Refashioning Russia - Södertörns högskola

own thinking about the subject is affected both by the cultural context I originally come fromand by the one I write my dissertation in. Thus, this thesis becomes an attempt to understandmyself through exploring history and its recycling within a given context. The process ofunderstanding the fashion built on past cultures and various uses of memory is based on theanalysis of a particular case, with a reflected awareness of my own role as a researcher in thisprocess. Thus, the process of understanding this phenomenon of nostalgia as a whole and thecollected data was hermeneutical, where my thinking constantly travelled back and forthbetween 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 arguedthat the hermeneutic act must always be accompanied by critical reflection, while the field oftradition and historical texts should not be left behind. Ricoeur emphasised “how the textitself may open up a space of existential and political possibilities. This dynamic, productivepower of the text undermines the idea of reality as a fixed, unyielding network of authoritativepatterns of interpretations” (Ramberg & Gjesdal, 2009).So, why would I fall under the spell of the Soviet past? A possible answer is that Icannot 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 birthand 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 nostalgiadescribed by Svetana Boym (2001). My first migration (when I was still a child) from theUSSR to Russia happened without my conscious participation and I could not influence theevents in any respect. Then, my migration from Russia to Sweden was not a forced one, butrather 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 (andI believe still are) with strong feelings of patriotism for their own country. The idea that thecollective good and prosperity should always be placed above all individual needs and desiresis cultivated by school education, films, books, and in family circles. However, the degree ofindoctrination and pressure may vary from case to case. The general tendency was toconvince people to strive for the greater good of the country, and those who managed toescape to the West would be looked upon (not without a tint of envy, though) as lazy selfishindividuals for whom their own economic wealth is more important than serving their nation.8

Although I would like to note that despite many people and public officials voicing suchopinion, it is not the only point of view, and a plurality of positions exists. Nevertheless, suchexplicit 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 duringthe process of writing this thesis. Going back and forth between my material andcontemporary debates around the heritage left after the fall of Communism, and looking backto when the longing for the lost home started to unfold, I started to regard the 1990-2010period differently. Observations made in 2012 brought a totally new dimension into myunderstanding of the phenomenon.Svetlana Boym, exploring “imagined homelands” of Soviet exiles who never returnedhome, said that “at once homesick and sick of home, they have developed a peculiar kind ofdiasporic intimacy, a survivalist aesthetics of estrangement and longing” (Boym, 2001: xix).Catching myself buying and collecting traditional souvenirs from Russia, I still resistedacknowledging myself being similar to those Russian emigrants in New York whom Boymdescribed. I do not participate in circles of Russian diaspora in Stockholm, but onlycommunicate with my Russian colleagues at the university. It is a both conscious and unconsciouschoice. I keep myself to the international or global community, which includespeople of various backgrounds and origins. In that sense I consider myself being a product ofglobalisation, and this standpoint affects the analysis of my material and will be reflected inthis dissertation.But there is from a critical perspective something else at work in the obsession with thepast and a lost home. In times of globalisation and alert issues of migration, the seduction bymemories of illusory non-controversial and easy life as well as the longing for an imaginedhappy past have never been stronger. Nostalgia, memory and history are abused nowadays byright-wing extremists and nationalists pursuing their reactionary agenda. Longing for the losthome, which was stolen by undesired immigrants or in the course of integration intosupranational and European communities, becomes the contested ground for the currentbattles over national identity. In this respect, the Russian case in all its complexity does seemto contribute to the global tendencies, especially regarding Russia’s growing problems withthe 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.9

1.4. Sources and methodological frameworkTo investigate the possible change in production and mediation of Soviet nostalgiaduring the period 1990-2010 I turn to Critical Theory for theoretical and methodologicalinspiration. In order to examine the change in production and mediation of memory of theSoviet past, I combine sociological research with interpretations of symbolic expressions andtexts in media.I apply a hermeneutic approach to the mediated forms of Soviet nostalgia to bring outthe meanings of a text from the perspective of its author, and of the interpretive communitiesthat in a given period encountered the text and unfolded its meaning. This thus entailsattention 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 newspapersarticles. I examine this material in terms of the social-historical moment, which involves anexamination of the producer of the text, its intentional recipient, its referent in the world (whatit 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 ofurban ethnography, qualitative interviews and a survey of press articles. In addition to theinterviews and the mapping of Russian press, I have made some small case studies, analysingin detail several TV-programmes and fashion design brands, applying elements ofinterpretative analysis. The examples of how the Soviet past is mediated in contemporaryRussia, which I treat as case studies, are by no means representative of the whole complexphenomenon. These case studies, TV-programmes and fashion designs I treat as, les lieux demémoire, 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 timehas become a symbolic element of the memorial heritage of any community” (Nora 1996:XVII). These sites of memory, I believe, illustrate important developments and perspectiveson the past, notably several trends which, being set into the political and social context, helpto understand the complex process of production and mediation of memory. To answerquestions of representation and mediation of Soviet past within certain socio-economicsettings I apply a thick description approach to the collected material.I started collecting and selecting relevant source material in 2010. In order to define thecircle of material for the analysis, I surveyed available online journal and newspaper articlesby using search engines. Based on my previous research experience (Kalinina, 2012), I10

selected key search words and phrases: nostalgia (nostalgia), Denis Simachev, Sovetskoeproshloe (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 subjectswere discussed; TV programmes and films that represented Soviet past; and names of peoplewho potentially could become key informants.Second, I divided the period of twenty years after the fall of the Soviet Union into twodecades, corresponding to the change of presidents: the era of Boris Yeltsin (in office 10 June1991 – 31 December 1999), and the era of Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev (VladimirPutin in office 31 December 1999 – 7 May 2008; Dmitry Medvedev in office 7 May 2008 – 7May 2012). Being rather sceptical about strict periodisation, I nevertheless believe – on thebasis of my first observations – that political developments dramatically contributed to theoutlook on Soviet legacy and heritage and influenced the dynamic of changes in productionand mediation of nostalgic sentiments. I treat the mediated representations and politicaldevelopments as closely related and mutually influential. In each period I identified the keysites of memory through which nostalgic memory of the Soviet Union was produced andmediated.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 chosenPetrovich, 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 firstrestaurant-club, decorated in “nostalgic fashion” and serving “good old” food, initiated in1993 and finally opened in 1997. This restaurant, comparing to many other, still exists. Itsowner Andrey Bilzho is identified in the media as one of the main actors in production ofmemories of the Soviet period. What interested me in Petrovich is how the Soviet past wasproduced and recycled in its interior, music selection and cuisine. Having identified my mainanalytical categories – space, time, object, value and bodily experiences – I moved on to theremembering and re-construction of the Soviet life experiences in TV shows. In three highlyrated and award-winning shows, namely Namedni: Nasha Era, Staraya Kvartira and StariePesni o Glavnom, I investigated different outlooks on the Soviet past and how memoryworked. As television became the main mass media in Russia during that period, my mainfocus was on the mediation of memory on television in this period. Looking at the maincategories identified in the analysis of Petrovich, I investigated the production of space, time11

and value in these programmes. In order to find parallels in the processes ofremembering/forgetting of the past, I took a brief turn to look at two theatre plays PesniNashego Dvora and Pesni Nashey Kommunalki (director Mark Rozovsky) that were runningduring 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 wasmediated. Although television continued to keep its dominant role within the mass media, theInternet and fashion industry also contributed to the process of mediation of memories. I havechosen three fashion brands, illustrating different commercial use of the memory. Myselection of brands (Denis Simachev, NinaDonis and Antonina Shapovalova) is justified bytheir popularity, media attention, and their different use of the Soviet heritage. I also believethat these three fashion brands correspond to the trends I spotted in the television programmesproduced 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, whileAntonina Shapovalova, a politician and designer, uses the Soviet past as propaganda tool ofthe Putin regime. By introducing fashion, I added another important analytical category – thebody. 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 thisTV-series among others is justified by both its content, and access to the producers and scriptmaterial. During this period, Internet archives and on-line communities, where visualimagery, films and TV programmes produced during the communist era, as well as individualmemories of those born in the USSR, rapidly flourished. Due to this reason I have chosen tointroduce Internet as one of the important media contributing to the phenomenon of nostalgiaproduction. Among many on-line resources tickling nostalgic sentiments of its users I haveselected the Internet project 1976-1982 Encyclopedia Nashego Detstva (Encyclopedia of OurChildhood) (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 andmusic critics constituted a great part of my source material. The purpose of the interviews wasto acquire detailed information about the studied phenomenon, including the experts’ personalpoint of view and perception of their own activities related to the production of mediatedrepresentations 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 toits contemporaries. We have no access to its original context of production or to the intentions12

of its author”. 3 Even though I have interviewed producers of TV-shows, artists, designers andtheatre directors, I realise that their opinions are coloured by the contemporary context inwhich they lived when these interviews were made. Thus, the understanding of and nostalgiafor the past are always in a process of constant production and development. It is not only thepast handed over to future generations through the complex and ever-changing fabric ofinterpretations that gets richer and more complex with time, but also the interpretations of theinterpretations of the past with time become more complex, since the reception history(Wirkungsgeschichte) of past texts and events continually add further layers of interpretationand meaning. If history according to Gadamer is always effective history, then nostalgia isalways effective nostalgia.Based on the mapping of the mass media sources I distinguished several keyinformants. During two research trips to Moscow and St. Petersburg I conducted around 40interviews, 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 consistedof 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). Themajority of informants (60 percent) were male, middle aged (40-60 years old) representativesof the Moscow and St. Petersburg middle class, engaged in intellectual activities. They allappeared 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 50years old), who lived in St. Petersburg and Moscow, and also knew each other. Thus, thisgroup of people, identified through the media survey, turned out to form an informal networkof intellectuals and business-minded creative individuals.One of the major difficulties I had in the interviewing process was gaining access to themajor players. Slowly, using snowballing technique, I managed to get in touch with my keyinformants, who had a wider network of media professionals and artists and supplied me withthe further contacts I needed. As a result I managed to get access both to the informants I hadidentified by mapping newspaper and journal articles, and also to a circle of people that wasnew to me, and which, as I learned later, comprised the main players who greatly contributedto 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

mass media in Russia during that period, my main focus is on the mediation of memory ontelevision. Among many programmes broadcast during this period, I have selected threehighly rated and award-winning shows, namely Namedni: Nasha Era, Staraya Kvartira andStarie Pesni o Glavnom. Looking at the main categories identified in the analysis ofPetrovich, I investigate the production of space, time and value in these programmes. In orderto find parallels in the processes of remembering/forgetting of the past, I take a brief turn tolook at two theatre plays that were running during the same period in one of the Moscowtheatres. I intend to argue (work in progress) that informal networks in Moscow contributed tothe flow of ideas between the main actors in the process of production and mediation ofnostalgia. This chapter is based mainly on primary sources: television programmes,interviews and urban observations in Moscow. I conclude that in the 1990s there were threemain trajectories of the use of the Soviet past: reflexive (Staraya Kvartira, theatre plays, thePetrovich 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 canbe profitable, and slowly patriotism starts to play an important role in the production ofcontemporary Russian identity.Chapter 6 investigates the process of mediation of post-Soviet nostalgia during thepresidencies of Putin and Medvedev (2000 – 2010). Starting with a brief outline of the mainpolitical and socio-economic changes in Russia, I introduce two new media, through whichnostalgia is mediated. Although television continued to keep its dominant role within the massmedia, the internet and fashion industry also contributed to the process of mediation ofmemories. I will give a brief summary of the major trends and events (for example the launchof the journal Nostalgia) and focus on three fashion brands, illustrating different commercialuse of the memory. My choice of brands (Denis Simachev, NinaDonis and AntoninaShapovalova) can be justified by their popularity, media attention, and their different use ofthe 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, whileAntonina Shapovalova, a politician and designer, uses the Soviet past as propaganda tool ofthe Putin regime. By introducing fashion, I add another important analytical category – thebody.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 programmesproduced during the Communist era, as well as individual memories of those born in the16

USSR, rapidly flourished. I have chosen to look at the Internet project 1976-1982Encyclopedia 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 andglamorized phenomenon. It was suddenly “cool to be born in the USSR”. A new generationalcluster of those born in the 1970s and 1980s were willing to spend time and money inglamorous clubs and restaurants and to purchase fashion brands at inflated prices. By the endof the period a noticeable tendency had emerged: nostalgia for life and youth in Soviet Unionwas 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 inRussia in the relation to post-Soviet nostalgia. I connect the processes of forgetting andremembering with contemporary political and cultural changes in Russia. In this chapter Iconclude that reflexive, commercial and aesthetic forms of nostalgia transformed intorestorative nostalgia (Boym, 2001).2. Previous researchThis thesis is a contribution to the research on nostalgia, memory and representations ofthe past. During the last decades the number of studies focusing on various aspects ofmnemonic 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 ofHolocost memories (Young, 1990, 1994; Linenthal, 2001), memories of the Second WorldWar (Capelletto, 2005, Suleiman, 2012) and the Vietnam War (Sturken, 1997; Tran, 2010;Hagopian, 2011), remembering Communism (Scribner, 2003; Todorova, 2012), nostalgia forYugoslavia (Velikonja, 2002) and the GDR (Rechtien, Tate, 2011; Hodgin, 2011; Clarke,Wölfel, 2011; Simine, 2005; Berghahn, 2005; Gries, 2004; Bach, 2002) range frominvestigations of memorials to films.Usually, in academic research and popular media articles, the kaleidoscope ofapproaches towards the past and its use is believed to vary from nostalgia (usually understoodas a bittersweet longing for things, persons or situations of the past) to retro (a fashion17

eminiscent of the past); from recycling (an act of processing used or abandoned materials forcreating new products) to revivalism (a desire or inclination to revive what belongs to anearlier time). American Russian-born scholar Sergey Oushakine, having written extensivelyon Russia, pointed out that “in the scholarship on cultural changes in postsocialist countries ithas become a cliché to single out nostalgia as an increasingly prominent symbolic practicethrough 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 massmedia, I have identified a prominent trend of labelling various, sometimes contradictory andambiguous, attitudes towards the Soviet past as well as different appropriations of the Sovietpast in popular culture and art – nostalgia for the Soviet times. At first sight, it seems as if thewhole nation was and still is nostalgic for the most controversial times in Russian history: thetimes of purges, wars, deprivations and fear. However, on closer inspection it becomesevident that either this cultural phenomenon is much more complex and does not boil down tonostalgia only, or the existing narrow definition of nostalgia should be modified to reflect thecomplexity of the phenomenon. Thus, placing the term nostalgia in the beginning of my longway of unfolding the complexity of representations of the Soviet past in Russian popularculture, I want to find out whether nostalgia as a term is indeed applicable, and if so to whatextent it can be used.In this chapter I present just a fraction of the countless articles and books that arewritten on various modalities of nostalgia. First, I start with the history of the term and themost used definition. Then I move to different aspects and geographies of nostalgia, pavingthe way for the theoretical framework on nostalgia and representations of the past that ispresented in the next chapter.2.1. Nostalgia: history of the termNostalgia, as “a painful yearning to return home” was first discussed in JohannesHofer’s medical dissertation in 1688. “La Maladie du Pays” as the cause of medical conditionwas associated with illness among troops fighting far away from home. Based on a study ofSwiss 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 withnostalgia was no longer associated with homesickness, but more with a “bitter-sweet yearningfor things, persons or situations of the past” (Guffey, 2006: 19). Gradually, nostalgia has18

come to be viewed as more a sociological phenomenon that helps individuals to adopt duringthe 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 aproductive attitude in more or less positive light. Thus, individuals going through dramaticchanges in their lives would be more prone to nostalgic experiences. For example, peoplemoving into a “mid-life crisis”, retirement, change of career path, or coping with divorce orpersonal 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 feelingin direct vs. indirect experience (Davis, 1979). If personal experiences are grounded inmemories that are specific to the individual and differ significantly across society, collectiveexperiences originate in cultural phenomena that members of a society share. “Directexperience refers back to events in the individual's own life, while indirect experience resultsfrom stories told by friends or family members or from information in books, movies, or othermedia” (Davis, 1979, quoted in Havlena and Holak, 1996a). Havlena and Holak, building onthis 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 collectiveexperience) (Havlena and Hovlak, 2007:650).This approach is not unproblematic, as people’s memories are socially constructed insuch a way that it is rather difficult to distinguish where there was a collective direct or anindirect experience, or where to draw the border between personal and impersonalexperiences.Russian-born literature scholar, novelist and media artist Svetlana Boym gave one of themost cited definitions of nostalgia in her groundbreaking Future of Nostalgia (2001). Shepointed 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 spatialdistance between the longing subject and longed for object, with the loss of the object beingthe primary condition for nostalgia to be experienced by the subject.Boym first initiated a discussion of nostalgia in her book Common Places: Mythologiesof 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 thesetwo distinct kinds. In The Future of Nostalgia (2001) she called these two types therestorative and the reflective: “restorative nostalgia stresses nostos and attempts a transhistoricalreconstruction of the lost home. Reflective nostalgia thrives in algia, the longingitself, and delays the homecoming – wistfully, ironically, desperately” (Boym, 2001: xviii). Ifrestorative nostalgia thinks of itself not as nostalgia but as truth and tradition, and protects akind of absolute truth, reflective nostalgia calls truths and traditions into doubt, leaving spacefor contradictions. Boym argued “restorative nostalgia is at the core of recent national andreligious revivals, it knows two main plots – the return to origins and conspiracy” (Boym,2001: xviii). In contrast, reflective nostalgia “allows us to distinguish between nationalmemory that is based on a single plot of national identity, and social memory, which consistsof 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 politicalphenomenon that utilises the past as part of a political program of reunification, involving therewriting of history according to contemporary political priorities; 2) aesthetic nostalgia,which is a cultural phenomenon calling for the preservation and worshiping of a unique pastand 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 andexploits 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 ofidentity.Volčič assumed that Yugo-nostalgia could be an important tool in opening up manypossibilities for coming to terms with the past. She pointed out that yugo-nostalgia has notcreated premises for construction of unifying identity, but on contrary divided the formerYugoslav republics. She noted that transformation of Yugo-nostalgia into mainstreamentertainment, with its reduced “microcosmic” perspective and illusory version of the past didnot promote historical understanding. Instead producers shifted focus away from the realhistorical tensions to conflicts between individuals. She concluded that nostalgicrepresentations produced by media fail to raise important political issues and address thedamaging features of nationalist discourse and the “divisive memories of the wars of the20

1990s” (Volčič, 2007: 34). According to Volčič, the danger of nostalgia lies in its benignform, 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: RussiaConcerning post-Soviet or post-Socialist memories, scholarship on cultural changes inpost-Soviet countries, and especially in Russia, usually singles out nostalgia as an“increasingly prominent symbolic practice through which the legacy of the previous periodmakes itself visible” (Oushakine, 2007). Scholars who have examined post-Soviet nostalgia inRussia 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). SergeyOushakine has critically reviewed the scholarship on this topic and pointed out that the majorcriticism against nostalgia stressed the “profound gap between the sanitized nostalgicreproductions and the actual traumatic history”. (Oushakine, 2007: 452). As a result, thescholars 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 apostcommunist censorship of sorts aimed at making the complex and troubling past moreuser-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 couldbe quickly forgotten or overcome.” Others see in postsocialist nostalgia a therapeuticmechanism called upon to alleviate the material, moral, and physical despair that becameso characteristic in the lives of many people in postsocialist Russia. Yet others perceive the“rehabilitation” of Soviet aesthetics as a specifically postsocialist reaction to marketdominated changes. As the argument goes, the “idealistic and romantic” imagery of Sovietfilm and music are meant to provide in this case a moral antidote for the persistent assaultof capitalist advertising. (Oushakine, 2007: 452) 44 See Tat'iana Zaslavskaia, “Sotsiostrukturnyi aspekt transformatsii rossiiskogo obshchestva”, Sotsiologicheskieissledovaniia, 2001, no.8:10; Boris Dubin, “Vozvrashenie ‘Bol'shogo stilia’? Staroe i novoe v trekhteleekranizatsiiakh 2005 goda”, Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006, no. 2:275; Kathleen E. Smith, “WhitherAnti-Stalinism?”, Ab Imperio, 4 (2004); and Birgit Beumers, “Pop Post-Sots, or the Popularization of History inthe Musical Nord-Ost”, SEEJ 48:3 (2004): 378–81. See also Semen Faibisovich, “Vozvrashenie” and KirillKobrin, “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 RussianDemocratization”, Washington Quarterly 29:1 (2005): 92–93; Jean-Marie Chauvier, “Russia: Nostalgic for theSoviet Era,” Le Monde Diplomatique (March 2004); Nina Khrushcheva, “‘Rehabilitating’ Stalin’”, World PolicyJournal (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 ofanalyses 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 publicholidays. She found reasons for nostalgic sentiments in the traumatic experiences of the1990s: when the intelligentsia lost its position and influence in society, people were deprivedof the past they knew and lost belief in the future. She viewed much of the “nostalgic” contenton Russian television in the 1990s in negative tones, not giving the audiences any possibilityof a critical approach to it. She blamed the entertainment establishment for imposing nostalgiaon people (Ivanova, 2002: 84-85). Ivanova explained the high popularity of Soviet televisionand video content by its potential to create a positive utopian myth in times when reality washarsh and frightening. She invented a term to describe nostalgia for Soviet times, for the BigSoviet Style: nostalyashee (nostalgia-present) – life lived in nostalgia for the Soviet. Thisnostalgia, she concluded, with its reference game with Soviet symbols, both lead to andbecame a symptom of survival of the Soviet culture in young Russia in the beginning of the2000s (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 ofglocalisation, a cultural trauma that has not been overcome and a protest against globalisationand imported Western values. Having presented their ethnographic work on Russiandocumentary programmes, films and talk shows, they explained the multilayered phenomenonof nostalgia as a reaction against the negative view of reality and the Soviet past thatdominated 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 (Novikovaand Dulo: 2011).The popular outlook on nostalgia as a phenomenon in Russia is rather negative, andthese two pieces of research confirm that established point of view. Despite of being rich inethnographic observations and presenting valuable data, both of these works draw theirconclusions on a limited and not so detailed analysis of media content.A big area of research on post-Soviet nostalgia comprises examinations of publicopinion and attitudes towards the fall of the Soviet Union. These studies are very importantwhen talking about the reception and uses of nostalgia or drawing conclusions on its harmful22

or positive effects. Long-life observations by the Levada Centre for statistical research and theHigher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia brought lots of insights into popular attitudesand behaviour practices closely connected with nostalgic sentiments and “practices ofnostalgia”. I will also use such data collected during the last twenty years in order to shedlight on the complexity of nostalgia.Studies in different former republics of attitudes towards the end of the Soviet rule showthe dependence of contemporary opinions on both historical experiences and governmentallyorchestrated historical education. In a survey of adolescents in post-Communist Russia andUkraine, Olena Nikolayenko (2008) analysed attitudes toward the dissolution of the SovietUnion. The results demonstrated a different degree of nostalgia among the young generationin Russia and Ukraine, identifying sources of positive and negative attitudes toward thecollapse of the Soviet Union, and revealing cross-national differences in the relationshipbetween Soviet nostalgia and national pride (Nikolaenko, 2008).The rapid growth of the number of nostalgic-themed restaurants and bars has attractedresearchers to studies of Post-Soviet nostalgia from a culinary perspective. Melissa L.Caldwell, for instance, investigated “the intersections of food and travel in Russian byfocusing on the phenomenon of culinary tourism as a mode of experiencing the foreignOther” (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 acutefeelings 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 theMuscovites 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. Inthe 1990s very little work was done on the use of nostalgia as an advertising tactic. Forexample, Holbrook and Schindler noted “nostalgia has received relatively little attention fromacademicians in general and from scholars devoted to the study of consumer research inparticular” (Holbrook and Shindler, 1991: 330). There was later a certain advancement in thisfield, as research focused on nostalgia proneness (Holbrook, 1993), the emotions produced bynostalgic advertisements (Holak and Havlena, 1998), and the consequences of its use inadvertising (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 ofproduct categories (Schindler and Holbrook, 2003), that advertisements with a nostalgictheme are capable of producing nostalgic reflections (Muehling and Sprott, 2004), and thatnostalgic advertisements create more positive attitudes toward the ad, the product and the23

