Soviet filmmakers followed similar trends. The breakthrough of Christianity and Russian nationalism in film was Andrei Tarkovsky’s Andrei Rublev of 1966. Rarely shown in the Soviet Union, the film depicted the fifteenth century icon painter Rublev as a man who survives the disasters of his time by faith and art. Tarkovsky later moved on to more psychologically introspective themes, usually with religious overtones, in his later works such as Stalker (1979), more or less science fiction. Though the film was seen in the Soviet Union, its showings were extremely limited. Tarkovsky had had enough and moved to the West, dying in Paris in 1986. Other film directors also divided their time between historical epics (Siberiade, also made in 1979 by director Andrei Konchalovsky) and mildly modernist films from the private life of the Soviet intelligentsia.
One of the most striking features of Soviet life from the 1960s onward was the emergence of popular culture. The beginnings lay in the Stalin era, and to a limited extent were there even before the revolution. In those years, however, the audience of popular culture was mainly the thin middle layer of urban society, with some extensions into the working classes. The main examples were the musical stages (estrada in Russian), which featured Soviet jazz bands and comedy routines, and film. The boundaries with the culture of the intelligentsia were fluid: Prokofiev and Shostakovich wrote film music, and major writers produced scripts as well. Some writers produced science fiction and detective stories, though both were under a cloud after the middle 1930s. The more liberal atmosphere of the Khrushchev era brought about a revival of popular fiction, especially science fiction, and jazz came back onto the radio and into musical theaters. What really changed Soviet popular culture, however, were television and the availability of Western popular music, not just jazz but eventually some forms of rock and roll. Television took popular music out of the theaters and into everyone’s apartment. While Soviet television put on some culture programs, it was the popular entertainment that made a mass audience, like Iulian Semenov’s World War II spy story, Seventeen Minutes of Spring, the hit miniseries of 1973 that so impressed the young Vladimir Putin.
Popular music had a complex history. As elsewhere, the jazz audience was increasingly elite after the 1960s, and American rock took its place. Soviet youth heard rock music on foreign radio stations, but also massive amounts of tape recordings began to circulate, many homemade, as tape recorders and players became widely available. The Brezhnev regime did not prohibit rock music. It tried to restrict what it saw as the more erotic and wild versions, but much rock music circulated openly, and the state began to sponsor rock bands and popular singers with eclectic styles. Some of them, like Alla Pugacheva, became wildly popular. Parallel to these more official versions of popular music were underground bands like Aquarium in Leningrad that also relied for a long time on taped recordings but by 1980 had acquired some state recognition. All late Soviet popular music was derived from Western models, even if modified with a local twist, and it also imitated Western music in creating a series of rapidly changing generational subcultures. Each new moment, from jazz to the disco craze of the late 1970s, had its own audience that often did not extend to listeners even a few years younger. Soviet popular culture, at least the musical variants, now had very little to do with “Soviet reality.” It also had little to do with the culture of the intelligentsia, official, critical, or dissident culture, though it did share in the sense of alienation of much of the intelligentsia. It also shared a social background as many of the popular musicians, even rockers, came from privileged backgrounds in the intelligentsia or even the party elite.
By the 1980s most of the great writers and artists of the early Soviet days were gone: Pasternak died in 1960, Shostakovich in 1975, and Sholokhov in 1984. Almost all of the first wave of film directors and actors of the 1920s were gone. The newer generation of writers and artists was not in the league of their predecessors, no more than their counterparts in the West were in the league of Proust or Joyce. Soviet writers and artists had the additional burden of an ossified but obligatory cultural policy, one that no longer attracted the new generations among the intelligentsia. Even if the dissidents seemed to many educated people shrill and unconvincing, their own views of the Soviet system were scarcely enthusiastic. The official cultural line and its products became more and more a fantasy world that ignored what the public actually read or watched. For the intelligentsia, Gorbachev’s Perestroika was an earthquake – a welcome earthquake, as they were sure that political freedom and a market economy would produce a great flowering of culture. They were sure that the time for the intelligentsia had finally come. They would find out otherwise.