A wave of nostalgia swept Russian popular culture and television. Old Soviet plays, songs and films attracted large audiences. The Soviet era was treated with ironic sentimentality as a source of sincerity and meaning. In fact, the first signs of this nostalgia began to emerge soon after the Soviet collapse. In the 1994 New Year’s Eve NTV television show, young and carefree journalists appeared on the screen sporting red Young Pioneer ties as a tribute to their own childhoods and singing a song from the classic Soviet comedy of 1956, Carnival Night. The show’s host was Leonid Parfenov – one of NTV’s brightest stars with an impeccable sense of style and period. He wore a dinner jacket and black tie and brought a technological novelty into the studio – a karaoke box. ‘It allows you to sing in your own voice to recorded music,’ Parfenov explained with a smile.
In contrast to Kiselev and Dobrodeev – golden Moscow youths with good connections – Parfenov, in his early thirties at the time, came from the small provincial town of Cherepovets, and conquered Moscow with his light and sincere touch. One of Parfenov’s first documentaries made for Central Television was called Deti XX s’ezda’ (The Children of the 20th Congress) and was dedicated to the shestidesiatniki. Standing on the Sparrow Hills above Moscow, Parfenov spoke to the camera: ‘We need to understand their rise, their drama, maybe even their tragedy and their second wind. Because without them, we would not be here and without their bitter experience – we can do nothing. Nothing. That is it.’ Parfenov posessed an acute sense of his own roots, Soviet history and its aesthetics.
The casual name of Parfenov’s programme on NTV, Namedni (an obsolescent form of ‘recently’ in Russian), implied the past and, in 1996, Parfenov turned to the stylistically coherent Soviet period and its popular culture, relaunching Namedni as a series of programmes about the past thirty years of Russian history. He defined historic periods not so much by political events, but by their sound, smell, rhythm and tone, mixing high and popular culture. Parfenov used montage and inversions liberally, and occasionally ‘mixed’ himself into historic documentary footage. There he was shooting ducks with Khrushchev, chatting with Hollywood actor Tom Hanks, lighting Fidel Castro’s cigar, kissing Marilyn Monroe. Behind Parfenov’s light-hearted project stood a serious perspective on Russia’s reconciliation with its own past and on turning history from a political minefield into an aesthetic object, providing people with a much-needed sense of continuity and stability.
Parfenov was not the only person trying to make a connection with the past. In 1995, Parfenov’s friend Konstantin Ernst, who had just been appointed the ‘chief producer of Channel One’, launched an advertising campaign called ‘The Russia Project’, which consisted of a series of one-and-a-half-minute films in which famous Soviet actors played ordinary people, war veterans, bus drivers, cosmonauts, or alcoholics. The purpose was to promote simple feelings: love, friendship, memory, kindness. In one episode, an old man walks through a Metro station and hears the sound of a wartime march; he stops and remembers his youth and his love when he was a young soldier. Each episode ended on a tag-line: ‘We remember’ or ‘It is my city’ or ‘Home is always better’.
This was a precursor to a much more resonant project that Ernst and Parfenov produced in December 1995. It was called Starye pesni o glavnom (Old Songs about Important Things). In it, Russian pop stars, dressed in 1930s fashion, performed popular songs of that decade in a pastiche show inspired by the Soviet socialist musicals and paintings such as the 1937 Celebration in a Collective Farm. It worked like a karaoke machine. ‘I had a very acute postmodernist feeling that everything has already been said, that it just needed to be revived. We couldn’t just waste it. Yes, these songs were written in the Stalinist years, but they were good songs,’ said Parfenov.79 To make the film, Parfenov and Ernst resurrected an old pavilion at Mosfilm Studios (Moscow’s equivalent of London’s Ealing Studios) and dusted off its old props, trucks and costumes. Yet Old Songs was shot using the best Kodak film and ended up costing $3 million – a vast sum of money by Russian standards at the time. It was sleek and modern.
The film appealed equally to the sense of nostalgia among older Soviet people – many of whom had voted for the communists – and to a younger audience that could barely remember Soviet culture, but danced to Soviet songs in expensive Moscow nightclubs, bought Soviet memorabilia in trendy flea markets and put on old Soviet clothes for fancy-dress parties. None of the participants could imagine that within three years the Kremlin would revive the most important old song of all – the Soviet national anthem – which would signal the start of restoration, or that a fancy-dress party would soon turn into a neo-Soviet parade of state nationalism.
However, in 1997, the young, urban NTV audience saw Parfenov’s Old Songs as proof that Russia could never return to the Soviet system and ideological wars. Parfenov’s programmes were saturated with the feeling of warmth that people experience when visiting the home where they grew up, picking up and smiling at their old toys or records. ‘We had parted with the Soviet regime, life around us was very different. We could sit in front of a Samsung TV, drink Absolut vodka, decorate our flats in a “European” style, but the soul demanded some harmony. What other songs could we sing?’ said Parfenov.80 Neither he nor Ernst had any political agenda when they made Old Songs: they made it for fun and their own pleasure, but they accurately sensed the public appetite.
It was also a natural reaction to several years of overdosing on popular Western culture which had swept over Russian television after the Soviet collapse and to a relentless bashing of anything Soviet under the slogan ‘We are the worst and useless’. It was only to be expected that, a few years later, an inferiority complex would engender feelings of wounded pride. As Parfenov told the New York Times in 1995, ‘It’s about admitting that there were things that were good… that there is nothing to be ashamed of, and that we don’t have any other history. What else can we reflect? Why should we struggle with ourselves?81 (Five years later Vladimir Putin would repeat the same words almost verbatim.) Parfenov’s work provided a sense of continuity and soothed the trauma of fractured history. In that sense his programmes acted like a tranquillizer, removing symptoms of anxiety.
Later, when nostalgia for the Soviet past morphed into a restoration of Soviet political practices, liberal critics pointed to Parfenov’s project as the original sin of stirring up nostalgia in the first place. This was hardly fair. The revival of old Soviet instincts was caused not by Old Songs, but by the lack of immunity against those instincts and the absence of a nation-building project and institutions.
One politician who tried to remake the past and turn Old Songs into a new ideology was Yuri Luzhkov, the all-powerful mayor of Moscow whose presidential ambitions were manifested in the reconstruction of the late-nineteenth-century Cathedral of Christ the Saviour that had been blown up by Stalin in 1931.[3] At the same time as Parfenov’s Namedni, Luzhkov celebrated the 850th anniversary of Moscow’s foundation. The date itself was chosen rather randomly, since nobody knew precisely when Moscow was founded, but it marked the fiftieth anniversary of the last lavish celebration in 1947.
The celebrations made use of all periods of Russian history as long as they contributed to Russia’s glory. Russian princes beheaded by the tsars, the tsars shot dead by the communists, the communists overthrown by Yeltsin – they all coexisted harmoniously and rejoiced triumphantly in Luzhkov’s extravaganza. Soviet and pre-Soviet icons were bundled together and fused into a peculiar new ideology of nationalism and patriotism.
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Luzhkov was also one of the first acting Russian politicians to exploit the subject of Crimea and Ukraine. He travelled to Sebastopol to declare that the city of Russian glory should never have been passed to Ukraine.