and (Muehling and Sprott, 2004; Pascal et al., 2002).Susan L. Holak, Alexei V. Matveev and William J. Havlena (2006, 2007) investigatednostalgia in post-Socialist Russia from a consumer behaviour perspective. They researchednostalgia proneness as a personality trait among Russians and discussed specific stimuli andadvertising content in the Russian marketplace designed to evoke individual and collectivenostalgia. Their research showed that the major nostalgia themes – specifically, the break-upof the Soviet Union, nature and food – identified in the Russian responses were related toadvertising and marketing for Russian products. Content analyses of consumer practicesidentified several cultural factors that may shape personality and nostalgic responses inmodern Russia. The most frequently mentioned subjects were the ones that related to therecent history of the USSR and Russia: 1) the transition to a market economy, 2) the loss ofsecurity, 3) the breakup of the Soviet Union, 4) former Soviet political holidays, and 5) natureand 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 wasrenamed as reflective). Canadian literature scholar Linda Hutcheon, well-known for her workon irony, has emphasised the importance of paying attention to the ironic dimension ofnostalgia phenomena (1995). Russian born American scholar Alexey Yurchak, advancingstudies of the last decades of the Soviet Union and the subsequent decades after the fall of theSoviet Empire, describing the Russian art world in 2008, noted that an increasing number ofartists turned to Soviet topics and aesthetics. Despite of admitting that some elements of thistrend have something in common with post-Communist nostalgia, he is careful to denounce itas inadequate. He explains artists’ interest in the Soviet past by their attempt to engage withthe past, not to nostalgically gazing at it. Working with notions of stjeb and irony, heidentified that within aesthetic forms of that decade the dominant was the one of sincerity ornew sincerity (Yurchak, 2008: 258). This post-Soviet phenomenon, according to Yurchak, is aparticular brand of irony – sympathetic and warm – which has allowed artists to remaincommitted 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 negativelybecause they are believed to encourage consumerist attitudes and present the past asentertaining. There is a belief in the press that when consumed by young audiences, who haveneither personal memories about the past being re-cycled and represented in an entertaininglight, nor profound knowledge of history, these traumatic aspects of Communist history24

threaten to trivialise tragic aspects of history and obstruct the process of coming to terms withthe Communist past.Romanian scholar Diana Georgescu called for “the analysis of the critical potential ofirony to challenge mainstream memory discourses” (in Todorova and Gille, 2010: 156). Sheexplored the political and social consequences of irony and the interactive and criticalpotential of verbal, visual and aural irony in advertisements and music. She suggested theterm “counter-memory” to indicate that these memories are not being included into the masternarrative but instead function as a disruption of widely accepted discourses. These alternativememory practices are casted in ironic modes. Being ironic does not prevent those whoremember from being serious.2.3. Nostalgia in the East: Eastern and Central EuropeThe anthology Post-Communist Nostalgia presents a substantial set of studies onvarious 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 alonging for stability, security and prosperity, but also a sense of loss of a specific form ofsociability. Both those who lived in opposition to the dominant ideology and youngergenerations have experienced a longing to and an interest in the recent past, learning about itor reinvesting in it and giving it fresh meanings. Contributors to the volume analysed theimpact of generational clusters, the rural-urban divide, gender differences and politicalorientation. In line with previous research of the last decade they argued that post-Communistnostalgia should not be seen as restorative, using Boym’s terminology, but instead berecognised as belonging to a healing process that strives to come to terms with both theCommunist past and the “transitional” present. Among the questions their volume addressedwere those of agency, content and genres of representation. The authors gave a wide overviewof memory genres and feelings evoked by the past in six post-Socialist countries, rangingfrom “self-irony and mockery to melancholy, grief, alienation, depression, anxiety, andtrauma” (Todorova and Gille, 2010: 278). The studies presented show that nostalgia does notmean 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 maybe”, but also the realities of past and present influence the boundaries and emotionalcolouring of memory work. Several authors drew attention to conflicts in the recollection of25

the Socialist past between generations and social groups. These conflicts surfaced highlycontradictory memory practices, which are often labelled as nostalgic. Themes such as thecommodification of memory, the loss of innocence and the turn to political nostalgia arebrought up in that same anthology.In the anthology Remembering Communism (2010) Maria Todorova, drawing attentionto the existing vast field of institutional approach to the East German past as well as asubstantial 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 EasternEurope “under the overall formula of ‘remembering communism’” (Todorova, 2010: 11-12).She favoured the term “remembering” over “memory” because the former “emphasizes livedexperience 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 tovarious genres of representations of the process (institutional discourses, archives andmemoires, textbooks and visual memories), made the mediated nature of Communistremembering explicit. However, most of the authors did not directly engage in the analysis ofthe mediation process as such.Zala Volčič (2007) studied the mediation of nostalgia in processes of remembering andforgetting in Yugoslavia. She explored media and other cultural practices, which in formerYugoslav countries have attempted to re-create a shared cultural memory. She suggested thatconsumer societies used nostalgia as a marketing tool for a lost, idealised past whose bestaspects might be seized through consumption. Such ironic appropriation, she explained, wasnot 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 consumerdesire.The author assumed that after the collapse of Yugoslavia it was precisely in the field ofculture that the Yugoslav “imagined community” was first challenged, while the mediaprovided 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 nostalgicpractices. Volčič suggested that the imagined community of the former Yugoslavia remainedan unfinished project, whose unity was predicated not on what it was, but what it mightbecome. Yugo-nostalgia is then less a longing for a real past than a longing for the desires andfantasies 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 wasfixated on the space and time of the past, whereas reflexive nostalgia looked back in searchfor alternative futures. These two different forms of nostalgia shared the “symbolicgeographies of disunity” that have dominated political discourse in former Yugoslavia for thelast twenty years (Lindstrom, 2006).Slovenian researcher Mitja Velikonja has confirmed the established understanding ofnostalgia as a retrospective utopia for a safety and stability, a fair and equal society, truefriendships and mutual solidarity. Nostalgia for Socialism embodied this utopian hope thatthere must be a better society than the current one (Velikonja, 2009).2.4. GDR Nostalgia: OstalgiaDuring the last twenty years the most extensive research has been done on so-calledOstalgie – a combination of the German words for ‘nostalgia’ and ‘east’ – a reevaluation ofthe history of the former German Democratic Republic and a boom of the German nostalgiaindustry. 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 beenassociated with Communist kitsch, and been criticised for its inability to critically engagewith history and “authentic” practices of collecting and displaying life in GDR (Berdahl,2010, Enns, 2007). Many researchers have contested this perspective. For example, somestudies of early 2000s’ ostalgia films showed that “nostalgic” films in fact criticisedGermany’s current socio-economic and political situation. Thus, understood within itscontemporary context, ostalgia can be seen as a re-examination of the utopian hopes andexpectations surrounding German reunification and a critique of a capitalist system that hasfailed 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 “sociallysanctioned commemorative practices” by investigating “social lives” of East German objectsin the context of transitional changes. She interrogated the politics of distinction between“mere” nostalgia and socially sanctioned commemorative practices by tracing the social livesof East German things, including their paths, diversions and recuperations. Building on27

Appadurai’s insight that ”from a theoretical point of view human actors encode things withsignificance, while from a methodological point of view it is the things-in-motion thatilluminate 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 aninterplay between hegemonic and oppositional memories” (Berdhal, 2010: 49). She concludedthat ostalgia both contested and affirmed a new order:In this business of Ostalgie, East German products have taken on new meaningwhen used the second time around. Now stripped of their original context of aneconomy of scarcity or an oppressive regime, these products largely recall an EastGermany that never existed. They thus illustrate not only the way in whichmemory is an interactive, malleable, and highly contested phenomenon, but alsothe processes through which things become informed with a remembering—andforgetting—capacity. (Berdahl, 2010: 52)Important for the understanding of nostalgia, the question of the role of the objects wasraised 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 (seeJameson 1991: 19) in former East Germany and a “nostalgia of style” primarily (but notexclusively) in the West. He wrote that the production and consumption of Ostproduktefunctioned as the “main symbolic locations for the crystalization of these two types ofnostalgia” (Bach, 2002: 548). In the case of modernist nostalgia, the consumption ofOstprodukte appears as a form of production itself – a reappropriation of symbols thatestablishes “ownership” of symbolic capital. In the nostalgia of style, Ostprodukte constituted“floating signifiers of the ‘neokitsch’ that undermine consumption as an oppositional practiceby at once turning the consumer into the market and the goods into markers of personal ironicexpression” (Bach, 2002: 548). “Nostalgia is colloquially a form of longing for the past, butits modernist variant is less a longing for an unredeemable past as such than a longing for thefantasies and desires that were once possible in that past. In this way, modernist nostalgia is alonging for a mode of longing that is no longer possible” (Bach, 2002: 548).Paul Cook in Representing East Germany Since Unification: From Colonization toNostalgia (2005) looked back towards the moment, when nostalgia in Germany started. Heexamined the state-sanctioned memorialisation and the growing nostalgia for East Germanyin literature, television, film and the internet to map out the path of German national identityduring 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 thisstereotype has been challenged.Wolfgang Becker’s film Good Bye Lenin! (2003) has inspired many scholars to research28

the vast fields of ostalgia in reunified Germany. Oana Godeanu-Kenworthy watched this filmthrough the lens of Jean Baudrillard’s theories of simulation and simulacra, and argued thatBecker deconstructed the nostalgic transformation and commodification of the Socialistnational past in the post-Communist age by exposing the deep collective needs to which thisstyle phenomenon responded. Confronted with the ideological dominance of Westernideology after 1989, the characters in the film struggled to come to terms with their own pastby creating alternative personal and collective narratives (Godenanu-Kenworthy, 2011).Anthony Enns (2007) in his essay about Good Bye Lenin! argued that ostalgiarepresented a critique of Germany's contemporary socio-economic and political situation. Heconnected ostalgia with a massive economic crisis in Germany at the time, characterised byunemployment and severe cuts in health care and education that have only increased thedisparity between East and West. In this context, the nostalgia for the East could be seen as areexamination of the utopian hopes and expectations surrounding German reunification and acritique of the capitalist system that has failed to adequately address current economic andcultural challenges (Enns, 2007).2.5. Nostalgia: concluding remarksAs this overview shows the perspectives on nostalgia phenomena vary from negativeand dismissive to those that argue that it has a potential for today’s generations to learn fromand critically engage with the past. Most of the research on this topic has touched on thequestion of how nostalgia has been mediated, focusing on different examples and usuallyconfined to a rather short time period. A study of the changes in the mediation of nostalgiaproduction over several decades should be able to bring welcome new insights into this field.3. Theoretical framework and analytical categoriesIn this thesis, the concept of nostalgia serves as a fundamental basis for analysingcultural changes in Russia after the fall of Communism. When presenting parts of thisdissertation at academic conferences, I received scholarly criticism for using the nostalgiaconcept 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 andfocused too much on individuals’ melancholic and psychological conditions. They suggestedemploying the term “cultural memory” instead, as this term would be more applicable to thedevelopments in Russia, because it covers more aspects of culture than nostalgia. Somethought that nostalgia was an ideology imposed by mass media, which has rapidly developedinto a commercial branding strategy, and therefore has excluded a more profound notion ofmelancholy as a reaction to the historical changes and contemporary conditions, which couldpotentially slow down transformation and development.One of the main arguments against using the concept of nostalgia was a denial ofnostalgic experiences by both the producers of “nostalgic” content and its consumers. Whenthis argument was discussed at the “Nostalgia” workshop on 12-13 November 2012 atSödertörn University, Sweden, the majority of individuals experiencing nostalgia deny beingnostalgic. An argument that nostalgia is not a condition that one chooses to be in, but acondition diagnosed by others, raised much positive feedback. It was claimed that nostalgia inthe East became true only after the attitudes to the past in the East were interpreted and namednostalgia in the West. After two long days of discussion participants returned to the startingpoint – the need for re-conceptualising, broadening or going beyond the concept of nostalgiato make it more applicable to changing cultural environments, which is in fact a debate thathas been brought up long time before.Indeed, the concept is problematic. In this thesis I see nostalgia as a complex andmultilayered phenomenon and concept, useful in the debate on cultural change and activeengagement 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 ofprogress, 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 isan 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 Feeling30

Zeitgeist, or the spirit of times, including real factors, events and ideas, was believed todefine epochs and create premises for changes (Blumer, 1969, Nystrom, 1928; Vinken, 2005;Sekacheva, 2006). Cultural theorist Raymond Williams has developed another concept tocharacterise the lived experience at a particular time and place. The concept of “structure offeeling” denotes the culture of a particular historical moment, a common set of perceptionsand values shared by a particular generation, which is most clearly articulated in particularartistic 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 elaboratedthroughout Williams’ life, in particular in Marxism and Literature (1977). Conceptualisingnostalgia as an overarching attitude, which may provide valuable input into understanding ofthe 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 Russianculture after the fall of the Soviet Union, I follow Raymond Williams’ theoretical frameworkand method on the analysis of culture. Williams wrote that any adequate definition of cultureshould include three categories and the relations between them: “ideal, in which culture is astate or process of human perfection, in terms of certain absolute values” (in this case theanalysis 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 adetailed way, human thought and experience are variously recorded” (analysis of culture thenis “the activity of criticisim, by which the nature of the thought and experience, the details ofthe 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 certainmeanings and values not only in art and learning but also in institutions and ordinarybehaviour” ( analysis of culture in this case is “the clarification of the meanings and valuesimplicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture”. This analysis includesboth 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 heunderstands art, i.e. “art, while clearly related to the other activities, can be seen as expressingcertain elements in the organisation which, within that organisation’s terms, could only havebeen expressed in this way. It is then not a question of relating the art to the society, but ofstudying all the activities and their interrelations, without any concession of priority to any ofthem we may choose to abstract” (Williams, 1961/2001: 62). He continued with claiming that31

even if “a particular activity came radically to change the whole organisation, we can still notsay that it is to this activity that all the others must be related; we can only study the varyingways in which, within the changing organisation, the particular activities and theirinterrelations were affected” (Williams, 1961/2001: 62). Admitting that activities can beconflicting and controversial, the change occurring in the society will be complex, andcontroversial, ambiguous and even paradoxical elements will be present in the wholeorganisation (Williams, 1961/2001:62).In The Long Revolution Raymond Williams understood the theory of culture as “thestudy 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 isthe complex of these relationships. Analysis of particular works or institutions is, in thiscontext, analysis of their essential kind of organisation, the relationships which works orinstitutions embody as parts of the organisation as a whole. A key-word, in such analysis, ispattern: it is with the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind that the useful culturalanalysis begins, and it is with the relationships between these patterns, which sometimesreveal unexpected identities and correspondences in hitherto separately considered activities,sometimes again reveal discontinuities of an unexpected kind, that general cultural analysisis concerned. (Williams, 1961/2001: 63)Williams saw the main challenge in studying culture in getting hold on a “sense of theways 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 (“valuedsystem of behaviour and attitudes”) and Ruth Benedicts’ (1934) pattern of culture (“selectionand configuration of interests and activities, and a particular valuation of them, producing adistinct organisation, a ‘way of life’”) are lived (Williams, 1961/2001: 63-64). He wasconvinced that the artistic expressions must be looked into for getting a deeper understandingof 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 livingresult of all the elements in the general organisation. And it is in this respect that the arts of aperiod, taking these to include characteristic approaches and tones in argument, are of majorimportance. For here, if anywhere, this characteristic is likely to be expressed; often notconsciously, but by the fact that here, in the only examples we have of recordedcommunication that outlives its bearers, the actual living sense, the deep community thatmakes the communication possible, is naturally drawn upon. (Williams, 1961/2001: 65)A structure of feeling, according to Williams, cannot be learnt. “One generation maytrain its successor, with reasonable success, in the social character or general cultural pattern,32

ut the new generation will have its own structure of feeling, which will not appear to havecome ‘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 itsown way to the changing and reproducing the changes in organisation with the available atthe certain moment creative tools (Williams, 1961/2002: 65).Williams suggested start searching for structural feeling of the past eras in thedocumentary culture, which in the studied case of nostalgia in Russia includes theatre plays,literature, architecture and interior design, television, dress-fashions, and the relationsbetween them all. These documents are not to be studied in autonomy, but their significanceis to be analysed in relation to the whole organisation, “which is more that the sum of its of itsseparable parts” (Williams, 1961/2001: 65). Williams pointed out that documentary culture isessential 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 theirown time. Taking this into consideration, the cultural analysis presented in this dissertationand based both on the study of fashion design, television programs, newspaper articles andartistic expressions, and the recorded accounts of living witnesses, will, according toWilliams, present only an approximation.Apart of suggesting a framework for the cultural analysis, the theory of structure offeeling 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 onlyaccessible 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 isrecorded 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 theorganisation of this period. After all witnesses had gone (one period includes threegenerations), the lived culture will be reduced to the selected combination and (a) used as acontribution to the general development of the society; (b) serving the purpose of historicalrecord and reconstruction; and (c) used as a rejection or forgetting of some aspects of whatused to be a lived culture (Williams, 1961/2001: 68). The selection process, according toWilliams, 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 thedevelopment of the society, the process of historical change, will largely determine theselective tradition. The traditional culture of a society will always tend to correspond to its33

contemporary systems of interest and values, for it is not an absolute body of work, but acontinual selection and interpretation. (Williams, 1961/2001: 68)Because the process of change is constant, complex and continuous, it is impossible topredict which past works will be relevant in the future. In this process of selective traditionit is therefore important that cultural institutions (museums and educational institutions)preserve “the tradition as a whole”, but not some selection done in accordance withcontemporary interests. In this case, the work of preservation and resistance to the criticismarguing for the irrelevance of certain works in a given period of time is necessary for anysociety (Williams, 1961/2001:69): “in a society as a whole, and in all its particularactivities, the cultural tradition can be seen as a continual selection and re-selection [andinterpretation] of ancestors” (Williams, 1961/2001:96). Because a society sees its pastthrough the lens of its contemporary experience, it makes sense, Williams suggested, not toreturn to the work of the period, but “to make the interpretation conscious, by showinghistorical alternatives; to relate the interpretation to the particular contemporary values onwhich it rests; and, by exploiting the real patterns of the work, confront us with the realnature of the choices we are making” (Williams, 1961/2001:70).Therefore, in this dissertation I will analyse chosen examples of representations of theSoviet past by actively relating it to the times they were created and interpreted, in order toshow the radical changes that have taken place in the values, attitudes and ways of life incontemporary Russia.3.2. Nostalgia, Progress, Continuity and RuptureModern 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 movefrom the past to the future has been linked to the notions of progress and perfectibility insocial 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 presentover past were based not only on views of the inevitability of linear progress forward to an34

improved future, but were also supported by evolutionism and historicism, and later by staticfunctionalist paradigms and theories of modernization” (2006: 919). When Gorbachev cameto power in the Soviet Union, many in the West and in the East believed that his liberalreforms would bring positive changes and re-new the ageing Socialist world. Many had bythat time understood that the regime could no longer function. Still, for many the end of theSoviet 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 aquestion that has puzzled many people from the former Soviet Union: “How to make sense ofthe sudden evaporation of the colossal and seemingly monolithic Soviet system and way oflife, in which we grew up and lived?” (Yurchak, 2003: 480). Both Western Sovietologists andordinary 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 movingtowards democratic reforms.Transitologists, studying the process of change from one political regime to another,have been anticipating a progressive gradual transition from authoritarianism to liberaldemocracy. In line with a belief into progressive future, many of them assumed that liberaldemocracy was a single endpoint of historical development (see critique of this perspective inStark, 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 transitologistsactually looked rather different. At that point, critics started to question whether the concepttransition, which implied progressive movement towards an end result, should be applied tocountries that went through political and economic crises (Cohen, 2000). The protracted andin some cases seemingly failing process of democratisation raised an issue ofwhether political systems that are no longer authoritarian regimes yet have not come toresemble liberal democracies should continue to be classified as countries in transit, orwhether it is time to recognize that the hybrid institutions of many so-called transitioncountries (italics mine) actually represent a stable equilibrium point rather than a stage onthe way to further democratization. (Carothers, 2002 quoted in Ganse-Morse, 2004: 322)Thus, critics of transitology argued that this perspective on regime change did notprovided framework for analyzing emergence of new forms of authoritarianism in EasternEurope (Roeder, 1994; Way, 2003). This form of transitology, which believed in linearhistorical progress, stopped scholars from thinking about post-Communist developments more35

generally. Critics proposed an understanding of post-Communist change as “open-endedtransformation [my italics] that, by rejecting any conception of a presumed endpoint totransition, forced analysts to focus on present events and to evaluate empirical evidencewithout the bias that potentially results from the belief that a country is on a transition track toa given outcome” (Ganse-Morse, 2004: 335). From this theoretical point, post-CommunistRussia was believed to hardly fit a transition paradigm, as a country progressing towardsliberal democracy. On the contrary, ”it looks like regression” (Cohen, 2000: 39).The “irreversible rupture” in the historical continuum, caused by the fall of the SovietUnion, created a deepening feeling of crisis often articulated in the reproach that after the fallof Communism all sense of stability and foreseeable future, as well as any unifying nationalidea disappeared. This disruption of normality or regularity, this disorganisation in theorderly, taken-for-granted universe of the Soviet Union had created conditions of possibilityfor nostalgic longing for the lost home and stability.Still judging from the perspective of progressive future, being nostalgic was seen as aconservative turning back, caused by an inability to cope with present circumstances and alost 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 determinatebackwards-looking stance. This not only closed down lines of active relation to the past, butalso valorised what was set up as its single, inescapable alternative, facilitated convenientversions of the past in favour of the present, and left the stage free for only avowedlyconservative reactions to modern times. Nostalgia became associated with a defeatist attitude topresent and future, appearing tacitly to acquiesce in the temporal ruptures of modernity by itsvery assumption of this attitude. Nostalgia was also conceived as seeking to attain theunattainable, to satisfy the unsatisfiable. If a dogmatic belief in progress entailed an ardentlonging for the future, nostalgia as its paired inversion entailed only an ardent longing for thepast. It is, then, as if nostalgia arises only in compensation for a loss of faith in progress, and forwhat 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 longerunderstood as it used to be (Sztopmpka, 2000: 449; Huyssen, 1994: 8). Huyssen believed thatmodern societies are not just experiencing “another doubt of progress”, but are “livingthrough a transformation of this modern structure of temporality itself. Increasingly in recentyears, 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 transitionsexperienced during modernity, ranging from wholesale acceptance through gradual36

adjustment to either melancholy over unchangeable forms of social malaise or arguments forfurther radical change” (Pickering, 2006: 920).Svetlana Boym argued “in a broader sense, nostalgia is rebellion against the modernidea of time, the time of history and progress. The nostalgic desires to obliterate history andturn it into private or collective mythology, to revisit time like space, refusing to surrender toirreversibility of time that plagues the human condition” (Boym, 2001: xv).The question is therefore whether or how nostalgia has contributed as a productive forceto the understanding of dramatic transformations of modernity and as a means of workingthrough the temporal trauma of modernity.3.3. Nostalgia and traumaOxford 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 thirddescribes “an emotional shock following a stressful event, sometimes leading to long-termneurosis”. Borrowed from medicine and psychiatry, the concept of trauma was introducedinto sociological theory. Pitirim Sorokin, analysing the aftermath of the Soviet revolution inhis Sociology of Revolution (1967/1928), “stressed the biological and demographic damage tothe society: physical degradation of population, widespread disease, mental disturbances,falling fertility rates, rising mortality rates, famine, etc.” (Sztompka, 2000: 450). PiotrSztompka extended the notion of trauma “to the damage inflicted by major social change onthe cultural, rather than biological, tissue of a society” (Sztompka, 2000: 450). He explainedthe notion of cultural trauma as relevant to the theory of social change and suggested thatcultural trauma should be treated as “a link in the ongoing chain of social changes; dependingon the number of concrete circumstances, cultural trauma may be a phase in the constructivemorphogenesis of culture or in the destructive cycle of cultural decay” (Sztompka, 2000:449).Informed by Robert K. Merton (1938/1996) and Anthony Giddens (1990), Sztompkadescribed several active and passive strategies of adaptations to traumatic experiences: “Apassive, ritualistic reaction would mean turning (or returning) to established traditions and37

