicative memory. These collective experiences crystallised in certain cultural forms
can become accessible and used after many years.
Developing these ideas, Aleida Assmann analyses the dynamics of both individual and
cultural memory, which consists in “a perpetual interaction between remembering and
forgetting” (A. Assmann, 1999/2008: 97). She distinguishes between two forms of
remembering and two corresponding forms of forgetting: more active and more passive ones.
As active forgetting she understands intentional acts, such as trashing and destroying,
including censorship, while non-intentional acts such as losing, hiding, neglecting, leaving
behind and dispersing she calls passive forgetting. Active remembering is a constant recalling
and re-using of cultural messages, which constitutes a process of canonisation, while passive
remembering is when cultural relics are preserved and archived in being de-contextualised
and disconnected from their former context (A. Assmann, 1999/2008: 98-99).
In 1997 Marita Sturken, an American scholar, wrote a book Tangled Memories, where
she analysed the production of American cultural memory with the Vietnam War and the

44
AIDS epidemic as two prime examples – two of the most traumatic experiences in US history.
She viewed American culture, often portrayed as one of amnesia, as one where cultural
memory is central to the construction of national identity. She distinguished between personal
memory and history as a “field of contested meanings in which Americans interact with
cultural elements to produce concept of nation, particularly in events of trauma, where both
structures and the fractures of a culture exposed” (Sturken, 1997: 3). Sturken focused on how
“memory objects and narratives move from the realm of cultural memory to that of history
and back” (Sturken, 1997: 5), and how history is told through popular culture, the media,
public images and memorials.
Sturken’s book conceptualises memory as narrative, and investigates how memories are
constructed and reconstructed through complex processes of remembering and forgetting.
Indeed, she considers forgetting to be an essential part of memory work, because the need for
coherent narratives and continuity of experience require forgetting. Having this focus on both
processes of remembering and forgetting, Sturken addresses works by Sigmund Freud, who
problematised the processes of forgetting. She also raises questions of how memory is
produced through the use of commodities. According to her, theorists such as Theodor W.
Adorno defined the emergence of commodity culture as a kind of cultural forgetting. She, on
the contrary, arguing that in the contemporary world the boundaries between art and
commerce are blurred, credits commodities with a capacity of producing cultural meanings.
Like Andreas Huyssen, Sturken also believes that cultural memory is produced through
representations, images, objects and the human body, by what she calls technologies of
memory, through which “memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (Sturken, 1997:
9).

3.6. Time and Space of Nostalgia

I believe two analytical categories – space and time – to become central to the analysis
of nostalgia and in discussing relations between past, present and future in contemporary
Russian culture. In the analytical chapters I am going to use these categories to analyse
representations of the Soviet past.

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 Svetlana Boym stressed the importance of space to the notion of nostalgia. Nostalgia is
defined as longing (algia) for a home (nostos) that no longer exists or has never existed.
Boym pointed out that if restorative nostalgia focuses on nostos and aims to reconstruct the
lost home, often in association with religious or nationalist revivals, reflective nostalgia
dwells on algia, and has no place of habitation. Reflective nostalgia is embodied in the
transient movement, not in any arrival to a safe destination. “If restorative nostalgia ends up
reconstructing emblems and rituals of homes and homeland in an attempt to conquer and
spatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizes
space” (Boym, 2001).
Because memories are mobilised through place, Boym investigated various sites in
Moscow and St. Petersburg for evidence of forms of restorative and reflective nostalgia,
which attempted to refer back to past identities, whether Tsarist or Soviet. Having examined
the longing for past stability during the glasnost period, she concluded that much memory
work during the 1980s was both restorative and reflective, and thus aimed to both conquer
and shatter space. She for instance believed artistic works by Ilya Kabakov to reconstruct
images of Russia that represented places that were impossible to revisit otherwise. These total
environments provided complete yet fragile replications of everyday spaces (for example a
Soviet toilet) and utopian spaces (the never-built Palace of the Soviets). In her discussion of
Kabakov’s works and also Nabokov’s poems and prose Boym explored not only dream-
spaces of home but also exile spaces, which are equally important for nostalgia, being places
of present and future.
Places of exile, as places of dwelling and reflecting on the lost home and the
impossibility of home-coming, are essential to the discussion of nostalgic experiences of
several generations of former Soviet citizens. Having “emigrated” from the country of
stable/stagnated present and predictable future (the USSR), people ended up (without
physically moving) in a totally new space (the new Russia), where neither past, present or
future were predictable. The known rules of game did not apply anymore, the bipolar world
suddenly turned into a globalised space, and feelings of both irreversibility of time and
unpredictability of the future dominated the new temporal reality of the physical environment.
“This involved a shift from spatial dislocation to temporal dislocation, and the sense of
feeling oneself a stranger in a new period that contrasted negatively with an earlier time in
which one felt, or imagined, oneself at home” (Keightley and Pickering, 2006: 922).
The first wave of “immigrants” was both notoriously unsentimental. Their attitudes
depended much on their status, attitude and perspective in the USSR, as well as on their

46
situation after the collapse of Communism. The second generation of “exiles” were different.
The Russians born after the fall of the Soviet Union developed a distinct approach to the
Soviet “homeland”, which was no less complicated. In fact, can they be nostalgic for
something they have never had? According to Boym that could be possible: one can indeed be
nostalgic for an imaginary/imagined home one has never inhabited. If their nostalgia was born
from the memories of mediated images of the past, what are these nostalgic images like?
Nostalgic images are of “double exposure” (Boym, 2001). They simultaneously present
images of present and past, dream and everyday life, home and abroad. Everything is
available at the same time in nostalgia. Different pasts can be mixed together with the present.
I would even add that temporally nostalgic images are of “triple exposure” – they not only
simultaneously present past and present, but also project images of future. These
representations of future are reflected and constructed through images of past. Moreover,
“fantasies of the past determined by the needs of the present have a direct impact on the
realities of the future” (Boym, 2001: xvi). If “the twentieth century began with a futuristic
utopia”, it “ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded, while positive
utopian past created conditions in order to look into the future” (Boym, 2001: xv).
So, “at first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a
different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dream” (Boym, 2001:
xv). This unpolluted and innocent past is the time of childhood. Childhood, a period of
innocence and sincerity, is an ultimate destination of the nostalgic. Both in everyday life and
in political campaigns restorative nostalgics tend to use sincerity and innocence as argument
for re-instating the old regime and promoting a nationalistic agenda. Innocence is, therefore,
the time of the unknown: a time that was not spoiled by the knowledge about the present. The
restorative nostalgic wants to go back to the time when they were not aware of how the
present would turn out. It is a nostalgia for the sincere and innocent time of not-knowing,
where not-knowing was the key to happy and light-hearted existence.
Time and space thus intermingle in the experience of loss that is so crucial to nostalgia.
[I]n longing for what is lacking in a changed present, nostalgia for a lost time clearly
involves yearning for what is now not attainable, simply because of the irreversibility of
time; but to condemn nostalgia solely to this position leaves unattended not only more
general feelings of regret for what time has brought, but also more general questions for how
the past may actively engage with the present and future. (Keightley and Pickering, 2006:
920)

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3.7. Nostalgia and Identity

Can nostalgia in these modern times be used as a tool for constructing a shared sense of
belonging? Svetlana Boym gave a negative answer to this question:

The moment we try to repair longing with belonging, the apprehension of loss with a
rediscovery of identity, we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Algia-
longing – is what we share, yet nostos-the return home – is what divides us. It is the promise to
rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to
relinquish critical thinking for emotional bolding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to
confuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantom
homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Un-reflected nostalgia breeds
monsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, is
at the core of the modern condition. (Boym, 2001: xvi)

I would agree with Boym that it could not only be problematic, but also very dangerous
to build a sense common identity on the basis of nostalgia. Nevertheless, it seems that
nostalgic sentiments can be used for identity construction in certain cultural and political
contexts. Can it be so that nostalgia in its amatory has necessary elements to be employed in
the process of identity formation: appeals to imaginary home, selectivity in relation to history
emotional approach rather than rational, game of symbols etc.
I suggest having a closer look at the notion of identity to answer this question. Identities
vary and can be individual, group, national, cultural, social, gender, sexual and so forth. In
this work attention will be given to questions of national, cultural and gender identities, the
analysis of which will be refined in later chapters.
The definition of identity brings many scholars to heated debates. According to Ernest
Gellner and Eric Hobsbawm, identity is applicable to some integral entity and can be best
described as a range of characteristics that are unique for a particular culture and ‘innate’ to a
specific people (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992). At the same time identity accentuates the
feeling of belonging that is shared among a particular culture or social group based on shared
experiences (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992). Identities can be also ”understood as
meanings attached to human individuals or collectives, in interaction among themselves and
with surrounding others” as well as ”signification processes” (Fornäs, 2011: 43).
Identities are not to be conceived as static, but as dynamic: no form of identity is ever
complete or totally stable, since identities always tend to change with time (Nora, 1988: 8).
They are “never unified” and “increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but

48
multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices
and positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process of
change and transformation (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 4).
The process of identification is a process of construction, which can never be completed
(Hall and du Gay, 1996: 2). As any signifying practices, identification is a process of
“articulation”, where differentiation plays one of the major roles. “And since as a process it
operates across difference, it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolic
boundaries, the production of ‘frontier effects’. It requires what is left outside, its constitutive
outside, to consolidate the process” (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 3). Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay
stressed the importance of situating the debates about identity within historically specific
developments and practices and in relation to the processes of globalization, which
characteristic to modernity (Hall and du Gay, 1996).

Hypothetically, it can be argued that Post-Soviet nostalgia was a result of

westernisation or “Americanisation” of Russian culture after the collapse of the Soviet
Union. The loss of unifying national idea with the fall of the Soviet empire was also, in the
eyes of some, was even deepened by the “militant” attack of Russian society by western
“foreign” culture. If to follow this logic, then the process of globalisation would be seen in
the light of cultural homogenisation, when local cultures become absorbed by global trends
and lose their uniqness. Following Arjun Appadurai (1996), I would suggest to focus more
on the discursive tensions between the processes of cultural homogenisation and
heterogenisation, cultural fusions, which happen when global tendencies come in contact
with local and become adopted in local settings. Analysis of these processes is highly
relevant in contemporary Russian context, as it might show how cultural fusions function
or fail in a previously closed society, and reveal that some identity discourses to a certain
extend might resemble old debates dating centuries ago. With no doubt the nostalgia in
Russia should be studied within the world context and as a part of globalisation process, or
a backfire to the processes of globalisation. However, I would suggest not narrowing down
the explanation of the phenomenon of the Post- Soviet nostalgia strictly to causes. So far it
seems to be of a more complex nature.

Seemingly, the process of identification “invokes an origin in a historical past with

which they continue to correspond”, in reality it uses “the resources of history, language and
culture in the process of becoming rather than being” (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 4). Therefore,

49
identities are narrated and “constituted inside” representations, and ”relate to the invention of
tradition as much as to tradition itself”: identities are not calling to return to our roots, but to
come in terms with our roots (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 4). Identities raise from “the imaginary
(as well as the symbolic) and therefore, always, partly constructed in fantasy, or at least
within a fantasmatic field” (Hall and du Gay, 1996. 4). Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay stressed
that:
Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need to
understand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specific
discursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, they
emerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product of
the marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturally-
constituted unity - an 'identity' in its traditional meaning (that is, an all-inclusive sameness,
seamless, without internal differentiation) (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 4).

Representations and their mediations lie in the centre of identity formation.

Representation is believed to be one of the central practices of culture and the so-called
‘circuit of culture’ (Hall, 1997: 1). As culture is all about ‘shared meanings’, which have to be
distributed and understood by the participants of cultural exchange, culture operates
representational systems, which are comprised from signs and symbols (Hall, 1997). Stuart
Hall describes three approaches to representation: reflective, intentional and constructionist.
The reflective approach implies that a representation reflects meanings that already exist in
the world (Hall, 1997: 24). The intentional approach implies that it is authors who possess a
unique idea or meaning, which they convey it into the world (Hall, 1997: 25). The last one
recognises social character as system of representations. As Hall puts it, “things do not mean:
we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs”. Within this
framework, mass media is such a system, where identities are constructed through the
interconnected networks of written and visual language. Nostalgia should also be understood
as representation of a certain kind. Nostalgia is representation of past, mediated in signs and
symbols through various communication channels.
Identities “arise and develop by the mediation of material tokens or signs of some kind:
words, images, sounds or other perceptible external marks organised into various forms of
artefacts, texts, works, genres and discourses” (Fornäs, 2011: 43). Identities articulate various
signs and symbols, basic material/immaterial units for ”for making meaning by attaching
meaning to it in socially contextualised interactive, intersubjective and interpretive practices”
(Fornäs, 2011:44).
In discussions about identities, it seems relevant to adopt Stuart Hall’s concept of

50
articullation (Hall, 1986/1996: 141-142). “An articulation is thus the form of the connection
that can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage which
is not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Hall, 1986/1996: 141). One
has to focus on the circumstances and context “that make possible for a discourse to articulate
distinct elements that have no necessary, logical, natural or universal relation. Thus, a theory
of articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certain
conditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not
become articulated, at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (Fornäs, 2011: 54).

This is a useful way of putting it, since it shows that while what the combination symbols
make of elements (sign and meaning, or representation and reference) is always context-
dependent, it need not be completely arbitrary in a strong sense, but conditioned by the
historical and social circumstances where symbols circulate and are used. The concept of
articulation invites studying how symbols are combined with plural meanings in socially
situated signifying practices, and in particular to understand how those meanings that are
attached to subjects as their identities also are context-dependent. (Hall, 1986/1996: 142)

Articulation is useful in relation to how communities address pt the past events and past
symbols in order to create modern identities. Certain memories become articulated and
juxtaposed in various media, and as a result become essential parts of identity formation. In
this process of articulation, remembering and forgetting play an important role.
Ernest Gellner argues, for example, that using cultural wealth from history, nations
might even radically transform such traces of the past (Gellner, 1983: 55).
Concepts used in relation to the discussion of identity formation are invented traditions
and imagined communities. The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has introduced the
term invented traditions (1983), which became central to the politics of memory approach and
studies of identity formation. Hobsbawm suggested that traditions that are presented as old,
sometimes in fact are rather recent inventions. He defines invented traditions as “a set of
practice, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolic
nature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, which
automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attempt
to establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (Hobsbawm, 1983: 1). Invention of
traditions, according to him, occurs during dramatic transformations of a society.
The same year another book, which became a landmark in the scholarly writings on
nationalism, was published. In Imagined Communities (1983/1991) Benedict Anderson
systematically described major factors that contributed to the emergence of nationalism. He

51
defined nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited
and sovereign” (Anderson, 1983/1991: 5). He explained that a community is imagined
because its “members will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear
of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (Anderson, 1983/1991:
6). He understood nations as a modern invention, which puts him in opposition to those who
believed that nations have existed since early ages. Anderson debated with Ernest Gellner on
the origin of the nation, claiming that Gellner’s formulation that nationalism invents nations
where they do not exist has its drawbacks. According to Anderson, Gellner “implies that
‘true’ communities exist which can be advantageously juxtaposed to nations. In fact, all
communities larger than primordial villages of face-to-face contact (and perhaps even these)
are imagined. Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by
the style in which they are imagined” (Anderson, 1983/1991: 7).
In 1993, ten years after the publications of Imagined Communities and The Invention of
Traditions, Hobsbawm’s colleague, a British African historian Terence Ranger, revisited the
concept by applying it in a non-Western framework. He moved away from the term
‘invention’ and embraced Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities, because “it
lays stress upon ideas and images and symbols. However politically convenient they were, the
new traditions were, after all, essentially about identity and identity is essentially a matter of
imagination” (Jeffrey K. Olick, Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi, Daniel Levy, 2011: 278).

Cultural memory is often used for constructing identities and making them concretes.
This collective cultural memory is “capable to reconstruct” relating its knowledge to an actual
and contemporary situation and, finally, becomes a part of “culturally institutionalised
heritage of a society” (J. Assmann, 1995: 130). Wilfried Spohn proposed “to define collective
identity as the extent of shared identifications, and to see collective memories as a crucial
cultural source of collective identities” (Eder and Spohn, 2005: 2). In other words, once
collective memory is objectified in pictures, monuments, history books or films, it becomes a
signifier of a certain collective identity of an individual and gives sense of belonging to a
distinct community and its cultural heritage. Since memories fluctuate and change in relation
to their representation in time, they become powerful tools of a communal character that
serves to underpin a self-image of an individual. Nostalgia is also based on selective
remembering and forgetting, uses of heroic and positive moments of the past. However, the
problem with nostalgia, as previous research has shown, lies more in how it divides than how
it unifies individuals over the understanding of the past. This makes nostalgia a problematic

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concept and tool in use for identity construction. It may nevertheless be worth researching its
possibilities for understanding contemporary Russian identity formation.

3.8. Nostalgia and irony

Linda Hutcheon, scholar of postmodenism, wrote “irony appears to have become a

problematic mode of expression at the end on the twentieth century […]. Irony has an
evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses into those who ‘get’ it and those
who don’t, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its ‘victims’” (Hutcheon,
1994: 1).
She called for treating irony not as isolated trope, but to be analysed within a broader
discursive framework, the ‘scene’ of irony, which she understood as social and political issue,
which, involved power based relations and communication (Hutcheon, 1994:1). She
investigated how and why irony was used and understood as a discursive practice or strategy,
by studying the consequence of both its comprehension and its misfiring. Verbal and
structural ironies, rather than with situational irony, cosmic irony, the irony of fate became
her main focus.
Hutcheon stressed “irony isn’t irony until it is interpreted as such-at least by the
intending ironist, if not the intended receiver. Someone attributes irony; someone makes it
happen” (Hutcheon, 1994:6). If in the past irony was mainly theorised from the point of the
ironist, the encoder, and has therefore been implicitly or explicitly intentionalist” (Hutcheon,
1994:111). Intentional ironies are usually understood as “stable”, intended, overt and capable
of being reconstructed by the interpreter. But “the only way to be sure that a statement was
intended ironically is to have a detailed knowledge of the personal, linguistic, cultural and
social references of the speaker and his audience” (Gaunt, 1989/2008).
There are ironies that are interpreted, not intended as ironic. These ironies include, but
not restricted to situational, ‘accidental’ or incidental ironies. Strategy of interpretation is
indeed one of the most common manifestation of irony (Hutcheon, 1994: 112). “Perhaps
seeing and hearing irony is itself an intentional act that makes irony happen?” (Hutcheon,
1994: 112).

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 To call something ironic is to frame or contextualize it in such a way that, in fact, an
intentionalist statement has already being made – either by the ironist or by the interpreter
(or by both). In other words, intentional/non-intentional may be a false distinction: all
irony happens intentionally, whether the attribution be made by the encoder or the
decoder. Interpretation is, in a sense, an intentional act on the part of the interpreter. ….
Interpreters, too, are not passive consumers or ‘receivers’ of irony: they make irony
happen by what I want to call intentional act, different from but not unrelated to the
ironist’s intention to be ironic. (Hutcheon, 1994: 118)

This approach would question the distinction between ‘intentionalist’ (marked by the
complicity of irony and interpreter) and ‘voluntarist’ ironies (where only the interpreter is
held accountable). In this case all ironies would be voluntarist in some way (Hutcheon, 1994:
113). If irony’s intentional function activated and put into play by the interpreter, then irony
would then be “a function of reading”, or better say, “would complete itself in reading”
(Hutcheon, 1994: 117). “It would not be something intrinsic to a text, but rather something
that results from the act of construing carried out by the interpreter who works within a
context of interpretive assumptions” (Hutcheon, 1994: 117). Thus, “interpreters are active
agents in making irony happen” (quoted in Hutcheon, 1994: 117). Hutcheon continued: irony
is always (whatever else it might be) a modality of perception – or, better, of attribution – of
both meaning and evaluative attitude” (Hutcheon, 1994: 117).
The participatory nature of irony involves ‘culturally-shared knowledge of the rules,
conventions, expectations’ in a particular cultural context. This context, the interpretative
community is therefore necessary for irony to happen.

If intentions are forms of ‘conventional behaviour that are to be conventionally ‘read’, then
they are ‘read’ within interpretative communities, but the meanings thus produced are as
much the production of intentional acts as those intentions being ‘read’: both ironist and
interpreter create intentionally, in other words. It is not a matter of the interpreter
‘reconstructing’ the exact meaning the ironist intended. (Hutcheon, 1994:117-118)

Ironist and interpreter exist in social relations and operate within a communicative
situation, and therefore the responsibility for ironic situation is a shared one. “The intended
audience, for instance, may not end up being the actual one; it might reject the ironic
meaning, or find it inappropriate or objectionable in some way; it may simply choose not to
see irony in a given utterance “(Hutcheon, 1994: 118).
Irony, as a learnt skill, involves “’social cognitive development’: that is, the ability to
infer both the knowledge shared by speaker and adresssee and the attitude of the speaker
toward what is being discussed” (Hutcheon, 1994: 122).

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 Irony and nostalgia are considered key components of today’s culture. It might have
been difficult to conceptualise the combination between nostalgia, which was seen as a
sentimental longing for the past, with irony, which tends to be understood as the rather edgy
opposite of sentimentality.
Susan Stewart’s study On Longing calls nostalgia a “social disease”, defining it as “the
repetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition” (Stewart; 1984: 23). By denying
and/or degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the idealised (and therefore always
absent) past into a site of immediacy, presence and authenticity. Stewart suggested that the
major differences between nostalgia and irony is that unlike the knowingness of irony (a mark
of the fall from innocence), nostalgia is utopian (Stewart, 1984:23). That is indeed an
argument to challenge, since it seems to be contradicted by Boym’s concept of “ironic”
nostalgia? (Boym, 1995). Some artefacts seem able to simultaneously be ironic and nostalgic.

