Back in the USSR
by Vadim Nikitin
The Nation
December 21, 2011 (This article appeared in the January
9-16, 2012 edition of The Nation.)
http://www.thenation.com/article/165315
For most 14-year-olds, the first year of high school is
mortifying enough without having to make justifications for
an entire country. But as the only Russian kid at an
international school in England in the late 1990s, that's
exactly what I was forced to do. Russia's spectacular
economic collapse after the end of the Soviet Union, the
ignominy of having "lost" the cold war, as was claimed in
the West, and President Boris Yeltsin's embarrassing public
behavior did not make it any easier.
My personal drama peaked on International Day in 1998, when
students had to give talks about the history of their native
countries. It was my chance to rehabilitate Russia.
Gesticulating wildly, I presented a country that had given
the world Lenin and Gagarin, defeated Nazi Germany, shot
down the American U2 spy plane flown by Gary Powers in 1960,
funded third-world revolution and created an alternative
social, political and economic model that gave the mighty
United States a run for its money around the globe.
When I described 1991 as the year that, "unfortunately, the
USSR collapsed," the middle-aged teacher stood up, cut short
my talk and abruptly dismissed the class. Visibly shocked
and angry, she grabbed my arm and whispered hoarsely close
to my face, "Nothing good ever came out of the Soviet Union,
and if I hear you praising that evil system again, you will
not be allowed to speak during the next period." Feeling
like a true Soviet dissident - though a pro-Soviet one! - I
kicked off my next class with a grandstanding disclaimer:
"The following presentation will be short, because I have
been censored. Ms. Robson does not want you to know the
history of my country!" Though I made more friends that day
than I had during all my middle school years, what seemed
like a daring gesture was something ordinary Russians had
long been doing back home since 1991: looking back at the
Soviet Union for comfort and pride.
The coming of age of Russia's first post-Communist
generation has done little to dampen society's preoccupation
with the Soviet past, particularly the Brezhnev years of the
mid-1960s to the early '80s. As the immensely popular
television journalist Leonid Parfyonov remarked, "The Soviet
Union has not gone away - it is the matrix for our present
civilization." Twenty years after the disintegration of the
Soviet Union, Russia is once again a de facto single-party
state (the December parliamentary elections have been widely
condemned as rigged); Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is
touting a Eurasian Union that would reunite former Soviet
republics; and one of Russia's most highly subscribed
satellite channels, Nostalgia, is dedicated to playing old
films and even reruns of Soviet news broadcasts.
Several books recently published in Russia reflect on
various changes in the memory and contemporary meaning of
the Soviet Union. What emerges is the progression of Soviet
nostalgia from a reaction to the chaos and material
deprivation of the 1990s to a more diffuse lament and search
for particular spiritual and emotional values.
Throughout the '90s, many Western scholars and journalists
were as perplexed and outraged as Ms. Robson by the growth
of Soviet nostalgia, sometimes blaming an alleged primeval
Russian longing for authoritarianism and sometimes blaming
Putin. In that climate, any attempts to connect pro-Soviet
feeling to the destructive post-Soviet social and economic
policies of Yeltsin and his US-backed advisers were
tantamount to justifying the horrors of Stalinism. Yet as
the threat of Communist restoration waned (if it ever
existed) and Yeltsin began to fall out of favor in Russia
and to a certain extent in the West, the mainstream US media
belatedly embraced the idea of Soviet memories as a
therapeutic balm, a kind of chicken soup for the post-
Communist soul. By then, however, the Russian people's
relationship with their past had already moved on.
The first post-Communist decade had left Russia in ruins.
Economic shock therapy, hyperinflation and the
disintegration of the welfare state, including the collapse
of the health system, contributed to a precipitous fall in
living standards and life itself. Between 1990 and 1994,
average life expectancy declined from 69 to 65. The drop for
men, from 64 to 57, was so great that a Western health
economist told the New York Times, "There is no historical
precedent for this anywhere in the world." Just as the
nation was humiliated abroad by the eastward expansion of
NATO and at home by poverty and the bloody quagmire in
Chechnya, Russia was being carved up by a small group of
self-proclaimed capitalists, known as oligarchs, who with
the Yeltsin government's support orchestrated a massive
insider privatization of the most lucrative state-owned
industries. Little wonder, then, that Putin's 2005
characterization of the Soviet breakup as "the greatest
geopolitical catastrophe of the [twentieth] century"
resonated with so many Russians.