outines, 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 culturaltrauma (Davis, 1979). For those who felt comfortable in Socialist societies, the differencebetween their past and present situations might have been striking. They have interpreted thedisruption of their world and way of life as traumatic, and therefore more easily embraced anostalgia 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 mightvalidate the socialist past” (in Todorova and Gilles, 2010:36).The sudden post-1989 socio-economic and political changes were identified among theones causing traumatic encounters. Crime and inflation can be seen as universal, affectingeveryone, while unemployment and degradation of status affected those less financiallysuccessful who were deprived of both social position and economic wealth in the newcapitalistic conditions (Sztompka, 1996; 2000; Ivanova, 2002; Wieliczko and Zuk, 2003).Cultural disorientation informed by Westernisation and Americanisation, new rules of life andconflicts of generations, as well as a disrupted coherence and a redefinition of historicaldevelopments and popular beliefs can be seen as some of the shifts that could turn intocultural traumas (Sztompka, 2000). However, these disorientations do not necessarily causecultural traumas.A traumatic sequence is started only when such maladjustments, tensions, andclashes are perceived and experienced as problems, as something troubling or painful thatdemands healing. In all these cases the shift form disorientation towards cultural trauma ismanifested by the intellectual, moral and artistic mobilization of a society, the appearanceof 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 actualevents. Meanwhile, some traumas can also be rooted in “widespread imaginations” oftraumatising events. Potential traumatic phenomena “may not lead to actual trauma, becausethey are explained away, rationalized, reinterpreted in ways which make them invisible,innocuous, or even benign and beneficial” (Sztompka, 2000; 457). Cultural trauma does notexist 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: “someof the interpretations construe such events as traumatic; some construe imagine, objectively38

non-existent events as traumatic; and some construe objectively traumatizing events as nontraumatic”(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 inthe “Third-World” countries. In the Russian media these days Soviet past is often presented asa utopian paradise of heroes. One should forget that such framing of the Socialist world as asuccessful economy was predominantly based on official propaganda on one side, anddominant media representations of the past on the other. In this way, positive representationsof the Socialist advancement in today’s mass media is a double construction, based on thepropagandistic constructions of the Socialist period itself further filtered throughcontemporary ideological interests of ruling powers and the mass media.The majority in the Soviet Union was aware of the “shortcomings” of socialistindustries and valued western products more than home-produced. Nevertheless, after the fallof Communism potential traumas of the period were overtaken by the traumas that emergedafter the collapse of the Soviet empire. It is believed that the “trauma of deindustrialisation” inthe 1990s “has brought about alcoholism, drug abuse, homelessness, and the feminization ofpoverty” (quoted in Todorova and Gilles, 2010: 5). In this case, what is seen as the traumathat spurs growing nostalgic sentiments towards what came before it is the periodimmediately after the fall of Communism, not Communism itself. Sometimes the period ofCommunism seems to be framed in popular opinion as more beneficial than the period afterthe collapse of authoritarian society.Legg suggested a different approach to the theoretical and practical linkage betweennostalgia and trauma: “While nostalgia denoted a positive attachment to a past real orimaginary home, trauma denoted the negative inability to deal effectively with a past event.While both conditions represent problematic engagements with the past, nostalgia oftenfocuses on a time and place before or beyond a traumatic incident” (Legg, 2004: 103). Withinthis framework, both the destination for nostalgic longing and the traumatic event are locatedin the past and feed into contested memories activated in the present time.3.4. Nostalgia as medical condition and reaction39

Disrupture in continuous development becomes an essential condition of possibility forthe 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 EasternEurope as a “regional phenomenon” (2011: 17). This phenomenon had double preconditions:“a certain market-centred modernity, a modernity that state socialism had been straining toresist 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 Europeanslooked backwards to find stability and autonomy otherwise denied to them. “EasternEuropeans naturally tethered themselves to recalled, also always fantasized aspects of lifebefore 1989 that seemed better – warmer, more human, safer, more moral – than the chaosand devolution of life today” (Boyer, 2011: 18). This point of view on one side can be seen assymptomatic of much research done in the 1990s and 2000s on nostalgic sentiments inEastern Europe. On the other side it recalls an important element of “market-centredmodernity”, which in my opinion served as an important precondition not only for people’semerging nostalgic feelings, but also for the commercialisation and glamorisation of suchnostalgia sentiments that were growing from below. This commercial aspect of nostalgia willbe discussed later, after some thoughts on the psychological element of nostalgia.The theoretical perspective on nostalgia as a psychological condition is linked to itsconceptualisation as epidemic. This perspective recalls Joannes Hofer’s medical dissertationfrom 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 pathologicalcondition of homesickness (Davis, 1979: 1), and return to origins: nation and fatherland(Boyer, 2011:18). This corporeal “disease” had symptoms ranging from melancholia andweeping to anorexia and suicide. The only cure from this painful condition was believed to bea return to the “native climate” – literally homecoming (Boyer, 2011: 18).Nostalgia in Eastern Europe did not necessarily mean restoration of state socialism, butrather a “socio-temporal yearning for a different stage or quality of life”, mainly youth, and “adesire 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 withhomesickness, but more with a “bitter-sweet yearning for things, persons or situations of thepast” (Guffey, 2006: 19). In respect to the Eastern European societies, nostalgia has come tobe viewed in Davis’ terms – as a sociological phenomenon that helps individuals to adoptduring the major life transitions (Davis, 1979). Fred Davis considered nostalgia as an40

“adaptive mechanism” in turbulent times of transition. Thus, individuals going throughdramatic traumatic changes in their lives would be more prone to nostalgic experiences. Forexample, people moving into a “mid-life crisis”, retirement, change of career path, or copingwith divorce or personal losses might experience nostalgia.3.5. Nostalgia and memoryMy informants warned me for using concept of nostalgia and instead proposed that Ishould employ the notion of cultural memory when characterising representations of theSoviet past in various art and media forms. They did not want their work or attitudes to thepast to be associated with negatively charged nostalgia. Many of them saw nostalgia as apassive condition caused by traumatic experiences, and they did not want to equate theirattitudes 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 andtherefore 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 inthinking these terms together rather than opposing them to each other.Fascination by memory touches fundamental questions of temporality and lifeexperience. The modern world’s obsession with memory “functions as a reaction formationagainst the accelerating technical processes that are transforming our Lebenswelt (lifeworld)in quite distinct ways” (Huyssen, 1994: 7). In the present world of speedy communicationtechnologies, memory[R]epresents the attempt to slow down information processing, to resist the dissolution oftime in the synchronicity of the archive, to recover a mode of contemplation outside theuniverse of simulation and fast speed information and cable networks, to claim someanchoring space in a world of puzzling and often threatening heterogeneity, nonsynchronicity,and information overload. (Huyssen, 1994:7)The relations between memory and history are complicated. History has been seen as acritical practice, where historians could remain independent and objective towards the past:based on historical evidence they could oppose nostalgia for the past (Keightley andPickering, 2006). However, historians are not immune to memory, and at the same timememory does not only consist of nostalgic sentiments, and therefore should not be opposed41

(Keightley and Pickering, 2006). Some forms of memory can be seen as symptoms ofamnesia and question the vision of “the classical modernist formulation of memory asalternative to the discourses of objectifying and legitimizing history, and as cure to thepathologies of modern life”; other forms of memory are associated with “some utopian spaceand 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 totalityof 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 usforward into the future. But a space of experience exists only in diametrical opposition to ahorizon of expectation, which is in no way reducible to the space of experience. Rather, thedialectic between these two poles ensures the dynamic nature of historical consciousness.For Paul Ricoeur (2000/2006) it is history that corrects and completes (sometimescontradicts) memory, while the whole reason in the production of the “nostalgia” is to correctand contradict history with memory. For Ricoeur the relations between history and memorycan 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 bywhich history from this point onward enriches memory is imposed on the anticipated futurethrough 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. Itis memory not only establishes the relations with the past, but also introduces a critical to theone’s of history position in the dealing with past or, even, opposes it. It becomes indeedmemory that enriches history, but not visa versa.For Ricoeur history has a critical authority “that is able not only to consolidate and toarticulate collective and individual memory but also to correct it or even contradict it” (quotedin Rusen, 2007: 11). The problem is that for many people in Russia, official history did nothave any critical authority, while memories both individual and collective could have servedthis purpose. We face a problematic turn. Yurchak wrote that different positions in sovietsociety influenced people’s experiences and hence memories. Thus even these individualmemories and collective memories of certain groups were not unison and constantlycontradicted each other. For some official history indeed was a critical authority, which wassupposed to bring sense into the millions of negative memories, which painted black good andprosperous life in the late socialism.42

To understand the relationship between history and memory, Ricoeur introduced thelinguistic medium of narrative, which memory and history both share. Memory narrative(individual or collective) circulates in conversation and belongs to everyday discourse. It isnot devoid of critical second thoughts, since during conversation a play of question-andanswerintroduces into a concrete public space an exchange of narratives.Memory is often conceptualised as a resistance agency and a “destabilizing forceagainst historical grand narratives. Memory can challenge dominant interpretations of thepast and stress the local and particular, although it must always remain dependent upon thepower-knowledge relations in which it exists” (Legg, 2004: 105). Counter memory canfunction as an embryonic “public sphere” in oppressive societies by being born in oralhistories, jokes, anecdotes, and photographs (Boym, 2001: 60-61).Andreas Huyssen believed that history was used to “invent national traditions, tolegitimize the imperial nation states, and to give cultural coherence to conflictive societies inthe throes of the Industrial Revolution” (Huyssen, 1994: 7). In comparison, the mnemonicpractices of our time seem “chaotic, fragmentary, and free-floating. They do not seem to havea clear political or territorial focus, but they do express our society’s need for temporalanchoring when in the wake of the information revolution, the relationship between past,present, and future is being transformed. Temporal anchoring becomes even more importantas the territorial and spatial coordinates of our late twentieth-century lives are blurred or evendissolved by increased mobility around the globe” (Huyssen, 1994: 7)Cultural memory, a term widely used in scholarly writing today, was first introduced bythe German scholar Jan Assmann, developing it from Maurice Halbwachs’ theory ofcollective memory. The latter first emerged in Halbwachs’ work Social Frameworks ofMemory (originally published as Les cadres sociaux de la mémoire, 1925), and was thenfurther developed in The Legendary Topography of the Holy Land (1941) and The CollectiveMemory (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 individualpractice. According to him, individuals could remember certain events in a coherent mannerbecause a society provides both the material for remembering and also a context filled in withcommemorative activities. Social groups also highlight which events an individual shouldremember or forget, as well as produce shared memories, which the individual has neverexperienced in any direct way.Based on the relation to past and present, Halbwachs also made a distinction between43

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 directrelation, historical memory can be understood as memory that reaches individuals throughhistorical documents. Autobiographical memory, for Halbwachs, is a memory of events onehas 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 “collectiveconcept for all knowledge that directs behaviour and experience in the interactive frameworkof society and one that obtains through generations in repeated societal practice andinitiation” (J. Assmann, 1995: 126). For Assmann, cultural memory is different from so-calledcommunicative 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 intohistory. Assmann instead argues that “in the context of objectivized culture and of organizedor ceremonial communication, a close connection to groups and their identity exists which issimilar to that found in case of everyday memory” (J. Assmann, 1995: 128). In other words, agroup builds its understanding of unity and uniqueness upon this preserved knowledge and isable to reproduce its identity. Thus, he continues, “objectivized culture has the structure ofmemory” (J. Assmann, 1995: 128). The distance from the everyday, as well as the availabilityof fixed points (texts, monuments, sites, rituals) can characterise cultural memory, in contrastto communicative memory. These collective experiences crystallised in certain cultural formscan become accessible and used after many years.Developing these ideas, Aleida Assmann analyses the dynamics of both individual andcultural memory, which consists in “a perpetual interaction between remembering andforgetting” (A. Assmann, 1999/2008: 97). She distinguishes between two forms ofremembering 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, leavingbehind and dispersing she calls passive forgetting. Active remembering is a constant recallingand re-using of cultural messages, which constitutes a process of canonisation, while passiveremembering is when cultural relics are preserved and archived in being de-contextualisedand disconnected from their former context (A. Assmann, 1999/2008: 98-99).In 1997 Marita Sturken, an American scholar, wrote a book Tangled Memories, whereshe analysed the production of American cultural memory with the Vietnam War and the44

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 culturalmemory is central to the construction of national identity. She distinguished between personalmemory and history as a “field of contested meanings in which Americans interact withcultural elements to produce concept of nation, particularly in events of trauma, where bothstructures 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 historyand 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 areconstructed and reconstructed through complex processes of remembering and forgetting.Indeed, she considers forgetting to be an essential part of memory work, because the need forcoherent narratives and continuity of experience require forgetting. Having this focus on bothprocesses of remembering and forgetting, Sturken addresses works by Sigmund Freud, whoproblematised the processes of forgetting. She also raises questions of how memory isproduced 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, onthe contrary, arguing that in the contemporary world the boundaries between art andcommerce are blurred, credits commodities with a capacity of producing cultural meanings.Like Andreas Huyssen, Sturken also believes that cultural memory is produced throughrepresentations, images, objects and the human body, by what she calls technologies ofmemory, through which “memories are shared, produced, and given meaning” (Sturken, 1997:9).3.6. Time and Space of NostalgiaI believe two analytical categories – space and time – to become central to the analysisof nostalgia and in discussing relations between past, present and future in contemporaryRussian culture. In the analytical chapters I am going to use these categories to analyserepresentations of the Soviet past.45

Svetlana Boym stressed the importance of space to the notion of nostalgia. Nostalgia isdefined 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 thelost home, often in association with religious or nationalist revivals, reflective nostalgiadwells on algia, and has no place of habitation. Reflective nostalgia is embodied in thetransient movement, not in any arrival to a safe destination. “If restorative nostalgia ends upreconstructing emblems and rituals of homes and homeland in an attempt to conquer andspatialize time, reflective nostalgia cherishes shattered fragments of memory and temporalizesspace” (Boym, 2001).Because memories are mobilised through place, Boym investigated various sites inMoscow 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 examinedthe longing for past stability during the glasnost period, she concluded that much memorywork during the 1980s was both restorative and reflective, and thus aimed to both conquerand shatter space. She for instance believed artistic works by Ilya Kabakov to reconstructimages of Russia that represented places that were impossible to revisit otherwise. These totalenvironments provided complete yet fragile replications of everyday spaces (for example aSoviet toilet) and utopian spaces (the never-built Palace of the Soviets). In her discussion ofKabakov’s works and also Nabokov’s poems and prose Boym explored not only dreamspacesof home but also exile spaces, which are equally important for nostalgia, being placesof present and future.Places of exile, as places of dwelling and reflecting on the lost home and theimpossibility of home-coming, are essential to the discussion of nostalgic experiences ofseveral generations of former Soviet citizens. Having “emigrated” from the country ofstable/stagnated present and predictable future (the USSR), people ended up (withoutphysically moving) in a totally new space (the new Russia), where neither past, present orfuture were predictable. The known rules of game did not apply anymore, the bipolar worldsuddenly turned into a globalised space, and feelings of both irreversibility of time andunpredictability 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 offeeling oneself a stranger in a new period that contrasted negatively with an earlier time inwhich one felt, or imagined, oneself at home” (Keightley and Pickering, 2006: 922).The first wave of “immigrants” was both notoriously unsentimental. Their attitudesdepended much on their status, attitude and perspective in the USSR, as well as on their46

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 theSoviet “homeland”, which was no less complicated. In fact, can they be nostalgic forsomething they have never had? According to Boym that could be possible: one can indeed benostalgic for an imaginary/imagined home one has never inhabited. If their nostalgia was bornfrom the memories of mediated images of the past, what are these nostalgic images like?Nostalgic images are of “double exposure” (Boym, 2001). They simultaneously presentimages of present and past, dream and everyday life, home and abroad. Everything isavailable 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 onlysimultaneously present past and present, but also project images of future. Theserepresentations 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 therealities of the future” (Boym, 2001: xvi). If “the twentieth century began with a futuristicutopia”, it “ended with nostalgia. Optimistic belief in the future was discarded, while positiveutopian 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 adifferent 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 ofinnocence and sincerity, is an ultimate destination of the nostalgic. Both in everyday life andin political campaigns restorative nostalgics tend to use sincerity and innocence as argumentfor 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. Therestorative nostalgic wants to go back to the time when they were not aware of how thepresent 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 clearlyinvolves yearning for what is now not attainable, simply because of the irreversibility oftime; but to condemn nostalgia solely to this position leaves unattended not only moregeneral feelings of regret for what time has brought, but also more general questions for howthe past may actively engage with the present and future. (Keightley and Pickering, 2006:920)47

3.7. Nostalgia and IdentityCan nostalgia in these modern times be used as a tool for constructing a shared sense ofbelonging? Svetlana Boym gave a negative answer to this question:The moment we try to repair longing with belonging, the apprehension of loss with arediscovery of identity, we often part ways and put an end to mutual understanding. Algialonging– is what we share, yet nostos-the return home – is what divides us. It is the promise torebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us torelinquish critical thinking for emotional bolding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends toconfuse the actual home and the imaginary one. In extreme cases it can create a phantomhomeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Un-reflected nostalgia breedsmonsters. Yet the sentiment itself, the mourning of displacement and temporal irreversibility, isat the core of the modern condition. (Boym, 2001: xvi)I would agree with Boym that it could not only be problematic, but also very dangerousto build a sense common identity on the basis of nostalgia. Nevertheless, it seems thatnostalgic sentiments can be used for identity construction in certain cultural and politicalcontexts. Can it be so that nostalgia in its amatory has necessary elements to be employed inthe process of identity formation: appeals to imaginary home, selectivity in relation to historyemotional approach rather than rational, game of symbols etc.I suggest having a closer look at the notion of identity to answer this question. Identitiesvary and can be individual, group, national, cultural, social, gender, sexual and so forth. Inthis work attention will be given to questions of national, cultural and gender identities, theanalysis of which will be refined in later chapters.The definition of identity brings many scholars to heated debates. According to ErnestGellner and Eric Hobsbawm, identity is applicable to some integral entity and can be bestdescribed as a range of characteristics that are unique for a particular culture and ‘innate’ to aspecific people (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992). At the same time identity accentuates thefeeling of belonging that is shared among a particular culture or social group based on sharedexperiences (Gellner, 1983; Hobsbawm, 1992). Identities can be also ”understood asmeanings attached to human individuals or collectives, in interaction among themselves andwith 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 evercomplete 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 but48

multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practicesand positions. They are subject to a radical historicization, and are constantly in the process ofchange 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 itoperates across difference, it entails discursive work, the binding and marking of symbolicboundaries, the production of ‘frontier effects’. It requires what is left outside, its constitutiveoutside, to consolidate the process” (Hall and du Gay, 1996: 3). Stuart Hall and Paul du Gaystressed the importance of situating the debates about identity within historically specificdevelopments and practices and in relation to the processes of globalization, whichcharacteristic to modernity (Hall and du Gay, 1996).Hypothetically, it can be argued that Post-Soviet nostalgia was a result ofwesternisation or “Americanisation” of Russian culture after the collapse of the SovietUnion. The loss of unifying national idea with the fall of the Soviet empire was also, in theeyes 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 inthe light of cultural homogenisation, when local cultures become absorbed by global trendsand lose their uniqness. Following Arjun Appadurai (1996), I would suggest to focus moreon the discursive tensions between the processes of cultural homogenisation andheterogenisation, cultural fusions, which happen when global tendencies come in contactwith local and become adopted in local settings. Analysis of these processes is highlyrelevant in contemporary Russian context, as it might show how cultural fusions functionor fail in a previously closed society, and reveal that some identity discourses to a certainextend might resemble old debates dating centuries ago. With no doubt the nostalgia inRussia should be studied within the world context and as a part of globalisation process, ora backfire to the processes of globalisation. However, I would suggest not narrowing downthe explanation of the phenomenon of the Post- Soviet nostalgia strictly to causes. So far itseems to be of a more complex nature.Seemingly, the process of identification “invokes an origin in a historical past withwhich they continue to correspond”, in reality it uses “the resources of history, language andculture 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 oftradition as much as to tradition itself”: identities are not calling to return to our roots, but tocome 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 leastwithin a fantasmatic field” (Hall and du Gay, 1996. 4). Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay stressedthat:Precisely because identities are constructed within, not outside, discourse, we need tounderstand them as produced in specific historical and institutional sites within specificdiscursive formations and practices, by specific enunciative strategies. Moreover, theyemerge within the play of specific modalities of power, and thus are more the product ofthe marking of difference and exclusion, than they are the sign of an identical, naturallyconstitutedunity - 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 bedistributed and understood by the participants of cultural exchange, culture operatesrepresentational systems, which are comprised from signs and symbols (Hall, 1997). StuartHall describes three approaches to representation: reflective, intentional and constructionist.The reflective approach implies that a representation reflects meanings that already exist inthe world (Hall, 1997: 24). The intentional approach implies that it is authors who possess aunique idea or meaning, which they convey it into the world (Hall, 1997: 25). The last onerecognises social character as system of representations. As Hall puts it, “things do not mean:we construct meaning, using representational systems – concepts and signs”. Within thisframework, mass media is such a system, where identities are constructed through theinterconnected networks of written and visual language. Nostalgia should also be understoodas representation of a certain kind. Nostalgia is representation of past, mediated in signs andsymbols 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 ofartefacts, texts, works, genres and discourses” (Fornäs, 2011: 43). Identities articulate varioussigns and symbols, basic material/immaterial units for ”for making meaning by attachingmeaning 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 of50

articullation (Hall, 1986/1996: 141-142). “An articulation is thus the form of the connectionthat can make a unity of two different elements, under certain conditions. It is a linkage whichis not necessary, determined, absolute and essential for all time” (Hall, 1986/1996: 141). Onehas to focus on the circumstances and context “that make possible for a discourse to articulatedistinct elements that have no necessary, logical, natural or universal relation. Thus, a theoryof articulation is both a way of understanding how ideological elements come, under certainconditions, to cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do notbecome 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 symbolsmake of elements (sign and meaning, or representation and reference) is always contextdependent,it need not be completely arbitrary in a strong sense, but conditioned by thehistorical and social circumstances where symbols circulate and are used. The concept ofarticulation invites studying how symbols are combined with plural meanings in sociallysituated signifying practices, and in particular to understand how those meanings that areattached 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 pastsymbols in order to create modern identities. Certain memories become articulated andjuxtaposed in various media, and as a result become essential parts of identity formation. Inthis process of articulation, remembering and forgetting play an important role.Ernest Gellner argues, for example, that using cultural wealth from history, nationsmight even radically transform such traces of the past (Gellner, 1983: 55).Concepts used in relation to the discussion of identity formation are invented traditionsand imagined communities. The British Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm has introduced theterm invented traditions (1983), which became central to the politics of memory approach andstudies 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 ofpractice, normally governed by overtly or tacitly accepted rules and of a ritual or symbolicnature, which seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behaviour by repetition, whichautomatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, they normally attemptto establish continuity with a suitable historic past” (Hobsbawm, 1983: 1). Invention oftraditions, according to him, occurs during dramatic transformations of a society.The same year another book, which became a landmark in the scholarly writings onnationalism, was published. In Imagined Communities (1983/1991) Benedict Andersonsystematically described major factors that contributed to the emergence of nationalism. He51

defined nation as “an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limitedand sovereign” (Anderson, 1983/1991: 5). He explained that a community is imaginedbecause its “members will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hearof 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 whobelieved that nations have existed since early ages. Anderson debated with Ernest Gellner onthe origin of the nation, claiming that Gellner’s formulation that nationalism invents nationswhere 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, allcommunities 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 bythe style in which they are imagined” (Anderson, 1983/1991: 7).In 1993, ten years after the publications of Imagined Communities and The Invention ofTraditions, Hobsbawm’s colleague, a British African historian Terence Ranger, revisited theconcept 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 “itlays stress upon ideas and images and symbols. However politically convenient they were, thenew traditions were, after all, essentially about identity and identity is essentially a matter ofimagination” (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 actualand contemporary situation and, finally, becomes a part of “culturally institutionalisedheritage of a society” (J. Assmann, 1995: 130). Wilfried Spohn proposed “to define collectiveidentity as the extent of shared identifications, and to see collective memories as a crucialcultural source of collective identities” (Eder and Spohn, 2005: 2). In other words, oncecollective memory is objectified in pictures, monuments, history books or films, it becomes asignifier of a certain collective identity of an individual and gives sense of belonging to adistinct community and its cultural heritage. Since memories fluctuate and change in relationto their representation in time, they become powerful tools of a communal character thatserves to underpin a self-image of an individual. Nostalgia is also based on selectiveremembering and forgetting, uses of heroic and positive moments of the past. However, theproblem with nostalgia, as previous research has shown, lies more in how it divides than howit unifies individuals over the understanding of the past. This makes nostalgia a problematic52

concept and tool in use for identity construction. It may nevertheless be worth researching itspossibilities for understanding contemporary Russian identity formation.3.8. Nostalgia and ironyLinda Hutcheon, scholar of postmodenism, wrote “irony appears to have become aproblematic mode of expression at the end on the twentieth century […]. Irony has anevaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses into those who ‘get’ it and thosewho 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 broaderdiscursive framework, the ‘scene’ of irony, which she understood as social and political issue,which, involved power based relations and communication (Hutcheon, 1994:1). Sheinvestigated 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 andstructural ironies, rather than with situational irony, cosmic irony, the irony of fate becameher main focus.Hutcheon stressed “irony isn’t irony until it is interpreted as such-at least by theintending ironist, if not the intended receiver. Someone attributes irony; someone makes ithappen” (Hutcheon, 1994:6). If in the past irony was mainly theorised from the point of theironist, the encoder, and has therefore been implicitly or explicitly intentionalist” (Hutcheon,1994:111). Intentional ironies are usually understood as “stable”, intended, overt and capableof being reconstructed by the interpreter. But “the only way to be sure that a statement wasintended ironically is to have a detailed knowledge of the personal, linguistic, cultural andsocial references of the speaker and his audience” (Gaunt, 1989/2008).There are ironies that are interpreted, not intended as ironic. These ironies include, butnot restricted to situational, ‘accidental’ or incidental ironies. Strategy of interpretation isindeed one of the most common manifestation of irony (Hutcheon, 1994: 112). “Perhapsseeing and hearing irony is itself an intentional act that makes irony happen?” (Hutcheon,1994: 112).53

