The fact that our generation was immediately confronted with a kind of concrete wall meant that we were forced to go in another direction... [We] never identified with Sovietpower, absolutely never... Whereas that generation, the 'sixtiers', had identified with it, they'd gone through the romance ofjoining the YCL [Komsomol, Young Communists' League] and hearing all these myths and stories about good communists. They'd been seduced by this subtle lie ... We never felt that. Our only hope was that we might get away with it just a bit, cheat the system a bit, maybe publish a few things. That was our rather minimal ambition .. . None of this was unbearable, unbearable isn't the word .. . but it was simply melancholy, very melancholy, watching what was happening around us, communism and more communism, and wondering when on earth it would end. In fact mostly it seemed it would never come to an end . . . We felt that for evermore and eternity there'd be a portrait of Brezhnev hanging there on the wall and someone singing some communist rubbish on the radio. So however much we laughed at Gorbachev, we should all remember very clearly that he played an absolutely enormous role.[102]
Glasnost' and the post-Soviet decade, 1985-2000
When Gorbachev came to power he hardly intended the end of the Soviet state, with its concomitant dismantling of political, economic and cultural institutions, the resulting need to adapt to altered economic circumstances, cycles of inflation and devaluation that impoverished significant portions of the population, the success of an emergent entrepreneurial class and a myriad of other changes. Initially, glasnost', coupled with perestroika, promised hope, and for some time it delivered on the promise that many men and women, themselves products of Khrushchev's Thaw (the 'sixtiers' to whom Popov refers), felt had been deferred for twenty-five years or more. Throughout 1986, 1987 and 1988, excited, amazed gasps greeted every manifestation of freedom: historical-political rehabilitations, literary and cinematic discoveries and rediscoveries, artistic revelations. Although wary about the durability of those gains without fundamental institutional reform, artists and cultural consumers alike fervently welcomed the recovery of their national pasts, the removal of political boundaries that had banished into oblivion emigre culture, the exposure of lies that had shaped Soviet life for so long and the opportunity to write and read, produce and watch, compose and listen without supervision. For more than sixty years the Soviet state had controlled the creation and distribution of cultural products; beginning in 1986, that domination disappeared.
Theatre and film unions supported Gorbachev rapidly and energetically, partly because they hoped that the absence of censorship would stimulate a revamped repertoire with which to lure dwindling audiences. They blamed political and bureaucratic interference for the system's inefficiency, and believed that independence would resolve many of their problems. They swiftly divested themselves of old-style political appointees in favour of those who had accumulated 'moral capital' by suffering from state repression.[103] A new Union of Theatre Workers replaced the All-Russian Theatrical Society, with the aim of 'freeing theatres from the close, pettifogging tutelage of the
Ministry . . . enabling theatre companies themselves to take all the essential decisions and manage their own affairs'.[104] Between January 1986 and 1988, the number of theatres in Moscow increased by 50 per cent, and amateur and semi-professional groups multiplied, including fringe companies offering more experimental productions.
In a parallel process, members of the Cinematographers' Union voted out two-thirds of the board in May 1986, electing in their stead 'uncompromised' directors (most of whom had entered the industry in the 1960s) like Elem Klimov, Eldar Shengelaia and Andrei Smirnov. Cinema studios converted to a financially self-supporting system (khozraschet) that permitted virtual autonomy over script selection, budgeting, casting and hiring, though it offered no solutions to the obstructions posed by entrenched interests, the lack of hard currency and the difficulty of gauging popular taste. In 1988 film studios gained the right to distribute their libraries of films directly, bypassing the official government export agency.
Almost immediately the Cinematographers' Union undertook a review of films suppressed during the Brezhnev years, mainly for political transgressions, and authorised their release: Aleksei German's Roadcheck (Proverka na dorogakh, 1971), its hero a POW suspected of collaboration with the Nazis; Gleb Panfilov's The Theme (Tema, 1979), with allusions to Jewish emigration; Aleksandr Askoldov's first and last film The Commissar (Komissar, 1968), with an ambiguous Red Army heroine, montage reminiscent of the 1920s, and a flash forward to the Holocaust. Audiences watched these 'recovered' films with interest, but reserved their passion for the new movies portraying the Soviet Union's painful past and its tumultuous present, just as they devoured investigative journalism in print and on TV All-Union television, reaching virtually every household in the nation, broadcast a startling number of documentary films.
A few directors (Kira Muratova, Aleksandr Sokurov, Lana Gogoberidze) welcomed glasnost' as the chance 'to make films that resist the overpoliticization of culture', rather than as an opportunity to make more openly political films.[105]But the majority of film-makers, freed from the demand to 'construct the future', portrayed the reality that surrounded them, and 'what they saw was a bleak picture: beggars on the streets, impoverished pensioners, economic chaos, street crime, Mafia shootings, pornographic magazines and videos, decaying houses and ramshackle communal apartments, and the emergence of a new class, the New Russians.. .'.[106] Feature films like Vasilii Pichul's hyper- realistic melodrama Little Vera (Malen'kaia Vera) and Iurii Mamin's satiric The Fountain (Fontan), both released in 1988 when ticket prices were still affordable, drew huge audiences (50 million for Little Vera) and international prizes.
Within a few years, however, audiences had had enough, preferring to watch Brazilian soap operas and optimistic fortune-tellers on TV in their relatively clean, safe and comfortable living rooms rather than the all-too- familiar grim reality (or Hollywood trash) on offer in decaying dirty theatres. Film production dropped as fast as it had risen: 300 films were released in 1990, 213 in 1991, 68 in 1994, 28 in 1996.[107] More recently annual production has stabilised at about 75, produced by small, privatised companies instead of the unprofitably large studios of yore. Russia's Ministry of Culture currently finances fewer than two dozen films annually, and studios in many ofthe former Soviet republics struggle to survive, relying on help from organisations like France's Centre National de Cinematographie.
The collapse of the Soviet Union meant the 'wholesale social displacement of the cult of high culture'.[108] Entrenched attitudes compounded enormous practical difficulties. During the Brezhnev years, the polarisation between those artists whom the state favoured and those whom it marginalised strengthened the 'perceived connectionbetween the moral integrity ofthe film "artist" and the social pessimism and aesthetic difficulty of his or her films'. In other words, inaccessibility denoted honesty, and entertainment meant compromise.[109] That attitude persisted well beyond the system's demise: 'Many people go to movie houses just to relax and enjoy themselves - to stop thinking,' commented a leading film-maker. 'We have to enlighten them and make them want to think.'[110] Yet 'auteur' films, however gratifying the international laurels they may accrue at Cannes, do not fill seats.
103
Katherine Verdery,
104
Michael Glenny, 'Soviet Theatre:
105
The phrase is Gogoberidze's. Svetlana Boym, 'The Poetics of Banality: Tat'iana Tolstaia, Lana Gogoberidze and Larisa Zvezdochetova', in Goscilo,
106
Birgit Beumers, 'Introduction', in B. Beumers (ed.),
108
Nancy Condee and Vladimir Padunov, 'The ABC of Russian Consumer Culture', in Nancy Condee (ed.),
110
Elem Klimov, 'Learning Democracy: The Filmmakers' Rebellion', in Stephen F. Cohen and Katrina van den Heuvel (eds.),