To call something ironic or nostalgic is, in fact, less a description of the entity itself (italics
mine) than an attribution of a quality of response (italics mine). Irony is not something in
an object that you either ‘get’ or fail to ‘get’: irony ‘happens’ for you (or, better, you make
it ‘happen’) when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually with
a certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you ‘perceive’ in an object; it is
what you ‘feel’ when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together for
you and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element of
response – of active participation, both intellectual and affective – that makes for the
power. (Hutcheon, 1998: on-line)

Hutcheon argued that because the element of active attribution is not being brought up, “the
politics of both irony and nostalgia are often written off as quietistic at best” (Hutcheon, 1998:
on-line). But both irony and nostalgia are “transideological”, which means that they can be
“made to ‘happen’ by (and to) anyone of any political persuasion” (Hutcheon, 1998: on-line).
Hutcheon suggested an explanation to the paradox of pairing of nostalgia and irony:

Perhaps the history of the wider cultural entity called postmodernity would help explain
this paradox. If, as it has been argued often, nostalgia is a by-product of cultural modernity
(with its alienation, its much lamented loss of tradition and community), then
postmodernity's complex relationship with modernity – a relationship of both rupture and
continuity – might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to this nostalgic
inheritance. (Hutcheon, 1998: on-line)

If sentimental nostalgia was a consequence of the last fin-de-siècle, then some nostalgia,
postmodernist nostalgia, as she named it, is of an “ironised order”. She continued: “the act of

55
ironising (while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines modernist assertions of
originality, authenticity, and the burden of the past, even as it acknowledges their continuing
(but not paralyzing) validity as aesthetic concerns” (Hutcheon, 1998: on-line).

3. 9. Concluding remarks

Nostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress: reactionary,

sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, and
evidence of a loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience of
loss endemic in modernity and late modernity. But one should admit that nostalgia has
numerous manifestations, including also a progressive impulse of saving previously repressed
utopian elements of the past into the future. These contradictions of nostalgia should not be
seen as opposite, but as mutually constitutive (Fornäs, 1984).
“Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationship between past and present to be
conceived of as fragile and corruptible, inherently dependent on how the resources of the past
are made available, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, and how
they are employed and deployed in the development of a relationship between past and
present” (Keightley and Pickering, 2006: 938). Thus, nostalgia should be seen as a critical
tool, where both positive or productive active uses and sterile, impotent or passive uses are
possible.

4. Price of laughing: irony and nostalgia in Late Soviet

culture

“Process which cannot be the simple comparison of art and society, but which must start from the
recognition that all the acts of men compose a general reality within which both art and what we
ordinarily call society are comprised. We do not compare the art with the society; we compare both
with the whole complex of human actions and feelings. We find some art expressing feelings which
the society, in its general character, could not express. These may be the creative responses which
bring new feelings into light. They may be also the simple record of omissions: the nourishment or
attempted nourishment of human needs satisfied” (Williams, 1961/2001: 87).

“Art as entertainment that poses questions”, Vitalij Komar

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 (from http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/muller/vitaly-komar9-9-09.asp ).

Film director Andrey Raykin to my question “Where should I search for the roots of
Post-Soviet nostalgia and appropriation of Soviet cultural memory?” answered: “In works of
Komar and Melamid, of course!” (St. Petersburg, 2011). At that point of time I, frantically
trying to secure interviews with well-known Russian journalists who had written about
designers Denis Simachev and Nina Donis, had not even realised that my hunt for answers to
my questions should have started with a careful investigation of the works of Russian artists
in a time when the Soviet Union was still alive and seemed to last for ever. It was my great
shame to miss from the very beginning such an obvious connection between the appropriation
of Soviet symbols by Russian designers and Russian émigré artists. However, despite of some
basic parallels in the use of Soviet symbols, there are some important conceptual differences,
which I am going to present in this dissertation.
Svetlana Boym wrote that it is revolution that produces nostalgia. “Revolutionary time
of perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produced an image of the last Soviet decades
as a time of stagnation, or alternatively, as a Soviet golden age of stability” (Boym, xvi).
Therefore, I start this chapter with a very brief overview of work of Komar and
Melamid in the broader context of the postmodernist paradigm, by relying on secondary
sources and interpretations done by other scholars. I do not want to present another history or
reinterpretation of postmodernism here, but just highlight some important categories that
Russian conceptualists appealed to, in order to be able to use them in the following chapters,
where I will analyse the media of Post-Soviet Russia.
I also introduce briefly Moscow subculture scene during perestroika time, which
became a vibrant field for emergence and development of various subcultural fashion styles.
Some of these subcultural fashion styles challenged Soviet symbols and hierarchies while
recycling fashionable products of Soviet textile industry. Relying mainly on interviews with
some representatives of this scene as well as existing internet archive and publications of
Misha Baster, who is engaged in documenting of subcultures in Russia, I will briefly describe
their fashions.

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4.1. Russian conceptualism

Rosalind Marsh discerns four recurring artistic strategies of representing the Stalinist
past: deliberately avoiding the subject; using “extreme factuality”; choosing “satire, the
grotesque, hyperbole and humour”; and finally “the use of allegory and fantasy” (Marsh,
Images of Dictatorship, 6-7, quoted in Ruten, 541). The artistic movement of Russian
conceptualism has combined the last two strategies.
Sots-art (also referred as Soviet Pop Art or Socialist Art), invented in the early 1970s by
two Russian-born artists Vitalij Komar and Alexander Melamid, together with conceptualism
– an artistic movement that relied heavily on a philosophical foundation 5 – constituted
“influential artistic and intellectual movements that transformed the Soviet ideological system
into material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgic
attitude” (Epstein, 2010: 64). Working across various media, artists appropriated Socialist
visual language to produce works, which aimed to challenge ideological and aesthetics
dictates of the Soviet state. Sots Art appropriated ready-made symbols, images, ideological
truths and propaganda of Socialist power by presenting them in a playful, ironic manner
aiming to free viewers from their ideological stereotypes.
The postmodernist paradigm was often employed to explain late Soviet and Post-Soviet
culture. Russian unofficial culture of the 1970s and 1980s, which Boris Groys called
postutopian (not to be confused with anti-utopian), was believed to be linked to the similar
Western phenomenon, which was characterised by the blurring of boundaries between “high”
and “low” cultures or arts and media, the appropriation of ready-mades, and an interest in the
everyday (Groys, 1988/1992: 105). Just like American artists turned to advertising as a source
for inspiration, Russian artists turned to the field of Soviet propaganda (Groys, 1988/1992:
106).
If postmodernism was ”often criticized for its aestheticism and moral indifference”,
Russian conceptualism, wrote the Anglo-American and Russian literary theorist and critical
thinker Mikhail Epstein, underscored ”the moral implications of metaphysical contingency,
which undermines totalitarian and hegemonic discourse and promotes self-irony as a mode of
humility” (Epstein, 2010: 65). He believed Russian conceptualism saw itself not as a “mere
replica of Western postmodernism, but as a reflection of the underlying structures of Russian

5
Mikhail Epstein thinks that Russian conceptualism should be regarded as a broader philosophical movement
(Epstein, 2010). Boym argues that the unofficial movement of Moscow romantic conceptualism, originally
coined by Boris Groys, “was not so much an artistic school as a subculture and way of life” (Boym, 2001: 311).

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history, where the signs of reality have always been subject to ideological manipulation” and
”reality itself has been constructed from ideological signs generated by its ruling minds as a
kind of hyper-reality” (Epstein, 2010: 65). Conceptualist project functioned as “a
psychoanalytic instrument for deconstructing the repressive Soviet superego” (Epstein, 2010:
65). By working in the medium of ”visualized concepts”, or ”mental projections”, which
constituted a philosophical foundation translated into a system of objects, but not with visual
forms as such, conceptualism was an ”ideo-analysis” that aimed to underscore the absurdity
of the constructions of Soviet ideology (Epstein, 2010: 66). The conceptualist method
involved:

The revelation of an inexorable and irreducible disjunction between them [i.e. thoughts and
objects], a gap bridged only by self-referential and therefore self-ironic conceptualizations.
Irony becomes the only possible form of truth for conceptual philosophy, inasmuch as it
lacks any criteria for verification but has innumerable criteria for philosophical self-
falsification (Epstein, 2010: 66).

What conceptualism had in common with ideology was ”a tendency to substitute signs or
concepts for real substance. But the principal difference between them is that ideology claims
its signs have real referents, while conceptualism reveals the emptiness of its own signs”
(Epstein, 2010: 69). Having organically emerged in the Soviet environment, “precisely
because it is the underside of total ideology”, conceptualism offered ”a radical challenge to
totalitarian claims of absolute truth, to the kind of ideological madness that prescribes ideas
for the interpretation and transformation of reality” (Epstein, 2010: 69).

Conceptualism attempts to expose the realistic fallacy that attributes objective existence to
general or abstract ideas. This was the hidden assumption of the Soviet system: it gave the
status of absolute reality to its own ideological pronouncements. Virtually every facet of
Soviet life was dictated by ideological presuppositions about the nature of social reality, and
conceptualism attempted to expose the contingent nature of such concepts by unmasking
them as constructions proceeding from the human mind or generated by linguistic practices”
(Epstein, 2010: 65).

4.1.1. Nostalgia of Ilya Kabakov

One of the founders of Russian conceptualism was the exiled artist Ilya Kabakov (born 1933),

59
who focused on features of Soviet civilization and interpreted them philosophically, focusing
on categories of space, time and object. Garbage was another important category in his work,
which he did not just understood as ”a negative aspect of physical existence”, but as ”the core
of existence itself, since reality reveals its transitoriness in the form of garbage” (Epstein,
2010: 68).

As the material integrity of a thing deteriorates, its sentimental value progressively grows.
An object which loses its functionality – becoming garbage – is preserved on the level of
pure meanings, in memory. Thus garbage is intrinsically more ideal and spiritual than those
brand-new things that serve us by their material utility. (Epstein, 2010: 68)

This “garbage”, materialised memories of the past, constituted his “total installations”, in
which he investigated the borders of Soviet utopian projects of the future and the dystopian
spaces that resulted from these projects. Living in inner exile in the Soviet Union and then in
exile in the United States, he explored the notions of loss and emptiness, focusing on the
category of emptiness, or void, which he viewed as “fundamental to Soviet reality” (Epstein,
2010: 67).

Kabakov’s museums and homes have sacred and profane spaces….. Only one is never sure
whose homes they are. The visitor here feels at ones the only host of this abandoned home
and an uninvited guest who came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Going to
Kabakov’s exhibits is akin to trespassing into a foreign world that feels like home (Boym,
2001: 310).

In 1992, the autobiographical and art-historical installation Toilets was “a surrogate museum
and a surrogate home”, moreover, it was “as much a memory museum” as it was “a museum
of forgetting” (Boym, 2001: 318). The temporality and narrative Kabakov predominantly
worked with made this installation both “new and nostalgic” (Boym, 2001: 318). Past and
memory were embodied in the fragments of life, everyday objects and trash, which allowed
Kabakov’s “nostalgic obscenity” not “simply refer back to time, but rather sideways” (Boym,
2001:319). In Kabakov’s installation the working principal was the one of a” narrative collage
of material objects”, which tell “an allegory of Soviet reality” (Boym, 2001: 319). In other
words, “objects are on the verge of becoming allegories, but never symbols” (Boym, 2001:
319).
These embarrassing memories, told through objects and spaces of the past, did not allow
the artist to reconstruct his home of the past, thus “leaving un unbridgeable gap in the
archaeology of memory” (Boym, 2001: 319). Toilet became Kabakov’s nostalgic home, a

60
home away from home, a home in longing for a lost time and place. This installation became
an eternal travel between past and present. It both attempted to dismantle Soviet utopias and
represented utopian dreams of possibility to underscore the faults of Soviet utopia. At the
same time it was nostalgia for utopia. Kabakov “reverses time and turns future oriented
utopias intro everyday ruins. He moves from the collective to the individual utopia, from
politics to art and life, and back to art” (Boym, 2001: 322).
Toilet was interpreted by Russian media and critics at that time as a betrayal of Russian
national pride, and was not seen as ironic nostalgia (Boym, 2001: 315). The utopian idea of
Kabakov to explore and narrate the drama of Soviet life crashed against a wall of
misunderstanding and refusal among his contemporary Russians.
In the installation We Live Here at Centre Pompidou, “Kabakov goes to the origins of
modern utopia and reveals two contradictory human impulses: to transcend the everyday in
some kind of collective fairy tale, and to inhabit the most uninhabitable ruins, to survive and
preserve memories” (Boym, 2001:324). Ultimately, what Kabakov was nostalgic about was
not a space, but a time. “If Past and Future are embodied in the installation in the shapes and
locations of objects, the Present is personified by the visitor himself” (Boym, 2001: 326). It
becomes clear that nostalgic longing is strongly linked to personal experiences and highly
selective. “Through the combination of empathy and estrangement, ironic nostalgia invites us
to reflect on the ethics of remembering” (Boym, 2001: 326).

4.1.2. Nostalgia of Komar and Melamid

Forced into emigration shortly after the Bulldozer Exhibition (1974) of non-
comformist art, Vitalij Komar and Alexander Melamid, founders of Sots-Art, “a style related
through nostalgia and parody to the official canon of Soviet art”, created a series of paintings
titled Nostalgic Socialist Realism (1981-1983) (Epstein, 2010: 70). They have acknowledged
that sometime in the 1980s nostalgia started occupying their souls.
In the series they examined and deconstructed “the ironic contradictions inherent in
myths of power” (Hillings, 1999: 49). Valerie Hillings, the Guggenheim Museum's expert in
Russian art, believed that “by selecting subjects illustrating the conflicting accounts of Soviet
history propagated by successive Communist regimes, Komar and Melamid identified the loss
of a past that had been expunged from the collective national memory”, while “emerging in

61
part from their attempts to reconnect with their homeland, these works use Socialist Realism
as their point of departure” (Hillings, 1999: 50).
Komar and Melamid deliberately chose the most controversial symbols of Soviet
power, such as figures of political leaders. In this series they emphasized the absent presence
both of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin following Stalin’s death in 1953 and Nikita
Khrushchev's destalinization in 1956. Just like Kabakov, Komar and Melamid created a
narrative of remembering. They told a story that they heard at a summer camp near Moscow
shortly after graduation from the Stroganov School of Art and Design. The story told that
statues of Stalin that had been too large to destroy have been buried all over Russia after his
death. This led to the artists’ realisation that Stalin’s effigy lay not only buried literally in the
Russian soil, but also deep in their subconscious. ‘This was a great discovery for us… There
were no more taboos anymore”, said the artists (Ratcliff, 1988: 17). From that moment, if to
believe the artists, they have started an “excavation” of the buried memories of the past, by
“digging” up repressed memories and questioning the very substance of their emotional
being. They have not rejected, but resurfaced historical events and their consequences through
recollection and image-production. “Necrology”, constant evocation of the past helped Komar
and Melamid to advance into the future (Ratcliff, 1988: 25, 156).

By constantly reflecting on their past perceptions of Soviet life – everything from passports
to banners to Socialist Realism – they are guarding themselves, and hopefully their
viewers, from not recognizing the signs of a totalitarian regime in the future. The danger of
amnesia is one that Komar and Melamid consider so real in out modern world. They have
spent their careers remembering so that we will recognize danger in the future. Again, for
them the ‘past and future meet in present’. They employ nostalgia as a means for rewriting
future history. (Leigh-Perlman, 2009: 16)

Komar and Melamid explained their repetitive remembering of Soviet symbols: “Our
Russian memories and our Russian history must come back from time to time because they
are a permanent part of our individuality. One cannot jump out of one’s biography; that is
impossible. Our past belongs to us, and our past is also part of our present” (Russians in
America 16). Sergey Oushakine wrote about Komar and Melamid:

It was precisely this ironic “outsidedness” that allowed the artists Vitaly Komar and Alex
Melamid to replicate stylistic gestures of Socialist Realism in their Sots art projects of the
early 1980s without fully merging with the replicated style. The effect of the visual
familiarity with the Sots art painting’s syntax and morphology was subverted by internal
discrepancies within this apparently homogeneous stylistic code. (Oushakine, 2007: 472)

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 Oushakine emphasised the “semantic polyphony of Sots art, its inherent symbolic
conflict between formally integrated but ideologically incompatible elements. It is precisely
this polyphony that is largely absent in retro replicas” (Oushakine, 2007: 473). Their constant
address to the past and the use of symbols of power has to be carefully read against the
context both these images were created and knowledge about tragedies caused by the Soviet
power. Similarly, the artists acknowledged the power of time in the contextualisation and
decontextualisation of the meaning of their work. “That is the destiny of parody – with time it
loses its original source… as time goes by and changes us – even we may lose the source of
parody in our work” (Russians in America 14).

4.1.3 Nostalgia and trauma in Russian conceptualism

Russian conceptualism is often understood as a result of or reaction to socio-cultural trauma

(Boym, 2001; Oushakine, 2007). Ellen Ruten, for instance, explains this interest of Russian
post-modernist artists and writers in the Soviet past as ”attempts to come to terms with the
legacy of the Soviet, and particularly Stalinist, past” (Ruten, 2009: 540).

[P]ostmodern artists exchange the search for truth and an ideal harmony with which
modernist art is associated for a playful, fictionalized, and ironic approach to reality. This
new approach has emerged not in the last place in reaction to traumatic sociopolitical
events, as a repudiation of the ideologically motivated historical atrocities of the first half
of the century…. in the postmodern era, artists tend to mistrust such notions as progress,
utopianism, and political ideology. (Ruten, 2009: 540)

Ruten explained the grotesque-humorous or fantastical approach, which seem to prevail

in Russian art in the 1980s, as a work of “post-memory”, a term used by Marianne Hirsh in
her article “Postmemories in Exile” (1996). If the first artistic reactions to traumatic historical
experiences are usually biographical ones, linked to those who have witnessed traumatic
events, then the shift towards the fantastic-grotesque was typical for second-generation artistic
copings with the past. The second and third generations, she claims, manage to free
themselves from their parents’ memories and claim their own way of remembering history.
It is tempting to try this hypothesis on the material I am to present in the last empirical
chapter of this thesis. However, I am rather sceptical about applying this theory to the work of
Russian conceptualist artists. They have not been victims of Stalinist terror themselves, but

63
they have lived through traumatic experiences of Soviet everyday reality. Some of them,
including Ilya Kabakov, address through personal traumatic memories the collective trauma
of Soviet people.
Ruten wrote that Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism could be analysed from a
therapeutic perspective:

First of all, Sots Art and Conceptualist artists are themselves inclined towards
therapeutically motivated auto-comments. On the one hand, they stress that their work is
marked by aesthetic or ironic distance, and thus as far from direct social critique as
possible; on the other, they do analyze it in psychological terms, as a successful way of
dealing with the traumatic Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) past. (Ruten, 2009: 542)

Vitalij Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, for example, stressed that a balance between
critical irony and affective nostalgia was their only means of dealing with Soviet history
(Ratcliff, 1988: 18, 40). Meanwhile Dmitrij Prigov conceptualised his “personal behavior” as
a Sots Art artist, as well as that of his contemporaries, as a “psychotherapeutic sublimation”
of “large cultural themes” (Pirogov, 2003:28). Pavel Pepperštejn, ideologist and founder of
“Inspection Medical Hermeneutics”, defined the group’s activities as healing acts in Russia’s
difficult perestroika years: “we felt our activity […] would be helpful […] and even
therapeutic for the situation” sphere when labeling their oeuvre “a joint struggle to come to
terms with their past”, an attempt “to get past their outrage, a feeling as necessary as it is
inadequate”, or “sessions of a psychoanalytic treatment that is supposed to shed light on the
political unconscious and its images” (quoted in Ruten, 2009: 542).
Sergey Afrika together with Sergei Anufriev in 1990 realized a performance Rozhdenie
Agenta (Birth of the agent), in which they climbed into the belly of the famous sculpture of
Vera Mukhina Rabochy I Kolkhoznitsa – the most important visual symbol of Soviet
ideology. This performance served as a starting point for many future projects dedicated to
reflections over the Soviet culture. In 1993, in the artistic project Krymaniya, Sergey worked
in a psychiatric hospital, studying the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the minds
of patients. This experience was the basis of a series of works devoted to the anesthetisation
of trauma. He used ready-made flags of the Soviet era filled with ideological symbolism, as
well as images of cartoon characters Neznayka (Dunno), and Donald Duck, adding words of
Lacan, Lifshitz and himself. 6
According to Ruten, “Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism are rarely defined in terms

6
Information about the project can be found on-line at http://artkladovka.ru/ru/artists/02/bugaev/bio/.

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that do not hark back to notions of art as therapy” (Ruten, 2009: 543). They pointed out that
everyone fell victim to “forced ideologisation” and Stalinist aesthetics, and then themselves
took on the “task of liberation from the power of discourse” (quoted in Ruten, 2009: 543).

One can argue that such critical and ironic approach to the represented Soviet past is
specific to a particular medium of art, and that other media will represent the Soviet past
differently, defined by the innate qualities of a medium. I suggest focusing on underground
dress in the Soviet Union in the 1980s to test this assumption.. This time I am not going to
look at exile artists, but at subcultures born in the Soviet Union. Being “vne” Soviet official
discourse, they could be analysed from the position of inner exile.