To call something ironic is to frame or contextualize it in such a way that, in fact, anintentionalist 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: allirony happens intentionally, whether the attribution be made by the encoder or thedecoder. 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 ironyhappen by what I want to call intentional act, different from but not unrelated to theironist’s intention to be ironic. (Hutcheon, 1994: 118)This approach would question the distinction between ‘intentionalist’ (marked by thecomplicity of irony and interpreter) and ‘voluntarist’ ironies (where only the interpreter isheld 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 ironywould 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 somethingthat results from the act of construing carried out by the interpreter who works within acontext of interpretive assumptions” (Hutcheon, 1994: 117). Thus, “interpreters are activeagents in making irony happen” (quoted in Hutcheon, 1994: 117). Hutcheon continued: ironyis always (whatever else it might be) a modality of perception – or, better, of attribution – ofboth 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 interpretativecommunity is therefore necessary for irony to happen.If intentions are forms of ‘conventional behaviour that are to be conventionally ‘read’, thenthey are ‘read’ within interpretative communities, but the meanings thus produced are asmuch the production of intentional acts as those intentions being ‘read’: both ironist andinterpreter 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 communicativesituation, and therefore the responsibility for ironic situation is a shared one. “The intendedaudience, for instance, may not end up being the actual one; it might reject the ironicmeaning, or find it inappropriate or objectionable in some way; it may simply choose not tosee irony in a given utterance “(Hutcheon, 1994: 118).Irony, as a learnt skill, involves “’social cognitive development’: that is, the ability toinfer both the knowledge shared by speaker and adresssee and the attitude of the speakertoward what is being discussed” (Hutcheon, 1994: 122).54

Irony and nostalgia are considered key components of today’s culture. It might havebeen difficult to conceptualise the combination between nostalgia, which was seen as asentimental longing for the past, with irony, which tends to be understood as the rather edgyopposite of sentimentality.Susan Stewart’s study On Longing calls nostalgia a “social disease”, defining it as “therepetition that mourns the inauthenticity of all repetition” (Stewart; 1984: 23). By denyingand/or degrading the present as it is lived, nostalgia makes the idealised (and therefore alwaysabsent) past into a site of immediacy, presence and authenticity. Stewart suggested that themajor differences between nostalgia and irony is that unlike the knowingness of irony (a markof the fall from innocence), nostalgia is utopian (Stewart, 1984:23). That is indeed anargument 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 (italicsmine) than an attribution of a quality of response (italics mine). Irony is not something inan object that you either ‘get’ or fail to ‘get’: irony ‘happens’ for you (or, better, you makeit ‘happen’) when two meanings, one said and the other unsaid, come together, usually witha certain critical edge. Likewise, nostalgia is not something you ‘perceive’ in an object; it iswhat you ‘feel’ when two different temporal moments, past and present, come together foryou and, often, carry considerable emotional weight. In both cases, it is the element ofresponse – of active participation, both intellectual and affective – that makes for thepower. (Hutcheon, 1998: on-line)Hutcheon argued that because the element of active attribution is not being brought up, “thepolitics 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 explainthis 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), thenpostmodernity's complex relationship with modernity – a relationship of both rupture andcontinuity – might help us understand the necessary addition of irony to this nostalgicinheritance. (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 of55

ironising (while still implicitly invoking) nostalgia undermines modernist assertions oforiginality, 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 remarksNostalgia has been viewed as the conceptual opposite of progress: reactionary,sentimental or melancholic. It has been seen as a defeatist retreat from the present, andevidence of a loss of faith in the future. Nostalgia is certainly a response to the experience ofloss endemic in modernity and late modernity. But one should admit that nostalgia hasnumerous manifestations, including also a progressive impulse of saving previously repressedutopian elements of the past into the future. These contradictions of nostalgia should not beseen as opposite, but as mutually constitutive (Fornäs, 1984).“Nostalgia is a term that enables the relationship between past and present to beconceived of as fragile and corruptible, inherently dependent on how the resources of the pastare made available, how those traces of what has been are mediated and circulated, and howthey are employed and deployed in the development of a relationship between past andpresent” (Keightley and Pickering, 2006: 938). Thus, nostalgia should be seen as a criticaltool, where both positive or productive active uses and sterile, impotent or passive uses arepossible.4. Price of laughing: irony and nostalgia in Late Sovietculture“Process which cannot be the simple comparison of art and society, but which must start from therecognition that all the acts of men compose a general reality within which both art and what weordinarily call society are comprised. We do not compare the art with the society; we compare bothwith the whole complex of human actions and feelings. We find some art expressing feelings whichthe society, in its general character, could not express. These may be the creative responses whichbring new feelings into light. They may be also the simple record of omissions: the nourishment orattempted nourishment of human needs satisfied” (Williams, 1961/2001: 87).“Art as entertainment that poses questions”, Vitalij Komar56

(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 ofPost-Soviet nostalgia and appropriation of Soviet cultural memory?” answered: “In works ofKomar and Melamid, of course!” (St. Petersburg, 2011). At that point of time I, franticallytrying to secure interviews with well-known Russian journalists who had written aboutdesigners Denis Simachev and Nina Donis, had not even realised that my hunt for answers tomy questions should have started with a careful investigation of the works of Russian artistsin a time when the Soviet Union was still alive and seemed to last for ever. It was my greatshame to miss from the very beginning such an obvious connection between the appropriationof Soviet symbols by Russian designers and Russian émigré artists. However, despite of somebasic 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 timeof perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produced an image of the last Soviet decadesas 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 andMelamid in the broader context of the postmodernist paradigm, by relying on secondarysources and interpretations done by other scholars. I do not want to present another history orreinterpretation of postmodernism here, but just highlight some important categories thatRussian 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, whichbecame a vibrant field for emergence and development of various subcultural fashion styles.Some of these subcultural fashion styles challenged Soviet symbols and hierarchies whilerecycling fashionable products of Soviet textile industry. Relying mainly on interviews withsome representatives of this scene as well as existing internet archive and publications ofMisha Baster, who is engaged in documenting of subcultures in Russia, I will briefly describetheir fashions.57

4.1. Russian conceptualismRosalind Marsh discerns four recurring artistic strategies of representing the Stalinistpast: deliberately avoiding the subject; using “extreme factuality”; choosing “satire, thegrotesque, 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 Russianconceptualism has combined the last two strategies.Sots-art (also referred as Soviet Pop Art or Socialist Art), invented in the early 1970s bytwo 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 systeminto material for parody and pastiche, often characterized also by a lyrical and nostalgicattitude” (Epstein, 2010: 64). Working across various media, artists appropriated Socialistvisual language to produce works, which aimed to challenge ideological and aestheticsdictates of the Soviet state. Sots Art appropriated ready-made symbols, images, ideologicaltruths and propaganda of Socialist power by presenting them in a playful, ironic manneraiming to free viewers from their ideological stereotypes.The postmodernist paradigm was often employed to explain late Soviet and Post-Sovietculture. Russian unofficial culture of the 1970s and 1980s, which Boris Groys calledpostutopian (not to be confused with anti-utopian), was believed to be linked to the similarWestern 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 theeveryday (Groys, 1988/1992: 105). Just like American artists turned to advertising as a sourcefor 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 criticalthinker Mikhail Epstein, underscored ”the moral implications of metaphysical contingency,which undermines totalitarian and hegemonic discourse and promotes self-irony as a mode ofhumility” (Epstein, 2010: 65). He believed Russian conceptualism saw itself not as a “merereplica of Western postmodernism, but as a reflection of the underlying structures of Russian5 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, originallycoined by Boris Groys, “was not so much an artistic school as a subculture and way of life” (Boym, 2001: 311).58

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 akind of hyper-reality” (Epstein, 2010: 65). Conceptualist project functioned as “apsychoanalytic instrument for deconstructing the repressive Soviet superego” (Epstein, 2010:65). By working in the medium of ”visualized concepts”, or ”mental projections”, whichconstituted a philosophical foundation translated into a system of objects, but not with visualforms as such, conceptualism was an ”ideo-analysis” that aimed to underscore the absurdityof the constructions of Soviet ideology (Epstein, 2010: 66). The conceptualist methodinvolved:The revelation of an inexorable and irreducible disjunction between them [i.e. thoughts andobjects], 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 itlacks any criteria for verification but has innumerable criteria for philosophical selffalsification(Epstein, 2010: 66).What conceptualism had in common with ideology was ”a tendency to substitute signs orconcepts for real substance. But the principal difference between them is that ideology claimsits signs have real referents, while conceptualism reveals the emptiness of its own signs”(Epstein, 2010: 69). Having organically emerged in the Soviet environment, “preciselybecause it is the underside of total ideology”, conceptualism offered ”a radical challenge tototalitarian claims of absolute truth, to the kind of ideological madness that prescribes ideasfor the interpretation and transformation of reality” (Epstein, 2010: 69).Conceptualism attempts to expose the realistic fallacy that attributes objective existence togeneral or abstract ideas. This was the hidden assumption of the Soviet system: it gave thestatus of absolute reality to its own ideological pronouncements. Virtually every facet ofSoviet life was dictated by ideological presuppositions about the nature of social reality, andconceptualism attempted to expose the contingent nature of such concepts by unmaskingthem as constructions proceeding from the human mind or generated by linguistic practices”(Epstein, 2010: 65).4.1.1. Nostalgia of Ilya KabakovOne 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, focusingon 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 coreof 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 ofpure meanings, in memory. Thus garbage is intrinsically more ideal and spiritual than thosebrand-new things that serve us by their material utility. (Epstein, 2010: 68)This “garbage”, materialised memories of the past, constituted his “total installations”, inwhich he investigated the borders of Soviet utopian projects of the future and the dystopianspaces that resulted from these projects. Living in inner exile in the Soviet Union and then inexile in the United States, he explored the notions of loss and emptiness, focusing on thecategory 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 surewhose homes they are. The visitor here feels at ones the only host of this abandoned homeand an uninvited guest who came to the wrong place at the wrong time. Going toKabakov’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 museumand a surrogate home”, moreover, it was “as much a memory museum” as it was “a museumof forgetting” (Boym, 2001: 318). The temporality and narrative Kabakov predominantlyworked with made this installation both “new and nostalgic” (Boym, 2001: 318). Past andmemory were embodied in the fragments of life, everyday objects and trash, which allowedKabakov’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 collageof material objects”, which tell “an allegory of Soviet reality” (Boym, 2001: 319). In otherwords, “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 allowthe artist to reconstruct his home of the past, thus “leaving un unbridgeable gap in thearchaeology of memory” (Boym, 2001: 319). Toilet became Kabakov’s nostalgic home, a60

home away from home, a home in longing for a lost time and place. This installation becamean eternal travel between past and present. It both attempted to dismantle Soviet utopias andrepresented utopian dreams of possibility to underscore the faults of Soviet utopia. At thesame time it was nostalgia for utopia. Kabakov “reverses time and turns future orientedutopias intro everyday ruins. He moves from the collective to the individual utopia, frompolitics 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 Russiannational pride, and was not seen as ironic nostalgia (Boym, 2001: 315). The utopian idea ofKabakov to explore and narrate the drama of Soviet life crashed against a wall ofmisunderstanding and refusal among his contemporary Russians.In the installation We Live Here at Centre Pompidou, “Kabakov goes to the origins ofmodern utopia and reveals two contradictory human impulses: to transcend the everyday insome kind of collective fairy tale, and to inhabit the most uninhabitable ruins, to survive andpreserve memories” (Boym, 2001:324). Ultimately, what Kabakov was nostalgic about wasnot a space, but a time. “If Past and Future are embodied in the installation in the shapes andlocations of objects, the Present is personified by the visitor himself” (Boym, 2001: 326). Itbecomes clear that nostalgic longing is strongly linked to personal experiences and highlyselective. “Through the combination of empathy and estrangement, ironic nostalgia invites usto reflect on the ethics of remembering” (Boym, 2001: 326).4.1.2. Nostalgia of Komar and MelamidForced into emigration shortly after the Bulldozer Exhibition (1974) of noncomformistart, Vitalij Komar and Alexander Melamid, founders of Sots-Art, “a style relatedthrough nostalgia and parody to the official canon of Soviet art”, created a series of paintingstitled Nostalgic Socialist Realism (1981-1983) (Epstein, 2010: 70). They have acknowledgedthat sometime in the 1980s nostalgia started occupying their souls.In the series they examined and deconstructed “the ironic contradictions inherent inmyths of power” (Hillings, 1999: 49). Valerie Hillings, the Guggenheim Museum's expert inRussian art, believed that “by selecting subjects illustrating the conflicting accounts of Soviethistory propagated by successive Communist regimes, Komar and Melamid identified the lossof a past that had been expunged from the collective national memory”, while “emerging in61

part from their attempts to reconnect with their homeland, these works use Socialist Realismas their point of departure” (Hillings, 1999: 50).Komar and Melamid deliberately chose the most controversial symbols of Sovietpower, such as figures of political leaders. In this series they emphasized the absent presenceboth of Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin following Stalin’s death in 1953 and NikitaKhrushchev's destalinization in 1956. Just like Kabakov, Komar and Melamid created anarrative of remembering. They told a story that they heard at a summer camp near Moscowshortly after graduation from the Stroganov School of Art and Design. The story told thatstatues of Stalin that had been too large to destroy have been buried all over Russia after hisdeath. This led to the artists’ realisation that Stalin’s effigy lay not only buried literally in theRussian soil, but also deep in their subconscious. ‘This was a great discovery for us… Therewere no more taboos anymore”, said the artists (Ratcliff, 1988: 17). From that moment, if tobelieve 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 emotionalbeing. They have not rejected, but resurfaced historical events and their consequences throughrecollection and image-production. “Necrology”, constant evocation of the past helped Komarand Melamid to advance into the future (Ratcliff, 1988: 25, 156).By constantly reflecting on their past perceptions of Soviet life – everything from passportsto banners to Socialist Realism – they are guarding themselves, and hopefully theirviewers, from not recognizing the signs of a totalitarian regime in the future. The danger ofamnesia is one that Komar and Melamid consider so real in out modern world. They havespent their careers remembering so that we will recognize danger in the future. Again, forthem the ‘past and future meet in present’. They employ nostalgia as a means for rewritingfuture history. (Leigh-Perlman, 2009: 16)Komar and Melamid explained their repetitive remembering of Soviet symbols: “OurRussian memories and our Russian history must come back from time to time because theyare a permanent part of our individuality. One cannot jump out of one’s biography; that isimpossible. Our past belongs to us, and our past is also part of our present” (Russians inAmerica 16). Sergey Oushakine wrote about Komar and Melamid:It was precisely this ironic “outsidedness” that allowed the artists Vitaly Komar and AlexMelamid to replicate stylistic gestures of Socialist Realism in their Sots art projects of theearly 1980s without fully merging with the replicated style. The effect of the visualfamiliarity with the Sots art painting’s syntax and morphology was subverted by internaldiscrepancies within this apparently homogeneous stylistic code. (Oushakine, 2007: 472)62

Oushakine emphasised the “semantic polyphony of Sots art, its inherent symbolicconflict between formally integrated but ideologically incompatible elements. It is preciselythis polyphony that is largely absent in retro replicas” (Oushakine, 2007: 473). Their constantaddress to the past and the use of symbols of power has to be carefully read against thecontext both these images were created and knowledge about tragedies caused by the Sovietpower. Similarly, the artists acknowledged the power of time in the contextualisation anddecontextualisation of the meaning of their work. “That is the destiny of parody – with time itloses its original source… as time goes by and changes us – even we may lose the source ofparody in our work” (Russians in America 14).4.1.3 Nostalgia and trauma in Russian conceptualismRussian 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 Russianpost-modernist artists and writers in the Soviet past as ”attempts to come to terms with thelegacy of the Soviet, and particularly Stalinist, past” (Ruten, 2009: 540).[P]ostmodern artists exchange the search for truth and an ideal harmony with whichmodernist art is associated for a playful, fictionalized, and ironic approach to reality. Thisnew approach has emerged not in the last place in reaction to traumatic sociopoliticalevents, as a repudiation of the ideologically motivated historical atrocities of the first halfof 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 prevailin Russian art in the 1980s, as a work of “post-memory”, a term used by Marianne Hirsh inher article “Postmemories in Exile” (1996). If the first artistic reactions to traumatic historicalexperiences are usually biographical ones, linked to those who have witnessed traumaticevents, then the shift towards the fantastic-grotesque was typical for second-generation artisticcopings with the past. The second and third generations, she claims, manage to freethemselves 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 empiricalchapter of this thesis. However, I am rather sceptical about applying this theory to the work ofRussian conceptualist artists. They have not been victims of Stalinist terror themselves, but63

they have lived through traumatic experiences of Soviet everyday reality. Some of them,including Ilya Kabakov, address through personal traumatic memories the collective traumaof Soviet people.Ruten wrote that Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism could be analysed from atherapeutic perspective:First of all, Sots Art and Conceptualist artists are themselves inclined towardstherapeutically motivated auto-comments. On the one hand, they stress that their work ismarked by aesthetic or ironic distance, and thus as far from direct social critique aspossible; on the other, they do analyze it in psychological terms, as a successful way ofdealing with the traumatic Soviet (and particularly Stalinist) past. (Ruten, 2009: 542)Vitalij Komar and Aleksandr Melamid, for example, stressed that a balance betweencritical irony and affective nostalgia was their only means of dealing with Soviet history(Ratcliff, 1988: 18, 40). Meanwhile Dmitrij Prigov conceptualised his “personal behavior” asa 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’sdifficult perestroika years: “we felt our activity […] would be helpful […] and eventherapeutic for the situation” sphere when labeling their oeuvre “a joint struggle to come toterms with their past”, an attempt “to get past their outrage, a feeling as necessary as it isinadequate”, or “sessions of a psychoanalytic treatment that is supposed to shed light on thepolitical unconscious and its images” (quoted in Ruten, 2009: 542).Sergey Afrika together with Sergei Anufriev in 1990 realized a performance RozhdenieAgenta (Birth of the agent), in which they climbed into the belly of the famous sculpture ofVera Mukhina Rabochy I Kolkhoznitsa – the most important visual symbol of Sovietideology. This performance served as a starting point for many future projects dedicated toreflections over the Soviet culture. In 1993, in the artistic project Krymaniya, Sergey workedin a psychiatric hospital, studying the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the mindsof patients. This experience was the basis of a series of works devoted to the anesthetisationof trauma. He used ready-made flags of the Soviet era filled with ideological symbolism, aswell as images of cartoon characters Neznayka (Dunno), and Donald Duck, adding words ofLacan, Lifshitz and himself. 6According to Ruten, “Sots Art and Moscow Conceptualism are rarely defined in terms6 Information about the project can be found on-line at http://artkladovka.ru/ru/artists/02/bugaev/bio/.64

that do not hark back to notions of art as therapy” (Ruten, 2009: 543). They pointed out thateveryone fell victim to “forced ideologisation” and Stalinist aesthetics, and then themselvestook 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 isspecific to a particular medium of art, and that other media will represent the Soviet pastdifferently, defined by the innate qualities of a medium. I suggest focusing on undergrounddress in the Soviet Union in the 1980s to test this assumption.. This time I am not going tolook at exile artists, but at subcultures born in the Soviet Union. Being “vne” Soviet officialdiscourse, they could be analysed from the position of inner exile.4.2. Fashioned body as artistic medium: Nostalgia in 1980sunderground fashion4.2.1. Soviet textile industry during late socialismSoviet fashion industry in the period of late socialism lagged hopelessly behind itsWestern counterpart, despite having access to a number of talented professionals. 7 Just likethe rest of the Soviet economy, fashion developed not according to the “fashion logic” ofchange, but according to the five-year plans (Bartlett, 2010). There were several ateliers thatcatered for the Soviet nomenclature and showed the norms of “good taste” to the rest of thecountry. Produced and merchandised for average people, wear was not only of a terribly lowquality, but also very hard to get hold on. Therefore buying precious items meant taking goodcare of them. 8 Because the majority of population has never had access to good design andquality textiles, people had to fashion themselves according to simple patterns available in thespecialized publications, which taught Soviet citizens the very first DIY principles. Yet, ingeneral, clothes looked rather dull, and only those who had access to distribution channels orwent abroad were able to follow international trends.Black markets were booming with Western products as well as with self-made dyedjeans. The constant shortage and high prices of quality Western products made peopleworship 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 vSSSR. Sovetski Kuznetski, 14. Moscow: Slovo.8 Yulia Gradskova in her dissertation Soviet People with Female Bodies: Performing Beauty and Maternity inSoviet 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 mosthated 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 ofenvy and irritation for many women. Always dressed with style and updated about the latesttrends, she was a patron of the fashion house on Kuznetsky 14, inviting to the Soviet UnionFrench 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 rebellionIn the perestroika years, members of various subculture groups who found themselvesin opposition to the dominant ideology used fashion as a platform for rebellion and amanifestation of inner freedom, as well as a protest against older generations and the inherentconformity of Soviet society.A few years before perestroika were difficult times for Russian underground withconstant regulations and bans on music and artists (Troitsky, Lepnitsky, 2011). Street patrolsand prosecution from the authorities lead to the shrinking of public spaces available for selfexpressionand creativity. The change of political climate around 1985 led to theamalgamation of previously distorted subcultural movements: artists, punks, new-wavers androckers stood up on the same side of the barricades. These people were united by a sharedsense of unsatisfied protest. Growing on the streets, these young people wanted to question oreven destroy what was known as a “Soviet man”, to sneer at all holy relics and places of theSoviet state, provoke the Soviet everyman and move forward to something different. Thenumber of protesters was small, and it was important for them to find each other in the Sovietsocial landscape, in order to collectively search for new forms of self-realisation and selfexpression.Similarly to Western subcultures, dress on the Russian subculture scene became amain form of self-expression and a communicative code, used to identify people with thesame 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 andoften used to describe the phenomenon of Soviet subcultures, 9 nevertheless seems9 Baster, 2011. Available at66

problematic. It is common to analyse the Soviet system by opposing “official” Soviet cultureand “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 thestate was not necessarily oppositional or dissident. Alexey Yurchak has suggested that the realsituation in the Soviet system was more complex (Yurchak, 2006). He talked about a hybridSoviet culture, where official and non-official elements were deeply intertwined. Indeed thebanning of some cultures in the Soviet Union led to the emergence of others, which otherwisewould never have appeared. The same could have been said about fashion: the undevelopedofficial Soviet fashion industry has lead to the domination of DIY production and outbursts ofcreativity 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 creativeattempts of the Soviet people. Several underground experiments became recognized on aninternational level. One of the symbols of recognition of these designs was the title MissAlternative-98 given to Pani Bronya (Dubner) and to the designer Alexander Petlura(Ljashenko).The chronological frames of the underground fashion phenomenon can be locatedsomewhere 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 byGorbachev’s perestroika, young underground subcultures, musicians and artists poured outinto 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, wasstill alive (Baster, on-line). There were many reasons for this change. First, around the sametime Western formats of glossy magazines, such as Cosmopolitan and Vogue, introducedWestern fashions and brands in Russia. Second, underground designs were not fit for thetough 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 andcontinued their career as professional designers there. Meanwhile, some of them left thesubcultural scene for personal reasons. 11http://www.kompost.ru/nt_al_ternativnaa_moda_do_prihoda_glanca_1985_1995.html10 Russian fashion journal ProFashion for years publishes analytical articles on the state of Russian FashionIndustry.11 Larissa Lazareva, 2010 from http://www.kompost.ru/nt_al_ternativnaa_moda_larisa_lazareva_2010_-page1.html.67