Not surprisingly, until Yeltsin's departure from the Kremlin
in 1999, positive attitudes about the Soviet Union were
inversely proportional to Yeltsin's popularity, strongly
suggesting that longing for the past reflected an implicit
criticism of his government's ruinous policies. As living
standards, salaries and personal safety plunged, poll after
poll detected a new nostalgia for the old regime. By 1995
Yeltsin's disapproval rating, at 69 percent, was close to
the proportion of people, ?63 percent, who assessed
positively their former lives in the Soviet Union.
Since 2000, when Putin became president, roughly the same
percentage of voters have approved of him as once
disapproved of his predecessor. However, there has been
remarkably little change in the polled levels of pro-Soviet
nostalgia. Even as people's lives became more stable,
prosperous and content, and even as satisfaction with
Putin's Kremlin grew, 58 percent of Russians surveyed in a
2009 Pew Research Center poll agreed that "it is a great
misfortune that the Soviet Union no longer exists." A 2011
poll by Russia's nongovernmental Public Opinion Foundation
found that 59 percent regretted the end of the USSR.
Clearly, Soviet nostalgia can no longer be viewed as simply
an expression of dissatisfaction with the current Russian
leadership and its policies.
Psychologists and some sociologists consider nostalgia a
defensive emotional response to situations of overwhelming
change. But Russian sociologist Leonid Gudkov, director of
the Levada Center, which conducts regular public opinion
surveys, believes the opposite might have occurred in
Russia. For Gudkov, the transition from Communism has been
characterized more by continuity than discontinuity. Leaving
aside obvious outward changes, such as the Kremlin's
professed new capitalist and democratic ideology, the use of
czarist-era symbols and the tricolor flag, the Soviet
endoskeleton - its authoritarian politics, police and
military structures, and state bureaucracy - has remained
remarkably intact (and even grown, in the case of the
bureaucracy). The key aspect of continuity with the Soviet
system, according to Gudkov, lies in the Soviet Person, an
archetype that still underpins the psychology and self-
identity of today's Russians. Could nostalgia for the USSR
simply be this internally displaced Soviet Person pining for
home?
From 1989 to 2004, the late Yuri Levada, a respected
sociologist and Russia's most authoritative pollster,
conducted a series of public opinion surveys designed to
investigate the national character. Since his death in 2006,
the project has been carried on by his successors, Gudkov
and Boris Dubin. Published in 2008 in the book The Post-
Soviet Person and Civil Society, their conclusions were
discussed in September at a special conference in Moscow
titled "A Soviet Person or a Modern One? Russian Values and
Political Culture."
Assessing democracy's failure to take root in post-Soviet
Russia, Gudkov and his co-authors do not blame extreme
economic inequality or government authoritarianism of the
past twenty years but the persistence of a Soviet mentality
handed down for generations. The Soviet Person's dependence
on the state enacts "a symbiosis of repression and the
adaptation to it," a "passive, dream-like belief that things
will somehow get better," coupled with the absence of "a
sense of responsibility." The Soviet Person "blames his
predicament on the government, the boss, the West; anyone
but himself." All this, Gudkov and others argue, describes
the archetype of a perpetual adolescent.
Beyond the question of whether these characteristics are
Russia-specific, Gudkov seems to blame the people themselves
for the mismanagement and undemocratic abuses of their
rulers since 1991. His narrative also glosses over those
instances when Russian citizens did try to take the
initiative - for example, by freely electing a legislature
(the Congress of People's Deputies and its Supreme Soviet)
in 1990, only to see it shelled into submission by
government tanks, under Yeltsin's urging, in 1993. Surely
mass economic disenfranchisement and Yeltsin's super-
presidential Constitution played as significant a part in
stifling democratic consolidation as a set of vague
character traits.
Nevertheless, even Gudkov's critics accept that seventy
years of insular, authoritarian and idiosyncratic rule have
produced at least some of the negative qualities attributed
to the Soviet Person. But those qualities can also carry a
compelling flip side, according to philosopher and close
Gorbachev associate Valentin Tolstykh's The Way We Were: The
Soviet Person as He Is (2008), an impressionistic memoir of
ordinary life in the USSR after World War II. For instance,
though sheltered, naïve and conformist, the Soviet Person,
writes Tolstykh, was also trusting, communal and idealistic,
qualities that find little scope for expression in Russia's
current cutthroat capitalist system. "The essential traits
of the Soviet Person: collectivism, internationalism, and
awareness," laments Tolstykh, have been replaced by
indifference. Far from Gudkov's uncharitable portrayal, the
Soviet experience actually produced a unique and admirable
kind of person whose "very real potential was ineptly
squandered and destroyed" after 1991.