4.2. Fashioned body as artistic medium: Nostalgia in 1980s

underground fashion
4.2.1. Soviet textile industry during late socialism

Soviet fashion industry in the period of late socialism lagged hopelessly behind its
Western counterpart, despite having access to a number of talented professionals. 7 Just like
the rest of the Soviet economy, fashion developed not according to the “fashion logic” of
change, but according to the five-year plans (Bartlett, 2010). There were several ateliers that
catered for the Soviet nomenclature and showed the norms of “good taste” to the rest of the
country. Produced and merchandised for average people, wear was not only of a terribly low
quality, but also very hard to get hold on. Therefore buying precious items meant taking good
care of them. 8 Because the majority of population has never had access to good design and
quality textiles, people had to fashion themselves according to simple patterns available in the
specialized publications, which taught Soviet citizens the very first DIY principles. Yet, in
general, clothes looked rather dull, and only those who had access to distribution channels or
went abroad were able to follow international trends.
Black markets were booming with Western products as well as with self-made dyed
jeans. The constant shortage and high prices of quality Western products made people
worship them, queuing for hours to buy imported items.

7
About one of the most important fashion houses in the Soviet Union see Schipakina, Alla (2009). Moda v
SSSR. Sovetski Kuznetski, 14. Moscow: Slovo.
8
Yulia Gradskova in her dissertation Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty and Maternity in
Soviet Russia (2007) wrote extensively on beauty practices and fashioning of women in Soviet Russia.

65
 Perestroika introduced to the Soviet people one of the most influential but also most
hated persons – the first lady of the State, Larissa Gorbacheva. As wife of the Secretary-
General of the Communist Party of the USSR, she became both a style icon and an object of
envy and irritation for many women. Always dressed with style and updated about the latest
trends, she was a patron of the fashion house on Kuznetsky 14, inviting to the Soviet Union
French fashion icons like Pierre Cardin and Yves Saint Laurent, and showing respect to
“alternative” fashion designers, protecting them from the attacks of the conformist public.

4.2.2. Underground fashion in the Soviet Union: nostalgia and rebellion

In the perestroika years, members of various subculture groups who found themselves
in opposition to the dominant ideology used fashion as a platform for rebellion and a
manifestation of inner freedom, as well as a protest against older generations and the inherent
conformity of Soviet society.
A few years before perestroika were difficult times for Russian underground with
constant regulations and bans on music and artists (Troitsky, Lepnitsky, 2011). Street patrols
and prosecution from the authorities lead to the shrinking of public spaces available for self-
expression and creativity. The change of political climate around 1985 led to the
amalgamation of previously distorted subcultural movements: artists, punks, new-wavers and
rockers stood up on the same side of the barricades. These people were united by a shared
sense of unsatisfied protest. Growing on the streets, these young people wanted to question or
even destroy what was known as a “Soviet man”, to sneer at all holy relics and places of the
Soviet state, provoke the Soviet everyman and move forward to something different. The
number of protesters was small, and it was important for them to find each other in the Soviet
social landscape, in order to collectively search for new forms of self-realisation and self-
expression. Similarly to Western subcultures, dress on the Russian subculture scene became a
main form of self-expression and a communicative code, used to identify people with the
same world-view, which resulted in an outburst of creativity among non-conformist youths.
The term “alternative fashion”, coined in 1988 in the Polish magazine Mlodosc and
often used to describe the phenomenon of Soviet subcultures, 9 nevertheless seems

9
Baster, 2011. Available at

66
problematic. It is common to analyse the Soviet system by opposing “official” Soviet culture
and “non-official” counterculture, thus creating a binary model (Cushman 1995). However,
that culture which had an aesthetics and an ideology that did not follow the official line of the
state was not necessarily oppositional or dissident. Alexey Yurchak has suggested that the real
situation in the Soviet system was more complex (Yurchak, 2006). He talked about a hybrid
Soviet culture, where official and non-official elements were deeply intertwined. Indeed the
banning of some cultures in the Soviet Union led to the emergence of others, which otherwise
would never have appeared. The same could have been said about fashion: the undeveloped
official Soviet fashion industry has lead to the domination of DIY production and outbursts of
creativity in society. Thus, the term “Soviet fashion” should not be narrowed down only to the
“official” designs produced by fashion houses like Dom Mod, but include any creative
attempts of the Soviet people. Several underground experiments became recognized on an
international level. One of the symbols of recognition of these designs was the title Miss
Alternative-98 given to Pani Bronya (Dubner) and to the designer Alexander Petlura
(Ljashenko).

The chronological frames of the underground fashion phenomenon can be located

somewhere between 1985 and 1995, with the highest peak of activity between 1985 and 1988.
Misha Baster, who worked on archiving of Soviet subcultures claimed that released by
Gorbachev’s perestroika, young underground subcultures, musicians and artists poured out
into the urban spaces of Moscow and this impulsive break out then died out around 1995,
even though the Tishinka flee-market, the main threshold to and source of this culture, was
still alive (Baster, on-line). There were many reasons for this change. First, around the same
time Western formats of glossy magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue, introduced
Western fashions and brands in Russia. Second, underground designs were not fit for the
tough economic rules of the 1990s, let alone to be adopted by large-scale mass production
(which was in deep depression by 1998 and never managed to recover even by 2012). 10 Third,
when it became possible, many of the designers and artists emigrated to the West and
continued their career as professional designers there. Meanwhile, some of them left the
subcultural scene for personal reasons. 11

http://www.kompost.ru/nt_al_ternativnaa_moda_do_prihoda_glanca_1985_1995.html
10
Russian fashion journal ProFashion for years publishes analytical articles on the state of Russian Fashion
Industry.
11
Larissa Lazareva, 2010 from http://www.kompost.ru/nt_al_ternativnaa_moda_larisa_lazareva_2010_-
page1.html.

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 The fashion that was born in the premises of urban squats was inspired by Western
dress cultures and an act of resistance against Soviet ideology and its dominant way of life. 12
Similar to Russian conceptualism, the emergence of alternative Russian fashion was possible
because of Soviet ideology. 13 This was not the first time youth cultures created their own style
in the Soviet Union and were demonised by the authorities for being an imitation of Western
fashions. 14 Even though certain aesthetic elements were imported from the West, the
questioning of the norms of Soviet lifestyles and the re-conceptualisation of Soviet symbols
could only develop in those countries that lived under communism. The resistance to the
dominant ideologies through means of consumption juxtaposed Western and Soviet
subcultures.

Many of the members of these subcultural scenes in Leningrad and Moscow were
students who were trained as artists or architects. Their art education gave them a wide
knowledge of styles and artistic movements, a developed sense of styles, as well as
professional training, enabling them to both come up with and develop new ideas technically.
Being inspired by 1920s’ avant-garde artists or working within the frames of the Moscow
conceptualist framework, many of them created wearable garments, while some constructed
art pieces suited more for artistic performances than for everyday use. They searched for
second-hand military uniforms and accessories at the Tishinka flee-market in Moscow, to
then retail, re-dye and mix them together, and present them both at organised performances in

12
For them the process of dressing-up, fashioning and consuming was en essential part of individual and group
identities. Individuals who shared a feeling of being neglected by the “official” standards came together and
developed a sense of group identity. Scholars have pointed out, quite rightly, that rebellious youth signalled their
group membership through distinctive and symbolic appropriation of visible status and cultural markers, such as
accessories, clothing, music, mannerisms and argot. Youth cultures revive and transform fashion items and
patterns of behaviour by relocating them into the contemporary context and ascribing them new meanings
through different use. Through this unconventional or unexpected use, youth cultures question the predominant
values and social order. The subcultures of the late Socialist era were first and foremost about consumption,
because they intentionally communicated ‘through commodities even if the meanings attached to those
commodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown’ (Subcultures: Reader, 1997). More on subcultures and
their style see: Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the meaning of style. London: Routledge, 1979.
13
Yurchak wrote extensively on the paradox of Soviet culture and the problematic of the concept of binary
opposition in relation to Soviet official and non-official discourse.
14
Young people interested both in the western cultures and resisting moralizing directions of Komsomol started
long time before 1985. Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957 kicked off both phenomenon of
fashionistas and people rejecting any non-Soviet way of life. Colourfully dressed according to the latest western
fashions and dancing to the hottest western bits, the stiljagas (modds or hipsters in English) were criticized by
the ideologically correct citizens, while Komsomol brigades patrolling streets, actively and aggressively
prosecuted them by publicly undressing, cutting off hair and destroying outfits (On stiljagas see: Guk, 1997: 21-
28; Lur’e ,1997: 17-19; Kaplan, 1997; Аksenov, 1992; Troitsky 1988:13; Fiertag, 1999). In the 1970s all around
the Soviet Union black-market economy supplied soviet modds, hipsters and hippies with over-priced western
products, self-produced accessories and clothing items. While the dress rebellion continued, its repression
continued as well, and many neformali (people, who went beyond accepted norms of behaviour) suffered a big
deal from it.

68
artists’ squats and at spontaneous hang-outs in Moscow or Leningrad (Interview with A.
Petlura 2012, Interview with V. Morozov 2012).

Elena Khudyakova, then a student of the Moscow Architectural Institute, started by

reconstructing costumes from sketches of Nadezhda Lamanova and Varvara Stepanova, who
were well-known designers of the beginning of the 20th century. Inspired by their designs of
functional clothing, she tried to adjust it to the 1980s’ reality. Carried away by the early
Soviet aesthetics, Khudyakova was one of the very first designers who recycled Soviet
military and working uniforms, as well as an essential element of Soviet life – “vatnik”,
“telogrejka” (a warm simple jacket), which later became central elements to the aesthetics of
post-Soviet nostalgia. She included these ultimate symbols of Soviet military power,
oppression and discipline into a fashionable wardrobe, thus stripping them of their ideological
power.

Artists Gosha Ostretsov and Timur Novikov created costumed performances, where
they developed the theme of “hyper-communism”. In the first collection, Gosha designed
ironic costumes of Communist invaders. His “Military” collection was dedicated to the
resettlement of communism to other planets, which reflected a dream of Perestroika days - to
get rid of it. At the same time in this collection, Ostretsov clearly mocked the ideals of
military might of the Soviet army and the idea of world revolution. Naivety and mocking
were achieved by adding to the military uniforms children’s toys and plastic baby night pot
instead of the cap, toy tanks instead of shoulder straps. In his staged happenings, dress and
performance converged together, referring back to the 1920s. His style was a merge of new-
wave aesthetics and naïve art, and evolved into elaborated concept of falling back into
childhood.

Katia Ryzhikova and Irene Burmistrova, members of duo “Krov’ s molokom” (Blood
and milk, in English), focused on futuristic fashion line. Their first collection “Zhelezny
sovok” (“Iron scoop” in English) was created in the spirit of socialist art, and included such
well-recognized Soviet symbols as shovels and forks, instruments of peasant-workers.

Katya Mikulskaya (later Mosina) developed a glamour version of military-style.

Purchased at Tishinka second hand market caps, boots, flight helmets and above all – military
uniforms and coats, she transformed into cocktail dresses by cutting off the sleeves and
opening back, and then painting the garments in trendy acid colours, adding up authentic

69
accessories, such as military belts. She made skirts form the red flag, and bras from fur
nomenclature caps.

The concentration of alternative designs was at its highest during so-called “Assa”
parades, manifestations of the underground movement usually around band “Pop-Mechanics”
of Sergei Kuryokhin, a creative collaboration of rock musicians, artists and poet. Oleg
Kolomiychuk, nicknamed Harry (or Garik) Assa (1953-2012), a former black marketer and a
king of rag-trade and second-hand markets, became a trendsetter in this underground
environment, creating together with others stage and everyday outfits for rock musicians. To
dress up “Pop Mechanics” Assa founded an impromptu fashion house “Ai da Lulli”. The
basis of collections was comprised of vintage outfits found at Tishinka flee-market. During
this time a style called “mertvy razvedchik” (dead spy, in English), which consisted of baggy
trousers gathered at the waist in the folds, big jackets with rolled up sleeves, double-breasted
coats and hats was adapted. The name of the style spoke for the origin of the clothes: sold by
the widows of passes away KGB members and spies, these garments were bought at second
hand market (interview with A. Petlura; http://w-o-s.ru/visual/assa/index.html).

Assa’s initiative was later continued by the artist Alexander Petlura, who around 1986-
1987 took over the collection, developed further the idea of fashion house and became a key
figure of Moscow’s art sphere. An enormous collection of garments from different eras
became a basis for Petlura artistic work. His project “Empire of things” told the unofficial
history of the Soviet Union through material objects. The dressed human body became a
vessel for historical narration marked with personal stories and memories. In Petlura’s long-
term project, the knowledge of Soviet reality was mediated through educational initiatives
(lectures, exhibitions and shows at higher education institutions home and abroad) as well as
ironic appropriations and interpretations in performances and shows, at the same time as his
work contributed to the contemporary Russian prêt-a-porter fashion.
Analysing underground dress culture of the 1980s and 1990s, I would like to stress that
this carnivalesque fashion, speaking in Bakhtin’s terms (1965) became a platform where
alternative individual voices could interact with each other, be expressed and heard. It created
“threshold” situations where Soviet hierarchies and normalised truths could be questioned and
broken. Soviet ready-made truths in these costume performances were overturned by
normally suppressed voices and energies. Inherited from Komar and Melamid, ironic attitudes
mocked and questioned both the normality of Soviet society and the serious attitude to it.

70
These performances were of a sharp, biting and provocative character, challenging
mainstream political and social discourses (Yurchak 2006, Hutcheon, 1994). By re-
contextualising Soviet symbols, such as military uniform, these designers removed both the
heroic pathos and the negative attitudes that surrounded such symbols during the time of
perestroika. Being ironic towards used elements did not always mean degrading the sign, but
retained a warm and caring attitude towards it (Hutcheon, 1994). In this case, certain positive
and naïve aspects of Soviet culture could not only preserve their positive meaning, but also
fuel a positive attitude after going through the processes of re-contextualization and over-
identification.
At the same time, this fashion was a part of a bigger “punk revolution”, which started to
spread around the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. During that period, major music
festivals were organised and key styles such as punk and hardcore appeared in several
mutations and combinations. In Moscow this style evolved into “aristocratic punk”, which
mixed the western DIY punk movement with a more general vintage style, based on mocking
the appearance of Soviet workers and nomenclature. This explains the constant exploitations
of various types of uniforms. The Soviet punk philosophy of “empowerment through total
liberation” can be best seen in the way existing objects were exploited. Remorseless
deconstruction of intensely hated KGB uniforms and prisoners’ jackets, turning them into
underwear and cocktail dresses, as well as dying them into acid colours, was not only a
demonstration of disrespect, but also an absence of fear that grew in the times of perestroika.
It was a ritualistic victory over the hated enemy by destroying its symbols of oppression and
degrading its power markers.
The Moscow and Leningrad punk scenes in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990s
were like the corresponding Western subcultures a rebellion against the prevailing ideology,
societal structure and lifestyle. At the same time, I regard them as part of a larger framework
of appropriation of Soviet political, cultural and ideological heritage. Streets, squares, clubs
and squats became the “public spaces”, where complex subculture identities were expressed
and constructed through the medium of dress, where dress itself became a “public space”, and
where opinions were negotiated and contesting views expressed through scandalous
performances.

This project of underground fashion also contained elements of utopia. One of the main
ideas behind these actions was to change people’s perceptions and to influence their attitude
to things and the surrounding environment. The main aim of these “fashion theatres” was to

71
make people see clothing not as something impersonal and only practical, but much more
than that – as something entertaining and exiting. Thus, the re-cutting, re-sewing and re-
dyeing military and working uniforms or the dress of pioneers, which were then introduced
into the context of 1980s’ punk subculture, was an attempt to destroy traditional social
hierarchies in the Soviet Union.

These young people had a special attitude to historical objects. For them the Tishinka
flee-market was a goldmine (interviews with A. Petlura, V. Morozov). They believed that one
could in theory try to sew something new, but there was no real need, as ready garments of
perfect quality and with a long and interesting history already existed. One just had to mix
and match them fearlessly with style to be able to shock and stress outsiders. They saw
novelty not in the creation of new objects, but in new interpretations, which became possible
by putting them into a new context and combining them with unexpected accessories and
elements, which shock, amused and frightened people. Mixing underwear and outwear in
reverse order was a gesture both towards people and objects, a rebellion against norms and
rules. Garik Assa, one of the members of this scene, said that what they were trying to do was
to plant non-Soviet culture into the Soviet reality. This culture mutated in the Soviet context
and produced new designs (Assa at http://w-o-s.ru/visual/assa/index.html).
Indeed Soviet subcultures did not invent anything new: this mode of treating objects
was parallel to the cut’n’mix bricolage attitude of Western punk, as analysed not least by Dick
Hebdige in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (1979). Not least the concept of bricolage,
which Hebdige took from Lévi-Strauss, also relates to Dadaism and futurism, as well as to
montage and collage practices in Russia in the 1920s: I have already mentioned that some of
the members of Moscow and Leningrad scene turned directly to the aesthetics of the 1920s.
The aesthetics of these costume performances and this fashion design was absurd, or as
it was called in Leningrad slang of the time: “stjeb” (Yurchak, 1997). During the late period
of Brezhnev rule, as Alexey Yurchak described, when the system did not seem to evolve, both
open critique and active propaganda of the system looked ridiculous (Yurchak, 1997). He
believed that it was not the communist ideology itself that was being laughed at and mocked,
but rather the submissive loyalty to it. Yurchak defined this type of irony by its serious
attitude to the ideological symbols of the system. It was not always clear (even for the author)
whether the author approved or laughed at the system. Sometimes both attitudes merged, so it
was impossible to distinguish between them. Yurchak pointed out two symbolic procedures of
“serious stjeb”: over-identification with ideological signs and re-contextualisation of these

72
ideological signs. Over-identification means automatic reproduction of the form of the sign
(text, ritual) as it is supposed to be in the official practice of the system. Re-contextualisation,
according to Yurchak, means placement of the sign into a different context, with the result
that a new connection between the signifier and the signified becomes visible, and therefore
also the peculiarity of the whole ideological construction, which was not clearly seen in the
ordinary context. Re-contextualisation thereby reveals the absurdity of a dominant ideology.
At the same time, by re-contextualising Soviet symbols, such as pioneer uniform,
underground designers removed their heroic pathos. It thereby re-established sincere and
warm attitudes to these symbols, which had simply been dismissed during the time of
perestroika. Thus the ironic attitude towards used elements did not always mean a degrading
of these inherited signs, but could also retain a warm and caring attitude towards them. In this
case, certain positive and naïve aspects of Soviet culture could preserve their positive
meaning.

Concluding remarks

Destalinisation started with Khruschev and managed to enter the public sphere during
perestroika. Critical representations of Stalin and his crimes were made in the 1980s, but in
the 1990s there was a slight change “from a fullblown demonizing towards a more positive
assessment of the past”, which later became ”the debates about the atrocities of the Stalinist
regime ’tainted by association’, … with the delegitimized democratic dreams of bygone
perestroika days” (Rutten, 2009: 541). Edgy irony shifted in tone and turned into something
warm and light hearted, while playful attitudes grew into new seriousness.
What were the reasons for that? How did the representations of Soviet reality change
after the fall of the Soviet Union? Which media took on the main role of representation of the
Soviet past? Such questions will be addressed in the next chapter.

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5. Nostalgia in the 1990s
5.1. Political and social dynamics of the 1990s

1990 started with demonstrations of independence and the Warsaw Pact countries attempts
to break free from communist rule. In January 1991 the drive for independence in the Baltic
States escalated. A few months later, when the referendum on the Soviet Union’s future
showed that a majority wanted some kind of reformed union to be retained, the Baltic States
strove for a complete breakaway.
In February Gorbachev stripped the Communist Party of its monopoly on power under the
Article 6 of the constitution by calling on parliament to allow multi-party politics. Later the
same year Gorbachev chose to merge a radical reform package and a much more cautious
plan for economic reforms. As a result, he satisfied no one and isolated himself politically.
Disapproving of Gorbachev’s liberal politics, the State Committee for the State of
Emergency (GKChP) 15 on the eve of signing a new deal with the republics, 16 placed
Gorbachev under house arrest in his Crimean residence and rolled tanks into Moscow,
occupied strategic positions, closed many newspapers and imposed an emergency junta to run
the country with the aim of reversing the reforms, re-imposing central rule, and halting the
republics’ drive to independence. 17 Yeltsin, earlier elected as the first Russian president,
began organizing resistance and was backed up by thousands of demonstrators, who turned
out to protect the White house 18. On 21 August the coup has collapsed, and a day later
Gorbachev resigned as Soviet Communist Party general secretary and dissolved the Central
Committee.
On 8 December 1991, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus agreed during their
meeting at Belovezh Forest near Minsk to disband the Soviet Union and form the
Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On 25 December, Gorbachev announced his
stepping down as Soviet president. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the last
time, and the white, blue and red tricolor of the Russian Federation flies in its place.

15
GKChP composed of military chiefs and Vice-President of the USSR, Gennadii Ianaev, Defence Minister
Dmitrii Iazov, the head of the KGB, Vladimir Kriuchkov, Prime Minister Valentin Pavlov.
16
The treaty was supposed to give the republics greater freedom. The signing was scheduled for August 20.
17
For witnesses’ accounts on the events of 1991, see Bonnell, E. Victoria, Ann Cooper, Gregory Freidin. (1994)
Russia at the Barricades: Eyewitness Accounts of the August 1991 Coup, M.E. Sharp.
18
On 12 June 1991 he was elected by popular vote to the newly created post of President of the Russian Soviet
Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR).