The fashion that was born in the premises of urban squats was inspired by Westerndress cultures and an act of resistance against Soviet ideology and its dominant way of life. 12Similar to Russian conceptualism, the emergence of alternative Russian fashion was possiblebecause of Soviet ideology. 13 This was not the first time youth cultures created their own stylein the Soviet Union and were demonised by the authorities for being an imitation of Westernfashions. 14 Even though certain aesthetic elements were imported from the West, thequestioning of the norms of Soviet lifestyles and the re-conceptualisation of Soviet symbolscould only develop in those countries that lived under communism. The resistance to thedominant ideologies through means of consumption juxtaposed Western and Sovietsubcultures.Many of the members of these subcultural scenes in Leningrad and Moscow werestudents who were trained as artists or architects. Their art education gave them a wideknowledge of styles and artistic movements, a developed sense of styles, as well asprofessional 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 Moscowconceptualist framework, many of them created wearable garments, while some constructedart pieces suited more for artistic performances than for everyday use. They searched forsecond-hand military uniforms and accessories at the Tishinka flee-market in Moscow, tothen retail, re-dye and mix them together, and present them both at organised performances in12 For them the process of dressing-up, fashioning and consuming was en essential part of individual and groupidentities. Individuals who shared a feeling of being neglected by the “official” standards came together anddeveloped a sense of group identity. Scholars have pointed out, quite rightly, that rebellious youth signalled theirgroup membership through distinctive and symbolic appropriation of visible status and cultural markers, such asaccessories, clothing, music, mannerisms and argot. Youth cultures revive and transform fashion items andpatterns of behaviour by relocating them into the contemporary context and ascribing them new meaningsthrough different use. Through this unconventional or unexpected use, youth cultures question the predominantvalues 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 thosecommodities are purposefully distorted or overthrown’ (Subcultures: Reader, 1997). More on subcultures andtheir 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 binaryopposition in relation to Soviet official and non-official discourse.14 Young people interested both in the western cultures and resisting moralizing directions of Komsomol startedlong time before 1985. Moscow World Festival of Youth and Students in 1957 kicked off both phenomenon offashionistas and people rejecting any non-Soviet way of life. Colourfully dressed according to the latest westernfashions and dancing to the hottest western bits, the stiljagas (modds or hipsters in English) were criticized bythe ideologically correct citizens, while Komsomol brigades patrolling streets, actively and aggressivelyprosecuted 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 aroundthe Soviet Union black-market economy supplied soviet modds, hipsters and hippies with over-priced westernproducts, self-produced accessories and clothing items. While the dress rebellion continued, its repressioncontinued as well, and many neformali (people, who went beyond accepted norms of behaviour) suffered a bigdeal 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 byreconstructing costumes from sketches of Nadezhda Lamanova and Varvara Stepanova, whowere well-known designers of the beginning of the 20 th century. Inspired by their designs offunctional clothing, she tried to adjust it to the 1980s’ reality. Carried away by the earlySoviet aesthetics, Khudyakova was one of the very first designers who recycled Sovietmilitary 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 ofpost-Soviet nostalgia. She included these ultimate symbols of Soviet military power,oppression and discipline into a fashionable wardrobe, thus stripping them of their ideologicalpower.Artists Gosha Ostretsov and Timur Novikov created costumed performances, wherethey developed the theme of “hyper-communism”. In the first collection, Gosha designedironic costumes of Communist invaders. His “Military” collection was dedicated to theresettlement of communism to other planets, which reflected a dream of Perestroika days - toget rid of it. At the same time in this collection, Ostretsov clearly mocked the ideals ofmilitary might of the Soviet army and the idea of world revolution. Naivety and mockingwere achieved by adding to the military uniforms children’s toys and plastic baby night potinstead of the cap, toy tanks instead of shoulder straps. In his staged happenings, dress andperformance converged together, referring back to the 1920s. His style was a merge of newwaveaesthetics and naïve art, and evolved into elaborated concept of falling back intochildhood.Katia Ryzhikova and Irene Burmistrova, members of duo “Krov’ s molokom” (Bloodand milk, in English), focused on futuristic fashion line. Their first collection “Zheleznysovok” (“Iron scoop” in English) was created in the spirit of socialist art, and included suchwell-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 – militaryuniforms and coats, she transformed into cocktail dresses by cutting off the sleeves andopening back, and then painting the garments in trendy acid colours, adding up authentic69

accessories, such as military belts. She made skirts form the red flag, and bras from furnomenclature 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. OlegKolomiychuk, nicknamed Harry (or Garik) Assa (1953-2012), a former black marketer and aking of rag-trade and second-hand markets, became a trendsetter in this undergroundenvironment, creating together with others stage and everyday outfits for rock musicians. Todress up “Pop Mechanics” Assa founded an impromptu fashion house “Ai da Lulli”. Thebasis of collections was comprised of vintage outfits found at Tishinka flee-market. Duringthis time a style called “mertvy razvedchik” (dead spy, in English), which consisted of baggytrousers gathered at the waist in the folds, big jackets with rolled up sleeves, double-breastedcoats and hats was adapted. The name of the style spoke for the origin of the clothes: sold bythe widows of passes away KGB members and spies, these garments were bought at secondhand 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 keyfigure of Moscow’s art sphere. An enormous collection of garments from different erasbecame a basis for Petlura artistic work. His project “Empire of things” told the unofficialhistory of the Soviet Union through material objects. The dressed human body became avessel for historical narration marked with personal stories and memories. In Petlura’s longtermproject, the knowledge of Soviet reality was mediated through educational initiatives(lectures, exhibitions and shows at higher education institutions home and abroad) as well asironic appropriations and interpretations in performances and shows, at the same time as hiswork contributed to the contemporary Russian prêt-a-porter fashion.Analysing underground dress culture of the 1980s and 1990s, I would like to stress thatthis carnivalesque fashion, speaking in Bakhtin’s terms (1965) became a platform wherealternative individual voices could interact with each other, be expressed and heard. It created“threshold” situations where Soviet hierarchies and normalised truths could be questioned andbroken. Soviet ready-made truths in these costume performances were overturned bynormally suppressed voices and energies. Inherited from Komar and Melamid, ironic attitudesmocked 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, challengingmainstream political and social discourses (Yurchak 2006, Hutcheon, 1994). By recontextualisingSoviet symbols, such as military uniform, these designers removed both theheroic pathos and the negative attitudes that surrounded such symbols during the time ofperestroika. Being ironic towards used elements did not always mean degrading the sign, butretained a warm and caring attitude towards it (Hutcheon, 1994). In this case, certain positiveand naïve aspects of Soviet culture could not only preserve their positive meaning, but alsofuel a positive attitude after going through the processes of re-contextualization and overidentification.At the same time, this fashion was a part of a bigger “punk revolution”, which started tospread around the late 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s. During that period, major musicfestivals were organised and key styles such as punk and hardcore appeared in severalmutations and combinations. In Moscow this style evolved into “aristocratic punk”, whichmixed the western DIY punk movement with a more general vintage style, based on mockingthe appearance of Soviet workers and nomenclature. This explains the constant exploitationsof various types of uniforms. The Soviet punk philosophy of “empowerment through totalliberation” can be best seen in the way existing objects were exploited. Remorselessdeconstruction of intensely hated KGB uniforms and prisoners’ jackets, turning them intounderwear and cocktail dresses, as well as dying them into acid colours, was not only ademonstration 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 anddegrading its power markers.The Moscow and Leningrad punk scenes in the 1980s and the first half of the 1990swere 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 frameworkof appropriation of Soviet political, cultural and ideological heritage. Streets, squares, clubsand squats became the “public spaces”, where complex subculture identities were expressedand constructed through the medium of dress, where dress itself became a “public space”, andwhere opinions were negotiated and contesting views expressed through scandalousperformances.This project of underground fashion also contained elements of utopia. One of the mainideas behind these actions was to change people’s perceptions and to influence their attitudeto things and the surrounding environment. The main aim of these “fashion theatres” was to71

make people see clothing not as something impersonal and only practical, but much morethan that – as something entertaining and exiting. Thus, the re-cutting, re-sewing and redyeingmilitary and working uniforms or the dress of pioneers, which were then introducedinto the context of 1980s’ punk subculture, was an attempt to destroy traditional socialhierarchies in the Soviet Union.These young people had a special attitude to historical objects. For them the Tishinkaflee-market was a goldmine (interviews with A. Petlura, V. Morozov). They believed that onecould in theory try to sew something new, but there was no real need, as ready garments ofperfect quality and with a long and interesting history already existed. One just had to mixand match them fearlessly with style to be able to shock and stress outsiders. They sawnovelty not in the creation of new objects, but in new interpretations, which became possibleby putting them into a new context and combining them with unexpected accessories andelements, which shock, amused and frightened people. Mixing underwear and outwear inreverse order was a gesture both towards people and objects, a rebellion against norms andrules. Garik Assa, one of the members of this scene, said that what they were trying to do wasto plant non-Soviet culture into the Soviet reality. This culture mutated in the Soviet contextand 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 objectswas parallel to the cut’n’mix bricolage attitude of Western punk, as analysed not least by DickHebdige 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 tomontage and collage practices in Russia in the 1920s: I have already mentioned that some ofthe 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 asit was called in Leningrad slang of the time: “stjeb” (Yurchak, 1997). During the late periodof Brezhnev rule, as Alexey Yurchak described, when the system did not seem to evolve, bothopen critique and active propaganda of the system looked ridiculous (Yurchak, 1997). Hebelieved 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 seriousattitude 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 itwas impossible to distinguish between them. Yurchak pointed out two symbolic procedures of“serious stjeb”: over-identification with ideological signs and re-contextualisation of these72

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 resultthat a new connection between the signifier and the signified becomes visible, and thereforealso the peculiarity of the whole ideological construction, which was not clearly seen in theordinary 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 andwarm attitudes to these symbols, which had simply been dismissed during the time ofperestroika. Thus the ironic attitude towards used elements did not always mean a degradingof these inherited signs, but could also retain a warm and caring attitude towards them. In thiscase, certain positive and naïve aspects of Soviet culture could preserve their positivemeaning.Concluding remarksDestalinisation started with Khruschev and managed to enter the public sphere duringperestroika. Critical representations of Stalin and his crimes were made in the 1980s, but inthe 1990s there was a slight change “from a fullblown demonizing towards a more positiveassessment of the past”, which later became ”the debates about the atrocities of the Stalinistregime ’tainted by association’, … with the delegitimized democratic dreams of bygoneperestroika days” (Rutten, 2009: 541). Edgy irony shifted in tone and turned into somethingwarm and light hearted, while playful attitudes grew into new seriousness.What were the reasons for that? How did the representations of Soviet reality changeafter the fall of the Soviet Union? Which media took on the main role of representation of theSoviet past? Such questions will be addressed in the next chapter.73

5. Nostalgia in the 1990s5.1. Political and social dynamics of the 1990s1990 started with demonstrations of independence and the Warsaw Pact countries attemptsto break free from communist rule. In January 1991 the drive for independence in the BalticStates escalated. A few months later, when the referendum on the Soviet Union’s futureshowed that a majority wanted some kind of reformed union to be retained, the Baltic Statesstrove for a complete breakaway.In February Gorbachev stripped the Communist Party of its monopoly on power under theArticle 6 of the constitution by calling on parliament to allow multi-party politics. Later thesame year Gorbachev chose to merge a radical reform package and a much more cautiousplan 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 ofEmergency (GKChP) 15 on the eve of signing a new deal with the republics, 16 placedGorbachev under house arrest in his Crimean residence and rolled tanks into Moscow,occupied strategic positions, closed many newspapers and imposed an emergency junta to runthe country with the aim of reversing the reforms, re-imposing central rule, and halting therepublics’ drive to independence. 17 Yeltsin, earlier elected as the first Russian president,began organizing resistance and was backed up by thousands of demonstrators, who turnedout to protect the White house 18 . On 21 August the coup has collapsed, and a day laterGorbachev resigned as Soviet Communist Party general secretary and dissolved the CentralCommittee.On 8 December 1991, the leaders of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus agreed during theirmeeting at Belovezh Forest near Minsk to disband the Soviet Union and form theCommonwealth of Independent States (CIS). On 25 December, Gorbachev announced hisstepping down as Soviet president. The Soviet flag was lowered from the Kremlin for the lasttime, 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 MinisterDmitrii 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 SovietFederative 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 moreconcentrated in Moscow, while provinces were getting poorer. Homelessness and povertyincreased 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 outputcontinued 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 longingfor “yesterday”, but hope for “tomorrow”, which made the whole situation to seem not sohopeless (Levada, 2002:7).Shortly after the events of 1993, economic difficulties made many people question the neworder and brought disappointment in liberal rule. Despite the fact that shops started to be filledwith consumer goods and the number of successful entrepreneurs increased, many people didnot have financial capacity to enjoy this abundance, and the “macroeconomic collapse hasbeen paralleled by an unprecedented demographic crisis, reflected in sharp in-creases inmortality rates and declining birth rates” (Brainard, 1998: 1096). Rising social and economicinequality 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 wereYoung well-educated men whose skills have enabled them to exploit new profit-makingopportunities in the private sector of the economy. The losers are older workers, men inparticular, whose human capital has been devalued and who have few incentives to acquire newskills relevant to the emerging economy. Women also appear to be among the biggest losersfrom the transition. Since profit-making opportunities and large rents will be arbitraged awayover time and individuals will acquire new skills, an eventual decrease in wage inequality inRussia should be expected. But-barring government interventions-this will happen much moreslowly than did the rise in inequality. (Brainard, 1998: 1112)Meanwhile on the ground of the economic reform, the relationship between the presidentand the parliament started deteriorating. Yeltsin’s special powers granted in 1991 to carry outreforms were supposed to expire in 1992. He demanded from the parliament to reinstate hisdecree powers, and after the parliament refused, called for a referendum on a newconstitution.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 SupremeSoviet, Russia's legislature. According to the then-current constitution the president did nothave the power to dissolve the parliament. As a result the Congress impeached Yeltsin and75

announced vice president Aleksandr Rutskoy to be acting president. In the beginning ofOctober situation deteriorated. The army, which had initially declared its neutrality, byYeltsin's orders stormed the Supreme Soviet building on October 4, and arrested the leadersof 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 theseparatist Chechen leader, Zhokar Dudayev, in December 1994 with Russian tanks andartillery attacking villages, killing hundreds of civilians and turning thousands of others intorefugees, did not add him public support either. After the crisis, which Yeltsin presented asconfrontation between pro-communist and democratic forces, his opponents were arrested. 19Their arrest did not last long – in 1994 they were released, and the proceedings were placedinto archives.In this story I would like to stress the importance of how Yeltsin portrayed and explainedto the public the events of October 1993. He justified his actions by claiming that thedefendants of the parliament wanted to bring back the communist power. According to thepolls both in 1993 and in 1994 people would choose Yeltsin as their presidential candidate. 20Despite 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 theCPSU.Trial of the CPSU turned out to be a major battlefield over the Soviet past. Politicalscientist, Kathleen Smith, in her book Mythmaking in the New Russia. Politics and Memoryduring 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 eventsfrom the Soviet past to defend legitimacy of their party. 21 Their strategy was to claim thatonly some party members committed the crimes. The democrats, on contrary, attractedattention to the crimes of the communist party as a whole. The Communist Party presenteditself as always having been working for the benefit of the nation. Instead of focusing onapologies, the communists shifted public attention to the pride in past economic, scientific,and military achievements, and resurrected old myths about struggle, self-sacrifice, andvictory. The party’s leadership role and consequent heavy losses in World War II were used19 Available online Октябрь 1993. Хроника переворота, 1997. Russki Zhurnal.http://old.russ.ru/antolog/1993/chron144.htm20 S Migdisova and E. Petrenko reported in 1994 “Rossiayane I segodnya otdali bi presidentskiy post BorisuYeltsinu. FOM survey. Available on-line at: http://bd.fom.ru/report/cat/eltzin_/rating_eltsin/of1994010221 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 officialsa chance to work out their reputations and that of their party, and demonstrate that noteveryone had given up communism or come to reject the achievements of the past. “TheParty’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, theclaim of victimization evoked great empathy” (Smith, 2002: 29). The absence of a trial thatwould have banned the Communist Party as well as the plotters of the coup led to thesituation where the Communist Party and its members were not prosecuted for the committedcrimes (Smith, 2002).By the end of the trial in 1994 the president proposed amnesty package, which first wasrejected 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 generalValentin Varennikov, charged as an accomplice of the GKChP, it seemed that the Augustcoup 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 yearsfrom the first Russo-Japanese war to the most recent Soviet-Afghan war…No one is guilty ofanything” (quoted in Smith, 2002: 45).In December 1995, parliamentary elections showed that the Russians supported theCommunists who secured the largest share of votes and won the elections. That created atheoretical possibility of Ziuganov’s success in the 1996 presidential election. At this point oftime the “dominating attitude” of nostalgia for the Soviet period of stability becamenoticeable.Studies showed:a steady prevalence of positive ratings, stereotypes, attitudes addressed to the last period ofRussian 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 betweenthe people, the whole situation of 1970 – 1980s often seems preferable to the current one. Thepresumption that nostalgic attitudes (orientations) are dominant in the modern Russian society isestablished and actively supported by a large part of the political and journalistic elite. Hencethe conclusions are often drawn about the failure or principal inability of the fundamentalreforms 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 publicopinion is quite willing to accept such treatment. (Levada, 2002:7) 2222 In Russian: ”Многочисленные исследования и наблюдения обнаруживают устойчивое преобладаниепозитивных оценок, стереотипов восприятия, установок, обращенных к прошедшим периодамотечественной истории, преимущественно к самому длительному в XX в. "периоду застоя". Судя поопросам, политическая и экономическая системы, лидеры, отношения между людьми, вся обстановка77