Tolstykh is not alone in feeling that "life was harder in
the Soviet Union, but there was more heart," as a commenter
puts it beneath a web video clip of the closing ceremony of
the 1980 Moscow Olympics. Another commenter, reacting to a
song by Soviet rock legend Viktor Tsoi, writes, "It's not
the [Soviet] system that I liked, but the people who lived
in it, the sense of something genuine and real that we had
back then."
In his influential study of Soviet life and Russian
attitudes about the Brezhnev era, Everything Was Forever,
Until It Was No More, University of California, Berkeley,
sociologist Alexei Yurchak, a former Soviet citizen, writes,
"An undeniable constitutive part of today's phenomenon of
post-Soviet nostalgia is the longing for the very real
humane values, ethics, friendships, and creative
possibilities...that were as irreducibly part of the
everyday life of [late] socialism as were the feelings of
dullness and alienation." Yurchak quotes a man who recounts
that "the 'crash of Communism' was also, in retrospect, the
crash of something very personal, innocent, and full of
hope, of the 'passionate sincerity and genuineness' that
marked childhood and youth."
It's no coincidence that aspects of youth and childhood
figure so prominently in contemporary Soviet nostalgia, or
that it is directed not at the Stalin era but at the
Brezhnev era (to which a third of Russians would like to
return, according to a 2005 poll), for that was when most of
the authors featured here, now in their 50s to early 70s,
were themselves young. One could even argue that
contemporary nostalgia for the "era of stagnation," as
Gorbachev characterized that period, is overdetermined: at
once a longing for the innocence of youth and the relatively
sheltered life under late socialism, before the damning
disclosures of glasnost and the full-blown cynicism of the
'90s - a longing for actual youth as well as for the
metaphorical adolescence that Gudkov attributes to the
Soviet state of mind.
The pervasiveness of such feelings may help explain the
meteoric success of Namedni, or Not So Long Ago, a decade-
long multimedia project by journalist Parfyonov. His
superstar status, built on his coolly ironic personality and
strong sense of integrity, accounts for the rest. Begun as a
TV series in the late '90s, it has spawned a line of
bestselling books. In its first incarnation, Namedni
featured Parfyonov narrating selected events from a
representative year in a decade of Soviet history, beginning
with 1961. Using archival footage and green-screen
technology originally used in the film Forrest Gump,
Parfyonov inserted himself into historical reels, doing
things like standing next to Nikita Khrushchev or shopping
in the first Soviet supermarket. In its wry, apolitical
collage of high politics, pop culture and everyday objects,
the show treated the Soviet Union as an open-ended, value-
neutral phenomenon.
If Parfyonov did not directly denounce the Soviet Union,
then neither did his broadcasts or subsequent books
sentimentalize it. "Many people feel tenderness for the
Soviet system. Even our leaders feel that way," Parfyonov
said in a recent interview. "And judging by how little
modern Russia has moved on from the Soviet Union, our nation
as a whole has yet to recognize the old regime's moral
failings."
The multivolume glossy, expensive books arising from the
Namedni project, the latest of which was published in
November, feature a grab bag of large color photographs,
news clips, interviews and narratives about every year from
1961 to 2005. For instance, 1962 spans physicist Lev Landau
winning the Nobel Prize, the launch of milk in plastic bags,
the Cuban missile crisis and the Soviet debut of the Hula-
Hoop. The books target readers who lived through Soviet
times as well as those who, like me, were too young to have
experienced the Soviet Union and want to know more about
their parents' generation.
The volumes are a runaway success despite their high price,
and this reflects a growing trend. In the past year alone,
at least three other books showcasing Soviet material
culture have caught the popular imagination, even on the
other side of the old Iron Curtain. Made in Russia: Unsung
Icons of Soviet Design, edited by Soviet-born American
writer Michael Idov and featuring contributions from the
likes of bestselling writer Gary Shteyngart, is a breezy
English-language meditation on such Soviet staples as
folding cups, Lomo cameras, fishnet shopping bags and rustic
cars. Olga Dydykina's coffee-table volume We Lived in the
USSR is a kind of Dorling Kindersley travel guide to the
Soviet Union, with hundreds of photos and a dictionary of
Soviet-era expressions. And Frédéric Chaubin's Cosmic
Communist Constructions celebrates forgotten examples of
late-Soviet architecture. What these books have in common is
a tone of what Russian-born American scholar Svetlana Boym
termed "reflective nostalgia," the kind that "lingers on
ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of
another place and another time."
