The Function of the Soviet Experience in Post-Soviet Discourse

Maria Litovskaya

The 'Soviet', whether we understand it as ideology or concrete social practice, is obviously a major cultural component of the contemporary social space in Russia. Twenty years have passed since the disintegration of the USSR. During this time, society at large and the individual who makes it up have gone through periods of euphoria, disappointment, hope, bewilderment and discontent. A new generation has grown up that has never seen Soviet rule. Many people who embodied the previous era have died. Many aspects of everyday life have drastically changed and the social structure has changed. However, despite these changes, Russia is still often referred to as a 'post-Soviet' society. This definition is symptomatic, because nobody in 1936 would have called Soviet society post-Tsarist or post-autocratic. The term 'Soviet' alone was quite sufficient, while the history of imperial Russia was the subject of academic interest, and used for propaganda purposes or personal memoirs.

If in the middle of 1990 Russian citizens (at least publicly) were divided distinctly into those who mourned and those who hated everything Soviet, while – gripped by the realities of a new life, actually little was said about the Soviet experience, then in modern Russia we witness the heyday of the recent past. It is sufficient to go into any Russian bookshop to see racks of books about the events of the Civil or Second World Wars, the collectivization or the space project or the Lenin-Stalin-Khrushchev-Brezhnev era. The radio and television programmes of the 'serious' channels are full of transmissions (both neutral and also admittedly controversial) about the Soviet past. Their number increases before significant historical dates for Soviet society, such as the 65th anniversary of the Victory over Fascism or the 50th anniversary of the first space flight. Finally, the popularity of historical (Soviet) themes in society and the ambiguity of their coverage are indirectly confirmed by the fact that the falsification of history has been declared a state problem, obviously in the first instance concerning recent Soviet history.

Simultaneously with the quantitative growth of texts about the 'Soviet' experience, the range of evaluations of this past changed. Today, even superficial surfing across sites of the Russian Internet shows the popularity of forums, blogs and bloggers, who quite professionally, i.e., with an understanding of the opportunity of various interpretations of the facts, discuss aspects of Soviet history. An important factor of published academic works and sites is the description of Soviet practices and politics, whether this concerns the relationship between ideology and the everyday, the designing of rules and norms or the functioning of memory of the Soviet experience in a contemporary space. As a result, on the one hand, these general efforts show the multifaceted nature of this phenomenon; on the other, there is a consecutive deconstruction of Soviet practices, which ultimately strips the Soviet experience of its demonic qualities as well as the conspiracy-charm inherent in its image, for example in 'dissident' literature.

Values, stereotypes, texts and images of Soviet culture are the subject for reflection of a broad layer of the population, and also for analysis not only of social scientists (researchers and academics), but also – in the Russian tradition – by social scientists-turned writers, artists or film-makers. The list of books which have received literary awards in 2009 makes apparent the increasing tendency of 'historicization'. At first sight, such a tendency can be attributed to nostalgia. But even at first sight it is clear that it would be difficult to unequivocally assess this phenomenon in post-Soviet culture as an interpretation – even sympathetic – of the Soviet past just as 'nostalgic'. This phenomenon requires differentiation, because texts of different types are characterized by a varied zeal for diverse approaches to Soviet history and its modern interpretations.

The rehabilitating approach to the Soviet past is, above all, characteristic for the policies of state television channels. The state policy on the representation of the Soviet past is more or less clear. In the modern (not only Russian) world the demand for a return to the past has become the source of a rapid growth of the 'heritage industry', that well-developed sphere of media activity which aims at the effective visualization of history, allowing it to be turned into some kind of consumer good. In Russia such a theatricalization of 'our past' is generated regularly on the level of advertising, serials, television shows such as Kakie nashi gody/These Were Our Years, where a certain 'glamourization' of the Soviet past is achieved through one-sided reduction (see Shaburova 2009: 33–44).