At that time “in a number of surveys it has been often suggested that the victory ofcommunists will bring the country back to the ‘desired period of ‘stagnation’” (Levada,2002:10). Yuriy Levada suggested that despite nostalgic mood-swings (especially in March1996, when Zyuganov’s electorate’s predominance in the presidential race was obvious), “toreturn to the Soviet past wanted just over one fifth of the respondents (of the sociologicalservey, conducted by VCIOM – Ekaterina’s comment), which is about the size of electoralsupport for the Communist Party” (Levada, 2002:13). Levada explained it by the fact thatmass nostalgia for ‘the situation before 1985’ could be characterized “more as a symbolicexpression of a critical attitude to the politics of the authorities, than a desire to return to theSoviet past” (Levada, 2002: 13). Detailed analysis of the statistical data showed that while inall observed groups (age and education groups, results from 1996 and 2000) there was a clearshift of sympathy for the situation ‘before 1985’, the resistance to the nostalgic moodsweakened. In the survey on attitudes towards competing economic systems – plan economyand market economy – it was only in ‘very transitional’ 1992 that the supporters of the marketeconomy dominated, although voices in favour of the position “better to change nothing in thesituation before 1985” were sound (Levada, 2002: 7). “Besides, – he continued, – thepresidential election in 1996, the default of 1998, new president coming to power in 2000 didnot have any significant impact on the level of nostalgia. It should be said, of course that thepublic mood does not determine the real possibility or impossibility of any kind of transition.It is only about mass preferences” (Levada, 2002:13). 23Nevertheless, in this difficult situation with strong nostalgic sentiments, Yeltsin had anadvantage the communists did not have. By 1996 Kremlin already controlled two state-owned70—80-х годов чаще всего представляется более предпочтительной по сравнению с нынешней.Создается и активно поддерживается значительной частью политической и журналистской элитыпредставление о доминировании ностальгических ориентации в современном российском обществе.Отсюда нередко делаются выводы о неудаче или даже о принципиальной невозможностиреформирования общества, неприемлемости чуждых моделей жизни для людей советско-российскогоформирования, неизбежности возврата к привычным образцам или хотя бы символам и т.д. Опросныеданные 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 прошлогожелают немногим более однойпятой опрошенных, что примерно соответствует размеру электоральной поддержки компартии. Этозначит, что массовую ностальгию по "положению до 1985 г." мы вправе характеризовать скорее каксимволическую, как выражение критического отношения к политике власти, но отнюдь не какстремление вернуть советское прошлое. Причем стоит отметить, что существенного влияния на уровеньностальгических 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 общественныенастроения 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 areal threat, Yeltsin managed to convince the privately owned NTV to join his campaign. Thismonopoly of the main broadcasting media became the decisive factor in Yeltsin's victoriouselection 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 correctcandidates. Show-case liberal Constitution, the nominal separation of powers, parlamentarism,human rights very quickly revealed their decorative-rhetorical character. ‘Democracy’ hasremained on paper, lasted no more than one election cycle. (Gudkov, 55) 24Before the presidential elections in 1996 ”crime, a social ill […] grew by an amazing 21.5per cent since 1992; the murder rate alone grew by 27.4 per cent, while drug-related crimesincreased 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 effectiveelectoral 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 thepost-communist Russia” (Brudny, 1997: 257), and in December 1995 ”would have won thefirst round and have been the undisputed front runner in the second round of the electionregardless 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 ofcampaigning 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 anticommunisttheme of Yeltshin’s campaign, the second focal point introduced was that therewere only two real candidates, and therefore ”the election was fundamentally a choicebetween 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! Waspublished 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 технологииманипулирования общественным мнением и административный ресурс для проведения нужных властикандидатов. 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 indocumentary and feature films in the weeks leading up to the election. This culminated with ashowing of the Academy Award winning movie, Burnt by the Sun, on the night before the firstround elections, and a movie depicting in extremely negative way the history of the CommunistParty on the eve of the second round. (Brudny, 1997: 260)This involvement of media in the election campaign is no accidence. In the 1990s, theRussian media industry evolved, simultaneously becoming more commercialised andpoliticised, and became an integral and important part of Russian economy, receiving foreigninvestments 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 marketwas one of the most important and significant manifestations of the new Russian economy, asort of highly visible symbol. However, the contribution of the media in a market economywas not limited to advertising. Itself, media industry became an aggressive and influentialplayer 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, remindingvoters 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 remarksThe former Eastern Bloc countries have undergone tumultuous changes over the pastcentury. Boym (2001) noted that nostalgia seems common after revolutions, such as theRussian Revolution of 1917 and more recent Russian political changes. “The revolutionaryépoque of perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union produces an image of the last Sovietdecades 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 ofcommunist rule had been a ”revolution” (Gaidar, 1996). Sociologist Tat’yana Zaslavskayarejected the proposition that a fundamental social revolution had taken place, and suggestedthat there had been evolution, led by intelligentsia against nomenklatura. But this80

intelligentsia reform movement had been stopped, and the political initiative had passed toBoris 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 bothbe called revolution. First, the new ruling elite consisted overwhelmingly of the formernomenklatura (Zaslavskaya, 2004). Second, there had been no mass movement that haddriven the former ruling group from power, but it had been the regime itself that had led tochange (Zaslavskaya, 2002). Zaslavskaya’s position opened up an important discussion onwether the changes were indeed so profound, as they seemed at a time.5. 2 Remembering the USSR in the 1990sRed curtains, busts of Lenin, old-fashioned furniture, pioneer uniform on waitresses andwaiters mixed with “kotleta-po-kievsky” (meat bolls kiev style – in English), Russian saladand eggs with mayonnaise comprised a “cocktail” of soviet restaurant kitsch appeared in the1990s and 2000s. Many of these places seized to exist long time ago, many of them still exista new ones opened just recently during work on this dissertation. I suggest focusing on one ofthe 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 thisrestaurant comparing with many others “nostalgic” places, becomes a good example of“reflective nostalgia”, directed not towards purely commercial purposes but by the intentionto remember and conceptualise the past.5.2.1 History of restaurant PetrovichIn 2001 journalist Ekaterina Drankina wrote in the magazine So-obschenie a praisingarticle that described a restaurant-club called Petrovich in Moscow, which shortly afteropening 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 a81

little. 25 The founders of the restaurant had to activate their networks in order to make theproject come true. Initially, the idea of the club did not seem to be commercially viable, andthe founders just hoped to at least get back what was invested. 26 Finally, the good spot wasfound, but it demanded some long and tedious work: dirty basement, trash-to-ceiling since theprevious century, beams and rails with huge bolts that protruded from the walls needed to betaken care of, but in the end were just painted over. To create a cosy, almost familyatmosphere, it was decided to hire non-professionals to cater. This strategy has worked: thestaff 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 couldfeel 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 andput table clothes on the tables) could attract so much attention in press and among Moscow’ssophisticated public. 27Indeed, in this place one cannot find two similar chairs: they are all different and seem tobe collected from old country houses and apartments. Besides chairs of different types, onecan 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 byBrezhnev, 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 deartime – 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, translationmine).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 toearn from dubious privatisation schemes and shady businesses. The rest were too preoccupied with making theends meet and hardly managed to stay on the surface, just on the poverty level. The economic crisis of 1998 ateup all the savings and salaries of most people, leaving them without means of existence. Dining out was not ontheir priority list at that moment. Thus, the only people who could afford eating out were the new oligarchs andthe emerging elite, notably people involved in communication and journalism, who were involved in contentproduction for TV, news and popular media corporations (see Afisha, 300, July, 2011).82

5.2.2. Materialised memories in PetrovichAfter 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 inheritedfrom the Soviet Union all of a sudden became dull, and people, who did so were consideredun-modern. The whole country was going through “modernising” period, when apartmentsand institutions were renovated according to European (read modern) standards (so calledevroremont, renovation European style). At this point of time unpopular, unfashionable andnon-modern Soviet past was doomed to end up on the garbage pile, while newness (presentand future) were seen as a move towards Western both in socio-economic, political sense andin terms of consumer culture.It was popular to talk about “transition” period of the East-block countries, includingRussia. 28 If the “transition period” in political sense implied the change from authoritarianpolitical model (Soviet, eastern) to democratic (western) model, then throwing away thematerial objects inherited from the Communist regime and its rapid substitution with westernproducts (fashion brands, cars, electronic devices, wall paper, toilets etc) symbolises thischange.Daphine Berdahl have spotted similar sentiments of capitalist “triumphalism” followingthe fall of the Berlin Wall. She wrote that in united Germany easterners rejected their owngoods while embraced products produced in the West. Meanwhile, West Germans collected“clumsy” East German products that embodied socialist industry failure. Western Gemanssaw Eastern Germans as ignorant and for being seduced by the fancy packaging of westerngoods (Berdahl, 2010: 50). She described the situation similar to the one in Russia in the verybeginning of the 1990s: “eastern products had also disappeared, nearly overnight, from thestore 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 fascinatedwith eastern German design and production, in Russia at that point of time, in the early 1990sthat were the Russians themselves.28 Cox Michael. (1998) Rethinking the Soviet Collapse. Sovietology, the Death of Communism and the NewRussia. London and New York: Pinter; Carothers, T. (2002) “The End of the Transition Paradigm”, Journal ofDemocracy 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 theprocess of collection of the things “removed form their ordinary use. 29 And the reason whyBilzho started to collect objects of the Soviet material culture was indeed, as he explainedhimself, because this soviet materiality started to disappear from the everyday. He said thataround 1993, “all of a sudden the items of Soviet everyday life started to disappear: even theordinary thick faceted glasses were hard to find!” (Interview with Andrey Bilzho, 2011). Inthe end the result of people’s forgetting or will to forget the materiality and life in the SovietUnion was a rich material heritage thrown away to the garbage places ready to be collectedand 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 selectedand collected according to their value in the private lives of their owners. Zooming on thestories how all these objects made their way into the premises of the restaurant helps todiscover a valuable for the understanding of the contemporary Russian society practices ofmemory. 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 findtheir space in the new life. Their owners had seen them as useless and ugly reminders aboutthe times, which had gone and ought to go into oblivion. They had been consumed and spittedout on the streets, thus loosing any symbolic value for its former owners. Nevertheless it doesnot mean that these objects lost their value per se: the owners of the restaurant had foundthem, selected from the big mass of rubbish, and re-contextualised. This example shows thatdiscarded past for some became a valuable treasure for others, thus reflecting differentattitudes to the Soviet past and its materiality in Russia.The second category is comprised of the objects bought at flea markets. These arematerialised memories of the owners, who do not need them anymore in the process ofconstruction of a new life. Nevertheless, they either understood the value of the objects oradmitted 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 totheir former owners. Even bigger money (though still not so big) the owners of the flea29 I use Belk’s definition of the process of collecting as “the process of actively, selectively and passionatelyacquiring and possessing things removed from ordinary use and perceived as part of a set of non-identicalobjects or experiences” (quoted in Chris Tilley, Webb Keane, Susanne Kuechler, Mike Rowlands, PatriciaSpyer, 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 therestaurant. They also did not have a space in the new life, but the owners valued them andwanted to find a good place for them, where they could start another life – almost as museumobjects and transmit memories, uniting people. Individual memories became a contribution tothe “pot” of collective memories. These materialised individual memories became essentialelements, which formed public lieu de memoire.So, the processes to be observed in Petrovich are the one of changing of value andformation of a collective memory through material objects. By putting discarded symbols ofsoviet 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 adifferent meaning – the old tea pot was no longer a functional object, but it was an aestheticobject.When Baudrillard talked about Duchamp and his ready-mades he put the process of thetransformation of value in the hands of an artist, while the public had to accept it and wasforced 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 thespace, where these objects can be preserved, and some visitors of the restaurant were inspiredby Bilzho to start thinking both about design and their attitude to the Soviet material culturedifferently. Nevertheless, people themselves actively got involved in this process, andPetrovich became a result of collective work, but not only a small group of owners. Byopening and decorating Petrovich the whole process was “set in motion a in which noweveryone implicated”, whereby soviet mass culture earned an aesthetic value and becomeboth objects of design and valuable part of identity (Baudrillard, 2005).Objects collected in Petrovich construct how Soviet life is remembered or could beremembered: coexisting in one place personal toys, consumer products, official statementsand newspapers speak for the interplay of individual and communal spheres of life, themixture of private and public identities. Petrovich interior and the whole atmosphere is wovenin a certain discourse of how the Soviet time is remembered: everything was there and lifewas possible despite all odds.So it happened that Petrovich collected an great number of various objects, which travelledto modern Moscow from the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, in other words, the times when85

the restaurants owners and frequenters were young. Both founders and guests belonged to thesame generational cluster of people born between 1950s-1980s, and therefore lived within theframes of material culture of the previous decades.Objects collected in Petrovich defy both easy and one-dimensional evaluation of the pastand linear chronological arrangements. The presence of these objects enacts and evokesdifferent times simultaneously forcing to conceptualise time as coexistence rather thansuccession 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 ofassociative logic. The associative logic works not through a year on the calendar, but throughan object: past time is visualised though a material object, which connects a viewer withemotions linked to a certain period of time. Time perspective in Petrovitch is invertedperspective: A visitor is looking through a key-hole into the pasts, which all exist theresimultaneously in all their complexities. On the surface, one can see the “print” of all thesevarious pasts in the form of identity (individual, group identity).In this respect, it is important to search not for chronological development of time, but topay attention to the material objects and themes these objects bring up. These themes includesport, 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 wouldbe the time of “nostalgia”.5.2.3. Food experience as mnemonic practice in PetrovichBesides the material side of Soviet everyday life, which incorporated objects taken frompast and put in a new contemporary context, and food, music also plays an important role inthe stimulation of the process of remembering. Because of its capacity “to evoke bodilyresponses in different sensory registers: sight, taste, touch, and sound” food functions amnemonic device, which “facilitates the transmission of different cultural realities acrossspace and time” (Caldwell, 2006:100). Food at Petrovich with all its sensory effects of tasteand smell, is said to be prepared using traditional recipes (however, not everything on themenu strictly comes from the Soviet Book about Healthy and Good Food), evoke if notnostalgia, then tradition. However this food tradition has nothing to do with food served at86

Soviet diners. It more recalls a memory of home made meals, warmth of the house, hearth andcommunication 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 therestaurant’s visitors an exciting combination of Soviet, Russian and European cuisine. 30 Themenu, which is presented in an old-fashioned office folder tied with shoestrings, includes thegourmand’s hits of the Soviet era – chicken Kiev style, and herring under a fur coat, let alonemany other “dishes, which awake nostalgia”. Steak wrapped in bacon was called theLunokhod. 31 And how would you like an assortment of pickled and marinated vegetablescalled Ambassador of the Soviet Union?5.2.4. The PetrovichsUnpretentious interior, selection of food and music influenced selection among potentialcustomers. If to take into consideration that during the soviet era music functioned both as acentralising and unifying power, then its inclusion into the re-production of the lost memoriesand identities of the time is necessary. Popular music of the Soviet times usually playedduring late night discos, guitar poetry (bard songs), jazz evenings comprise the musicalrepertoire of the Petrovich.Most new Russians did not bother to enter because the Petrovich simply was “not coolenough” for them: they did not want to sit at a table, on which there were no tablecloths. Thusthe 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 conceptualmanager of the restaurant. The artist and essayist Andrew Bilzho was born in Moscow. In hisyouth, “inspired by books and films by Vasily Aksenov” went into medicine, became apsychiatrist, and spent ten years at the Institute of Psychiatry. While being a student becameinterested 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. 32Bilzho 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 Andrew30 In the hall Petrovich the Traveller, which opened a bit later due to the increased popularity of the club andneed 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 toland on the Moon to explore the surface and return back pictures to study. The programme was launched andexecuted between 1969 and 1977.32 Autobiography is available on-line at: http://www.snob.ru/profile/513587

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 publishinghouse Kommersant, was surprisingly warmly welcomed by people of all sorts, genders andsocial classes (Bilzho, 2007). 33 Thus, the space of Petrovich emerged thanks to a fictionalcharacter, as well as a person who shared and embodied the same cultural and historical codesby means of communicating with other, similar characters.According to Bilzho himself, “Petrovich is a scoop (sovok in Russian), he is our averagesoul” (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), atypical Soviet person, who possessed a whole range of characteristics, depicted by Bilzho inhis caricatures and books (Bilzho, 2007). These characteristics included relations with otherpeople, attitudes to material life and the Soviet state, physical and psychologicalcharacteristics etc.To become a member of the club every one, who comes to the basement becomesPetrovich, and thus accept these commonly shared characteristics of homo sovieticus orPetrovich. In a way this addition to the individual name of every member of the club becomesa confirmation of belonging to a national generation group of really existing people withsimilar, identifiable background, who were born and grown up in the USSR, and thereforeperformed the same practices and grew up within authoritarian discourses, elaborated a selfreflectiveand ironic attitude to themselves, to the country they lived and live in, to the past, aswell 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 ofPetrovichs include Vladimir Petrovich Mayakovski, Yuri Petrovich Gagarin and other personswho for obvious reasons had no chance of attending the club in person, but were stillnumbered 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 ofhumour, indeed are necessary features one has to acquire if one wants to visit Petrovich. Atable might be next to the sign Klizmennaya or a wooden leg with the words Valya’s legwritten on it. Signs on the toilets, like “Petrovich, you are such a M” (for men: mudak inRussian) and “Petrovna, you are yourself, such a ZH” (for women: zhopa in Russian), are33 Kommersant publishing house was established in the 1990s in Moscow (for more information see Afisha, 300,July, 2011).88

hard to decipher for young children. Bilzho himself describes Petrovich and the Petrovichswho enjoy their time in his restaurant:People see an old radio receiver, just like the one their grand mother used to have, an oldcigarette pack Soyuz-Apollo, and understand that we are partially constituted by these old itemsand memories about them. Here, people good-naturedly laugh at kitsch and propaganda of thattime – this is an irony in the spirit of the Soviet intelligentsia’s kitchens, often the only placewhere 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 ofthe Petrovichs, Aleksey Sitnikov, 34 remembers the beginning of the 1990s:A sufficiently large group of people meet regularly to discuss the fact that the vastcommunity of consultants, humorists, journalists, and people who were professionallyengaged in media and communication, had no "their own" place to meet. Previously,everybody gathered at the The Crew (restaurant Ekipazh in Russian), but eventually itbegan to change, and then was actually closed for some reason. Nevertheless, everyonein the group realised that "we must meet more often," and it was indeed in The Crewthat 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 hadthen need to find a space where communication between then could be continued. This lack ofcommunication in a cosy environment where people could satisfy their longing forcommunicative practices in the familiar surroundings brought phenomenon of Petrovich intolife. To certain extend what was searched for is not only a space to meet, as it could happenanywhere, in any pub or a restaurant, but a space, which could on the one hand serve as asubstitute for a cosy environment of the lost home, and on the other as a space where only anexclusive group of people could enjoy each others company. Indeed, this sense of familiarityand comfort could have been reached through familiar objects of the common past, which iswhat the founders of the restaurant successfully accomplished.Concluding remarksExample of restaurant Petrovich reveals several important tendencies in attitudes towardsSoviet 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.89

material culture of the late Soviet period became revisited. Revaluation of everyday objectscorresponded with opening of an “unofficial museum” of the late Soviet culture, wherevarious individual memories and histories from different decades were available at the sametime. It was both all-inclusive and exclusive at the same time: it unified unofficial storiesmaterialised in objects, but only united people, who felt the same about the Soviet past. Itcreated an identity, which contrasted “new Russians”, a class of nouveau riche emerged in the1990s.5.3. Remembering in theatre in the 1990sAt the same time (indeed in 1996) as Petrovich opened its doors for public, Moscowtheatre U Nitiskikh vorot (Nikitsky Gate in Russian) presented its new production Pesninashego dvora (Songs of our yard in Russian). Director Marc Rozovsky chose for the playsongs 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 takesplace in the small, closed at all sides by low Moscow buildings theatre’s courtyard. Thisunusual outdoor setting in the form of disappearing typical old Moscow yard and the songs ofthe past brought the audience back in time:when no matter what happened we could find moments to laugh carelessly in the transport, onescalator, running barefoot on the warm puddles on the pavement. There was a time when weempathized with all the oppressed, destitute, enslaved in the world, believing that we areamazingly lucky to be born in our country. (Tissovskaya, online)The crowd gathered for the premiere was of the most different social background, but itdid not stop everyone from plunging happily into the half-forgotten, gentle, twilightmemories. Audience sang, clapped, danced, drank, and snack [...]. From time to time MarkRozovsky would call: “Is not it time for us to wave a glass?”, which meant that it was the timefor a shot of vodka and some sandwiches. And then he carried the audience drinks andsandwiches. A mediator of the play, who connected the stage and the audience, MarkRozovsky said that he wanted to “extend the dear moments of youth”, and keep the joy ofsurging twilight memories, as well as “to forget the unjust vanity of earthly existence”(Interview with Mark Rozovsky, 2012).90

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”, inwhich “nostalgic motives were sound absolutely for everyone” (Vash Dosug, 2004). MarkRozovsky, comparing this play with a television production Starie Pesni o Glavnom, whichcame out at the same time, said that the songs in the play were not “the old songs about themost important”, but the most important songs about the past. These songs, in his viewcomprised an essential layer of Russian unofficial culture. They were written during the mostterrible times and were full of intimacy, melody and humanity. “This is what we were missingout. These songs protected an individual, kept his/her personality (identity) intact” (Interviewwith 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 performanceparticularly enjoyable, usually were of a younger age, who felt disconnected and too far fromthis culture, they found old-fashionable, as these songs sounded alien to them. 35 The rest ofthe audience knew some of these songs and the stories behind them, which allowed collectivememory to be activated: from Stalin’s mass purges, concentration camps, prisons, to youthsummer camp songs, travels, the first love and the very first kiss. For these people music wasa medium through which both individual and collective memories were communicated, andwhich allowed time and space travel.Communal apartment, just like Moscow courtyard, became one of the main “characters” ofMark Rozovsky play Pesni Nashey Kommunalki (Songs of Our Communal Apartment inRussian). In this play the action took place in the walls of the theatre, in the staged communalapartment. The same performance is repeated: actors presented the whole kaleidoscope ofvarious social characters sharing the same common space through musical performance.These two theatre plays were not the only productions, where Soviet songs and “commonplace” were reproduced. In 1995-1997 several regular TV programmes were broadcasted onRussian television.5.4. Soviet cultural memories on Russian television in the 1990s35 See comments on on-line forum. Available here: http://www.teatr.ru/th/perfcommview.asp?perf=1469&rep=0)91

Disappearance of soviet era films and programmes during the short period in the 1990swas compensated with their gradual return to Russian television landscape. Comedies of thelast decades of socialism and wartime films filled in broadcasting time. Meanwhile televisionprograms such as “Stary Televisor”, “Namedni: Nasha Era”, “Staraya Kvartira”, “Starie Pesnio Glavnom” revisited Soviet history. All of a sudden amnesia turned into abundance ofmemory. I suggest having a closer look at Russian television to trace representations ofsocialist life in what is considered one of the most influential media channels sinceperestroika (Zassursky, 1999). Is this the moment when alternative group changed todominant? Reached the dominant group via the biggest communicative medium?5.4.1. Remembering the USSR in the TV-program Namedni 1961-1991: NashaEra5.4.1.1.The story behind Namedni 1961-1991: the Nasha EraThe first episode of the program Namedni (in English Recently/Yestereve) by Russianjournalist Leonid Parfenov was aired on the Central Television’s Second Program inNovember 1990. At the time the producer of the project was a company ATV, founded byAnatoly Malkin in 1988. Initially, the genre of the program was an “information program ofnon-political news of the week” (Snob, video on-line). The program did not last long: in early1991 Parfenov was dismissed.In October 1993 Parfenov, who had already started to work for the newly createdchannel NTV, resumed the production of the program in its original version, and two yearslater 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 StateTelevision and Radio Broadcasting Company NTV”, all NTV’s air time has been transferredto the Fourth Television Channel, which lead to the dramatic increase of the audience ofNTV, and as a result since January 1997 NTV broadcasting net covered Western Europe, theMiddle East and North Africa (Petrova, Vorontsova, 1996, on-line).In 1996 Parfenov again had changed the genre of the program from the “InformationProgram 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 on92

March 1, 1997, at 22:40 on NTV. At the moment of the beginning of program’s broadcastingin 1997 Leonid Parfenov became the producer-in-chief of the channel and remained at thisposition until 1999.The project was prolonged first until 1999, and then until 2004, thus covering few moreyears including 2003. Even though, in 2001 the program changed its genre once again – thistime from the “documentary project” to “current affairs program”, Parfenov kept loyalty tohis previous idea – in the end of each year (until 2003) a special edition of the program, whichsummed up the whole year, came out. On January 31, 2003 the program won the Teffy awardin the category “Information-analytical program”.Despite being an evident successful year, 2003 was a difficult time for the program andthe NTV channel in general: after Nikolai Senkevich became general director of NTV theworking conditions has become tougher. 36 In 2004 the program was closed and Parfenov wasfired from NTV in the connection to the scandal around the program. 37Nevertheless the idea did not die out completely and in 2007 Leonid Parfenov startedworking on a new project still closely connected to Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha Era: a bookalbumwith the same title divided into five volumes, each representing a decade of the Sovietperiod (initially the project included only four volumes, but then was extended and includedone more, the fifth volume). The basis for publication was built on the materials LeonidParfenov has collected with the help of friends, acquaintances, and many readers of his diaryin 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 todisagree with that. Even though in the books covered some topics, which have not beentouched upon I the series, the themes in the documentary are represented with more detailsand sophistication.5.4.1.2. Analysing Namedni 1961-1991: Nasha EraThe first circle of the program Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha Era 38 can be seen as anencyclopaedia 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 fromglobal political news, survey of some local events relevant for (some) soviet citizens, glorious36 This information can be found on-line: http://www.newsru.com/russia/09feb2003/parf.html, andhttp://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.93

achievements in sport and culture, economic development and its subsequent evaluation, todiscussions of fashion trends, cultural events, popular films and TV-programs.Apart of the narration of selected events and analysis of existing cultural trends, theprogram also included experts’ opinions. Among the experts were Egor Gaydar (Soviet andRussian 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 – anedited image of Parfenov was inserted in some official Soviet newsreels: Parfenov huntingwith Nikita Khrushchev, Parfenov and Forrest Gump in the White House, Parfenov translatesMikhael Gorbachev’s talk for Reagan, Parfenov inside MIR space shuttle, Parfenov courtsand kisses Marilyn Monroe, Parfenov lights Castro’s cigar, Parfenov together with LeonidBrezhnev at official ceremony.Narration of serious political events and decisions was mixed with stories about seeminglybanal sides of everyday life: after a short presentation of a major political event or catastropheParfenov started describing fashionable clothes or new consumer products, which suddenlyappeared in the stores of the Union at that particular moment in time. This construction ofsubject sequences cannot be explained by logic of chronology: generally following the flowof time, Parfenov sometimes breaks the chronological order when narrating the stories of ayear.Provided that episodes usually started either with a retelling of a glorious achievement ora short annotation to a film, which became symbolic during the era. Episodes usually endedeither with an annotation on a film, or a story about new fashions, or an important eventhappened on the very last days of the year. However, sometimes an episode started with amajor event or a change, which occurred during the first months of the year. To illustrate theselection of the topics, length allocated to each theme and their sequence, I suggest looking atthe first episode of the program.The first episode reveals the core events of the year 1961 selected by Parfenov. The lengthof the episode is 36 min 55 sec, which covers 23 topics, intro, and several bumpers andannounce of the next episode. Later the length of one episode will become longer: episodesabout the 1980s were about 45-60 min and include around 30 topics. The sequence of thepresented “topics of the year” in the first episode of the series is as follows:94