74
 As a result of Yeltsin’s economic reform inflation and prices on food rose in 1992.
Millions of Russians lost all their savings. Income inequalities grew; wealth became more
concentrated in Moscow, while provinces were getting poorer. Homelessness and poverty
increased as the government failed to pay pensions or the wages of workers in the state sector.
Financial crimes and corruption flourished with impunity. While manufacturing output
continued to slump, Russia became even more dependent on its raw material sector.
Nevertheless, in 1992 despite the hardship, among the public mood prevailed not the longing
for “yesterday”, but hope for “tomorrow”, which made the whole situation to seem not so
hopeless (Levada, 2002:7).
Shortly after the events of 1993, economic difficulties made many people question the new
order and brought disappointment in liberal rule. Despite the fact that shops started to be filled
with consumer goods and the number of successful entrepreneurs increased, many people did
not have financial capacity to enjoy this abundance, and the “macroeconomic collapse has
been paralleled by an unprecedented demographic crisis, reflected in sharp in-creases in
mortality rates and declining birth rates” (Brainard, 1998: 1096). Rising social and economic
inequality was rather visible on the streets of big cities, and well documented in the press.
Brainard’s study shows that the winners from this transformation then were

Young well-educated men whose skills have enabled them to exploit new profit-making
opportunities in the private sector of the economy. The losers are older workers, men in
particular, whose human capital has been devalued and who have few incentives to acquire new
skills relevant to the emerging economy. Women also appear to be among the biggest losers
from the transition. Since profit-making opportunities and large rents will be arbitraged away
over time and individuals will acquire new skills, an eventual decrease in wage inequality in
Russia should be expected. But-barring government interventions-this will happen much more
slowly than did the rise in inequality. (Brainard, 1998: 1112)

Meanwhile on the ground of the economic reform, the relationship between the president
and the parliament started deteriorating. Yeltsin’s special powers granted in 1991 to carry out
reforms were supposed to expire in 1992. He demanded from the parliament to reinstate his
decree powers, and after the parliament refused, called for a referendum on a new
constitution.
The rapidly escalating constitutional crisis reached its culmination on September 21, 1993,
when Boris Yeltsin tried to dissolve the Congress of People's Deputies and the Supreme
Soviet, Russia's legislature. According to the then-current constitution the president did not
have the power to dissolve the parliament. As a result the Congress impeached Yeltsin and

75
announced vice president Aleksandr Rutskoy to be acting president. In the beginning of
October situation deteriorated. The army, which had initially declared its neutrality, by
Yeltsin's orders stormed the Supreme Soviet building on October 4, and arrested the leaders
of the resistance. The ten-day conflict turned out to be a deadly event.
Yurii Levada stated that the feelings of hope dominating in 1992 by the end of 1993 -
beginning of 1994 faded (Levada, 2002: 7). Yeltsin’s military attack launched on the
separatist Chechen leader, Zhokar Dudayev, in December 1994 with Russian tanks and
artillery attacking villages, killing hundreds of civilians and turning thousands of others into
refugees, did not add him public support either. After the crisis, which Yeltsin presented as
confrontation between pro-communist and democratic forces, his opponents were arrested. 19
Their arrest did not last long – in 1994 they were released, and the proceedings were placed
into archives.
In this story I would like to stress the importance of how Yeltsin portrayed and explained
to the public the events of October 1993. He justified his actions by claiming that the
defendants of the parliament wanted to bring back the communist power. According to the
polls both in 1993 and in 1994 people would choose Yeltsin as their presidential candidate. 20
Despite of the difficulties caused by the economic reform, few wanted to turn back time.
While some called for reconciliation and mutual forgiveness during the on-going trial of the
CPSU.
Trial of the CPSU turned out to be a major battlefield over the Soviet past. Political
scientist, Kathleen Smith, in her book Mythmaking in the New Russia. Politics and Memory
during the Yeltsin Era (2002), wrote that the communists, defending themselves in the court,
omitted all negative moments of the Soviet history and used positive memories and events
from the Soviet past to defend legitimacy of their party. 21 Their strategy was to claim that
only some party members committed the crimes. The democrats, on contrary, attracted
attention to the crimes of the communist party as a whole. The Communist Party presented
itself as always having been working for the benefit of the nation. Instead of focusing on
apologies, the communists shifted public attention to the pride in past economic, scientific,
and military achievements, and resurrected old myths about struggle, self-sacrifice, and
victory. The party’s leadership role and consequent heavy losses in World War II were used

19
Available online Октябрь 1993. Хроника переворота, 1997. Russki Zhurnal.
http://old.russ.ru/antolog/1993/chron144.htm
20
S Migdisova and E. Petrenko reported in 1994 “Rossiayane I segodnya otdali bi presidentskiy post Borisu
Yeltsinu. FOM survey. Available on-line at: http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/eltzin_/rating_eltsin/of19940102
21
Detailed account of the trial see in Smith, 2002: 11-29.

76
as examples of suffering for the benefits of the others. The trial gave the communist officials
a chance to work out their reputations and that of their party, and demonstrate that not
everyone had given up communism or come to reject the achievements of the past. “The
Party’s new status as a victim of repressive government policies also made for good publicity.
At the time when many Russians felt themselves to be causalities of current policies, the
claim of victimization evoked great empathy” (Smith, 2002: 29). The absence of a trial that
would have banned the Communist Party as well as the plotters of the coup led to the
situation where the Communist Party and its members were not prosecuted for the committed
crimes (Smith, 2002).
By the end of the trial in 1994 the president proposed amnesty package, which first was
rejected in the parliament, and only after alteration and under the slogans of “reconciliation”
and “mutual forgiveness” it passed. As a result of these amnesty as well as the case of general
Valentin Varennikov, charged as an accomplice of the GKChP, it seemed that the August
coup plotters were not criminals at all (Smith, 2002: 46 - 47). Zhirinivsky declared in 1994,
“We have the right to forgive them all – from Kaliningrad to Kamchatka – for ninety years
from the first Russo-Japanese war to the most recent Soviet-Afghan war…No one is guilty of
anything” (quoted in Smith, 2002: 45).
In December 1995, parliamentary elections showed that the Russians supported the
Communists who secured the largest share of votes and won the elections. That created a
theoretical possibility of Ziuganov’s success in the 1996 presidential election. At this point of
time the “dominating attitude” of nostalgia for the Soviet period of stability became
noticeable.
Studies showed:

a steady prevalence of positive ratings, stereotypes, attitudes addressed to the last period of
Russian history, mainly to the very long-term in the XX century ‘period of stagnation’.
According to the polls, the political and economic system, the leaders, the relationship between
the people, the whole situation of 1970 – 1980s often seems preferable to the current one. The
presumption that nostalgic attitudes (orientations) are dominant in the modern Russian society is
established and actively supported by a large part of the political and journalistic elite. Hence
the conclusions are often drawn about the failure or principal inability of the fundamental
reforms of society, unacceptable alien models of life for people of the Soviet-Russian formation,
inevitable return to familiar patterns, or at least characters, etc. Survey data show that public
opinion is quite willing to accept such treatment. (Levada, 2002:7) 22

22
In Russian: ”Многочисленные исследования и наблюдения обнаруживают устойчивое преобладание
позитивных оценок, стереотипов восприятия, установок, обращенных к прошедшим периодам
отечественной истории, преимущественно к самому длительному в XX в. "периоду застоя". Судя по
опросам, политическая и экономическая системы, лидеры, отношения между людьми, вся обстановка

77
 At that time “in a number of surveys it has been often suggested that the victory of
communists will bring the country back to the ‘desired period of ‘stagnation’” (Levada,
2002:10). Yuriy Levada suggested that despite nostalgic mood-swings (especially in March
1996, when Zyuganov’s electorate’s predominance in the presidential race was obvious), “to
return to the Soviet past wanted just over one fifth of the respondents (of the sociological
servey, conducted by VCIOM – Ekaterina’s comment), which is about the size of electoral
support for the Communist Party” (Levada, 2002:13). Levada explained it by the fact that
mass nostalgia for ‘the situation before 1985’ could be characterized “more as a symbolic
expression of a critical attitude to the politics of the authorities, than a desire to return to the
Soviet past” (Levada, 2002: 13). Detailed analysis of the statistical data showed that while in
all observed groups (age and education groups, results from 1996 and 2000) there was a clear
shift of sympathy for the situation ‘before 1985’, the resistance to the nostalgic moods
weakened. In the survey on attitudes towards competing economic systems – plan economy
and market economy – it was only in ‘very transitional’ 1992 that the supporters of the market
economy dominated, although voices in favour of the position “better to change nothing in the
situation before 1985” were sound (Levada, 2002: 7). “Besides, – he continued, – the
presidential election in 1996, the default of 1998, new president coming to power in 2000 did
not have any significant impact on the level of nostalgia. It should be said, of course that the
public mood does not determine the real possibility or impossibility of any kind of transition.
It is only about mass preferences” (Levada, 2002:13). 23
Nevertheless, in this difficult situation with strong nostalgic sentiments, Yeltsin had an
advantage the communists did not have. By 1996 Kremlin already controlled two state-owned

70—80-х годов чаще всего представляется более предпочтительной по сравнению с нынешней.

Создается и активно поддерживается значительной частью политической и журналистской элиты
представление о доминировании ностальгических ориентации в современном российском обществе.
Отсюда нередко делаются выводы о неудаче или даже о принципиальной невозможности
реформирования общества, неприемлемости чуждых моделей жизни для людей советско-российского
формирования, неизбежности возврата к привычным образцам или хотя бы символам и т.д. Опросные
данные подтверждают, что общественное мнение довольно охотно принимает подобные трактовки”.

23
In Russian: “Таким образом, при всех колебаниях настроений (самое очевидное — в марте 1996 г.,
когда было заметно преобладание электората Г.Зюганова в президентской гонке) возвращения прошлого
желают немногим более одной
пятой опрошенных, что примерно соответствует размеру электоральной поддержки компартии. Это
значит, что массовую ностальгию по "положению до 1985 г." мы вправе характеризовать скорее как
символическую, как выражение критического отношения к политике власти, но отнюдь не как
стремление вернуть советское прошлое. Причем стоит отметить, что существенного влияния на уровень
ностальгических настроений такого рода не оказали ни президентские выборы 1996 г., ни дефолт 1998 г.,
ни приход к власти в 2000 г. нынешнего президента. Следует, конечно, оговориться, что общественные
настроения не определяют реальную возможность или невозможность какого бы то ни было перехода.
Речь идет только о массовых предпочтениях”.

78
television channels (Zasursky, 1999). By manipulating fear that a communist comeback was a
real threat, Yeltsin managed to convince the privately owned NTV to join his campaign. This
monopoly of the main broadcasting media became the decisive factor in Yeltsin's victorious
election campaign.

For the first time special “political thechnologies” to manipulate public opinion and
‘administrative resource’ (punctuation is mine) were widely used to bring to power the correct
candidates. Show-case liberal Constitution, the nominal separation of powers, parlamentarism,
human rights very quickly revealed their decorative-rhetorical character. ‘Democracy’ has
remained on paper, lasted no more than one election cycle. (Gudkov, 55) 24

Before the presidential elections in 1996 ”crime, a social ill […] grew by an amazing 21.5
per cent since 1992; the murder rate alone grew by 27.4 per cent, while drug-related crimes
increased by 62.7 per cent during the same period” (Brudny, 1997: 257). All these factors,
including absence of well-organised political force capable of carrying out an effective
electoral campaign, diminished Yeltsin’s chances at re-election (Brudny, 1997: 257).
Meanwhile, ”Zyuganov had at his disposal the largest and best organized political force in the
post-communist Russia” (Brudny, 1997: 257), and in December 1995 ”would have won the
first round and have been the undisputed front runner in the second round of the election
regardless of the identity of the other run-off candidate” (Brudny, 1997: 258).
In the relation to Yeltsin presidential campaign, one should keep in mind that ”instead of
campaigning on his own record, Yeltsin began to campaign on the record of his opponents”
(Brudny, 1997: 260), and the main competitor Genady Zyuganov. Apart of the main anti-
communist theme of Yeltshin’s campaign, the second focal point introduced was that there
were only two real candidates, and therefore ”the election was fundamentally a choice
between a return to the dark communist past and the prospect of brighter future” (Brudny,
1997: 260).
At this stage, Brudny notices, ”mass media began to play a very important role. (Brudny,
1997: 260). A new, aggressively anti-Communist weekly tabloid called GodForbid! Was
published by the leading Russian publisher Kommersant, a Yeltsin supporter. However,

The key role in this typically post-communist form of negative campaign was, however,

24
In Russian: Именно тогда впервые были широко использованы особые политические технологии
манипулирования общественным мнением и административный ресурс для проведения нужных власти
кандидатов. Образцово-либеральная по форме Конституция, номинальное разделение властей,
парламентаризм, права человека очень быстро обнаружили свой декоративно-риторический характер.
«Демократия» осталась на бумаге, не просуществовав более одного избирательного цикла.

79
 assigned to state television. The horrors of the communist era were shown regularly in
documentary and feature films in the weeks leading up to the election. This culminated with a
showing of the Academy Award winning movie, Burnt by the Sun, on the night before the first
round elections, and a movie depicting in extremely negative way the history of the Communist
Party on the eve of the second round. (Brudny, 1997: 260)

This involvement of media in the election campaign is no accidence. In the 1990s, the
Russian media industry evolved, simultaneously becoming more commercialised and
politicised, and became an integral and important part of Russian economy, receiving foreign
investments and generating new revenues, as well as funding streams:

Media had made a significant contribution to the development of a market economy,

perhaps even more than other institutions. The rapid development of the advertising market
was one of the most important and significant manifestations of the new Russian economy, a
sort of highly visible symbol. However, the contribution of the media in a market economy
was not limited to advertising. Itself, media industry became an aggressive and influential
player in a difficult and controversial evolution of the Russian economic scene. (Zassursky,
1999, on-line)

On the eve of the second round “he also struck a final blow against nostalgia, reminding
voters that in the past only Communist Party bosses had lived well” (Smith, 2002: 148).
Elections turned into a referendum on the abuses and atrocities of the Communist past.
President Yeltsin stayed in power.

Concluding remarks

The former Eastern Bloc countries have undergone tumultuous changes over the past
century. Boym (2001) noted that nostalgia seems common after revolutions, such as the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and more recent Russian political changes. “The revolutionary
époque of perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produces an image of the last Soviet
decades as a time of stagnation, or alternatively, as a Soviet golden age of stability, strength,
and ‘normalcy,’ the view prevalent in Russia today” (p. xvi).
It was not entirely clear what kind of change had taken place at the end of the 1980s –
the beginning of the 1990s. Yeltsin’s prime minister, Yegor Gaidar, claimed that the end of
communist rule had been a ”revolution” (Gaidar, 1996). Sociologist Tat’yana Zaslavskaya
rejected the proposition that a fundamental social revolution had taken place, and suggested
that there had been evolution, led by intelligentsia against nomenklatura. But this

80
intelligentsia reform movement had been stopped, and the political initiative had passed to
Boris Yeltsin’s circle, who had became in possession of public assets (Zaslavskaya, 2002: 6–
9). She also mentioned two important reasons, why the change happened in Russia could both
be called revolution. First, the new ruling elite consisted overwhelmingly of the former
nomenklatura (Zaslavskaya, 2004). Second, there had been no mass movement that had
driven the former ruling group from power, but it had been the regime itself that had led to
change (Zaslavskaya, 2002). Zaslavskaya’s position opened up an important discussion on
wether the changes were indeed so profound, as they seemed at a time.

5. 2 Remembering the USSR in the 1990s

Red curtains, busts of Lenin, old-fashioned furniture, pioneer uniform on waitresses and
waiters mixed with “kotleta-po-kievsky” (meat bolls kiev style – in English), Russian salad
and eggs with mayonnaise comprised a “cocktail” of soviet restaurant kitsch appeared in the
1990s and 2000s. Many of these places seized to exist long time ago, many of them still exist
a new ones opened just recently during work on this dissertation. I suggest focusing on one of
the first restaurants, which opened in the middle of the 1990s in Moscow.
What makes Petrovich interesting case to look at is its function both of a lieu de memoire,
where collective memory was produced through material objects and of a new public space,
which created and strengthened many informal networks. At the same time, I believe that this
restaurant comparing with many others “nostalgic” places, becomes a good example of
“reflective nostalgia”, directed not towards purely commercial purposes but by the intention
to remember and conceptualise the past.

5.2.1 History of restaurant Petrovich

In 2001 journalist Ekaterina Drankina wrote in the magazine So-obschenie a praising

article that described a restaurant-club called Petrovich in Moscow, which shortly after
opening in 1997 became well known and loved for its conceptual so-called “nostalgic”
cuisine, design and friendly atmosphere.
The foundation of the restaurant was a rather chaotic enterprise. One of the founders,
Aleksey Sitnikov remembers that everyone had to do something, to invest a little bit, to help a

81
little. 25 The founders of the restaurant had to activate their networks in order to make the
project come true. Initially, the idea of the club did not seem to be commercially viable, and
the founders just hoped to at least get back what was invested. 26 Finally, the good spot was
found, but it demanded some long and tedious work: dirty basement, trash-to-ceiling since the
previous century, beams and rails with huge bolts that protruded from the walls needed to be
taken care of, but in the end were just painted over. To create a cosy, almost family
atmosphere, it was decided to hire non-professionals to cater. This strategy has worked: the
staff was enthusiastic people who really cared for the place and their work.
In 1997, when the restaurant finally opened its doors to visitors, newly rich Russians could
feel rather bewildered and confused to find out that this place being so poorly decorated
(some thought that the owners did not have enough money to buy new “good” furniture and
put table clothes on the tables) could attract so much attention in press and among Moscow’s
sophisticated public. 27
Indeed, in this place one cannot find two similar chairs: they are all different and seem to
be collected from old country houses and apartments. Besides chairs of different types, one
can examine photos of Brezhnev and Gagarin on the walls, ancient radio sets, an accordion,
piles of magazines, a black and white television set, an odd-looking phone, numerous signs,
and old photos and documents. If they wish, visitors can take from a shelf Virgin lands by
Brezhnev, Proceedings of the XXII Congress of the Communist Party or Spark magazines
(Ogonyek in Russian) of those days and read them for pleasure, as well as play board games.
“The caricatures, music players, sewing machines, bureaus, hangers with clothes of that dear
time – all these objects dear to the Soviet person [italics mine] – make this interior alive
(http://www.iddosug.net/articles.php?rubr=7&art=2372&cat=1&cur_num=79, translation
mine).
This was a place that could be easily called “home”.

25
from the official website: http://www.club-petrovich.ru/rus/about/history_sitnikov/.
26
from the official website http://www.club-petrovich.ru/rus/about/history_bilgo/.
27
In the 1990s the culture of going out was restricted only to the ones with money, the new rich who managed to
earn from dubious privatisation schemes and shady businesses. The rest were too preoccupied with making the
ends meet and hardly managed to stay on the surface, just on the poverty level. The economic crisis of 1998 ate
up all the savings and salaries of most people, leaving them without means of existence. Dining out was not on
their priority list at that moment. Thus, the only people who could afford eating out were the new oligarchs and
the emerging elite, notably people involved in communication and journalism, who were involved in content
production for TV, news and popular media corporations (see Afisha, 300, July, 2011).

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5.2.2. Materialised memories in Petrovich

After the fall of the Union Russian markets were flooded with “modern” Western objects,
which for many represented new life and modernity. To posses and to use things inherited
from the Soviet Union all of a sudden became dull, and people, who did so were considered
un-modern. The whole country was going through “modernising” period, when apartments
and institutions were renovated according to European (read modern) standards (so called
evroremont, renovation European style). At this point of time unpopular, unfashionable and
non-modern Soviet past was doomed to end up on the garbage pile, while newness (present
and future) were seen as a move towards Western both in socio-economic, political sense and
in terms of consumer culture.
It was popular to talk about “transition” period of the East-block countries, including
Russia. 28 If the “transition period” in political sense implied the change from authoritarian
political model (Soviet, eastern) to democratic (western) model, then throwing away the
material objects inherited from the Communist regime and its rapid substitution with western
products (fashion brands, cars, electronic devices, wall paper, toilets etc) symbolises this
change.
Daphine Berdahl have spotted similar sentiments of capitalist “triumphalism” following
the fall of the Berlin Wall. She wrote that in united Germany easterners rejected their own
goods while embraced products produced in the West. Meanwhile, West Germans collected
“clumsy” East German products that embodied socialist industry failure. Western Gemans
saw Eastern Germans as ignorant and for being seduced by the fancy packaging of western
goods (Berdahl, 2010: 50). She described the situation similar to the one in Russia in the very
beginning of the 1990s: “eastern products had also disappeared, nearly overnight, from the
store shelves as West German distributors assumed control of the East German market”
(Berdahl, 2010: 50). If in united Germany, it were the West Germans, who became fascinated
with eastern German design and production, in Russia at that point of time, in the early 1990s
that were the Russians themselves.

28
Cox Michael. (1998) Rethinking the Soviet Collapse. Sovietology, the Death of Communism and the New
Russia. London and New York: Pinter; Carothers, T. (2002) “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal of
Democracy 13 (1), 6-21; Diamond, L. (2002) “Thinking About Hybrid Regimes”, Journal of Democracy 13 (2),
21-35.

83
 At the time of active disposal of the Soviet past, Bilzho passionately engaged into the
process of collection of the things “removed form their ordinary use. 29 And the reason why
Bilzho started to collect objects of the Soviet material culture was indeed, as he explained
himself, because this soviet materiality started to disappear from the everyday. He said that
around 1993, “all of a sudden the items of Soviet everyday life started to disappear: even the
ordinary thick faceted glasses were hard to find!” (Interview with Andrey Bilzho, 2011). In
the end the result of people’s forgetting or will to forget the materiality and life in the Soviet
Union was a rich material heritage thrown away to the garbage places ready to be collected
and preserved by someone, who suddenly saw its value and importance for the future.
The memories of the Soviet past, and therefore the objects that represent them, are selected
and collected according to their value in the private lives of their owners. Zooming on the
stories how all these objects made their way into the premises of the restaurant helps to
discover a valuable for the understanding of the contemporary Russian society practices of
memory. First, some of the objects were found in the garbage piles in Moscow courtyards.
These ones comprise the first category of rejected memories and past, which could not find
their space in the new life. Their owners had seen them as useless and ugly reminders about
the times, which had gone and ought to go into oblivion. They had been consumed and spitted
out on the streets, thus loosing any symbolic value for its former owners. Nevertheless it does
not mean that these objects lost their value per se: the owners of the restaurant had found
them, selected from the big mass of rubbish, and re-contextualised. This example shows that
discarded past for some became a valuable treasure for others, thus reflecting different
attitudes to the Soviet past and its materiality in Russia.
The second category is comprised of the objects bought at flea markets. These are
materialised memories of the owners, who do not need them anymore in the process of
construction of a new life. Nevertheless, they either understood the value of the objects or
admitted that someone could find them useful, or had difficulties to throw them away,
appreciating their good state or quality. These objects could also bring some small money to
their former owners. Even bigger money (though still not so big) the owners of the flea

29
I use Belk’s definition of the process of collecting as “the process of actively, selectively and passionately
acquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identical
objects or experiences” (quoted in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, Patricia
Spyer, Christopher Tilley (2006): Handbook of Material Culture, Sage. P. 535).

