The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

on December 31, 1995, Channel 1, the main television broadcaster, aired a wholly new type of show. The New Year's Eve tradition had been in flux since perestroika. In 1986, Gorbachev, speaking at the twenty- seventh Party Congress, condemned Soviet television for being dull. In response, broadcast executives rushed to reformat their programming, scrapping, among others, The Blue Flame, the New Year's Eve variety show that had been in existence for a generation. Now Channel 1, which reached about 93 percent of Russian households, showed a film that sounded remarkably like the old show.³ Called Old Songs About the Most Important Things, it was billed as a musical. The cast of characters harked back to the propaganda musicals of the 1930s and 1950s. These generally featured collective-farm workers, friendly competitions, and innocuous love interests that spurred self-improvement in the less perfect of the pair. Often, there was class conflict that presented the opportunity for mild ideological critique, which invariably ended with the victory of communism over evil.

Old Songs featured collective-farm workers, a truck driver, a recently decommissioned soldier, a teacher, a bourgeois, a recently released convict, a "rocker" (one could tell because he had long hair and wore fancy city clothes), and a "virgin ready for marriage" (this was the role as listed in the credits), among others. The plot, such as it was, provided opportunities for this ensemble to sing twenty-one Soviet songs, most of them lyrical but many with references to the Great Patriotic War. This was no remake of a Soviet movie, though. In

this film, the classes lived in peace. Indeed, there was no conflict of any kind. There was a lot of pursuing of love interests, interspersed with the women's insistence that there be no premarital sex, but there was no culmination: no one got married, no one had sex, and nothing triumphed over anything else. The only person clearly marked as Other in the film—the "rocker"—sang a song in Ukrainian, a language not yet perceived as foreign but rather as a difficult-to- decipher dialect of Russian. In fact, nothing happened in the film, and this seemed to be the heart of its nostalgic message: against the backdrop of post-Soviet Russia, where the war in Chechnya was entering its second year, where newspapers reported endlessly on crime, conflict, and constant economic concerns, it imagined a past straight out of Soviet newspapers, where nothing ever happened unless it was in the West. In Old Songs, people happily consumed Soviet-made products such as hollow-filter Belomorkanal cigarettes (so named for the Gulag's largest project) and a rubbery processed cheese called Druzhba ("Friendship"), but they bought them willingly, and without having to stand in line, from a well-stocked shop where male customers were cheerfully served by busty saleswomen decked out in evening gowns. The Soviet era was recast as romantically placid and the Soviet regime as benevolent. In the film's most bizarre moment, a man and a woman huddle in a tiny rowboat.

"Do you know why your feet are so adorable?" he asks her.

"I do," she responds. "It is because our Soviet regime is so wonderful."

"That's correct," he says, and rises from kissing her feet to kissing her face—or so we assume, for the camera shyly pans away. The scene referenced Soviet-era spoofs of Soviet propaganda, which ascribed to the regime both unlimited powers and boundless magnanimity. But if the Soviet-era spoofs, which circulated in samizdat or simply as jokes, were edgy, this spoof of a spoof was soft and rounded. At the end of the film the entire cast, including the "rocker," the bourgeois, and the convict, gather around a giant table at the center of which sits one of the unique edible symbols of Soviet privilege, a roast suckling pig just like the ones Zhanna's father started receiving on New Year's Eve

once he became governor. In the reimagined Soviet past, everyone got a piece of the pig.⁴

Created by two men who were about to become the most influential people in Russian television,* Old Songs was a huge hit. The new renditions of the old songs could, for the next year and beyond, be heard on street corners all over the country, where kiosks were briskly selling two-cassette audio sets. There would be sequels: Old Songs About the Most Important Things 2, 3, and 4. The following year, the other major federal broadcast channel resurrected The Blue Flame, the Soviet New Year's Eve show, to compete for what was turning out to be a giant nostalgia audience. Once cable and satellite television took hold a few years later, an entire channel was launched to show Soviet television twenty-four hours a day. It was called Nostalgia, and its logo, shown in a corner of the screen, contained a red hammer and sickle.