1. On January 1 a new monetary reform is introduced in the USSR. In the process ofdenomination money of the old standard are changed in relation 1:1. Prices decreasedaccordingly (approximately 40 sec.)2. In February the dog Strelka, who travelled to space in August 1960, had 6 puppies (30sec.)3. “Corn – the queen of the fields”: In 1961 Khrushchev corn plantation campaign is atits 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 (1min. 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 fivevolumes during 1961 (1 min. 20 sec.)17. Rokotov’s illegal volute exchange criminal case starts in May and then ends withcapital 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 3-4July, Vienna (35 sec.)21. Soviet song Khotiat li russkie voini? becomes popular (Do the Russians want war? InEnglish) (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.).95

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 choiceand way of representation of the chosen material (interview, official websitewww.namednitv.ru).Namedni structures time of the basic syntactical level: the represented topics rest on linearorder of time, where some topics have to precede others. However, watching the program inon DVD gives an opportunity to go back and forth while watching. The narrative of the yearhas to unfold itself between the beginning of the year and its end. Taking into account thatnarrative is a basic form for representing and comprehending the past, the present and thefuture, the fact that episodes in the program are not always structured according to their actualunfolding in the “real time” deserves attention. It happens so, that the handpicked events ofthe year are represented according to the “logics of narrations” – which topics follow eachother more smoothly in terms of their topics, as in the example with the sportsmen and the22 nd Sjezd. In this sense the unfolding of narrative of the past events is constructed in such away that these events are made comprehensible for the viewer in terms of logical connectionsbetween events.It becomes clear that the amount of allocated time is not defined only by the politicalimportance or a political impact of the event, but also by the visual qualities of theavailable/presented material and possibilities to converge Soviet newsreels with cartoons,caricatures and other media genres. For example, highly criticized and long time despisedKhrushchev project to plant corn on the vast territories of the Union was presented both bythe official propaganda documentaries and propaganda cartoon, which only strengthen theironic effect produced by intonation and the comments of the narrator. Moreover the effect ofthe comical was stressed by the simultaneous presentation of the documentaries, cartoon andcomments of Leonid Parfenov: the screen was broken into three smaller windows where twodocumentaries and one cartoon illustrated the story about Khrushchev’s project.This way of representation together with gritty comments of Parfenov and thensubsequent biased commentary of Anatoly Streliany represented the political initiative and itsimplementations as a major failure. Indeed corn plantations became not only one of the mostdiscussed and ridiculed topic in the Soviet Union and built a basis for many politicalanecdotes, but became a rich layer of the Soviet everyday culture and a symbol of a failure ofthe agriculture reforms and incapability of the Soviet government to resolve problematicsituation the soviet state economics was.96

Another example is the representation of the only meeting between President JohnKennedy and Nikita Khrushchev on 3-4 July in Vienna (35 sec.). The meeting was discussednot in terms of the importance of the discussions about escalating Berlin crisis, but presentedin terms of a drastic difference of looks of two heads of the states and their respectivepartners, and could be suggestively interpreted as a difference between two political systemsreflected 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 thefamous trio of soviet actors Georgy Vitsin, Yuri Nikulin and Yevgeny Morgunov (the lengthof the episode is 1 min. 20 sec.), if to take the length of the each thematic episode as animportant measure of significance. No doubt, the latter topic is more powerful in terms of itsvisuality because it includes many shots form the popular films and thus, I suggest, memorystimulating. Even being acute as a political event the Non-Aligned Movement and its activitymight have not been remembered by the majority of the soviet population. While the filmswith participation of these famous actors were so darling to all belonged to the last sovietgeneration.5.4.1.3. The last Soviet generationAlready in the discussion about restaurant Petrovitch, I have touched upon the questionof homo soveticus. 39 In the relation to Parfenov’s TV programme I find it important tocontinue the discussion about the “last Soviet generation” and its characteristics. Parfenovrepeats 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 imaginewithout or even understood. 40For 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. Thisperiod can be divided into two: the thaw (ottepel’), the shorter period of Khrushchev’sreforms, and the stagnation (zastoi), Brezhnev’s period, with the Soviet intervention inCzechoslovakia 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. Sobraniesochinenij v 10 tomakh. T. 5: Homo sovetikus. Moscow, 2000.40 In Russian: “Проект Намедни. Наша эра 1961-1991.Cобытия, люди, явления, определившие образжизни. То без чего нас невозможно представить. Еще труднее понять.”.97

31). In Parfenov project this period is chronologically divided into three periods, each tenyears long (the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s).According to Yurchak, “these two periods roughly correspond to two generations – theolder generation that is sometimes called the ‘sixtiers’ (shestidesiatniki, identified by thename of their formative decade) and the younger group, here called the ‘last sovietgeneration’”. 41 He claims that these people, who came of age during the 1970s and mid-1980sshared the same “understandings, meanings, and processes of that period”, despite of theirsocial, 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 Russianphilologist Marina Kniazeva, whoPointed out, that generation of people, whom she calls “the children of stagnation” (deti zastoiain Russian), unlike previous and subsequent generations, had no “inaugural event” aroundwhich to coalesce as a cohort (1990). The identity of the older generations was formed aroundevents such as revolution, the war, the denunciation of Stalin; the identity of the youngergenerations has been formed around the collapse of the Soviet Union. Unlike these older andyounger groups, the common identity of the last Soviet generation was formed by a sharedexperience of the normalized, ubiquitous, and immutable authoritative discourse of theBrezhnev’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 triesto map and communicate to the viewer, whoever she/he is, who tries to understand themultifaceted fabric of Soviet identity.The complexity of this identity is according to Yurchak hidden in the fact that themajority of the population “collectively participated in the production and reception ofauthoritative texts and rituals in the local contexts”, while at the same time they also wereactively engaged in creation of “various identities and form of living that were enabled byauthoritative discourse, but not necessarily defined by it” (Yurchak, 2006: 32). He argues thatthis “complex relationship allowed them to maintain an affinity for many aestheticpossibilities and ethical values of socialism, while at the same time interpreting them in newterms that were not necessarily anticipated by the state – thus avoiding many of the system’simitations and forms of control” (Yurchak, 2006: 32).41 He continues that the last Soviet generations – “people who were born between the 1950s and the early1970 and came of age between the 1970s and the mid-1980s” (Yurchak, 2006: 31).98

Leonid Parfenov with means of TV documentary represents this complex relationshipbetween the official discourses and everyday practices of average soviet citizens. Theserelationships can be seen on several levels: focusing on materiality of life, zooming on privateand intimate circle of communication and non-political topics, developing sarcastic and ironicapproach to everything that happens in the surrounding environment.One of the leading narratives fully developed by Parfenov in the episodes representingthe 1960s and the 1970s is a quiet, but relentless pursuit of the soviet citizens of their privatespace and material property in the times of economic mobilization. The series show a clearline 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 flatafter years of living in communal apartments (mainly this was the case in Moscow andLeningrad) 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 largeaccording to the standards – max three room flat of 45 sq.m.) space. People could startbuilding “communism in one’s own apartment” by managing to get something somewhere,listening to the “voices” (Western radio programs), gossiping about Politburo, raisingchildren. This was exactly the time when in the quiet privacy of small kitchens (standardkitchen was 5,5 sq.m.) previously mentioned “kitchen conversations” became possible.With not too demanding job and low labour productivity people could create much timefor their leisure, a great culture of private life of the last decades of the Soviet rule. Thisculture is comprised of popular comedies with Vitsin, Morgunov and Nikulin, news aboutsport achievements and treasure hunts after new high heeled shoes, and as equally importantfor the construction of the soviet person’s identity as suffering, deprivation, repressions andlack of freedom.Yurchak called for the importance of the analysis of the Soviet system in all itscomplexity and with existed paradoxes in order to explain today’s phenomenon of Post-Sovietnostalgia. He wrote:Everyday reality of “normal life” (‘normal’naya zhizn’) was not necessarily equivalent to “thestate” or “ideology”; indeed, living socialism to them often meant something quite differentfrom the official interpretations provided by state rhetoric.An undenianable constitutive part of today’s phenomenon of “post Soviet nostalgia,” which is acomplex 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’s99

proclaimed goals – and that were as irreducibly part of the everyday life of socialism as werethe feelings of dullness and alienation. (Yurchak, 2006: 8)Yurchak suggested looking at the Soviet society of the late socialism by applying theconcept of vnye, a particular relation to the system, where one lives within but remainsrelatively “invisible”. Yurchak insisted on shifting from “pro/anti dichotomy in relation toauthoritative discourse”, as the performative acts adopted by many soviet citizens do not fitthis binary oppositional structure. Instead, he suggests paying attention to the practices, whichare not explicitly involved with authoritative discourse, as they are considered uninterestingand irrelevant. As a result, people replaced “Soviet political and social concerns with a quitdifferent set of concerns that allowed one to lead a creative and imaginative life” (Yurchak,2006: 132). 42Yurchak believed that the more extreme examples of living vnye “are sometimesdescribed as internal emigration (vnutrenniaia emigratsia in Russian) (Yurchak, 2006: 132).This powerful metaphor, however, however, should not be read as suggesting completewithdrawal from Soviet reality into isolated, bounded, autonomous spaces of freedom andauthenticity. In fact, unlike emigration, internal emigration captures precisely the state of beinginside 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 systempossibilities, 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 relatedexamples 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 morewidespread cases the metaphor of internal emigration perhaps might be adapted to refer tocertain dispositions and relations – for example, as emigration from the constative dimension ofauthoritative 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, anddiscourses. 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 astrategy 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 jokingmanner by Parfenov, contains elements of irony:Physicists - the main authority era - have calculated that the pressure exerted on the surface bythe female foot on heels is higher than the pressure of elephant’s foot. Press reports the42 Introducing concept of living vne, Yurchak refers to M. Bakhtin concept of vnenahodimost.100

incidents of stopped escalators of Moscow and Leningrad undergrounds because stiletto- heelsgetting stuck. (Namedni 1961-1991. Nasha era, episode 1, 1961)The commentator to the scene Renata Litvinova in a characteristically languishing butserious manner explains the significance of the new footwear for fashions of the 1960s and itsplace in the wardrobe of any Soviet lady.Another example is very enlightening. The story about one of the greatest constructionsof 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 thefollowing saying will become very popular: The further into forest the more GES. In Russianoriginal it goes: Chem dalshe v les, tem bolshe GES, which is a remix of a well-knownsaying: Chem dalshe v les, tem bolshe drov, and approximately means: the more one gets intoan affair the more troubles faces on the way.Effect of sarcasm and irony is achieved not only by the use of remade old refrains andsayings, which sound funny in the context of narration, but also by the serious andmonotonous voice of Parfenov himself and commentators, as well as choice of biasedlanguage. Moreover the effect is strengthened by the temporal and emotional distance thejournalist and the commentators have to the presented information. They cast their evaluativecomments and explanations thirty-eight years after the retold events took place, knowing thatthe discussed time has passed and the results of taken actions and activities are available topublic knowledge.Some episodes such as one about Bratskaya GES or another about the Bay of PigsInvasion of Cuba are enriched with contemporary images of the discussed places: LeonidParfenov travels to the GES and walks down the beach of the Bay of Pigs, thus witnessing theplaces the important historical events happened. On the one side this pilgrimage createsconnection between now and then, emphasising the end of then: sudden change from blackand 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 havealready started.This irony can create a different affect. A user of the official website of LeonidParfenov Alexander wrote on July 18, 2011 at 17:43: “The program ‘Namedni’ helps to shakeup own memories of past life. When watching this program sometimes a feeling of nostalgiafor the happiest years of life rises. Thank you very much, Leonid!” (fromhttp://leonidparfenov.ru/namedni/). Another viewer of the program, Olga (born 1960s,101

engineer during the Soviet times, now housewife) expressed in the interview after watchingten episodes about the 1980s: “After watching this program my nostalgia about the Soviettimes 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 withsarcasm, and you see muffs, blatant errors, madness (a good word!). Something seems to bedull, barbarian […] . We were producing rubbish. Whatever he tells about our achievementssounds like we were sick. Perhaps it is because we were so brainwashed” (June 3, 2012,Stockholm).5.4.2. Collective Remembering in Staraya Kvartira5.4.2.1. Staraya Kvartira in the nutshellParallel to Parfenov’s TV-show Namedni, another federal channel broadcastedprogramme 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 Sovietand 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, takenyear after year since 1947. Memories of participants and witnesses of various events, thesimulation with all the details of everyday life of some of them (events) on the territory ofStaraya Kvartira, help to reveal the content of this or that year under review. As the participantsof the program are prominent political figures, artists, writers and poets, sportsmen, as well asordinary citizens, who are relevant to the discussed events. In the program melodies andrhythms, songs and poems of recent years, performed by famous singers, composers andensembles are played. A special role in the revival of nostalgic memories of viewers belongs tothe anchor of the program, the head of the theatre Letuchaya Mish’ Grigory Gurvich and itsauthor 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 RussianTelevision in 1996 – 1999, was produced by the ATV company and its president and generalproducer Anatoliy Malkin. 43 In 1998 Staraya Kvartira was awarded Teffy award in the43 ATV Productions (Copyright television – in English, ATV) is the oldest in Russia independent privatetelevision production company. It was created in the Soviet Union in September 1988, and in September 1989for the first time aired its own cycle of periodic program (Press Club). Since then it produced programs forChannel 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 Malkinis its president and general producer.102

nomination “The Best Journalistic Program”. The same award was given to its author ViktorSlavkin in the nomination “The Best Script” in 2000. In 2000 the program was awarded theState Award. Later, the impact of the program was valued by its inclusion into the list of themost important and symbolic programs ever broadcasted on Russian Television. JournalistSvetlana Sorokina in Programma Peredach, a TV program about the most interesting andinfluential TV shows and films, said that appeared in 1996 show Staratya Kvartira wascreated to satisfy people’s nostalgic longing for the cosy atmosphere and warm relationshipexisted in the “old communal apartments”. She said that the moment the TV show went on airbecame an event of historical significance, even though Staraya Kvartira was not the onlyprogram, where nostalgic sentiments were expressed (Programma Peredach, 06.07.2010)The name of the program Staraya Kvartira refers to the space, where performance tookplace, - an old communal apartment. The main characters of the show were the people, wholived in that apartment and their guests, who came over to celebrate holidays and contemplateabout 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 anentertainment show.The studio of the program was divided into two parts: the stage, where invited guestsand anchors had discussions, and the audience hall, where spectators were sited. The stagewas decorated as an old apartment with respective zones: a dining room with old-fashionedfurnishing (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 timesplayed an important role in the creation of the atmosphere.Kitchen space was essential element of the studio. Discussions and judgements, quarrelsand celebrations, which took place in any Soviet kitchen, were reproduced or re-enacted onthe stage:In Staraya Kvartira we had such times, and faced such characters, who demanded strictevaluation. The problem was that we were not in court, but in an apartment, in the kitchen andthe tone of the conversation was supposed to meet these conditions. And Grisha was able to finda middle ground between an outspoken symbol of their citizenship and compliance with thelaws 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 theirmaterial form functioned as a background for dining and spending time in the company ofgood old friends; or in the theatre play Pesni Nashey Kommunalki, with kitchen as the central103

space, where events took place, the stage of Staraya Kvartira decorated with conspicuousobjects of the Soviet consumption culture, formed a space for active remembering anddialogue 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 themost secret and important memories. This connection of memories with objects and spaceseems to play an essential role in the production of cultural memory of the Soviet times. Boththese categories connected with bodily experience of the time as well as with the creation ofatmosphere of the time through the decoration of space in the “fashions” of the rememberedperiod. The studio had to look on purpose a little bit shabby, because, according to AnatolyMalkin, it was supposed to resemble a Soviet Palace of Culture (Dom Kulturi), and thereforemake the time travel more “tangible”.The space of Staraya Kvartira made it possible to connect distanced historical andpresent time spaces. The connection was initiated and made possible through the door with anumber of doorbells. Anchors invited the program’s guests on stage by ringing one of thedoorbells. In the soviet times one communal apartment was inhabited by many families, andin order for a visitor to reach the right family (s)he had to ring the bell with the last name of afamily/person (s)he wanted to visit. In the program, the show takes place inside the communalapartment, 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 apartmentsspaces: 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 individuallives framed by the living conditions of communal flats and shared experiences of theCommunist regime, comprised the complex carpet of the Soviet “unofficial” history. Thespace, 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 onpeople and individual stories. A group of editors had the task of searching for interestingstories and people, who could give their personal accounts on the events, discussed in theprogram’s episodes (Interview with Irina Kemarskaya, 2012). One by one or in groups, guestswere invited onto the stage to present different versions of the same events. 44 The role ofanchors was to act as mediators – introduce guests, ask them questions and moderate thedebates by bring in controversial topics.44 The group of 10-12 editors carefully selected guests for each episode. Every invited guest had to provide aphoto.104

During the first years of the broadcasting time, there was one main anchor, GrigoryGurvitch, who had the task of keeping the process of remembering going and retaining anobjective position. Later, due to various reasons, the second anchor became involved, and theprocess of remembering all of a sudden took a different turn. Being of two differentgenerations and coming from families with different background and position during thecontroversial Communist times, sometimes anchors expressed controversial interpretations ofthe events, and, therefore, mirrored conflicting versions of the past. Presentation of individualstories, ambiguous facts and their interpretations by different groups of people paved the pathfor contemplation over the country’s official history. The complexity and multidimensionalrepresentations had its goal to do justice and reconcile people, who shared different opinionsand 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 – therestoration of justice. Or at least that it replaces […]. There is something else – just everydaylife, years, and reconciliation. By the way, in the beginning I could not reconcile these andthose, the left and the right. Passion flared up and resentments surfaced, and spilled on thescreen. 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 thatit 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 wasto “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 thatthere was a part of life that had nothing to do with the Soviet Union as such (ProgrammaPeredach, 06.07.2010). Therefore, the reason why the program was produced was hispersonal interest, by not an official order from above. He wanted to tell history throughconflicting individual narratives as opposed to the grand narrative of official history, which heconsidered to be false and manipulative (Programma Peredach, 06.07.2010).The presence of the audience comfortably seated and observing the happening on thestage occasionally taking part in the performance as “witnesses” also, in my opinion, had adeep symbolic meaning. It illustrated the reality of the Soviet life: everything private was atthe same time public (Boym, 1994). Leaving in the communal apartment with neighboursconstantly eavesdropping and watching each other every step was a memory of many presentin the program. Yet because even in these conditions people could find some rare moments of105

privacy, the focus on private life became so essential for the authors of the program. 45 At thesame time, the choice of telling the history of the country through a collection of individualmemories was also a step of bringing justice to the account of the events and reconciliationwith those, whose memories were betrayed by the official narratives.The format of the programme allowed for re-enactement of certain events in order togive a live experience for the audience to try to comprehend the complexity and contestationof attitudes and behaviours in those turbulent years. Vanessa Agnew wrote that “reenactment’scentral 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 gainedthrough the bodily experience. Re-enactment ”emerges as a body-based discourse in whichthe 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 eventof Stalin’s funerals. As editor-in-chief of the programme told me, the effect was stunning, aspeople could really feel the strength of the contradictory reactions and ambiguous emotionsand therefore to come closer to understand the overall hysteria in the Soviet Union during thefunerals of the dictator.The leading anchor’s humorous improvisations smoothed and relieved some highlyproblematic questions, giving a chance for communicative processes:[Gurvitch] fully improvised within each plot, adding up to it and colouring it with hishumour, unexpected turns of thought, subtle philosophical remarks. Theatre, pop and literaryexperiences were always at his disposal. Talking about the year 1948, we decided to replay, tore-enact on of the most dramatic moments of the infamous session of Agricultural Sciencecommittee, when Lysenko and his followers raided genetics. Just wanted to play out a fewpages of transcripts on the stage, and the audience was to serve the remarks “applause”, “criesof indignation”, as well as shouts of “Long live Stalin!”… The difficulty was to explain itclearly to the audience. And Grisha found in process a very short and clear formula: “To betterunderstand the time, try to instil a plague on ourselves”. Audience immediately perfectlyunderstood everything, and played a role. It was true that then after the obscurantist speech fromthe podium ended with collective singing of “International”, it felt a little uncomfortable. But inthis situation was a result of “collective art therapy”, so to mark our experiment. 46Among invited guests were known political figures, artists and actors, singers andactivists, famous TV personas and ordinary citizens – all of them became equal on the stageof Staraya Kvartira. A soviet singer Edita Piekha (episode about 1957), through the narrationof her personal life during the period, which also included memories of her family starvation45 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.106

during the war, funny stories about living conditions and banalities of everyday life, andmemories of the neighbours in the communal apartment (which were no different from anyother ordinary story) made her figure of celebrity closer and more intimate for theunderstanding of an average soviet and Russian citizen.The process of unification and reconciliation was enhanced both by inviting theaudience to sing along with the guests and anchors and by symbolical meal-sharing, whetherit 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 ofattitudes towards presented events, which also included irony, but the irony was not thedominating attitude. An important role in shaping of the relations towards the past andindividual 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 memoriesthey shared with the audience. His obscure, not attractive appearances and speech impedimentmade him to look trustworthy so people wanted to reveal their secrets. His appearance madehim “normal”, a kind of a “guy next door”, a true anchor, initially without any distancingcelebrity aura. Grigory Gurvitch’s role as a mediator corresponds with the role of MarkRozovsky in both Pesni Nashego Dvora and Pesni Nashej Kommunalki theatre plays in termsof his interaction with the audience.The figure of Grigory Gurvitch was essential to the overall concept of the programbecause of his personal involvement into the country’s history. His very individual approachto the witnesses, genuine curiosity and profound knowledge about the events he was not partof becomes an example for the young generations on how to manage past controversies tobuild up the road for future success and development:Grisha led discussions about the far away events as if he had witnessed them, and even tookpart in them. And it was not only his broad erudition and education. As a true humanist, heperceived history very personally, he knew that he, Grigory Gurvitch, a child to this history, andeverything 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 enthusiasticallyasked details about particular event, and people feeling that he is not indifferent to them andtheir troubles and joys, became open and frank with him. 47In my opinion, this programme serves as a good example of how in a media genre aversion of historical justice is brought up through the living witnessing and personal47 Viktor Slavkin, available on-line: http://www.gurvich.ru/napolputi.php?id=32.107

testimonies. Despite of the existing script, which outlined the general sequences of presentedevents and people invited to “testify”, the program was a live show, where the unfolding ofmemories and events could take on unexpected turns. Moreover, by bringing togetherdifferent generations, the producers of the program marked a link between the past, presentand future. Older people shared their stories with those who were younger, leaving space forquestions and redefinitions.This was achieved by asking people, who wanted to participate in the program to beamong audience, to come in dynasties: a grandmother should bring along her grandson. It wasdecided that the audience should be diverse and include all possible ages. If the focus ofNamedni was to learn about the events, which shaped the last Soviet generation, the StarayaKvartira apart of having the same aim, also tried to establish a live dialogue betweengenerations.5.4.3.2 Time in Staraya KvartiraThe first year to be remembered in the program was 1947. Anatoly Malkin explainedthat the reason to start with that year was two-folded: first, he was born in 1946 and it seemedlogical to him to start the narration after his own birth. Second, it made sense not to touch thetopic 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 from1947, when the monetary reform and abolition of rationing system were launched, the sovietpeople could finally feel that the transition from military to civilian way of life started, andtherefore it made sense to begin narration with a story about new life. 48Each episode presented one year. However, after a while it became clear that allcollected and filmed material did not fit into one-hour episode, and it was decided to splitmaterial into two parts (Interview with Irina Kemarskaya, 2012). Unfolding of time in theprogramme 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 drinkingchampagne, celebrating and cheering for the upcoming year. It was followed by documentarynewsreels and reading of Pravda newspaper. Topics for collective remembering in theprogram were selected by its screen-writer Viktor Slavkin, who revealed that he had to study48 This interview is available on-line at: www.peoples.ru/art/theatre/dramatist/slavkin/108

all publications of a Soviet magazine Ogonyek to choose topics and to create some sort of aportrait of a year, which included themes varying form politics, technology, twist dance, andfashions, - everything, which in his opinion, comprised the drama of life, where banality andtragedy coexisted together (Interview, Slavkin, available on-line). In its ambition to reviewdifferent sides of the Soviet life, the representation of the epoch is somewhat similar to theone presented in Namedni: not only politics, but also trivialities of life were under scrutiny ofthe 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, andthe program went on air again the following year in its new version. Starting from 2000 theTV 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 oneprogram), in the new version of the program it was indeed not year as the main focus, but acertain date, to which certain events were connected. One of the major changes that happenedwas the total absence of the audience in the studio, which reflected the transformation of thewhole concept of the program – from collective remembering to an entertainment programmeon history. In the new version the “hosts” moved into a “private apartment” and invited guestsover.As an illustration of how the program was scripted and how chosen topics werepresented, I suggest analysing in details one of its episodes. I have chosen 1989 because of itssignificance in the fall of the communist regimes around Europe and the events, which causethe fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The episode is divided into two, and was shown over theperiod of two weeks. The themes presented in the episode and the time allocated to discussionof each topic is the following.Part 11. Celebration of the 1989 New Year Eve in Dom Kino (Cinema House, in English). Theshow 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 25. Short Introduction (2 min.)6. Fall of the Berlin wall (12 min. 30 sec.)109