84
market stands/second hand shops could earn by selling them. This link in the chain, a seller,
also needed to value these objects to bother to sell them afterwards.
The third category is the objects, which were brought by their owners directly to the
restaurant. They also did not have a space in the new life, but the owners valued them and
wanted to find a good place for them, where they could start another life – almost as museum
objects and transmit memories, uniting people. Individual memories became a contribution to
the “pot” of collective memories. These materialised individual memories became essential
elements, which formed public lieu de memoire.
So, the processes to be observed in Petrovich are the one of changing of value and
formation of a collective memory through material objects. By putting discarded symbols of
soviet material culture in his restaurant, the owner questioned the categories of design objects,
material memories and their aesthetic value. By locating old teapot and newspapers
(Komsomol member-cards, heating elements etc) in the restaurant, Bilzho invested it with a
different meaning – the old tea pot was no longer a functional object, but it was an aesthetic
object.
When Baudrillard talked about Duchamp and his ready-mades he put the process of the
transformation of value in the hands of an artist, while the public had to accept it and was
forced to change its understanding of the categories. In the case of Petrovich, the owners
(artists and PR-managers) are indeed powerful actors in the process. They are initiators of the
space, where these objects can be preserved, and some visitors of the restaurant were inspired
by Bilzho to start thinking both about design and their attitude to the Soviet material culture
differently. Nevertheless, people themselves actively got involved in this process, and
Petrovich became a result of collective work, but not only a small group of owners. By
opening and decorating Petrovich the whole process was “set in motion a in which now
everyone implicated”, whereby soviet mass culture earned an aesthetic value and become
both objects of design and valuable part of identity (Baudrillard, 2005).
Objects collected in Petrovich construct how Soviet life is remembered or could be
remembered: coexisting in one place personal toys, consumer products, official statements
and newspapers speak for the interplay of individual and communal spheres of life, the
mixture of private and public identities. Petrovich interior and the whole atmosphere is woven
in a certain discourse of how the Soviet time is remembered: everything was there and life
was possible despite all odds.
So it happened that Petrovich collected an great number of various objects, which travelled
to modern Moscow from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in other words, the times when

85
the restaurants owners and frequenters were young. Both founders and guests belonged to the
same generational cluster of people born between 1950s-1980s, and therefore lived within the
frames of material culture of the previous decades.
Objects collected in Petrovich defy both easy and one-dimensional evaluation of the past
and linear chronological arrangements. The presence of these objects enacts and evokes
different times simultaneously forcing to conceptualise time as coexistence rather than
succession of epochs. The space of Petrovich is filled by the materiality of the 1950s, 1960s,
1970s and 1980s, which is not organised chronologically as in a real museum, but chaotically,
where all years are mixed together and not dated according to any linear time development.
The Soviet past exists simultaneously in this spatial setting though adhering to a kind of
associative logic. The associative logic works not through a year on the calendar, but through
an object: past time is visualised though a material object, which connects a viewer with
emotions linked to a certain period of time. Time perspective in Petrovitch is inverted
perspective: A visitor is looking through a key-hole into the pasts, which all exist there
simultaneously in all their complexities. On the surface, one can see the “print” of all these
various pasts in the form of identity (individual, group identity).
In this respect, it is important to search not for chronological development of time, but to
pay attention to the material objects and themes these objects bring up. These themes include
sport, space travels, tourism, music, summer life and summerhouse, fashions, school etc.
These themes will help to understand what time Petrovich and his guests exist in. That would
be the time of “nostalgia”.

5.2.3. Food experience as mnemonic practice in Petrovich

Besides the material side of Soviet everyday life, which incorporated objects taken from
past and put in a new contemporary context, and food, music also plays an important role in
the stimulation of the process of remembering. Because of its capacity “to evoke bodily
responses in different sensory registers: sight, taste, touch, and sound” food functions a
mnemonic device, which “facilitates the transmission of different cultural realities across
space and time” (Caldwell, 2006:100). Food at Petrovich with all its sensory effects of taste
and smell, is said to be prepared using traditional recipes (however, not everything on the
menu strictly comes from the Soviet Book about Healthy and Good Food), evoke if not
nostalgia, then tradition. However this food tradition has nothing to do with food served at

86
Soviet diners. It more recalls a memory of home made meals, warmth of the house, hearth and
communication in the kitchen, than poorly prepared and served food in the Soviet cantinas.
Indeed, a connoisseur of Soviet food culture, Andrew Bilzho and his partners offer to the
restaurant’s visitors an exciting combination of Soviet, Russian and European cuisine. 30 The
menu, which is presented in an old-fashioned office folder tied with shoestrings, includes the
gourmand’s hits of the Soviet era – chicken Kiev style, and herring under a fur coat, let alone
many other “dishes, which awake nostalgia”. Steak wrapped in bacon was called the
Lunokhod. 31 And how would you like an assortment of pickled and marinated vegetables
called Ambassador of the Soviet Union?

5.2.4. The Petrovichs

Unpretentious interior, selection of food and music influenced selection among potential
customers. If to take into consideration that during the soviet era music functioned both as a
centralising and unifying power, then its inclusion into the re-production of the lost memories
and identities of the time is necessary. Popular music of the Soviet times usually played
during late night discos, guitar poetry (bard songs), jazz evenings comprise the musical
repertoire of the Petrovich.
Most new Russians did not bother to enter because the Petrovich simply was “not cool
enough” for them: they did not want to sit at a table, on which there were no tablecloths. Thus
the interior became some sort of customer filter: “ordinary people” were not even interested.
And the ones who were interested belonged to a certain pool of people, the Petrovichs.
At this point it is relevant to introduce one of the most influential persons within the post-
Soviet memory culture, as was defined by my informants, Andrej Bilzho, the conceptual
manager of the restaurant. The artist and essayist Andrew Bilzho was born in Moscow. In his
youth, “inspired by books and films by Vasily Aksenov” went into medicine, became a
psychiatrist, and spent ten years at the Institute of Psychiatry. While being a student became
interested in caricature and started to draw “jokes on paper” for newspapers and magazines.
Since the early 90s the main cartoon character Petrovich gradually became very popular. 32
Bilzho recollects that the idea of creation of some sort of space “of” or “in the name of”
and “around” the cartoon character Petrovich was born in 1993 (interview with Andrew
30
In the hall Petrovich the Traveller, which opened a bit later due to the increased popularity of the club and
need to expand its premises, a visitor can expect a wide range of various cuisines form all over the world.
31
Lunokhod (In Russian: Луноход, or "Moonwalker") was a series of Soviet robotic lunar rovers designed to
land on the Moon to explore the surface and return back pictures to study. The programme was launched and
executed between 1969 and 1977.
32
Autobiography is available on-line at: http://www.snob.ru/profile/5135

87
Bilzho). At that time it was not yet clear what it should be: a club, a restaurant or a diner.
Bilzho noticed that the cartoon character Petrovich, whom he invented for the publishing
house Kommersant, was surprisingly warmly welcomed by people of all sorts, genders and
social classes (Bilzho, 2007). 33 Thus, the space of Petrovich emerged thanks to a fictional
character, as well as a person who shared and embodied the same cultural and historical codes
by means of communicating with other, similar characters.
According to Bilzho himself, “Petrovich is a scoop (sovok in Russian), he is our average
soul” (official website www.club-petrovich.ru/rus/about/history_bilgo/). In other words,
Petrovich became a collective image of the so-called homo sovieticus (Zinoviev, 1981;
Levada, 2000: 2002; 2003a; 2003b; 2004a; 2004b; 2004c; Gudkov, Dubin, Zorkaya, 2008), a
typical Soviet person, who possessed a whole range of characteristics, depicted by Bilzho in
his caricatures and books (Bilzho, 2007). These characteristics included relations with other
people, attitudes to material life and the Soviet state, physical and psychological
characteristics etc.
To become a member of the club every one, who comes to the basement becomes
Petrovich, and thus accept these commonly shared characteristics of homo sovieticus or
Petrovich. In a way this addition to the individual name of every member of the club becomes
a confirmation of belonging to a national generation group of really existing people with
similar, identifiable background, who were born and grown up in the USSR, and therefore
performed the same practices and grew up within authoritarian discourses, elaborated a self-
reflective and ironic attitude to themselves, to the country they lived and live in, to the past, as
well as share the same memories and attitudes towards material culture of that bypassed era.
One can also become Petrovich in absentia: the pantheon of famous sculptures of
Petrovichs include Vladimir Petrovich Mayakovski, Yuri Petrovich Gagarin and other persons
who for obvious reasons had no chance of attending the club in person, but were still
numbered among the ranks of Petrovichs. All of them were born and lived in this country,
were part of its history, shared the same pride in it and the same secrets.
An ironic attitude to Soviet time and its material culture, as well the impenetrable sense of
humour, indeed are necessary features one has to acquire if one wants to visit Petrovich. A
table might be next to the sign Klizmennaya or a wooden leg with the words Valya’s leg
written on it. Signs on the toilets, like “Petrovich, you are such a M” (for men: mudak in
Russian) and “Petrovna, you are yourself, such a ZH” (for women: zhopa in Russian), are

33
Kommersant publishing house was established in the 1990s in Moscow (for more information see Afisha, 300,
July, 2011).

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hard to decipher for young children. Bilzho himself describes Petrovich and the Petrovichs
who enjoy their time in his restaurant:

People see an old radio receiver, just like the one their grand mother used to have, an old
cigarette pack Soyuz-Apollo, and understand that we are partially constituted by these old items
and memories about them. Here, people good-naturedly laugh at kitsch and propaganda of that
time – this is an irony in the spirit of the Soviet intelligentsia’s kitchens, often the only place
where you could freely express your thoughts. (Andrew Bilzho, on-line)

There was yet another reason behind the foundation of this restaurant. This is how one of
the Petrovichs, Aleksey Sitnikov,34 remembers the beginning of the 1990s:

A sufficiently large group of people meet regularly to discuss the fact that the vast
community of consultants, humorists, journalists, and people who were professionally
engaged in media and communication, had no "their own" place to meet. Previously,
everybody gathered at the The Crew (restaurant Ekipazh in Russian), but eventually it
began to change, and then was actually closed for some reason. Nevertheless, everyone
in the group realised that "we must meet more often," and it was indeed in The Crew
that the idea of creating a new club was conceived. (Petrovich, official website)

In the 1990s people who used to meet in the private kitchens during the soviet period had
then need to find a space where communication between then could be continued. This lack of
communication in a cosy environment where people could satisfy their longing for
communicative practices in the familiar surroundings brought phenomenon of Petrovich into
life. To certain extend what was searched for is not only a space to meet, as it could happen
anywhere, in any pub or a restaurant, but a space, which could on the one hand serve as a
substitute for a cosy environment of the lost home, and on the other as a space where only an
exclusive group of people could enjoy each others company. Indeed, this sense of familiarity
and comfort could have been reached through familiar objects of the common past, which is
what the founders of the restaurant successfully accomplished.

Concluding remarks

Example of restaurant Petrovich reveals several important tendencies in attitudes towards

Soviet past. In the period when western goods were praised more than locally produced ones,

34
Aleksey Sitnikov was a co-founder of Petrovich, founder and president of the consulting group "IMAGE-
Contact", doctor of psychological sciences and professor.

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material culture of the late Soviet period became revisited. Revaluation of everyday objects
corresponded with opening of an “unofficial museum” of the late Soviet culture, where
various individual memories and histories from different decades were available at the same
time. It was both all-inclusive and exclusive at the same time: it unified unofficial stories
materialised in objects, but only united people, who felt the same about the Soviet past. It
created an identity, which contrasted “new Russians”, a class of nouveau riche emerged in the
1990s.

5.3. Remembering in theatre in the 1990s

At the same time (indeed in 1996) as Petrovich opened its doors for public, Moscow
theatre U Nitiskikh vorot (Nikitsky Gate in Russian) presented its new production Pesni
nashego dvora (Songs of our yard in Russian). Director Marc Rozovsky chose for the play
songs that “people, who understand, the ones, who remember” (Ezhik, 2008).
The play is performed every summer, when the weather is at its most. The action takes
place in the small, closed at all sides by low Moscow buildings theatre’s courtyard. This
unusual outdoor setting in the form of disappearing typical old Moscow yard and the songs of
the past brought the audience back in time:

when no matter what happened we could find moments to laugh carelessly in the transport, on
escalator, running barefoot on the warm puddles on the pavement. There was a time when we
empathized with all the oppressed, destitute, enslaved in the world, believing that we are
amazingly lucky to be born in our country. (Tissovskaya, online)

The crowd gathered for the premiere was of the most different social background, but it
did not stop everyone from plunging happily into the half-forgotten, gentle, twilight
memories. Audience sang, clapped, danced, drank, and snack [...]. From time to time Mark
Rozovsky would call: “Is not it time for us to wave a glass?”, which meant that it was the time
for a shot of vodka and some sandwiches. And then he carried the audience drinks and
sandwiches. A mediator of the play, who connected the stage and the audience, Mark
Rozovsky said that he wanted to “extend the dear moments of youth”, and keep the joy of
surging twilight memories, as well as “to forget the unjust vanity of earthly existence”
(Interview with Mark Rozovsky, 2012).

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 Press was ecstatic about the performance and described the play as “a very Russian play,
live human, touching, sentimental, which appeals to sensitive and compassionate heart”, in
which “nostalgic motives were sound absolutely for everyone” (Vash Dosug, 2004). Mark
Rozovsky, comparing this play with a television production Starie Pesni o Glavnom, which
came out at the same time, said that the songs in the play were not “the old songs about the
most important”, but the most important songs about the past. These songs, in his view
comprised an essential layer of Russian unofficial culture. They were written during the most
terrible times and were full of intimacy, melody and humanity. “This is what we were missing
out. These songs protected an individual, kept his/her personality (identity) intact” (Interview
with Mark Rozovsky, 2012).
This music had a power to unite people of different generations and generational clusters,
as well as of various social backgrounds. The ones, who did not find the performance
particularly enjoyable, usually were of a younger age, who felt disconnected and too far from
this culture, they found old-fashionable, as these songs sounded alien to them. 35 The rest of
the audience knew some of these songs and the stories behind them, which allowed collective
memory to be activated: from Stalin’s mass purges, concentration camps, prisons, to youth
summer camp songs, travels, the first love and the very first kiss. For these people music was
a medium through which both individual and collective memories were communicated, and
which allowed time and space travel.
Communal apartment, just like Moscow courtyard, became one of the main “characters” of
Mark Rozovsky play Pesni Nashey Kommunalki (Songs of Our Communal Apartment in
Russian). In this play the action took place in the walls of the theatre, in the staged communal
apartment. The same performance is repeated: actors presented the whole kaleidoscope of
various social characters sharing the same common space through musical performance.
These two theatre plays were not the only productions, where Soviet songs and “common
place” were reproduced. In 1995-1997 several regular TV programmes were broadcasted on
Russian television.

5.4. Soviet cultural memories on Russian television in the 1990s

35
See comments on on-line forum. Available here: http://www.teatr.ru/th/perfcomm-
view.asp?perf=1469&rep=0)

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 Disappearance of soviet era films and programmes during the short period in the 1990s
was compensated with their gradual return to Russian television landscape. Comedies of the
last decades of socialism and wartime films filled in broadcasting time. Meanwhile television
programs such as “Stary Televisor”, “Namedni: Nasha Era”, “Staraya Kvartira”, “Starie Pesni
o Glavnom” revisited Soviet history. All of a sudden amnesia turned into abundance of
memory. I suggest having a closer look at Russian television to trace representations of
socialist life in what is considered one of the most influential media channels since
perestroika (Zassursky, 1999). Is this the moment when alternative group changed to
dominant? Reached the dominant group via the biggest communicative medium?

5.4.1. Remembering the USSR in the TV-program Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha

Era

5.4.1.1.The story behind Namedni 1961-1991: the Nasha Era

The first episode of the program Namedni (in English Recently/Yestereve) by Russian
journalist Leonid Parfenov was aired on the Central Television’s Second Program in
November 1990. At the time the producer of the project was a company ATV, founded by
Anatoly Malkin in 1988. Initially, the genre of the program was an “information program of
non-political news of the week” (Snob, video on-line). The program did not last long: in early
1991 Parfenov was dismissed.
In October 1993 Parfenov, who had already started to work for the newly created
channel NTV, resumed the production of the program in its original version, and two years
later Namedni was even nominated for Teffy award as “The best program about art”.
On November 11, 1996 by the decree №1386 of the President of Russian Federation,
“On the stabilization and improvement of the quality of broadcasting the All-Russia State
Television and Radio Broadcasting Company NTV”, all NTV’s air time has been transferred
to the Fourth Television Channel, which lead to the dramatic increase of the audience of
NTV, and as a result since January 1997 NTV broadcasting net covered Western Europe, the
Middle East and North Africa (Petrova, Vorontsova, 1996, on-line).
In 1996 Parfenov again had changed the genre of the program from the “Information
Program About Non-political News Namedni” to the “Documentary Series Namedni 1961-
1991. Nasha Era (Recently/Yestereve, 1961-1991. Our Era in English), which was aired on

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March 1, 1997, at 22:40 on NTV. At the moment of the beginning of program’s broadcasting
in 1997 Leonid Parfenov became the producer-in-chief of the channel and remained at this
position until 1999.
The project was prolonged first until 1999, and then until 2004, thus covering few more
years including 2003. Even though, in 2001 the program changed its genre once again – this
time from the “documentary project” to “current affairs program”, Parfenov kept loyalty to
his previous idea – in the end of each year (until 2003) a special edition of the program, which
summed up the whole year, came out. On January 31, 2003 the program won the Teffy award
in the category “Information-analytical program”.
Despite being an evident successful year, 2003 was a difficult time for the program and
the NTV channel in general: after Nikolai Senkevich became general director of NTV the
working conditions has become tougher. 36 In 2004 the program was closed and Parfenov was
fired from NTV in the connection to the scandal around the program. 37
Nevertheless the idea did not die out completely and in 2007 Leonid Parfenov started
working on a new project still closely connected to Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha Era: a book-
album with the same title divided into five volumes, each representing a decade of the Soviet
period (initially the project included only four volumes, but then was extended and included
one more, the fifth volume). The basis for publication was built on the materials Leonid
Parfenov has collected with the help of friends, acquaintances, and many readers of his diary
in Live Journal. The book project contains a lot more information than it was in the TV –
program, both in terms of topics and space allocated for the each theme. I would date to
disagree with that. Even though in the books covered some topics, which have not been
touched upon I the series, the themes in the documentary are represented with more details
and sophistication.

5.4.1.2. Analysing Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha Era

The first circle of the program Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha Era 38 can be seen as an
encyclopaedia of Soviet life in the format of a TV documentary series. As any encyclopaedia,
Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha Era presents a rich mosaic of various information ranging from
global political news, survey of some local events relevant for (some) soviet citizens, glorious
36
This information can be found on-line: http://www.newsru.com/russia/09feb2003/parf.html, and
http://www.newsru.com/russia/31may2004/zelim.html.
37
This information can be found on-line: http://www.newsru.com/russia/01jun2004/parfenov.html.
38
There are 31 episodes in the programme.

