#19: Experience of Perestroika

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Perestroika Songspiel

Project authors: Chto Delat? Olga Egorova (Tsaplya); Dmitry Vilensky; Natalia Pershina (Gliuklya); Nikolai Oleinikov
Director: Olga Egorova (Tsaplya)
Composer: Mikhail Krutikov
Screenplay: Tsaplya, Dmitry Vilensky, Gliuklya
Camera and lighting: Artem Ignatov
Sound: Sergei Knyazev
Set design: Nikolai Oleinikov, Dmitry Vilensky

Our project deals with a key episode during perestroika in the Soviet Union. The action of the film unfolds on August 21, 1991, after the victory over the restorationist coup. On this day of unprecedented popular uplift it seemed that democracy had won a final victory in our country and that the people should and would be able to build a new, just society.

Scene 1

The Chorus sings the introduction. Behind them we see a cityscape with a stormy sky above it.

We’ve come to tell you the story
Of hopes that didn’t come true
Of promises that weren’t made good.
Here are five heroes of perestroika,
Five heroes of perestroika.
Today they are the masters of history,
They are making history:
An idealistic democrat,
A noble businessman,
A heroic revolutionary,
A bitter nationalist,
And a woman who has found her own voice.
Today they believe that together they can build
A new, just society.
Tyranny has fallen!
The communist regime will never return.
There’s no going back to the past!
There’s no going back to the past!
Whatever the future holds, it will be better than the past,
Better than the past. . .
We will tell you the story
Of hopes that didn’t come true
Of promises that weren’t made good.

The true picture of the past flits by. . .” These words by Walter Benjamin have the most direct bearing on the phenomenon of perestroika.

A choir of contemporaries is attempting to construct a comfortable image of perestroika as an irreversible movement toward capitalism. This image serves the needs of the squalid powers that be and thus legitimates the paltry existence of the choristers themselves. To interrupt the flagrantly obscene din raised by these voices, it makes sense to turn to the central question that Benjamin asks in his theses on the concept of history: who is the subject of history? For those who accept the task of continuing the struggle for emancipation, the answer to this question is unambiguous: “the struggling, oppressed class itself.” That is, the class-as-multitude that clearly realizes and rejects the existing order of things, which fetters our lives, dreams, and the dignity and strength of constituent labor. That is, all those who still remember the pride of belonging to the human struggle for freedom.

A conversation about Next Stop Soviet; political naïveté; what it means to experience defeat; exhaustion and humanism; who changes the world; vanity and visionaries; how to keep your ear to the ground; and the challenges that each generation faces.

Next Stop Soviet was a Scandinavian initiative that organized the visits of thousands of young Scandinavians to the Soviet Union in 1988. The idea was to continue breaking the isolation of the USSR through manifold human and cultural exchanges. The outcome was that five thousand Danes went to the USSR through more than one hundred different projects. The Danes lived in private homes with young people with the same interests or occupations as their guests. Among the hosts was Dmitry Vilensky, a member of Chto Delat? It was his first contact with foreigners.

Ungdomshuset (“Youth House”) was the popular name of the building formally named Folkets Hus (“House of the People”), located on Jagtvej 69 in Copenhagen. It functioned as an underground scene venue for music and a meeting point for various leftist groups from 1982 until 2007, when it was torn down. Due to the ongoing conflict between the municipal government of Copenhagen and the activists occupying the premises, the building has been the subject of intense media attention and public debate since the mid-nineties.
What is the task of this film? That’s a good question, the right question. Cinema has long faced the task of how to film a political seminar. The task has been solved in different ways: the famous discussion scene in Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point or the lecture scene in Godard’s La Chinoise established a certain approach to filming such things.

Time is like a river that flows endlessly through the universe,
and you could never step into the same river twice…
Heraclitus (attributed)

As a network vehicle, Perpetuum Mobile brings together multiple fields of art, practice and enquiry that exist in disparate institutional frames and territories – acting as a conduit and engine for new forms of knowledge, organisation and imagination. Less than a year ago, Perpetuum Mobile didn’t exist. Perhaps, as its counterpart in science, its ideal never will. As a real-world vehicle, however, it has been set in motion

Among its driving ideas, is the ambition to re-think certain basic historical, institutional as well as  theoretical paradigms which have been in one way or another compromised, falsely delimited or obfuscated at the present historical juncture. One way to bring something genuinely new into existence, is finding ways in which to re-write the rules of the game. It is best to proceed by way of example.

Artemy Magun: I think it is important that you and I talk about perestroika. First, because you were an active participant in perestroika and, from the viewpoint of our group, you are one of the few activists who have remained faithful to its emancipatory content. Second, because you and I both basically subscribe to the same assessment of the current conjuncture in Russia, although we part ways when it comes to perestroika. I have argued that it was a kind of revolution; while in your groundbreaking book you call it a restoration.

Twenty years separate us from the events of perestroika. That is a fairly long time historically: it is the same amount of time as separated perestroika itself from the end of the Thaw, in the Soviet Union, and the events of 1968, in Western Europe. However, the specificity of these serious historical events rests in the fact that they don’t contain their own meaning. Rather, this meaning is determined gradually and post factum, depending on how history unfolds after the events. Thus, as it fades gradually into the historical past, perestroika appears different today than it did twenty years ago. Its destructive, catastrophic import (something that only hardcore retrogrades insisted on during perestroika itself) has become obvious, as well as the fact that, although they actively helped Russia in the nineties, the western powers had an egoistic stake in weakening the country and returning it to the international “semi-periphery.” In their assessment of perestroika, your own works vigorously employ the broader historical context-both the internal history of the October Revolution, which perestroika consummated, and the history of Russia as a “peripheral empire” whose historical legacy was continued by the Soviet Union in its later phase.

Over the last couple of years several photo albums came out on the unlikely subject of Russian criminal tattoo. These albums, narrating about the Self, body, and totalitarianism, document the marginal yet incredibly powerful visual subculture of the late-Soviet Gulag. Beyond relative visibility of underground Soviet dissident inteligencia of the 1960-1970s, beyond forged by Moscow-based foreign correspondents definition of “Soviet dissident art, these amateur artists of the Gulag engraved bodies of their human canvases with striking by any standards images of grass-roots anti-totalitarian resistance. The owners of these tattoos of outmost anti-Soviet sentiment and grotesque (top Soviet politicians portrayed as pigs or Communist slogans mixed with foul language) for the remainder of their live span became carriers of best examples of truly direct, political, and uncompromising dissent Soviet culture ever produced, and in comparison to which forever pale the most radical works of Soviet non-conformist artists, including Sots Art, looking like toothless jokes for the middle-class at best.

I learned to say no early in life. And calling oneself a feminist is equivalent to saying no to this society.

Most people believe that feminism came to Russia from the west, that there is no native political and cultural ground for it. But this is not the case. Rather, Russian feminism is simply an unpopular intellectual and cultural movement, which nevertheless has its own agenda and, moreover, its own discontinuous native traditions. Contemporary Russian feminism began to take shape, both intellectually and politically, during perestroika. Although before this time there were also specialists in feminist theory in the Soviet academic community. Sociologists studied the problems of gender inequality and sexual emancipation, and the stories and essays of Russian feminists collected in the anthology Women and Russia (1979) were published in samizdat.