7. Mezhregionalnaya Deputatskaya gruppa (Deputee group, in English) and SvyatoslavFedorov (5 min. 35 sec.)8. Vtoroj Syezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR (The Congress of People's Deputies of theSoviet 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 StarayaKavrtira time allocated for each theme is more significant.In the introduction the anchor told about the change in the status of Dom Kino, whichturned from a place for an ordinary place into the centre of democratic life, where people likeYeltsin and Sakharov held their talks and Mezhregionalnaya Deputatskaya gruppa had theirmeetings. Because the episode started with the celebration of New Year, everyone got a glassof 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 mentionedthat there was less censorship in 1989, than at the time that episode of Staraya Kvartira wason air: “It is a legend that censorship disappeared” (Staraya Kvartira, episode about1989: 3min. 25 sec.), thus providing parallels and comparing the previous epoch with 1999. Becausea large screen was placed above the stage, audience could enjoy screenings of short shotsfrom films and documentaries, if they were available. Episode with Kapustnik story was oneof such examples, when the space of Dom Kino enhanced the experience of remembering ofcinema 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 underscrutiny (Agnew, 2004). The story about the first cooperatives was told with elements of reenactment:the stage was decorated as a small coffee place called Staraya Kvartira, withwaiters 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. Whileentertaining conversation unfolds in time, another re-enacting performance enters the scene: amiddle-aged man is trying to sell out counterfeited jeans to the audience. Audience reacts withlaughter, and camera tries to capture many individual expressions and affirmations. Smilingand nodding people confirm that the re-enacted story is true.110

After funny story about the first private business initiative, the anchor changed topic tothe more ambiguous and sad history about the Afgan war. With the moment ofcommemoration of those who have never come back from Afganistan and short newsreels thetheme was introduced. General Boris Gromov, who, according to the official statements, wasthe last Soviet soldier leaving Afganistan, brought up both the pain of disappointment andlosses of millions of Soviet people, and pride and courage of the soviet soldiers. Indeed, theheroism of individual soldiers was compared with the inability of the state officials to committo the war. The loss of memory and refusal to remember the young boys died serving theircountry (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 theorganisation Afgan Mothers, confronted the general’s words that no one was left on the Afganland. 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 samemistake was repeated again. In order to commemorate the dead, the episode ended with a songperformed 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 theevents of 1989. Talking about the fall of the Wall in present tense, the anchor introduced twowitnesses, coming from the two confronting camps: a Russian advisor of the ambassador ofthe USSR in Berlin Igor Maksimovich and ambassador of the Federal German Republic inRussia, Ernst-Jörg von Studnitz. They gave their personal accounts of the events, agreeing ordisagreeing with popular myths brought about by the screen-writer, Viktor Slavkin, who wasalso present on the stage. What I find essential in this discussion is the evaluation of theevents. During the discussion Maksimovich said: “The wall disappeared because citizens ofthe GDR wanted the wall to go”, and not because of Gorbachev, who, according toMaksimovitch, was just confronted with the fact. Keeping in mind that these words were saidin 1999, when it became evident that the process of democratisation and liberalisation ofpolitical life in Russia turned into the cementing of authoritarian rule, these words shouldhave 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 theaudience material evidence, a piece of the Wall, a “silent witness of the biggest tragedy of the20th century”. Meanwhile, ordinary people from the audience (both Russian and Germanspeaking!) also told about their stories of the events. While they talked, newsreels from Berlinillustrated and confirmed their words.111

The theme of standing up for freedoms and democratic changes continued in the nexttwo discussions: one about Mezhregionalnaya deputatskaya gruppa, an undergrounddemocratic 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 anddecisions, happened in 1989 and their projection on Russia of 1999. In both episodes theunderstanding of the then-contemporary political and social situation, reflected people’smoods. 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. Themajority of the population by 1999 did not get the rights and possibilities they were promisedby 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 offear to loose their fortunes. A woman said that the talking in the audience about her memoriesof her participation in the demonstrations, made here to re-live the same emotions and feelingof hope. The same strategy of re-enactment of a historical moment is used in the last episodeof the year - the death of Andrei Sakharov (December 14). The anchor and Anatoly Shabat saton the stairs of the stage like people were sitting on the staircase of Sakharov’s house. A shortnewsreel about major cultural events rounded up the story about 1989. The Soviet period wasabout to end.5.4.3. Remembering in Starie Pesni o Glavnom5.4.3.1. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 1Starie Pesni o Glavnom (The Old Songs about the Most Important, in English) was aseries of music television shows, broadcasted on New Year Eve on the First Russian TVchannel in the 1990s. One of the originators of the entertaining show was journalist LeonidParfenov (whose project Namedni Nasha Era I have already discussed) with Konstantin Ernstas the main producer. Four freestanding musical episodes starring famous pop-artists werecomprised of the popular songs of the 20 th century. Three first episodes presented differentdecades of the USSR, while the last one rounded up the 20 th century.Starie Pesni o Glavnom (Leonid Parfenov and Konstantin Ernst, 1995), the firstepisode, can be viewed as an alternative version of the after-war period. It had many112

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 tonaturalize 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, asales lady in the village store, a young couple in the boat, a head of the village, a group offarmers etc.) and pointing out (using present tense), that there were many villages, where lifewent on quietly and calmly, people lived in harmony and love and sang songs, because “thesoul demanded it”. This dream-like utopian village looked outstandingly fake, while villagedwellers behaved and appeared too emotional and exaggeratedly sincere and in love. Fairytalelooking houses, clean village roads, fake trees and bushes created gave away studiosettings.Any traces of story line were absent: songs followed one by one, with short breaksreserved for some banal small-talks, which introduced the next scene and a song. The songsnarrated love and life stories – “the most important”. Every scene included one or morecharacters, who played the roles, reserved for her/him in the story of the song. The length ofeach scene equalled to the length of a song plus a short talk between the characters (i.e. 3 – 4min.). The songs selected in this episode were mainly of post-war origin, however, pre-warand wartime songs and melodies were included as well. The genres varied from traditionalfolk 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), KubanskieKazaki (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., farmerboys in the fields. Together theses scenes created a portrayal of a day in a village, whichended with a big feast, where all characters gathered together at the dinner table, happilysinging.5.4.3.2. Starie Pesni o Glavnom Episode 2The 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, the113

“events” took place in the summer and portrayed an “ordinary day of the Soviet citizens”, thisepisode was intentionally connected to the celebration of the New Year, and therefore set theformat for the following musicals. Comparing to the first episode, Starie Pesni o Galvnom 2was created to resemble a very popular in the Soviet time program broadcasted on New YearEve, Novogodniy Goluboy Ogoniok (1962-1985). 49 This connection to the existing prototypeset 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 backto the 1962 episode of Goluboy Ogoniok, where a singer Iosif Kabzon dressed as Che Gevaraperformed a song Kuba Liubov Moia, Cuba my love in English), and sketches resembled thisdear to many soviet people program.The program indeed reserved a significant place in the soviet popular culture. As JuliaLarina has put it:This TV program [Goluboy Ogoniok] brought together a large country, even inthose years when it had nothing in common. General secretaries and presidentsfollowed each other, and it [the program] remained. There was Goluboy Ogoniok,which was indeed popularly elected. Actually, its history is a history of the SovietUnion 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 wasdecorated to resemble the studio of Goluboy Ogoniok, while its exterior looked familiar to socalled Television Theater, where Goluboy Ogoniok was filmed before it was moved toOstankino. 50Many scenes featured a typical Moscow (or any other soviet city) courtyard, with a yardkeeper (dvornik), who knew all residents of the houses around. As much as the previous49 For episodes of Goluboy Ogonek see http://cccp.tv/video/Goluboj_Ogonek_36/ . The program known as aTelevisionnoe kafe was broadcasted for the first time in 1962. Later this program was aired under Na Ogonek, NaGoluboy Ogonek, Goluboy ogonek. In the bginning of its history, the program was broadcasted every week. Withtime it was only shown on public holidays, and Novogodniy Goluboi Ogonek – on New Year Eve. DuringPerestroika time, the format of the New Year’s Eve programs changed. In the 1990s the program was revivedagain (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 theprevious 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. (RomodinDenis, from http://www.sovarch.ru/catalog/object/343/).114

musical, Starie Pesni O Glavnom 2 featured popular songs, this time from the 1960s: “Liubliuja 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 willwait 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, theepisodes from the soviet popular films were used to create a number of short scenes and tointroduce songs, as well as the episodes from Goluboy Ogoniok itself. For example, “Techetreka 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 thesinger was a well-known Russian pop-star of the 1990s. Starting with this episode, manywell-known catch phrases, originating from popular films and television programs, are usedby 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 participantsof Kabachok, Nataliia Selezniova, Olga Aroseva, Mikhail Derzhavin, Rudolf Rudin andZinovii Visotskii, a popular singer of the 1990s Filipp Kirkorov and Natasha Koroleva alsostarred.5.4.3.3. Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Episode 3The musical Starie Pesni o Glavnom 3 (Konstantin Ernst, 1997) was different from itstwo predecessors. It was made as a sequence to a popular in the 1970s comedy IvanVassilievich 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, hiswife Zina and their neighbours – a married couple, met 20 years later for the celebration ofthe New Year. In the original film Shurik invented a time machine. During the first test apower 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 his51 Kabachek 13 Stuliev was a humorous Soviet television show (Zelinskii, 1966-1980) staresartists of the Theatre of Satire. The action took place in a Polish restaurant. During 15 years, 13 issueswere released. The production of the program stopped after the aggravation of the political situation inPoland.115

neighbour Ivan Vassilievich Bunsha and a thief Gorge Milosslavlky into the times of Ivan theTerrible, while Ivan the Terrible actually came to the future, to the 1970s. According to theoriginal story (the film was based on the theatre play of Mikhail Bulgakov, 1935) the tsarcomes back to his own time. In the TV musical the tzar Ivan Vassilievich escaped back to the1970s being seduced by the work in the film industry. Meanwhile the business in the 16 thcentury did not go so well, with the thief George Millosalavski substituting the tsar. Torestore “the historical truth”, Shurik, Zina and Miloslawki using the time machine travelledback 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 thefilm studio, which produced many popular films in the Soviet times. While the maincharacters were searching for the tsar they stumbled into several films, shown in cinemas inthe 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 thathe would be given the main role of the tsar and a good film director, who can film him. Thedirector 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 HappyNew Year from his palace in the 16 th century.The episode started with the official address of Leonid Brezhnev to the soviet people onthe New Years Eve of 1971 (usually this official address was shown in the new year issue ofGoluboy Ogeniok). The speech was interrupted by the appearance on the screen an angryactor Nikolay Fomenko. This collision of the cinematic time representations of the 1970s and1990s therefore set the mood of the musical.Similar to the previous musicals, this episode was comprised from the songs popular inthe 1970s, which included songs of composers Raymond Pauls; Robert Rozhdestvenskij,Aleksander Ginsburg (Galich), songs from David Tukhmanov’s vinyl “Po Volne MoieiPamiati 1974-1975” (On the Waves of My Memories in English), as well as then-popularmelodies of vocal-instrumental-bands (VIA) Veselie Rebiata (Merry Guys in English, one ofthe most popular pop-rock bands, winner of All-union and international contests and songfestival “Pesnia Goda”), and Pojuschie Gitari (Singing guitars in English. They wereespecially popular in the beginning of the 1970s, and served as an example for many VIAslater).Popular in the 1970s songs of the western disco and pop bands “Rasputin” (banned fromperforming 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 were116

performed within the frames of the musical by the artists themselves together with Russiansingers of the 1990s. Besides, foreign films and songs from them also found a space withinthe frames of the program, such as Russian cover version of the soundtrack from Americanfilm 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 thefilms shown during the decade. The plot itself makes the collection of popular films seemlogical: 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 hisfriends run around Mosfilm, from one room to another, bumping into different film charactersand peeking at short scenes. Besides films are not presented according to the times of theirbroadcasting 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 comedyIroniya Sudbi ili s Legkim Parom (Riazanov, 1975) – several times. What became even morevisible 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 31 st (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 freestandingmusic videos with a references to and citations of the originals. To a certain extend itis a new reading of the old cinematic material and melodies.Some of the film scenes are re-played but changed dramatically: song “Pesnja o DalekojRodine/Gde-to Daleko from Semnadtsat mgnovenii vesni (Seven moments of Spring, 1973.Performance – I. Kabzon, music Michael Tavierdiev, lyrics: Robert Rozhdestvenskii) wasperformed by Russian pop-artist Leonid Agutin. Film-setting, interior of the restaurant as wellas interaction between the main characters was followed almost with precision - even blackand white colour palette was retained. However, this film citation was “enriched” with aseveral semi-erotic moments, which reminded the viewer that it was not the 1970s film, butthe 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 memorytravel, not structured according to the chronologic placement of years – linear history, butleaping from one year into another, skipping some completely. More colourful memoriesappear, 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 acinematic memory – the representation of the epoch trough films, censored and approved by117

politburo films – portraying everyday life of the Soviet citizens. Moreover, this representationalso suggests many alternative versions of the past, as well as dreamlike: among the citedcinematic cultural references there are several cartoon characters. Besides, these cartooncharacters live in these alternative 1970s together with all other heroes – they run aroundMosfilm chasing each other and interacting with “real” people. The cinematic space allowsIvan 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 outcomecan 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, sodeliberately exaggerating fake-ness of the characters and settings can be seen not onlybrainless entertainment show, sometimes tasteless and vulgar, but also as a parody on theofficial propaganda in the USSR. It is kitschy and unserious, but exactly these features referback 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 inthe 1970s), where in the best traditions of the Soviet formal presentations the anchorsinformed about achievements in agriculture, holidays and jolly life in the Soviet Union, whilein 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 theserious attitude to the official soviet discourses. 52Well-known Soviet television shows and films became the frames in which Russian popstarswere located. This representational strategy, using Oushakine’s terminology, “doublyenhanced the effect of recognition”. ”Amalgamating in space and time two recognizableimages”, a necessary historical backdrop was supplied for the post-Soviet celebrities and,simultaneously, popularized Soviet films (Oushakine, 2007: 462). “Material clichés of pastdecades — a red kerchief, a signature military hat (Budenovka), or a typical military blouse(gimnasterka)”, this “aesthetic of temporal cross-dressing, recognizable elements of the dailylife” framed Russian pop stars of the 1990s (Oushakine, 2007: 471). “This visual enframingprovided by the props of the past” was interwoven into no less clichéd and just slightlychanged plot cut-and-pasted from well-known films. “Longing for the signifiers of the pasthas 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 Studiesof Postsocialism,” in Cultural Studies. Aleksandr Etkind, ed. St. Petersburg: European University Press, 2006.(in Russian).118

it is a desire to retain the stereotyped, “automatized perception” driven by the search toconfirm the familiarity of the already familiar that determines the production of these periodpieces” (Oushakine, 2007: 471).Grotesqueness and sick humour failed to mask an important message: unlike modernsongs, Soviet ones spoke about the main things. And the main thing was not love, thoughmost song were devoted to love, but a belief in a better tomorrow, which saturated those. Theviewers of New Year musicals felt longing not for the Soviet ideology and communal farmsbut for their dream, hope and a belief that the future would be better than the past. For the firsttime 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, PostscriptThe last forth episode the Starie Pesni o Glavnom, Postscript (2000) referred to thedifferent decades, including the post-soviet one. The events took place in a mythical hotel inthe middle of nowhere. The story – guest arrived to the hotel, where they had to give awaytheir watch before the clock stroked twelve. One pair of watch was left with the owner – amagical watch with a little insect, who would make his owner’s (a cleaning girl lookingsuspiciously like Cinderella) wish come true – she would become a singer. Guests (playedagain by Russian actors and pop-artists) occupied the hotel rooms according to the year of thesong they sang they played, and one by one presented different popular songs of the 20 thcentury in the new cover versions. In one mythical space, different decades of the centurycoexisted together, and a viewer (or a listener) could travel from one year to another byopening the hotel doors. Thus, the century of Russian/Soviet history was summed up in theform of popular songs.5.5. Structure of feeling in the 1990sUnderstanding nostalgia for the economic and social stability of the late socialism as thestructure of feeling, I suggest looking at the dominant productive group, in which the structureof feeling is “primarily evident” (Williams, 1961/2001: 80). However, the structure of feelingdoes 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).119

Nostalgia was not a uniform attitude in Russian society of the 1990s. Comparing withearly 1990s nostalgic sentiments seemed to grow in the second half of the decade.Communists activists, who lost from the transformations, wanted restoration of politicalregime. Social group, described by Alexey Yurchak, as living vne, was not unanimous in theirattitude to the past. They might not want to have the return of the former regime, but couldhave been nostalgic both for the times of stability, social security, and their youth. Sovietdissidents, those who have been in oppositional relationship with the Soviet power, couldhave 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 triggeredboth personal and collective nostalgia in early 1990s (Zuckerman and Caryl, 1999). Oldercitizens, in particular, who experienced anxiety about the loss of employment and socialservices 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 predictorsof Soviet nostalgia when other variables are held constant. […] Older age-groups were morepositive about the Soviet system, and so were the less affluent; younger age-groups and themore affluent were less enthusiastic” (White, 2010:7). Apparently the level of education wasnot a significant factor, nor was gender (White, 2010:7-8).Thus, when producers of ”nostalgic” television programmes claimed that they havegiven 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 howto represent the past viewers were longing for. My answer to this question would be thatoverall representation of the past was reflexive, critical, ironic and sentimental. However,there were traces of different tendencies: non-critical and amnesiac. Both an excess ofmemory and a shortage of memory defined 1990s Russian cultural landscape. It consistedfrom categories of resistance, repetition compulsion, transference, working through, and,finally, the work of recollection. In the middle of the 1990s judging from the example ofStarie Pesni o Glavnom, excess of memory in the form of repetition compulsion, (accordingto Freud it puts a turn to action in the place of genuine memory through which the present andthe 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-memoryin Staraya Kvartira or Pesni Nashego Dvora, was a fundamentally critical memory. Ricoeur’s120

shortage of memory in Starie Pesni o Glavnom could be seen in how the producers cultivatedthe 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 ofbeing swallowed up by it. In Staraya Kvartira, I saw an attempt to establish causal relationsbetween events, find explanations for what happened, and what could have happened. Thus, itcreated interesting relations between memory and history. As opposing to the official soviethistorical tradition, memory took on the task to re-establish the “truth”, at the same timefeeding into the present constructions of cultural identity of people who were born in theSoviet union. At the same time, knowing the “unreability” of memories, mediators, such asanchors and archivarious and screen play-writer plaid a role of historian, who could correctand 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. Inthis programme historical re-enactment and collective remembering played a major role.. Inthis program important and controversial topics are brought for discussion – to investigate thecomplexity of past and people’s actions and motivations. Namedni, in its turn was an ironicencyclopaedia of Soviet life, presented Soviet history Parfenov style. This was the story aboutgeneration of people like Parfenov and about Parfenov himself. It was both reflective andcritical to the past and the present.For Nora, history is manipulated by memory, “facts” of history become transferrals ofactual historic events into cultural memory, which transforms the events of the past intocopies of themselves that are used in order to describe and define the present. Contrary towhat Nora writes, those taking part in the production of the programs, the plays and thePetrovich restaurant, saw in memory a possibility to let justice give a verdict to the officialhistory, which they thought was corrupted and had nothing to do with history or past as it hadnever revealed the real events or/and intentionally changed them in order to suit then-needs ofpropaganda.In my examples, the cultural appropriation of history created a mythic space of culturalmemory, which is a highly contested landscape, where historical surrogates contributed to theconstruction of an imagined realm of cultural identity. Soviet history was appropriated intothe 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 differentfrom each other, which both reveals and creates the contested fields of the different versions121

of the past, and therefore present and future. The 1990s also gave rise to different ways ofnegotiating Russia’s past, present and future.In Namedni space, journalist Leonid Parfenov “remembered” past in the studio, whichwas decorated as imaginary archive. Parfenov “opened up” any drawer/topic and thentravelled 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 – manypeople came and left, thus connecting the re-created place of Staraya Kvartira with manyother spaces from the past. In Pesni Nashego Dvora and Pesni Nashej Kommunalki it is thespace of communal apartment, which was also slowly disappearing, due to the societalchanges. 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 Glavnomspace was artificial. It was a dead space.There was also an evident attempt traced in both places like restaurant Petrovich andtelevision programmes to restore community and communicative processes both betweenpeople of the same generations, and between different generations. The communication couldbe 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 colleaguesmet in the restaurant, which reminded its guests of an old apartment; in the play PesniNashego Dvora they met in the old courtyard; in the play Pesni Nashej Kommunalki and theTV show Staraya Kvartira in communal apartment, in the musical Starie Pesni o Glavnomthe 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-existingcommunication. The places started to disappear, the communication disappearcorrespondingly These were public spaces, where in the Soviet times communicationprocesses were possible, as people discussed to a certain extend political issues, everydayproblems and celebrated holiday. These places became historical sites important foridentification 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 wereinvited along to join the process of remembering.Svetlana Boym also noticed “The utopian nostalgia of the extreme right has alsoflourished in the post-Soviet period. In Mikhail Gorbachev's time, the future-orientedideology of the avant-garde and socialist realism was replaced by a backward glance ofcommemoration. The past, in contemporary Russia, has turned into a kind of future perfect, or122

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