The television channels offer the modern Russian spectator above all a well-censored idealized version of the past, where blemishes (or shortcomings, depending on the script) of the Soviet system are resisted by collectivism, mutual responsibility, patriotism, spirituality and heartfulness. Such texts reconstitute patriarchal relations, which society has considered lost but genuine and worthy, thus creating the basis for a regulated and predictable (with all its shortcomings) world of the past. Paradoxically this happens even with the scripts of serials built around the exposures of the official Soviet version of history (e.g., V kruge pervom/In the First Circle; Deti Arbata/Children of the Arbat, Moskovskaia saga/Moscow Saga), not to mention texts obviously based on the idealization of the 'communal' past (e.g., Sinie nochi/Blue Nights, Gromovy/The Gromovs). Socially weak characters who have not lost their humanity despite the complexities of Soviet history form the basis for a nostalgic perception, and thus manipulate and stimulate the direction of nostalgia. This allows the spectators, who identify with the heroes, to experience afresh the feeling of belonging to the Soviet experience, perceiving their contemporaries as post-Soviet people without a feeling of shame.

At the same time the history of the Soviet period conceals many explosive themes, which give rise to a different sort of exposure and the formation of a 'repressive history' of Russia. This version, almost absent from television because of the 'falsification' component, is developed first of all in the space of Internet publications and non-fiction literature. It focuses on several themes connected with the problem of Stalinism. A similar – criminatory or revelatory – use of the Soviet experience is, on the one hand, characteristic of historical essays devoted to the disclosure of new secrets of Soviet history; on the other hand, it is typical of journalistic and publicistic essays, which see all the problems of modern Russia precisely in its Soviet heritage and instil in the country's population a sense of guilt for the past.

Although on the level of popular culture the attitudes to the Soviet past remain polarized, even this sphere of cultural activity sees ambivalent attitudes. The further Russian society moves away from 1991, the less frequent become one-sided references that accuse or ridicule the Soviet experience. This also concerns research texts devoted to the deconstructive description of Soviet cultural policies and the rewriting of Soviet cultural history. The reference to the recent past more and more frequently includes both the representation of the negative experience and the attachment of a certain symbolical capital to the Soviet concept. We mean here not the Soviet past and its research as such, but the use of facts or images concerning this experience in order to regulate certain moods in modern Russian society. At the same time, the sense that the Soviet experience is prone to oblivion is omnipresent in society, including the demand to record its details, which is implemented in particular in numerous Internet-projects, such as sovietlife, sovietsongs and other sites on the Soviet everyday.

These tendencies are connected with the specific position of the Soviet past in post-Soviet space. One may argue that the Soviet past is a past like any other. The popular biographies of Boris Pasternak and Bulat Okudzhava written by Dmitrii Bykov, of Mikhail Prishvin, Aleksei Tolstoi and Mikhail Bulgakov written by Aleksei Varlamov, of Leonid Leonov written by Zakhar Prilepin at first sight differ little, say, from the biography of Anton Chekhov by Donald Rayfield, but the disputes around them are of a personal nature, where 'big history' corresponds to family and autobiography. Valerii Todorovskii's film Stiliagi/Hipsters (2008), made in the style of a musical, did not surmise a dispute about the credibility of Soviet reality of the second half of the 1950s which it represented, but precisely this aspect was most heatedly discussed among audiences and critics.

The turn to the past happens for different reasons, mostly because the original cult of the past is an organic consequence of the progress of modernity. The constant change of the conditions of life, which has become a normal condition of societies of the modern times, evoke in people the desire to return to more habitual and 'organic' past times, which can be described as 'good, old' and even ideal. But, as Etkind remarks, even in the 'ideal' case

modernization is a painful and traumatic process; some lose, others gain, almost everybody simultaneously loses and gains [...] People respond to traumas with fantasies, nostalgic and other, which should be understood and not condemned [...] This convenient and large, global narrative blurs distinctions between the feelings of the Russian intelligent, whose father was killed in the Gulag and whose children became alcoholics during the stagnation, whose savings disappeared during perestroika and, at last, whose culture – making sense of these events, was destroyed in the last decade, and the feelings of an Indian peasant, a French townsman, and an American house owner, who cannot hold at bay the global competition, lose their usual sources of income [...] Everybody is bad off (but when was it good?); but for everybody it's bad in different ways [...] The economy is irreversibly globalized, while culture answers with particularisation; whence arise problems that differ everywhere. The originality of the post-Soviet moment lies in its Soviet past.