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achievements in sport and culture, economic development and its subsequent evaluation, to
discussions of fashion trends, cultural events, popular films and TV-programs.
Apart of the narration of selected events and analysis of existing cultural trends, the
program also included experts’ opinions. Among the experts were Egor Gaydar (Soviet and
Russian economist, politician, commented on economics), Renata Litvinova (actress,
commented on culture) Tatyana Drubich (actress, commented on culture), Anatoly Strelyany
(writer, publicist, commented on agriculture and political reforms), Sergei Karaganov
(political scientist, commented on politics).
The presentation of information was interrupted by short (15-20 sec) video jokes – an
edited image of Parfenov was inserted in some official Soviet newsreels: Parfenov hunting
with Nikita Khrushchev, Parfenov and Forrest Gump in the White House, Parfenov translates
Mikhael Gorbachev’s talk for Reagan, Parfenov inside MIR space shuttle, Parfenov courts
and kisses Marilyn Monroe, Parfenov lights Castro’s cigar, Parfenov together with Leonid
Brezhnev at official ceremony.
Narration of serious political events and decisions was mixed with stories about seemingly
banal sides of everyday life: after a short presentation of a major political event or catastrophe
Parfenov started describing fashionable clothes or new consumer products, which suddenly
appeared in the stores of the Union at that particular moment in time. This construction of
subject sequences cannot be explained by logic of chronology: generally following the flow
of time, Parfenov sometimes breaks the chronological order when narrating the stories of a
year.
Provided that episodes usually started either with a retelling of a glorious achievement or
a short annotation to a film, which became symbolic during the era. Episodes usually ended
either with an annotation on a film, or a story about new fashions, or an important event
happened on the very last days of the year. However, sometimes an episode started with a
major event or a change, which occurred during the first months of the year. To illustrate the
selection of the topics, length allocated to each theme and their sequence, I suggest looking at
the first episode of the program.
The first episode reveals the core events of the year 1961 selected by Parfenov. The length
of the episode is 36 min 55 sec, which covers 23 topics, intro, and several bumpers and
announce of the next episode. Later the length of one episode will become longer: episodes
about the 1980s were about 45-60 min and include around 30 topics. The sequence of the
presented “topics of the year” in the first episode of the series is as follows:

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1. On January 1 a new monetary reform is introduced in the USSR. In the process of
denomination money of the old standard are changed in relation 1:1. Prices decreased
accordingly (approximately 40 sec.)
2. In February the dog Strelka, who travelled to space in August 1960, had 6 puppies (30
sec.)
3. “Corn – the queen of the fields”: In 1961 Khrushchev corn plantation campaign is at
its zenith (3 min. 30 sec.)
4. The Soviet film Chelovek – Amfibia is on (Human-amphibian in English) (1 min.)
5. Yuri Gagarin’s first space travel starts on 12 April (3 min. 30 sec.)
6. Floristic becomes a new hobby trend (40 sec.)
7. Stiletto heels are in fashion (1 min. 20 sec.)
8. The Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba begins and ends in April (2 min. 20 sec.)
9. Standard large-panel five-stories houses - khrushchevki – beat all building records (1
min. 20 sec.)
10. A star of the last Soviet operetta artist Tatiana Shmiga raises in 1961 (40 sec.)
11. Bratskaya GES gives the first electricity in November (3 min. 30 sec.)
12. End of construction of the Dvorets Sjezdov (Palace of Congress in English) (30 sec.)
13. Jumping records of the Soviet sportsmen Valerii Brumel’ (40 sec.)
14. The 22nd Communist Party Congress starts on October 17 (4 min. 40 sec.)
15. Stalin’s remains are removed from the mausoleum on October 31 (30 sec.)
16. Previously banned works of Ilija Il’if and Eugenii Petrov are published in five
volumes during 1961 (1 min. 20 sec.)
17. Rokotov’s illegal volute exchange criminal case starts in May and then ends with
capital punishment in July (1 min. 40 sec.)
18. The first meeting held of the Non-Aligned Movement on 1-6 September (30 sec.)
19. Clown Oleg Popov becomes the most famous Soviet clown (1 min.)
20. The only meeting between President John Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev on 3-4
July, Vienna (35 sec.)
21. Soviet song Khotiat li russkie voini? becomes popular (Do the Russians want war? In
English) (50 sec.)
22. The start of Berlin Wall erection on August 13 (3 min.)
23. Formation of the well-known artistic trio Vitsin-Nikulin-Morgunov (1 min. 20 sec.).

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 Answering questions about his decision to omit some topics and to include the others,
Leonid Parfenov claimed that it was the format of the TV- program that dictated the choice
and way of representation of the chosen material (interview, official website
www.namednitv.ru).
Namedni structures time of the basic syntactical level: the represented topics rest on linear
order of time, where some topics have to precede others. However, watching the program in
on DVD gives an opportunity to go back and forth while watching. The narrative of the year
has to unfold itself between the beginning of the year and its end. Taking into account that
narrative is a basic form for representing and comprehending the past, the present and the
future, the fact that episodes in the program are not always structured according to their actual
unfolding in the “real time” deserves attention. It happens so, that the handpicked events of
the year are represented according to the “logics of narrations” – which topics follow each
other more smoothly in terms of their topics, as in the example with the sportsmen and the
22nd Sjezd. In this sense the unfolding of narrative of the past events is constructed in such a
way that these events are made comprehensible for the viewer in terms of logical connections
between events.
It becomes clear that the amount of allocated time is not defined only by the political
importance or a political impact of the event, but also by the visual qualities of the
available/presented material and possibilities to converge Soviet newsreels with cartoons,
caricatures and other media genres. For example, highly criticized and long time despised
Khrushchev project to plant corn on the vast territories of the Union was presented both by
the official propaganda documentaries and propaganda cartoon, which only strengthen the
ironic effect produced by intonation and the comments of the narrator. Moreover the effect of
the comical was stressed by the simultaneous presentation of the documentaries, cartoon and
comments of Leonid Parfenov: the screen was broken into three smaller windows where two
documentaries and one cartoon illustrated the story about Khrushchev’s project.
This way of representation together with gritty comments of Parfenov and then
subsequent biased commentary of Anatoly Streliany represented the political initiative and its
implementations as a major failure. Indeed corn plantations became not only one of the most
discussed and ridiculed topic in the Soviet Union and built a basis for many political
anecdotes, but became a rich layer of the Soviet everyday culture and a symbol of a failure of
the agriculture reforms and incapability of the Soviet government to resolve problematic
situation the soviet state economics was.

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 Another example is the representation of the only meeting between President John
Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev on 3-4 July in Vienna (35 sec.). The meeting was discussed
not in terms of the importance of the discussions about escalating Berlin crisis, but presented
in terms of a drastic difference of looks of two heads of the states and their respective
partners, and could be suggestively interpreted as a difference between two political systems
reflected in the appearances of its leaders.
The first meeting held of the Non-Aligned Movement on 1-6 September (30 sec.),
according to its representation in the project had less significance that the formation of the
famous trio of soviet actors Georgy Vitsin, Yuri Nikulin and Yevgeny Morgunov (the length
of the episode is 1 min. 20 sec.), if to take the length of the each thematic episode as an
important measure of significance. No doubt, the latter topic is more powerful in terms of its
visuality because it includes many shots form the popular films and thus, I suggest, memory
stimulating. Even being acute as a political event the Non-Aligned Movement and its activity
might have not been remembered by the majority of the soviet population. While the films
with participation of these famous actors were so darling to all belonged to the last soviet
generation.

5.4.1.3. The last Soviet generation

Already in the discussion about restaurant Petrovitch, I have touched upon the question
of homo soveticus. 39 In the relation to Parfenov’s TV programme I find it important to
continue the discussion about the “last Soviet generation” and its characteristics. Parfenov
repeats in the beginning of the every episode: The project Recently 1961-1991. Our Era.
Events, people, situations, determined the style of life. It is something we cannot be imagine
without or even understood. 40
For Alexei Yurchak, the post-Stalinist period between the mid-1950s and mid-1980s
(roughly the same Parfenov presents in Namedni) is the period of the late socialism. This
period can be divided into two: the thaw (ottepel’), the shorter period of Khrushchev’s
reforms, and the stagnation (zastoi), Brezhnev’s period, with the Soviet intervention in
Czechoslovakia in the summer 1968 as a symbolic divide between the two (Yurchak, 2006:

39 Philisopher A. Zinov’ev wrote about homo soveticus for the first time in 1982. Zinovi’ev A. Sobranie
sochinenij v 10 tomakh. T. 5: Homo sovetikus. Moscow, 2000.
40 In Russian: “Проект Намедни. Наша эра 1961-1991.Cобытия, люди, явления, определившие образ

жизни. То без чего нас невозможно представить. Еще труднее понять.”.

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31). In Parfenov project this period is chronologically divided into three periods, each ten
years long (the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s).
According to Yurchak, “these two periods roughly correspond to two generations – the
older generation that is sometimes called the ‘sixtiers’ (shestidesiatniki, identified by the
name of their formative decade) and the younger group, here called the ‘last soviet
generation’”. 41 He claims that these people, who came of age during the 1970s and mid-1980s
shared the same “understandings, meanings, and processes of that period”, despite of their
social, gender, educational and professional differences, as well as ethnicity and language,
which in their turn provided “differences in the experiences of socialism by these people”.
Talking about these generations Yurchak finds it important to refer to the words of a Russian
philologist Marina Kniazeva, who

Pointed out, that generation of people, whom she calls “the children of stagnation” (deti zastoia
in Russian), unlike previous and subsequent generations, had no “inaugural event” around
which to coalesce as a cohort (1990). The identity of the older generations was formed around
events such as revolution, the war, the denunciation of Stalin; the identity of the younger
generations has been formed around the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike these older and
younger groups, the common identity of the last Soviet generation was formed by a shared
experience of the normalized, ubiquitous, and immutable authoritative discourse of the
Brezhnev’s years. (Quoted in Yurchak, 2006: 32)

Thus, the identity of these generations was formed around shared experiences produced,
but not necessarily defined by the structures and discourses of the authoritarian soviet state.
Indeed, these complex relations between the state and people comprise the field Parfenov tries
to map and communicate to the viewer, whoever she/he is, who tries to understand the
multifaceted fabric of Soviet identity.
The complexity of this identity is according to Yurchak hidden in the fact that the
majority of the population “collectively participated in the production and reception of
authoritative texts and rituals in the local contexts”, while at the same time they also were
actively engaged in creation of “various identities and form of living that were enabled by
authoritative discourse, but not necessarily defined by it” (Yurchak, 2006: 32). He argues that
this “complex relationship allowed them to maintain an affinity for many aesthetic
possibilities and ethical values of socialism, while at the same time interpreting them in new
terms that were not necessarily anticipated by the state – thus avoiding many of the system’s
imitations and forms of control” (Yurchak, 2006: 32).

41He continues that the last Soviet generations – “people who were born between the 1950s and the early
1970 and came of age between the 1970s and the mid-1980s” (Yurchak, 2006: 31).

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 Leonid Parfenov with means of TV documentary represents this complex relationship
between the official discourses and everyday practices of average soviet citizens. These
relationships can be seen on several levels: focusing on materiality of life, zooming on private
and intimate circle of communication and non-political topics, developing sarcastic and ironic
approach to everything that happens in the surrounding environment.
One of the leading narratives fully developed by Parfenov in the episodes representing
the 1960s and the 1970s is a quiet, but relentless pursuit of the soviet citizens of their private
space and material property in the times of economic mobilization. The series show a clear
line of the building of a human material paradise for the members of the soviet population.
Among the very first “treasures” are: a private apartment, a car, a deodorant, toilet paper –
small but pleasant examples of improving life conditions. Indeed to move into a private flat
after years of living in communal apartments (mainly this was the case in Moscow and
Leningrad) was easily one of the greatest events for many Soviet people after the War ended –
finally a soviet citizen could shield her/his private life in a closed intimate (but rather large
according to the standards – max three room flat of 45 sq.m.) space. People could start
building “communism in one’s own apartment” by managing to get something somewhere,
listening to the “voices” (Western radio programs), gossiping about Politburo, raising
children. This was exactly the time when in the quiet privacy of small kitchens (standard
kitchen was 5,5 sq.m.) previously mentioned “kitchen conversations” became possible.
With not too demanding job and low labour productivity people could create much time
for their leisure, a great culture of private life of the last decades of the Soviet rule. This
culture is comprised of popular comedies with Vitsin, Morgunov and Nikulin, news about
sport achievements and treasure hunts after new high heeled shoes, and as equally important
for the construction of the soviet person’s identity as suffering, deprivation, repressions and
lack of freedom.
Yurchak called for the importance of the analysis of the Soviet system in all its
complexity and with existed paradoxes in order to explain today’s phenomenon of Post-Soviet
nostalgia. He wrote:

Everyday reality of “normal life” (‘normal’naya zhizn’) was not necessarily equivalent to “the
state” or “ideology”; indeed, living socialism to them often meant something quite different
from the official interpretations provided by state rhetoric.
An undenianable constitutive part of today’s phenomenon of “post Soviet nostalgia,” which is a
complex post-Soviet construct, is the longing for the very real humane values, ethics, friendship,
and creative possibilities that the reality of socialism afforded – often in spite of the state’s

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 proclaimed goals – and that were as irreducibly part of the everyday life of socialism as were
the feelings of dullness and alienation. (Yurchak, 2006: 8)

Yurchak suggested looking at the Soviet society of the late socialism by applying the
concept of vnye, a particular relation to the system, where one lives within but remains
relatively “invisible”. Yurchak insisted on shifting from “pro/anti dichotomy in relation to
authoritative discourse”, as the performative acts adopted by many soviet citizens do not fit
this binary oppositional structure. Instead, he suggests paying attention to the practices, which
are not explicitly involved with authoritative discourse, as they are considered uninteresting
and irrelevant. As a result, people replaced “Soviet political and social concerns with a quit
different set of concerns that allowed one to lead a creative and imaginative life” (Yurchak,
2006: 132). 42
Yurchak believed that the more extreme examples of living vnye “are sometimes
described as internal emigration (vnutrenniaia emigratsia in Russian) (Yurchak, 2006: 132).

This powerful metaphor, however, however, should not be read as suggesting complete
withdrawal from Soviet reality into isolated, bounded, autonomous spaces of freedom and
authenticity. In fact, unlike emigration, internal emigration captures precisely the state of being
inside and outside at the same time, the inherent ambivalence of this oscillating position.
Although uninterested in the Soviet system, these milieus heavily drew on that system
possibilities, financial subsidies, cultural values, collective ethics, forms of prestige, and so on.
The metaphor of internal emigration may apply less to other, less extreme but still related
examples of this lifestyle, when one is actually quite involved in many activities of the system,
but nevertheless remains partial to many of its connotative meanings <…>. In these more
widespread cases the metaphor of internal emigration perhaps might be adapted to refer to
certain dispositions and relations – for example, as emigration from the constative dimension of
authoritative discourse, but not from all meanings and realities of socialist life. (Yurchak, 2006:
132-133)

One of the strategies of living vnye is to be ironic about events, practices, and
discourses. Ironic attitudes were constantly present in soviet times in the forms of jokes,
which were constantly retold by soviet citizens. Andrei Bilzho has also mentioned irony as a
strategy or attitude to the past in relation to the discussion about his restaurant Petrovich.
Leonid Parfenov also uses irony when talking about epoch, which went into oblivion.
For example, the story about new fashion on stiletto heels, narrated in a slight joking
manner by Parfenov, contains elements of irony:

Physicists - the main authority era - have calculated that the pressure exerted on the surface by
the female foot on heels is higher than the pressure of elephant’s foot. <…> Press reports the

42
Introducing concept of living vne, Yurchak refers to M. Bakhtin concept of vnenahodimost.

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 incidents of stopped escalators of Moscow and Leningrad undergrounds because stiletto- heels
getting stuck. (Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha era, episode 1, 1961)

The commentator to the scene Renata Litvinova in a characteristically languishing but

serious manner explains the significance of the new footwear for fashions of the 1960s and its
place in the wardrobe of any Soviet lady.
Another example is very enlightening. The story about one of the greatest constructions
of the Khrushchev era – about Bratskaya GES Parfenov concludes with the following phrase:
“later on Angora river Ust-Ilimskaya and Boguchanskaya GES will be built, and the
following saying will become very popular: The further into forest the more GES. In Russian
original it goes: Chem dalshe v les, tem bolshe GES, which is a remix of a well-known
saying: Chem dalshe v les, tem bolshe drov, and approximately means: the more one gets into
an affair the more troubles faces on the way.
Effect of sarcasm and irony is achieved not only by the use of remade old refrains and
sayings, which sound funny in the context of narration, but also by the serious and
monotonous voice of Parfenov himself and commentators, as well as choice of biased
language. Moreover the effect is strengthened by the temporal and emotional distance the
journalist and the commentators have to the presented information. They cast their evaluative
comments and explanations thirty-eight years after the retold events took place, knowing that
the discussed time has passed and the results of taken actions and activities are available to
public knowledge.
Some episodes such as one about Bratskaya GES or another about the Bay of Pigs
Invasion of Cuba are enriched with contemporary images of the discussed places: Leonid
Parfenov travels to the GES and walks down the beach of the Bay of Pigs, thus witnessing the
places the important historical events happened. On the one side this pilgrimage creates
connection between now and then, emphasising the end of then: sudden change from black
and white images to colour film where images of erected monuments, abandoned buildings,
and playing children stress the fact that the old times have passed and the new times have
already started.
This irony can create a different affect. A user of the official website of Leonid
Parfenov Alexander wrote on July 18, 2011 at 17:43: “The program ‘Namedni’ helps to shake
up own memories of past life. When watching this program sometimes a feeling of nostalgia
for the happiest years of life rises. Thank you very much, Leonid!” (from
http://leonidparfenov.ru/namedni/). Another viewer of the program, Olga (born 1960s,

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engineer during the Soviet times, now housewife) expressed in the interview after watching
ten episodes about the 1980s: “After watching this program my nostalgia about the Soviet
times decreased. We felt good about the future then. And now I am confused, feel ashamed,
not proude. He [Leonid Parfenov – Ekaterina’s comment] tells about achievements with
sarcasm, and you see muffs, blatant errors, madness (a good word!). Something seems to be
dull, barbarian […] . We were producing rubbish. Whatever he tells about our achievements
sounds like we were sick. Perhaps it is because we were so brainwashed” (June 3, 2012,
Stockholm).

5.4.2. Collective Remembering in Staraya Kvartira

5.4.2.1. Staraya Kvartira in the nutshell

Parallel to Parfenov’s TV-show Namedni, another federal channel broadcasted

programme Staraya Kvartira, which also took its guests and viewers to the time travel.
It is said on the website of the ATV company:

Staraya Kvartira is a program, where, in the form of a spectacular play, the life stories of Soviet
and Russian ordinary people, whose destinies were intertwined with the great and small,
dramatic and comic events of our country are told. Each program is a slice of our history, taken
year after year since 1947. Memories of participants and witnesses of various events, the
simulation with all the details of everyday life of some of them (events) on the territory of
Staraya Kvartira, help to reveal the content of this or that year under review. As the participants
of the program are prominent political figures, artists, writers and poets, sportsmen, as well as
ordinary citizens, who are relevant to the discussed events. In the program melodies and
rhythms, songs and poems of recent years, performed by famous singers, composers and
ensembles are played. A special role in the revival of nostalgic memories of viewers belongs to
the anchor of the program, the head of the theatre Letuchaya Mish’ Grigory Gurvich and its
author Viktor Slavkin and archivist E. Horoshevtsev.
(www.atv.ru/programs_atv/archive_tv/old_apartment/)

The TV show Staraya Kvartira (The Old Apartment), broadcasted on the Russian
Television in 1996 – 1999, was produced by the ATV company and its president and general
producer Anatoliy Malkin. 43 In 1998 Staraya Kvartira was awarded Teffy award in the

43
ATV Productions (Copyright television – in English, ATV) is the oldest in Russia independent private
television production company. It was created in the Soviet Union in September 1988, and in September 1989
for the first time aired its own cycle of periodic program (Press Club). Since then it produced programs for
Channel 1 Ostankino (later renamed into the ORT), 4-th channel Ostankino (later - the NTV), TV-6, REN TV,
TNT and DTV, as well as Russia-1, TV Center, Russia-K (chanel Culture), Carousel. Since 1994 Anatoly Malkin
is its president and general producer.

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nomination “The Best Journalistic Program”. The same award was given to its author Viktor
Slavkin in the nomination “The Best Script” in 2000. In 2000 the program was awarded the
State Award. Later, the impact of the program was valued by its inclusion into the list of the
most important and symbolic programs ever broadcasted on Russian Television. Journalist
Svetlana Sorokina in Programma Peredach, a TV program about the most interesting and
influential TV shows and films, said that appeared in 1996 show Staratya Kvartira was
created to satisfy people’s nostalgic longing for the cosy atmosphere and warm relationship
existed in the “old communal apartments”. She said that the moment the TV show went on air
became an event of historical significance, even though Staraya Kvartira was not the only
program, where nostalgic sentiments were expressed (Programma Peredach, 06.07.2010)
The name of the program Staraya Kvartira refers to the space, where performance took
place, - an old communal apartment. The main characters of the show were the people, who
lived in that apartment and their guests, who came over to celebrate holidays and contemplate
about past time. The genre of the program is a scripted journalistic serial program”, a hybrid,
which combines many different genres: a musicale, a TV play, a documentary and an
entertainment show.
The studio of the program was divided into two parts: the stage, where invited guests
and anchors had discussions, and the audience hall, where spectators were sited. The stage
was decorated as an old apartment with respective zones: a dining room with old-fashioned
furnishing (included a sofa, a table, and a TV-set with a traditional lacy napkin) and a kitchen
(with a stove, a shelf with jars and an old sink), with “authentic” objects of the Soviet times
played an important role in the creation of the atmosphere.
Kitchen space was essential element of the studio. Discussions and judgements, quarrels
and celebrations, which took place in any Soviet kitchen, were reproduced or re-enacted on
the stage:

In Staraya Kvartira we had such times, and faced such characters, who demanded strict
evaluation. The problem was that we were not in court, but in an apartment, in the kitchen and
the tone of the conversation was supposed to meet these conditions. And Grisha was able to find
a middle ground between an outspoken symbol of their citizenship and compliance with the
laws of hospitality, which are binding for the landlord. (Viktor Slavkin, available on-line:
http://www.gurvich.ru/napolputi.php?id=32, translation mine)

As much as in restaurant Petrovich, where the chaotic collection of memories in their

material form functioned as a background for dining and spending time in the company of
good old friends; or in the theatre play Pesni Nashey Kommunalki, with kitchen as the central

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space, where events took place, the stage of Staraya Kvartira decorated with conspicuous
objects of the Soviet consumption culture, formed a space for active remembering and
dialogue between controversial memories. There was a special place on the stage, so called
“stool of remembering”, where invited guests were encouraged to sit down and reveal the
most secret and important memories. This connection of memories with objects and space
seems to play an essential role in the production of cultural memory of the Soviet times. Both
these categories connected with bodily experience of the time as well as with the creation of
atmosphere of the time through the decoration of space in the “fashions” of the remembered
period. The studio had to look on purpose a little bit shabby, because, according to Anatoly
Malkin, it was supposed to resemble a Soviet Palace of Culture (Dom Kulturi), and therefore
make the time travel more “tangible”.
The space of Staraya Kvartira made it possible to connect distanced historical and
present time spaces. The connection was initiated and made possible through the door with a
number of doorbells. Anchors invited the program’s guests on stage by ringing one of the
doorbells. In the soviet times one communal apartment was inhabited by many families, and
in order for a visitor to reach the right family (s)he had to ring the bell with the last name of a
family/person (s)he wanted to visit. In the program, the show takes place inside the communal
apartment, but the door the viewers and the audience saw was the outdoor with the bells.
Thus, through this door Staraya Kvartira was connected with other communal apartments
spaces: opening the door in Staraya Kvartira, an anchor opened to any communal apartment,
and therefore linked the events and experiences of one flat with many others. Many individual
lives framed by the living conditions of communal flats and shared experiences of the
Communist regime, comprised the complex carpet of the Soviet “unofficial” history. The
space, where private life was almost impossible, invoked the interest in the individual stories.
Indeed, as the producers claim, the central idea behind the program was to focus on
people and individual stories. A group of editors had the task of searching for interesting
stories and people, who could give their personal accounts on the events, discussed in the
program’s episodes (Interview with Irina Kemarskaya, 2012). One by one or in groups, guests
were invited onto the stage to present different versions of the same events. 44 The role of
anchors was to act as mediators – introduce guests, ask them questions and moderate the
debates by bring in controversial topics.

