Popular culture was swept by a wave of noir. One of the most gifted and popular producers of the genre was the television journalist Alexander Nevzorov, Russia’s first TV star, who over the years had tried himself out as a church choirboy, a professional stuntman, an investigative reporter, a crusader, an ultra-nationalist, a parliamentarian, an imperialist, a romantic individualist, a mercantile cynic, a con man and in the end even a liberal. Nevzorov was the product of television and its embodiment, a man who constructed reality and his own image.
He made his first television appearance at the end of 1987 in the daily news show 600 Seconds. The handsome Nevzorov, clad in a black leather jacket and sporting fashionable stubble, sat under a blinking clock that was counting down 600 seconds during which he was uncovering dirt and corruption, shaming bureaucrats, showing murderers and their victims, talking to prostitutes and alcoholics. Watching his show broadcast live was a sport. Some people made bets: will he make it in 600 seconds or not? His stunts were flawless. Although 600 sekund (600 Seconds) was initially produced and broadcast by a regional Leningrad channel, it was watched by 50 million people across Russia.
Nevzorov was both the presenter and a reporter. He and his crew burst into offices and hospitals, broke into prisons and abattoirs. He showed the underworld in all its gory details. His journalistic stunts and his chutzpah mesmerized the audience. He pushed his microphone into the faces of city council officials and prisoners. While Vzglyad was made and watched by the Westernized urban elite, 600 Seconds had a much wider appeal and peddled anything that sold: gratuitous violence, nationalism and death pornography. The more corpses the merrier.
‘I was a conquistador who was conquering virgin information territory and crushing savages along the way. I did not give a damn about morality or public interest. I was simply dealing in the most profitable information. And the most profitable information at the time was crime… I had impudence, courage and an exceptional lack of principles,’ Nevzorov explained.2 Some of Nevzorov’s ‘revelations’ were simply staged. His nightly prime-time programmes created the sensation that the country consisted entirely of criminals, drunkards and the homeless. How much of what Nevzorov showed was actually true was a very different matter. In his programmes, he called Leningrad ‘Petrograd’, as the city was known at the time of the Bolshevik Revolution and civil war.
In 1990 Nevzorov played himself in a full-length documentary film called You Can’t Live Like That, directed and narrated by Stanislav Govorukhin, a film-maker best known for his thrillers. Nevzorov appeared in the film in the part of a lone crusader against crime, a heroic reporter-investigator fighting for the truth. You Can’t Live Like That was a classic film noir which people queued to see as though it was a thriller, not a documentary, deriving odd pleasure from self-deprecation. The film presented a Bosch-like picture of the country’s physical and moral degradation. Rapists, serial killers, thieves, drunkards and prostitutes populated the film which showed the lowest depths of Russian society. ‘This is what seventy years [of Soviet rule] have done to us,’ Govorukhin lamented.
In 1989 most people in the Soviet Union favoured ‘socialism with a human face’. Between 1989 and 1991 the number of those who felt that socialism brought nothing but queues and repressions and that ‘we are the worst country in the world’, destined to teach others how not to live, grew from 7 per cent to 56 per cent. People started to refer to the Soviet Union as ‘this country’ rather than ‘our country’. The word ‘Soviet’ morphed into ‘Sovok’ (dustpan) and was used as an antonym to ‘normal’ or ‘civilized’. This self-deprecation had nothing to do with repentance. It was the reverse side of the imperial superiority complex that had been hammered into people for decades and which was to resurface a decade and a half later when Russia got richer. The narrative of revenging the humiliation of the 1990s, ‘imposed on Russia by the West’, would become the centrepiece of the restoration ideology under Vladimir Putin. In fact, this ‘humiliation’ was imposed not by the West but by those who cultivated the idea of Sovok and by Putin himself.
The pessimism that engulfed the country in 1990 was as exaggerated as the euphoria had been four years earlier. It partly reflected the worsening economic situation in the country, uncertainty about the future, the rise in criminality and the weakness of the government. But as Alexander Yakovlev remarked at the beginning of 1990, ‘It seems to me that there is a lot of theatricality and exaggeration in this confusion of minds, this whirlwind of events, outbursts of emotions and ambitions’. The paradox was that for all the difficulties and pessimism, Russian society was more friendly and receptive to the outside world than it was a decade later when life had become more comfortable and people started to holiday abroad, while lamenting the loss of the empire and its influence. At the time, the majority of people felt the most significant achievements of the Perestroika years were the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Eastern Europe and freedom of speech. Russian society seemed more agitated than depressed. And however apprehensive people felt about the future in 1990, few wished to go back to Brezhnev’s era of ‘developed socialism’.
This spirit of the last years of the Soviet regime revealed itself in a raft of anti-Utopian novels which appeared in the late 1980s. The most interesting one was a short novella by Alexander Kabakov, an author and staff writer for Moskovskie novosti. It was called Nevozvrashchenets (The Man Who Doesn’t Return) and painted an apocalyptic picture of the future. A scientist, transported into the future at the instructions of his KGB minders, finds Moscow in 1993 run by quasi-military juntas who arbitrarily execute people in the name of Great Reconstruction. Tanks roam around the ruined city. Orthodox ‘knights’ spear Jews gathered by the stands of a liberal newspaper, while bearded members of the Revolutionary Committee of Northern Persia hunt people wearing Orthodox crosses. The scientist – an ultimate intelligentsia type – moves around the dark and cold streets with a Kalashnikov, dexterously dodging death like a Hollywood movie hero.
The novella ends on an unexpectedly optimistic note: offered the chance to go back to the good old times where people ‘drank milky tea and read family novels’, the scientist decides to stay in ‘catastrophic’ 1993. Walking up a desolate Tverskaya Street, he spots a car containing his KGB minders who are pointing a gun at him. ‘I fell to the ground, having already undone a gun holster under my coat – at the ready. Here [in 1993] I was not afraid of them…’3 The dissipation of fear was one of the most important results of the Perestroika years.
Looking for Cover
If anyone had a reason to feel fearful in 1990, it was the party and the KGB that were fast losing control over the situation in the country. Faced with mass rallies outside the Kremlin, the Communist Party was forced to abolish the sixth article of the constitution that guaranteed its monopoly on power. The KGB – the ‘combat division’ of the Communist Party – was also under pressure. By 1990 the liberal media, with Moskovskie novosti in the vanguard, turned its cannons on the KGB. Watching the party surrender its political monopoly, many KGB officers felt disoriented and exposed.