(Lipovetskii and Etkind 2008)

The Soviet past can hardly be called ideal: few Russians would contest that. Endemic to texts of different sizes and genres about the Soviet experience created by former Soviet citizens with a greater or smaller degree of expressiveness are the authors' attempts first 'to get even' with the personal experience, i.e., to give an estimation of the country leaning on the experience where they lived and where their heroes lived; and second, to offer their version of the general concept of interaction between man and the Soviet state.

As Slavoj Zizek remarks, the interest in the past in modern post-socialist societies is usually explained by the 'immaturity' of the expectation of people who dreamt of 'another life', without imagining what, for example, capitalism meant: the inhabitants of the socialist camp wanted the capitalist democratic freedom while simultaneously preserving the guaranteed stability of socialism. When the people in the countries of Eastern Europe protested against communist regimes, the majority dreamt not of capitalism as a form of social organization, but about material prosperity and equity. They wanted to live outside rigid state control, beyond the primitive ideological brainwash and hypocrisy. When the lofty ideals of the Velvet Revolution were dispelled by a new reality, people reacted in different ways. The most natural expression of post-communist disappointment has been nostalgia for 'the good old times', which we should not take too seriously, since the desire to return to the grey and poor socialist reality is hardly genuine. Rather, 'it is a form of mourning, of gently getting rid of the past' (Zizek 2009). However, in the case of Russia, the mourning is complicated by an understanding that the Soviet experience – deprived of some of its important features – continues to exist.

On the one hand, a significant portion of modern post-Soviet society is composed of people who have spent part of their life in the USSR. In the state that exists no longer, they underwent their socialization process, and they became – many not of their own will – citizens of another country with essentially different rules and living conditions. For the majority, the massive changes implemented by the state were traumatic, and the condition of modern Russian society is in many respects the result of this trauma. Moreover, 'that country' (as Russia is called by its citizens) – did not enthuse many, and for quite different reasons. On the other hand, according to Leonid Parfenov

before our eyes a certain third state has emerged: not the Soviet Union, of course, but also not Russia in the historical sense. We live in a country that should correctly be called post-Soviet Russia. In fact, the majority of people consider only the Soviet past its own. We have no mental link with imperial Russia. Well, just figure who of our compatriots would distinguish Alexander II from Alexander III?! The majority of Russians today serve in the army in Soviet style, they receive their education in institutes in the Soviet way, they are treated in hospitals in the Soviet way, they choose those in power, watch television and do lot of other things.

(Parfenov 2009: 4)

Addressing the same theme, Dmitrii Bykov emphasizes the paradox of the Russian perception of past and present:

The Fatherland has got used to failures and to the contrary, and we willingly weep for them. We are a very nostalgic people. We look, stooping our old shoulders, like the three-rouble sausage, like The Pub '13 Chairs' of the stagnation era – and we weep, but back then we all spat! Where else can people despise and spit on something one day, and turn it into a gem the next? Either our life gets worse, or we do not like ourselves as we are: but life without a nostalgic flair always reminds us of the plague. We are sick of everything. But very soon, we might be weeping for everything.

(Bykov 2009)

The understanding that modern Russians live inside Soviet heritage and that this induces them to correlate an often contradictory knowledge of history with family and personal memory has gradually become a common phrase and enriches the notion of emotional links to previous epochs. Those who left Russia, in turn, construct their narrative about the ambiguous reasons that led them to make their choice. The first decade of the new millennium, when the first emotions about the disintegration of the Soviet state had subsided, saw a wide consideration of the Soviet experience not only through groundless denial or, to the contrary, absolute acceptance of the Soviet past, but also through the realization that condemnation/nostalgia are not the only emotions that arise during its representation and comprehension.

In the eyes of witnesses, the Soviet experience loses more and more of its palpability. The Soviet authorities have left no accessible corpus of objective data; even official information on the incomes of the population, on prices, living standards and medicine was either classified or falsified. The basic source of data lies in memoirs, in biased evaluations by Soviet citizens. In this story about the Soviet past, gaps cannot be avoided; these must be filled in a fragmentary manner, underlining the reliance on the imagination, on mythologizing on the basis of previous cultural experience and in the vein of new concepts.