44
The group of 10-12 editors carefully selected guests for each episode. Every invited guest had to provide a
photo.

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 During the first years of the broadcasting time, there was one main anchor, Grigory
Gurvitch, who had the task of keeping the process of remembering going and retaining an
objective position. Later, due to various reasons, the second anchor became involved, and the
process of remembering all of a sudden took a different turn. Being of two different
generations and coming from families with different background and position during the
controversial Communist times, sometimes anchors expressed controversial interpretations of
the events, and, therefore, mirrored conflicting versions of the past. Presentation of individual
stories, ambiguous facts and their interpretations by different groups of people paved the path
for contemplation over the country’s official history. The complexity and multidimensional
representations had its goal to do justice and reconcile people, who shared different opinions
and versions of the past:

People who come to the stage, bring with them memories and unspoken secrets (words)
accumulated over the years.... Someone wants to defend himself, someone - to restore the truth.
And for me it is the most important element of the programme, the most important task – the
restoration of justice. Or at least that it replaces […]. There is something else – just everyday
life, years, and reconciliation. By the way, in the beginning I could not reconcile these and
those, the left and the right. Passion flared up and resentments surfaced, and spilled on the
screen. Especially when Staraya Kvartira lived through the 1930s, or the unforgettable 1953
[i.e. Stalin’s death]. For some it was a light, while for some it was mourning. And I realised that
it was impossible to reconcile. Much can be, but this cannot. (Gurvitch,
http://www.gurvich.ru/mr_holyday.php?id=15, translation mine)

At the same time, if to believe Anatoly Malkin, another reason behind the program was
to “restore” the image of life he lived himself. He was young in the Soviet Union, fell in love,
was happy and managed to realize himself as a creative individual, and, thus, believed that
there was a part of life that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union as such (Programma
Peredach, 06.07.2010). Therefore, the reason why the program was produced was his
personal interest, by not an official order from above. He wanted to tell history through
conflicting individual narratives as opposed to the grand narrative of official history, which he
considered to be false and manipulative (Programma Peredach, 06.07.2010).
The presence of the audience comfortably seated and observing the happening on the
stage occasionally taking part in the performance as “witnesses” also, in my opinion, had a
deep symbolic meaning. It illustrated the reality of the Soviet life: everything private was at
the same time public (Boym, 1994). Leaving in the communal apartment with neighbours
constantly eavesdropping and watching each other every step was a memory of many present
in the program. Yet because even in these conditions people could find some rare moments of

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privacy, the focus on private life became so essential for the authors of the program. 45 At the
same time, the choice of telling the history of the country through a collection of individual
memories was also a step of bringing justice to the account of the events and reconciliation
with those, whose memories were betrayed by the official narratives.
The format of the programme allowed for re-enactement of certain events in order to
give a live experience for the audience to try to comprehend the complexity and contestation
of attitudes and behaviours in those turbulent years. Vanessa Agnew wrote that “re-
enactment’s central narrative is thus one of conversion from ignorance to knowledge,
individualism to sociability, resistance to compliance, and present to past” (Agnew, 2004:
330). She argued that re-enactment potentially offers a kind of historical knowledge gained
through the bodily experience. Re-enactment ”emerges as a body-based discourse in which
the past is reanimated through physical and psychological experience” (Agnew, 2004: 330).
For example, in the programme on 1953 the audience was engaged into the re-enacted event
of Stalin’s funerals. As editor-in-chief of the programme told me, the effect was stunning, as
people could really feel the strength of the contradictory reactions and ambiguous emotions
and therefore to come closer to understand the overall hysteria in the Soviet Union during the
funerals of the dictator.
The leading anchor’s humorous improvisations smoothed and relieved some highly
problematic questions, giving a chance for communicative processes:

[Gurvitch] fully improvised within each plot, adding up to it and colouring it with his
humour, unexpected turns of thought, subtle philosophical remarks. Theatre, pop and literary
experiences were always at his disposal. Talking about the year 1948, we decided to replay, to
re-enact on of the most dramatic moments of the infamous session of Agricultural Science
committee, when Lysenko and his followers raided genetics. Just wanted to play out a few
pages of transcripts on the stage, and the audience was to serve the remarks “applause”, “cries
of indignation”, as well as shouts of “Long live Stalin!”… The difficulty was to explain it
clearly to the audience. And Grisha found in process a very short and clear formula: “To better
understand the time, try to instil a plague on ourselves”. Audience immediately perfectly
understood everything, and played a role. It was true that then after the obscurantist speech from
the podium ended with collective singing of “International”, it felt a little uncomfortable. But in
this situation was a result of “collective art therapy”, so to mark our experiment. 46

Among invited guests were known political figures, artists and actors, singers and
activists, famous TV personas and ordinary citizens – all of them became equal on the stage
of Staraya Kvartira. A soviet singer Edita Piekha (episode about 1957), through the narration
of her personal life during the period, which also included memories of her family starvation
45
Svetlana Boym wrote extensively about communal apartments in her books (1994, 2001).
46
Viktor Slavkin, Available on-line at: http://www.gurvich.ru/napolputi.php?id=32, translation mine.

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during the war, funny stories about living conditions and banalities of everyday life, and
memories of the neighbours in the communal apartment (which were no different from any
other ordinary story) made her figure of celebrity closer and more intimate for the
understanding of an average soviet and Russian citizen.
The process of unification and reconciliation was enhanced both by inviting the
audience to sing along with the guests and anchors and by symbolical meal-sharing, whether
it was some Vodka and buterbrod (sandwich in English) or champagne with candies.
In Namedni the main attitude was irony, while in Staraya Kvartira there is a complex of
attitudes towards presented events, which also included irony, but the irony was not the
dominating attitude. An important role in shaping of the relations towards the past and
individual stories is reserved for the anchor. In comparison with the star of Leonid Parfenov,
who himself became the centre of the program Namedni, Staraya kvartira starred an anchor,
who understood his task in bringing in focus people, their emotions and conflicted memories
they shared with the audience. His obscure, not attractive appearances and speech impediment
made him to look trustworthy so people wanted to reveal their secrets. His appearance made
him “normal”, a kind of a “guy next door”, a true anchor, initially without any distancing
celebrity aura. Grigory Gurvitch’s role as a mediator corresponds with the role of Mark
Rozovsky in both Pesni Nashego Dvora and Pesni Nashej Kommunalki theatre plays in terms
of his interaction with the audience.
The figure of Grigory Gurvitch was essential to the overall concept of the program
because of his personal involvement into the country’s history. His very individual approach
to the witnesses, genuine curiosity and profound knowledge about the events he was not part
of becomes an example for the young generations on how to manage past controversies to
build up the road for future success and development:

Grisha led discussions about the far away events as if he had witnessed them, and even took
part in them. And it was not only his broad erudition and education. As a true humanist, he
perceived history very personally, he knew that he, Grigory Gurvitch, a child to this history, and
everything that came before is a part of his biography, and has a direct relation to him.
Especially, what happened in the country where he was born. That is why he so enthusiastically
asked details about particular event, and people feeling that he is not indifferent to them and
their troubles and joys, became open and frank with him. 47

In my opinion, this programme serves as a good example of how in a media genre a

version of historical justice is brought up through the living witnessing and personal

47
Viktor Slavkin, available on-line: http://www.gurvich.ru/napolputi.php?id=32.

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testimonies. Despite of the existing script, which outlined the general sequences of presented
events and people invited to “testify”, the program was a live show, where the unfolding of
memories and events could take on unexpected turns. Moreover, by bringing together
different generations, the producers of the program marked a link between the past, present
and future. Older people shared their stories with those who were younger, leaving space for
questions and redefinitions.
This was achieved by asking people, who wanted to participate in the program to be
among audience, to come in dynasties: a grandmother should bring along her grandson. It was
decided that the audience should be diverse and include all possible ages. If the focus of
Namedni was to learn about the events, which shaped the last Soviet generation, the Staraya
Kvartira apart of having the same aim, also tried to establish a live dialogue between
generations.

5.4.3.2 Time in Staraya Kvartira

The first year to be remembered in the program was 1947. Anatoly Malkin explained
that the reason to start with that year was two-folded: first, he was born in 1946 and it seemed
logical to him to start the narration after his own birth. Second, it made sense not to touch the
topic of the World War Two to avoid repetitions of existing representations of the war events.
Meanwhile, Viktor Slavkin explained the choice of the first year by arguing that starting from
1947, when the monetary reform and abolition of rationing system were launched, the soviet
people could finally feel that the transition from military to civilian way of life started, and
therefore it made sense to begin narration with a story about new life. 48
Each episode presented one year. However, after a while it became clear that all
collected and filmed material did not fit into one-hour episode, and it was decided to split
material into two parts (Interview with Irina Kemarskaya, 2012). Unfolding of time in the
programme followed calendar year: each episode started with a celebration of a New Year,
and then following events were introduced.
In the beginning of the programme guests, anchors and the audience were drinking
champagne, celebrating and cheering for the upcoming year. It was followed by documentary
newsreels and reading of Pravda newspaper. Topics for collective remembering in the
program were selected by its screen-writer Viktor Slavkin, who revealed that he had to study

48
This interview is available on-line at: www.peoples.ru/art/theatre/dramatist/slavkin/

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all publications of a Soviet magazine Ogonyek to choose topics and to create some sort of a
portrait of a year, which included themes varying form politics, technology, twist dance, and
fashions, - everything, which in his opinion, comprised the drama of life, where banality and
tragedy coexisted together (Interview, Slavkin, available on-line). In its ambition to review
different sides of the Soviet life, the representation of the epoch is somewhat similar to the
one presented in Namedni: not only politics, but also trivialities of life were under scrutiny of
the anchors and the viewers.
Being restrained by the time, the program’s makers had to omit many important topics.
This explained why the intended last 1999 New Year episode in fact did not become last, and
the program went on air again the following year in its new version. Starting from 2000 the
TV show changed its name and became Novaya Staraya Kvartira (The New Old Apartment).
If the first version offered its viewers to time travel into different years (one year in one
program), in the new version of the program it was indeed not year as the main focus, but a
certain date, to which certain events were connected. One of the major changes that happened
was the total absence of the audience in the studio, which reflected the transformation of the
whole concept of the program – from collective remembering to an entertainment programme
on history. In the new version the “hosts” moved into a “private apartment” and invited guests
over.
As an illustration of how the program was scripted and how chosen topics were
presented, I suggest analysing in details one of its episodes. I have chosen 1989 because of its
significance in the fall of the communist regimes around Europe and the events, which cause
the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The episode is divided into two, and was shown over the
period of two weeks. The themes presented in the episode and the time allocated to discussion
of each topic is the following.
Part 1
1. Celebration of the 1989 New Year Eve in Dom Kino (Cinema House, in English). The
show starts with a sketch show, Kapustnik (approximately 5 min.)
2. Presentation of the guests (2 min.)
3. Emergence of cooperatives as a new economic activity (10 min.)
4. The end of Afghan war (30 min.)
Part 2
5. Short Introduction (2 min.)
6. Fall of the Berlin wall (12 min. 30 sec.)

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 7. Mezhregionalnaya Deputatskaya gruppa (Deputee group, in English) and Svyatoslav
Fedorov (5 min. 35 sec.)
8. Vtoroj Syezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR (The Congress of People's Deputies of the
Soviet Union, in English) (12 min. 35 sec.)
9. Death of Andrei Sakharov (7 min.)
10. Review of other events (4 min.)

If in Namedni, each remembered topic got between 30 sec. and 5 min., in Staraya
Kavrtira time allocated for each theme is more significant.
In the introduction the anchor told about the change in the status of Dom Kino, which
turned from a place for an ordinary place into the centre of democratic life, where people like
Yeltsin and Sakharov held their talks and Mezhregionalnaya Deputatskaya gruppa had their
meetings. Because the episode started with the celebration of New Year, everyone got a glass
of champagne to rise while listening the history of Kinokapustnik (short comedy sketches,
usually a short collection of cinematic episodes with commentaries – Ekaterina’s comment).
Talking about censorship on television, film director (kinodramaturg) Arkadii Inin mentioned
that there was less censorship in 1989, than at the time that episode of Staraya Kvartira was
on air: “It is a legend that censorship disappeared” (Staraya Kvartira, episode about1989: 3
min. 25 sec.), thus providing parallels and comparing the previous epoch with 1999. Because
a large screen was placed above the stage, audience could enjoy screenings of short shots
from films and documentaries, if they were available. Episode with Kapustnik story was one
of such examples, when the space of Dom Kino enhanced the experience of remembering of
cinema visit.
The program producers took full advantage of historical re-enactment as a method,
which, facilitated the act of emotional connection with and understanding of the epoch under
scrutiny (Agnew, 2004). The story about the first cooperatives was told with elements of re-
enactment: the stage was decorated as a small coffee place called Staraya Kvartira, with
waiters buzzing around. The anchor in a half-ironic, half-serious manner discussed with a
“shark of capitalism” myths and realities of the first legal private business in Russia. While
entertaining conversation unfolds in time, another re-enacting performance enters the scene: a
middle-aged man is trying to sell out counterfeited jeans to the audience. Audience reacts with
laughter, and camera tries to capture many individual expressions and affirmations. Smiling
and nodding people confirm that the re-enacted story is true.

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 After funny story about the first private business initiative, the anchor changed topic to
the more ambiguous and sad history about the Afgan war. With the moment of
commemoration of those who have never come back from Afganistan and short newsreels the
theme was introduced. General Boris Gromov, who, according to the official statements, was
the last Soviet soldier leaving Afganistan, brought up both the pain of disappointment and
losses of millions of Soviet people, and pride and courage of the soviet soldiers. Indeed, the
heroism of individual soldiers was compared with the inability of the state officials to commit
to the war. The loss of memory and refusal to remember the young boys died serving their
country (or at least that was what they made to believe into by the official war propaganda)
became the leading theme of this episode. Invited on the stage the representatives of the
organisation Afgan Mothers, confronted the general’s words that no one was left on the Afgan
land. Crying on the stage, they criticized both the Soviet state and on-going Chechen war,
warning that the example of the Afgan war did not teach the country anything, and the same
mistake was repeated again. In order to commemorate the dead, the episode ended with a song
performed by Alexander Rozanbaum, who gave many concerts in Afganistan.
The second part of the episode started with the discussion of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
Accompanied with commentaries of the anchor, the newsreels showed to the audience the
events of 1989. Talking about the fall of the Wall in present tense, the anchor introduced two
witnesses, coming from the two confronting camps: a Russian advisor of the ambassador of
the USSR in Berlin Igor Maksimovich and ambassador of the Federal German Republic in
Russia, Ernst-Jörg von Studnitz. They gave their personal accounts of the events, agreeing or
disagreeing with popular myths brought about by the screen-writer, Viktor Slavkin, who was
also present on the stage. What I find essential in this discussion is the evaluation of the
events. During the discussion Maksimovich said: “The wall disappeared because citizens of
the GDR wanted the wall to go”, and not because of Gorbachev, who, according to
Maksimovitch, was just confronted with the fact. Keeping in mind that these words were said
in 1999, when it became evident that the process of democratisation and liberalisation of
political life in Russia turned into the cementing of authoritarian rule, these words should
have made people think about their own role in the political process in the country.
Ernst-Jörg von Studnitz strengthened his personal memories by sending around in the
audience material evidence, a piece of the Wall, a “silent witness of the biggest tragedy of the
20th century”. Meanwhile, ordinary people from the audience (both Russian and German
speaking!) also told about their stories of the events. While they talked, newsreels from Berlin
illustrated and confirmed their words.

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 The theme of standing up for freedoms and democratic changes continued in the next
two discussions: one about Mezhregionalnaya deputatskaya gruppa, an underground
democratic movement; and the second about Vtoroj Syezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR.
Introduced by the newsreel, an improvised re-enactment of a debare between two deputies,
Jurii Boldirev and Arkadii Murashev, went on about re-evaluation of political events and
decisions, happened in 1989 and their projection on Russia of 1999. In both episodes the
understanding of the then-contemporary political and social situation, reflected people’s
moods. Speakers and audience commented that they were all “naïve”, “idealists”, “dreamers”.
If the prevailing attitudes among the audience were hope, trust to the media, the government,
Yeltsin and the “democrats”, then in 1999 – loss of belief, disappointment and frustration. The
majority of the population by 1999 did not get the rights and possibilities they were promised
by the government, absence of civil society, mechanisms of control over the government,
while the representatives of the business world are forced to stay loyal to the regime out of
fear to loose their fortunes. A woman said that the talking in the audience about her memories
of her participation in the demonstrations, made here to re-live the same emotions and feeling
of hope. The same strategy of re-enactment of a historical moment is used in the last episode
of the year - the death of Andrei Sakharov (December 14). The anchor and Anatoly Shabat sat
on the stairs of the stage like people were sitting on the staircase of Sakharov’s house. A short
newsreel about major cultural events rounded up the story about 1989. The Soviet period was
about to end.

5.4.3. Remembering in Starie Pesni o Glavnom

5.4.3.1. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 1

Starie Pesni o Glavnom (The Old Songs about the Most Important, in English) was a
series of music television shows, broadcasted on New Year Eve on the First Russian TV
channel in the 1990s. One of the originators of the entertaining show was journalist Leonid
Parfenov (whose project Namedni Nasha Era I have already discussed) with Konstantin Ernst
as the main producer. Four freestanding musical episodes starring famous pop-artists were
comprised of the popular songs of the 20th century. Three first episodes presented different
decades of the USSR, while the last one rounded up the 20th century.
Starie Pesni o Glavnom (Leonid Parfenov and Konstantin Ernst, 1995), the first
episode, can be viewed as an alternative version of the after-war period. It had many

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similarities with a genre of patriotic musical, such as The Cossacks from Cuban' or Volga,
Volga, one of Stalin's favourite genres. “It offered comic relief but at the same time helped to
naturalize ideology, presenting old cultural heroes in new ideological trappings” (Boym,
1995).
It started with a non-diagetic male voice presenting the main characters (a teacher, a
sales lady in the village store, a young couple in the boat, a head of the village, a group of
farmers etc.) and pointing out (using present tense), that there were many villages, where life
went on quietly and calmly, people lived in harmony and love and sang songs, because “the
soul demanded it”. This dream-like utopian village looked outstandingly fake, while village
dwellers behaved and appeared too emotional and exaggeratedly sincere and in love. Fairy-
tale looking houses, clean village roads, fake trees and bushes created gave away studio
settings.
Any traces of story line were absent: songs followed one by one, with short breaks
reserved for some banal small-talks, which introduced the next scene and a song. The songs
narrated love and life stories – “the most important”. Every scene included one or more
characters, who played the roles, reserved for her/him in the story of the song. The length of
each scene equalled to the length of a song plus a short talk between the characters (i.e. 3 – 4
min.). The songs selected in this episode were mainly of post-war origin, however, pre-war
and wartime songs and melodies were included as well. The genres varied from traditional
folk and blatnie pesini [prison folklore] to and popular film songs of the 1940s – 1950s.
Among film songs were the ones from Bolshaya Zhizn (Big Life in English, Lukov, 1939,
1946 (released in 1958)), Raznie Sud’bi (Different Fates in English, Lukov, 1956), Kubanskie
Kazaki (The Cossacks of the Kuban in English, Pir’ev, 1949), Devchata (The Girls,
Chulyukin, 1961), Aleksander Parkhomenko (Lukov, 1942).
Thus, the episode was comprised of a number of small genre scenes illustrating each song
– a couple in a boat, a prisoner coming back home, a car-driver on the way home etc., farmer
boys in the fields. Together theses scenes created a portrayal of a day in a village, which
ended with a big feast, where all characters gathered together at the dinner table, happily
singing.