* * *
But for some Russians, such an ironically detached,
materialistic and even quasi-archaeological approach to the
USSR belittles the spiritual, interpersonal aspects of the
Soviet past. "I don't give a damn about vintage telephone
handsets or '70s record players. Those old things are not
what we miss," said my 62-year-old father when I asked him
if he liked watching Namedni. "I miss the way people were,
the way we felt, the way society was." Nor is it only the
older generation that feels this way; many young Russians
also "miss" the USSR, even though they never actually
experienced it.
Irina Gluschenko, associate professor at Moscow's Higher
School of Economics, recently asked her students to describe
their feelings about the Soviet era. Their responses showed
that if Soviet nostalgia was once a reaction to post-
Communist poverty and turmoil, today, at least among a
portion of Russia's more educated and upwardly mobile youth,
it is seen as an antidote to the consumerism, anomie and
lack of spirituality that blight these beneficiaries of
Russia's increased wealth.
"The Pioneer camps, the Young Communist League - all that
united people," writes one student. "Today, people inhabit
their computers and apartments without even knowing who
lives next door." Another lamented the passing of the
"unhurried spirituality" of Soviet life. Even the formerly
negative aspects of that life, like consumer-goods shortages
and queues, are sometimes reinterpreted as sources of
simplicity, creativity and innocent pleasure. The Soviet
Union's darker aspects, such as censorship, surveillance,
repression and travel restrictions, did not feature in the
responses.
"A post-Soviet person is one who is lost in this world. He
is totally naked - spiritually, materially, nationally,"
declared a 17-year-old to Serguei Oushakine, a Princeton-
based Russian anthropologist and author of The Patriotism of
Despair, an examination of Russia's postsocialist identity.
"The partial rehabilitation of the Soviet Union represents
an attempt to graft Soviet values onto the realities of
capitalism," writes Irina Gluschenko. This rehabilitation
takes official and unofficial, cultural and commercial,
forms, from the reinstatement of the Soviet red star
insignia and red military banner in the Russian army to the
reintroduction of updated Soviet packaging of consumer
products.
Yet paradoxically, writes Gluschenko, the ubiquity of such
symbols has diluted the essence that gave them their appeal
in the first place. Indeed, the popular objects and rituals
Putin has resuscitated - the old Soviet anthem, the Victory
Day parade and even the Cheburashka cartoon character,
currently the Russian Olympic team mascot - were beloved not
in themselves but because of their strong emotional links to
Soviet values, which are at odds with the commercial and
political imperatives behind their revival.
In his study of nostalgia for the Tito period, Slovenian
sociologist Mitja Velikonja describes a struggle between
top-down and bottom-up nostalgia. The first involves the
production and mass distribution of symbolic objects, "a
kind of nostalgia engineering, management or marketing,"
while the second describes the noncommodified, nonmaterial
culture of nostalgia among the grassroots, contained in
stories, collective memories and general attitudes - in
other words, "a heartfelt nostalgia." Over the past decade
in Russia, an elaborate superstructure of top-down nostalgia
has emerged alongside bottom-up nostalgia. Commodified and
stripped of context, these reincarnated totems were
initially popular but now ring increasingly false among a
growing number of people who nonetheless retain an authentic
longing for aspects of the late Soviet period. Putin may
have initially derived some political capital from
encouraging Soviet nostalgia, but its magic is clearly
wearing thin. "The past cannot be the future," proclaims Mr.
Freeman, a popular anonymous animated character in a hit
YouTube video critical of the government.
Nevertheless, a rejection of official Soviet nostalgia
should not be read as a rejection of nostalgia per se: two
of the main beneficiaries of the humiliating showing of the
ruling United Russia Party in the December parliamentary
elections, the Communist Party and A Just Russia, also
position themselves as nostalgic parties (the Communist
Party even featured Stalin on some of its election
posters!).
Although many Russians remain attached to the Soviet Union,
the relative constancy of that fondness obscures tectonic
shifts in the attitudes and dynamics that underpin it. No
longer is Soviet nostalgia merely a flailing response to
crisis, a denunciation of the government, a desire to turn
back time or the helpless lament of those left behind by the
new system. Today's Soviet nostalgics can be young or old,
right-wing or left-wing, regime loyalists, anti-regime
nationalists, liberals or even apolitical hipsters. But the
nature of their longing has gradually shifted away from a
desire to restore the USSR, something 75 percent of Levada
poll respondents supported in December 2000 but only 53
percent did this past November. Soviet nostalgia is becoming
more reflective, personal and independent, and thus less
subject to political manipulation. In bringing back aspects
and techniques of Soviet rule, Putin may have missed a
fundamental point about nostalgia: that people long to
relive the past only when they are sure it is irretrievably
gone.
[Vadim Nikitin is a freelance journalist and Russia
analyst.]
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