Abstract
A widely enjoyed joke from the late state socialist period in Eastern Europe and the USSR offered the following mock political analysis: “The Soviet (/Hungarian/Polish/Romanian, etc.) intelligentsia is at a crossroads. One path is alcoholism; the other is impassable.” My Perestroika, a fascinating and remarkably complex documentary, provides a moving account of what happened once that other path appeared passable.
The film follows Andrei, Boris, Olga, and Ruslan, former classmates in Moscow’s School Number 57, and Lyuba, Boris’s wife. The protagonists were at the university during the regime changing years of 1989 to 1991. Boris and Lyuba became teachers and work at School Number 57; Andrei owns multiple retail outfits for designer men’s clothing produced by a France-based multinational company; Olga services pool tables for a company owned by a friend; Ruslan is a rock legend, founder of the hard rock band NAÏV who “has no job, no income” and makes a living as a street musician and by giving banjo lessons. The film presents an honest and intimate portrait of life in post-Soviet society, as experienced by a small group of—in some important ways privileged—young professionals in Moscow.
I like the film for two reasons. First, it provides a rare and intimate glimpse of the everyday lifeworlds of five young professionals in post-Soviet Russia. It is replete with valuable, expertly interviewed, and cleverly juxtaposed bits of narrative about events, feelings, predispositions, twists, and turns in private lives or politics. For the most part, the subjects are comfortable in their role as narrators and offer fascinating, insightful, freestyle thoughts about the ways in which their lives and history are intertwined. The narrators speak about the Soviet past with honesty, a superb sense of the grotesque, and unconcealed confusion.
I also like My Perestroika because it undertakes an ambitious project. It is neither about the post-Soviet present as such, nor exclusively about the state-socialist past. Instead, it is about the ways in which historical experiences build up in people’s lives, how subjects try to make sense of them, and the ways in which they affect the life strategies, experiences, and recollections of the narrators. Admirably, the film foregrounds complex and open-ended points about social change by masterfully layering three “moments” in the lives of the protagonists: the “high state socialist” period of the late seventies, when the narrators were children (being prepared, in one of the best Soviet schools in Moscow, to become “Real People, useful for the construction of a Communist society”); the mid-eighties to mid-nineties, namely, the period of the collapse of the state socialist status quo in the USSR; and the film’s present, about 20 years thereafter. Private family footage on super-8 film from Boris’s childhood, official Soviet newsreel and television coverage, and various forms of amateur footage from the time of the collapse and the attempted coup of 1991 mix with powerful visual commentaries from the present.
Olga is baffled by the fact that in Russia today, the “middle class,” which she always thought she belonged to, has a minimum income of $3,000 to $5,000 dollars per month—a criterion that would put her “barely above the poverty line.” Lyuba reminisces about growing up in the USSR as the mixing of intimacy and high politics: “I went to school, I ate dinner and I fought for peace.” She remembers, with a perfectly ambiguous giggle, how bitterly she and her mother fought in 1989 about Lenin’s place in history. Andrei, whose Party membership application was rejected, while serving in the Soviet Army in the mid-eighties, for no apparent reason, is a fairly successful businessman today who could not have “imagine[d] that [he] would have [his] own business one day.” Meanwhile Ruslan, his classmate, has no idea how people who had ever embraced a socialist world view could become businessmen. The key theme of the film is the impossibility of making sense of the state socialist past and the post-Soviet present in terms of each other.
This film will be of great import in both undergraduate and graduate education, in a wide variety of courses in historical sociology, social change, state socialism and its aftermath, post-Soviet cultural and social studies, and any course on intellectuals or on memory and historical interpretation. Key to the film’s success would be intensive preparation of students in terms of the social, cultural, political, and economic context of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. After such contextualization, the film will be a great enhancement, providing an emotionally powerful and intellectually challenging raw material for discussions on a wide range of substantive and methodological points. Unfortunately for those of us planning to use it in the classroom, the film is a few minutes longer than the usual time allotted to a class meeting in American universities.