5.4.3.2. Starie Pesni o Glavnom Episode 2

The second episode Starie Pesni o Glavnom 2 (Leonid Parfenov and Konstantin Ernst,
1996) explored another decade of the Soviet past, the 1960s. If in the first episode, the

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“events” took place in the summer and portrayed an “ordinary day of the Soviet citizens”, this
episode was intentionally connected to the celebration of the New Year, and therefore set the
format for the following musicals. Comparing to the first episode, Starie Pesni o Galvnom 2
was created to resemble a very popular in the Soviet time program broadcasted on New Year
Eve, Novogodniy Goluboy Ogoniok (1962-1985). 49 This connection to the existing prototype
set the frames of this musical. The interior of the studio, the format, even some of the jokes
(for example, Che Gevara and his mate, present in the beginning of the episode, referred back
to the 1962 episode of Goluboy Ogoniok, where a singer Iosif Kabzon dressed as Che Gevara
performed a song Kuba Liubov Moia, Cuba my love in English), and sketches resembled this
dear to many soviet people program.
The program indeed reserved a significant place in the soviet popular culture. As Julia
Larina has put it:

This TV program [Goluboy Ogoniok] brought together a large country, even in

those years when it had nothing in common. General secretaries and presidents
followed each other, and it [the program] remained. There was Goluboy Ogoniok,
which was indeed popularly elected. Actually, its history is a history of the Soviet
Union and Russia. (http://www.ogoniok.com/4926/2/) Gurvitch,
http://www.gurvich.ru/mr_holyday.php?id=15,

The second episode of the musical of Starie Pesni o Glavnom was divided into two parts:
one episode was shown before on December 31, and second - after the clock struck twelve.
This format of dividing into two reminded about Novogodniy Goluboy Ogoniok from 1964,
which also was halved and shown before and after twelve. The studio of the program was
decorated to resemble the studio of Goluboy Ogoniok, while its exterior looked familiar to so
called Television Theater, where Goluboy Ogoniok was filmed before it was moved to
Ostankino. 50
Many scenes featured a typical Moscow (or any other soviet city) courtyard, with a yard
keeper (dvornik), who knew all residents of the houses around. As much as the previous

49
For episodes of Goluboy Ogonek see http://cccp.tv/video/Goluboj_Ogonek_36/ . The program known as a
Televisionnoe kafe was broadcasted for the first time in 1962. Later this program was aired under Na Ogonek, Na
Goluboy Ogonek, Goluboy ogonek. In the bginning of its history, the program was broadcasted every week. With
time it was only shown on public holidays, and Novogodniy Goluboi Ogonek – on New Year Eve. During
Perestroika time, the format of the New Year’s Eve programs changed. In the 1990s the program was revived
again (http://www.ogoniok.com/4926/2/).
50
According to the authors of online encyclopedia of the Soviet architecture, so called Dvorets na Yauze
(Palace-on-Yauza, in English), formerly known as Dvorets Kulturi Elekrtolampovogo Zavoda, was based on the
previous building constructed in 1903 on the same spot, namely Vvedenskii Narodnii Dom (Ivanov-Shitz, I.A.).
Existing interiors and exterior were build according to the architectural plans of Efimovitch B.V. (Romodin
Denis, from http://www.sovarch.ru/catalog/object/343/).

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musical, Starie Pesni O Glavnom 2 featured popular songs, this time from the 1960s: “Liubliu
ja Makaroni” (“I love macaroni”, in English, Yulii Kim), “Lada” (Shainskii, Pliatzkovskii),
“Nezhnost’” (“Tendernes”, in English, Pakhmutova, Grebennikov and Dobronravov, 1965),
“Nash Sosed” (“Our neighbour”, in Enlgish, Potemkin, 1968), “Ja tebja podozhdu” (“I will
wait for you”, in English, Ostrovskii, Oshanin, 1963), from the popular films of that period,
both Soviet and Western: the soundtrack from French film Un Homme et Une Femme,
Passazhir s Ekvatora (A passenger from Equator in English, Kurochkin, 1968). This time, the
episodes from the soviet popular films were used to create a number of short scenes and to
introduce songs, as well as the episodes from Goluboy Ogoniok itself. For example, “Techet
reka Volga”, the song, which was performed by Mark Bernes in 1963 on Goluboy Ogoniok
(from the film Reka Volga, Segel, 1962), was also performed in this episode. This time the
singer was a well-known Russian pop-star of the 1990s. Starting with this episode, many
well-known catch phrases, originating from popular films and television programs, are used
by the main characters in the conversations.
There was a block of scenes from a popular 1960s soviet TV-show Kabachok 13 Stuliev
(Club 13 Chairs in English) in the second half of the musical. 51 Besides the usual participants
of Kabachok, Nataliia Selezniova, Olga Aroseva, Mikhail Derzhavin, Rudolf Rudin and
Zinovii Visotskii, a popular singer of the 1990s Filipp Kirkorov and Natasha Koroleva also
starred.

5.4.3.3. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 3

The musical Starie Pesni o Glavnom 3 (Konstantin Ernst, 1997) was different from its
two predecessors. It was made as a sequence to a popular in the 1970s comedy Ivan
Vassilievich Menjaet Professiju (Ivan Vassilievich: Back to the Future, in English, Gayday,
1973), and therefore had a story line to follow. The same characters – Shurik, a scientist, his
wife Zina and their neighbours – a married couple, met 20 years later for the celebration of
the New Year. In the original film Shurik invented a time machine. During the first test a
power cut happened, and Shurik lost consciousness. In his dream (which is coloured,
compared with black and white reality), his wife left him, and he accidently sent his

51
Kabachek 13 Stuliev was a humorous Soviet television show (Zelinskii, 1966-1980) stares
artists of the Theatre of Satire. The action took place in a Polish restaurant. During 15 years, 13 issues
were released. The production of the program stopped after the aggravation of the political situation in
Poland.

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neighbour Ivan Vassilievich Bunsha and a thief Gorge Milosslavlky into the times of Ivan the
Terrible, while Ivan the Terrible actually came to the future, to the 1970s. According to the
original story (the film was based on the theatre play of Mikhail Bulgakov, 1935) the tsar
comes back to his own time. In the TV musical the tzar Ivan Vassilievich escaped back to the
1970s being seduced by the work in the film industry. Meanwhile the business in the 16th
century did not go so well, with the thief George Millosalavski substituting the tsar. To
restore “the historical truth”, Shurik, Zina and Miloslawki using the time machine travelled
back to the 1970s to search for the real Ivan the Terrible, who, according to the gossips,
worked at film studio Mosfilm. Thus, the travel back in time was framed by the travel to the
film studio, which produced many popular films in the Soviet times. While the main
characters were searching for the tsar they stumbled into several films, shown in cinemas in
the 1970s. Thus, Brezhnev time was portrayed through a cinematic lens.
Eventually, tsar Ivan the Terrible agreed to go back to his own time, on the condition that
he would be given the main role of the tsar and a good film director, who can film him. The
director given to him was Sergei Ezenshtein, who made a film Ivan the Terible in 1944-1946.
It is indeed Ivan the Terrible who addressed to the viewers in the end and wished them Happy
New Year from his palace in the 16th century.
The episode started with the official address of Leonid Brezhnev to the soviet people on
the New Years Eve of 1971 (usually this official address was shown in the new year issue of
Goluboy Ogeniok). The speech was interrupted by the appearance on the screen an angry
actor Nikolay Fomenko. This collision of the cinematic time representations of the 1970s and
1990s therefore set the mood of the musical.
Similar to the previous musicals, this episode was comprised from the songs popular in
the 1970s, which included songs of composers Raymond Pauls; Robert Rozhdestvenskij,
Aleksander Ginsburg (Galich), songs from David Tukhmanov’s vinyl “Po Volne Moiei
Pamiati 1974-1975” (On the Waves of My Memories in English), as well as then-popular
melodies of vocal-instrumental-bands (VIA) Veselie Rebiata (Merry Guys in English, one of
the most popular pop-rock bands, winner of All-union and international contests and song
festival “Pesnia Goda”), and Pojuschie Gitari (Singing guitars in English. They were
especially popular in the beginning of the 1970s, and served as an example for many VIAs
later).
Popular in the 1970s songs of the western disco and pop bands “Rasputin” (banned from
performing during Boney M concert in Moscow in 1978, yet highly popular at discos),
“Stumbling in” (by Suzi Quatro and Chris Norman), “I will survive”, by Glory Geinor were

116
performed within the frames of the musical by the artists themselves together with Russian
singers of the 1990s. Besides, foreign films and songs from them also found a space within
the frames of the program, such as Russian cover version of the soundtrack from American
film The Sandpit Generals (The Defiant, The Wild Pack, 1971, Bartlett).
As the first two episodes, Glavnie Pesni o Glavnom 3 features scenes and songs from the
films shown during the decade. The plot itself makes the collection of popular films seem
logical: the main characters travelled to Mosfilm (Soviet film production studio in Moscow)
to search for the escaped tsar, and therefore turned out in the cinematic setting. Shurik and his
friends run around Mosfilm, from one room to another, bumping into different film characters
and peeking at short scenes. Besides films are not presented according to the times of their
broadcasting in the 1970s, but more following the logic of spectacular and visual effects.
Moreover, if some films are being cited only once, some, like a New Year Eve comedy
Ironiya Sudbi ili s Legkim Parom (Riazanov, 1975) – several times. What became even more
visible is that the film scenes did not actually corresponded with the songs performed:
characters Queen Anna and Lord Bekingem from D’Artanyan and Three musheteri (Ungvald-
Kninkevitch, 1978) preformed a song from the film June 31st (Kvinkhidze, Zatsepin, 1978).
This tendency of mixing together songs and films became a business card of this episode.
Usually the films’ scenes are not replayed but more referred to, and the episodes became free-
standing music videos with a references to and citations of the originals. To a certain extend it
is a new reading of the old cinematic material and melodies.
Some of the film scenes are re-played but changed dramatically: song “Pesnja o Dalekoj
Rodine/Gde-to Daleko from Semnadtsat mgnovenii vesni (Seven moments of Spring, 1973.
Performance – I. Kabzon, music Michael Tavierdiev, lyrics: Robert Rozhdestvenskii) was
performed by Russian pop-artist Leonid Agutin. Film-setting, interior of the restaurant as well
as interaction between the main characters was followed almost with precision - even black
and white colour palette was retained. However, this film citation was “enriched” with a
several semi-erotic moments, which reminded the viewer that it was not the 1970s film, but
the 1990s musical he/she was watching.
In a way, the happening can be seen as a travel in the labyrinth of history. It is a memory
travel, not structured according to the chronologic placement of years – linear history, but
leaping from one year into another, skipping some completely. More colourful memories
appear, while bleak ones are omitted. It is the songs and character’s faces are remembered,
while sometime very tragic stories behind the scenes are not included, forgotten. It is a
cinematic memory – the representation of the epoch trough films, censored and approved by

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politburo films – portraying everyday life of the Soviet citizens. Moreover, this representation
also suggests many alternative versions of the past, as well as dreamlike: among the cited
cinematic cultural references there are several cartoon characters. Besides, these cartoon
characters live in these alternative 1970s together with all other heroes – they run around
Mosfilm chasing each other and interacting with “real” people. The cinematic space allows
Ivan the Terrible, who is indeed the sweetest character and wanna-be actor shook hands with
“cinematic” Lenin and Stalin. Soviet past all of a sudden becomes a fairy tale, which outcome
can be changed using time machine. One can travel back and forth in this alternative 1970s,
recycling its artefacts and memories.
What makes the series worth analysing is that the representations of these decades, so
deliberately exaggerating fake-ness of the characters and settings can be seen not only
brainless entertainment show, sometimes tasteless and vulgar, but also as a parody on the
official propaganda in the USSR. It is kitschy and unserious, but exactly these features refer
back to the whole seriousness and absurdity of the official life and propaganda in the media.
The newsreel episode (programme Vremia, in English Time, which first was broadcasted in
the 1970s), where in the best traditions of the Soviet formal presentations the anchors
informed about achievements in agriculture, holidays and jolly life in the Soviet Union, while
in the West life was difficult and problematic. It was an ironic representation of the polished,
non-problematic, dream-like reality presented in the Soviet news. What was mocked is the
serious attitude to the official soviet discourses. 52
Well-known Soviet television shows and films became the frames in which Russian pop-
stars were located. This representational strategy, using Oushakine’s terminology, “doubly
enhanced the effect of recognition”. ”Amalgamating in space and time two recognizable
images”, a necessary historical backdrop was supplied for the post-Soviet celebrities and,
simultaneously, popularized Soviet films (Oushakine, 2007: 462). “Material clichés of past
decades — a red kerchief, a signature military hat (Budenovka), or a typical military blouse
(gimnasterka)”, this “aesthetic of temporal cross-dressing, recognizable elements of the daily
life” framed Russian pop stars of the 1990s (Oushakine, 2007: 471). “This visual enframing
provided by the props of the past” was interwoven into no less clichéd and just slightly
changed plot cut-and-pasted from well-known films. “Longing for the signifiers of the past
has very little in common with longing for the past experience, glorious or otherwise. Rather,

52
Yurchak describes this ideas in details in “Night Dances With the Angel of History: Critical Cultural Studies
of Postsocialism,” in Cultural Studies. Aleksandr Etkind, ed. St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2006.
(in Russian).

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it is a desire to retain the stereotyped, “automatized perception” driven by the search to
confirm the familiarity of the already familiar that determines the production of these period
pieces” (Oushakine, 2007: 471).
Grotesqueness and sick humour failed to mask an important message: unlike modern
songs, Soviet ones spoke about the main things. And the main thing was not love, though
most song were devoted to love, but a belief in a better tomorrow, which saturated those. The
viewers of New Year musicals felt longing not for the Soviet ideology and communal farms
but for their dream, hope and a belief that the future would be better than the past. For the first
time after perestroika television depicted the ‘Soviet’ not as an object of criticism but as the
‘lost paradise’” (Novikova and Dulo in Vartanova, 2011: 194).

5.4.3.4. Srarie Pesni o Glavnom, Postscript

The last forth episode the Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Postscript (2000) referred to the
different decades, including the post-soviet one. The events took place in a mythical hotel in
the middle of nowhere. The story – guest arrived to the hotel, where they had to give away
their watch before the clock stroked twelve. One pair of watch was left with the owner – a
magical watch with a little insect, who would make his owner’s (a cleaning girl looking
suspiciously like Cinderella) wish come true – she would become a singer. Guests (played
again by Russian actors and pop-artists) occupied the hotel rooms according to the year of the
song they sang they played, and one by one presented different popular songs of the 20th
century in the new cover versions. In one mythical space, different decades of the century
coexisted together, and a viewer (or a listener) could travel from one year to another by
opening the hotel doors. Thus, the century of Russian/Soviet history was summed up in the
form of popular songs.

5.5. Structure of feeling in the 1990s

Understanding nostalgia for the economic and social stability of the late socialism as the
structure of feeling, I suggest looking at the dominant productive group, in which the structure
of feeling is “primarily evident” (Williams, 1961/2001: 80). However, the structure of feeling
does not only correspond to the dominant social character, the abstract of a dominant group,
but it also an “expression of the interaction” with alternative social characters (Williams,
1961/2001: 80).

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 Nostalgia was not a uniform attitude in Russian society of the 1990s. Comparing with
early 1990s nostalgic sentiments seemed to grow in the second half of the decade.
Communists activists, who lost from the transformations, wanted restoration of political
regime. Social group, described by Alexey Yurchak, as living vne, was not unanimous in their
attitude to the past. They might not want to have the return of the former regime, but could
have been nostalgic both for the times of stability, social security, and their youth. Soviet
dissidents, those who have been in oppositional relationship with the Soviet power, could
have been nostalgic for the time of their youth, but hardly were nostalgic for the period.

Economic and social transition in the 1990s caused personal losses, which triggered
both personal and collective nostalgia in early 1990s (Zuckerman and Caryl, 1999). Older
citizens, in particular, who experienced anxiety about the loss of employment and social
services guarantees they once had were more prone to nostalgic sentiments (Ford, 1995).
White, for example, wrote “It is age and living standards that are the most powerful predictors
of Soviet nostalgia when other variables are held constant. […] Older age-groups were more
positive about the Soviet system, and so were the less affluent; younger age-groups and the
more affluent were less enthusiastic” (White, 2010:7). Apparently the level of education was
not a significant factor, nor was gender (White, 2010:7-8).

Thus, when producers of ”nostalgic” television programmes claimed that they have
given people what they wanted – travelled them back in time – they were not exactly lying.
Nostalgic sentiments were existent in Russian society in Yeltsin era. The question was in how
to represent the past viewers were longing for. My answer to this question would be that
overall representation of the past was reflexive, critical, ironic and sentimental. However,
there were traces of different tendencies: non-critical and amnesiac. Both an excess of
memory and a shortage of memory defined 1990s Russian cultural landscape. It consisted
from categories of resistance, repetition compulsion, transference, working through, and,
finally, the work of recollection. In the middle of the 1990s judging from the example of
Starie Pesni o Glavnom, excess of memory in the form of repetition compulsion, (according
to Freud it puts a turn to action in the place of genuine memory through which the present and
the past could be reconciled with each other), became one of the ways of dealing with past.
Instead of a remembering in Starie Pesni o Glavnom I observed a process of “acting out”.
There was a repetition memory, which was resistant to criticism, while recollection-memory
in Staraya Kvartira or Pesni Nashego Dvora, was a fundamentally critical memory. Ricoeur’s

120
shortage of memory in Starie Pesni o Glavnom could be seen in how the producers cultivated
the repetition-memory from which some viewers and producers fled with a bad conscience.
What happened is that the former in the end have lost themselves in it; the later were afraid of
being swallowed up by it. In Staraya Kvartira, I saw an attempt to establish causal relations
between events, find explanations for what happened, and what could have happened. Thus, it
created interesting relations between memory and history. As opposing to the official soviet
historical tradition, memory took on the task to re-establish the “truth”, at the same time
feeding into the present constructions of cultural identity of people who were born in the
Soviet union. At the same time, knowing the “unreability” of memories, mediators, such as
anchors and archivarious and screen play-writer plaid a role of historian, who could correct
and question the memories, as having more profound knowledge of the past and “history”.

Staraya Kvartira was good examples of that people do not remember in isolation. In
this programme historical re-enactment and collective remembering played a major role.. In
this program important and controversial topics are brought for discussion – to investigate the
complexity of past and people’s actions and motivations. Namedni, in its turn was an ironic
encyclopaedia of Soviet life, presented Soviet history Parfenov style. This was the story about
generation of people like Parfenov and about Parfenov himself. It was both reflective and
critical to the past and the present.
For Nora, history is manipulated by memory, “facts” of history become transferrals of
actual historic events into cultural memory, which transforms the events of the past into
copies of themselves that are used in order to describe and define the present. Contrary to
what Nora writes, those taking part in the production of the programs, the plays and the
Petrovich restaurant, saw in memory a possibility to let justice give a verdict to the official
history, which they thought was corrupted and had nothing to do with history or past as it had
never revealed the real events or/and intentionally changed them in order to suit then-needs of
propaganda.
In my examples, the cultural appropriation of history created a mythic space of cultural
memory, which is a highly contested landscape, where historical surrogates contributed to the
construction of an imagined realm of cultural identity. Soviet history was appropriated into
the lieux de memoire, and already in the 1990s used by political elites and society as a whole.
However, these places of memory as constructed in the presented examples were different
from each other, which both reveals and creates the contested fields of the different versions

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of the past, and therefore present and future. The 1990s also gave rise to different ways of
negotiating Russia’s past, present and future.
In Namedni space, journalist Leonid Parfenov “remembered” past in the studio, which
was decorated as imaginary archive. Parfenov “opened up” any drawer/topic and then
travelled to the places mentioned in the story, which in many cased were spaces of dystopia -
non-inhabited, abandoned, or ruined. In Staraya Kvartira, space was vibrant and alive – many
people came and left, thus connecting the re-created place of Staraya Kvartira with many
other spaces from the past. In Pesni Nashego Dvora and Pesni Nashej Kommunalki it is the
space of communal apartment, which was also slowly disappearing, due to the societal
changes. This space reminded about the life in communal apartment to those, who lived there,
and spoke to those, who had never known what the life there was. In Starie Pesni o Glavnom
space was artificial. It was a dead space.
There was also an evident attempt traced in both places like restaurant Petrovich and
television programmes to restore community and communicative processes both between
people of the same generations, and between different generations. The communication could
be made possible through the creation both of a real physical space, and of a media space,
where the communication could be made possible. In Petrovich old friends and colleagues
met in the restaurant, which reminded its guests of an old apartment; in the play Pesni
Nashego Dvora they met in the old courtyard; in the play Pesni Nashej Kommunalki and the
TV show Staraya Kvartira in communal apartment, in the musical Starie Pesni o Glavnom
the site was an imaginary village, Dom Kulturi, the Mosfilm studio and a hotel. By 1997,
these spaces (communal apartments and yards) became the lost spaces of non-existing
communication. The places started to disappear, the communication disappear
correspondingly These were public spaces, where in the Soviet times communication
processes were possible, as people discussed to a certain extend political issues, everyday
problems and celebrated holiday. These places became historical sites important for
identification as opposed to the official historical sites produced by the government.
What I also found fascinating is that mainly men presented the memories of the past.
Anchors-men were those active producers of the memories of the past, while women were
invited along to join the process of remembering.
Svetlana Boym also noticed “The utopian nostalgia of the extreme right has also
flourished in the post-Soviet period. In Mikhail Gorbachev's time, the future-oriented
ideology of the avant-garde and socialist realism was replaced by a backward glance of
commemoration. The past, in contemporary Russia, has turned into a kind of future perfect, or

122
future imperfect (both are clear deviations from Russian grammar). There has been great
confusion about what is to be commemorated and what is to be forgotten” (Boym, 1995: 152)
The opening of the archives in the late 1980s allowed, for the first time, for the “historical
memory” especially of the Stalinist period to be preserved. However, “at the same time, the
belief in concealed facts […] and various conspiracies that prevents Russians from knowing
their true history persists. […] The new grassroots nationalism (including some groups with
strong ties to the KGB and former Soviet nomenklatura) represents a peculiar folklorization
of high-cultural nationalist or imperialist theories (Boym, 1995: 152). ”Communist rule did
not end suddenly in 1989, or in 1991. And for many, at least in Russia, there was no radical
break but a complex evolution in which many of the former ruling group, and many of the
values of the Soviet period, remained intact” (White, 2010). “Inspired by glasnost, the initial
desire to draw a sharp line between the recent Soviet past and the non-Soviet present
gradually exhausted itself by mid 1990s. Attempts to clearly differentiate ‘victims’ and
‘villains’ of the Soviet regime were increasingly replaced by conscious efforts to restore the
lost feeling of collective belonging and to reestablish cultural connections with the past that
would be neither horrifying nor humiliating (Oushakine, 2007).

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