Introduction

What follows is a light overview of the role that cultural symbolism or cultural myths take in a society. The society under discussion here is, of course, Russian society. It is an overview that is meant to illustrate the fact that even widely recognized symbolism within a given culture or society will not have a single, universal interpretation outside of a given context. There are groups of individuals with conflicting ideologies who can and will identify with the same cultural symbolism even though they may be passively or actively at odds with each other, politically speaking. Myths and mythical symbols both comprise aspects of a culture and serve to anchor the legitimacy of other aspects by association. Such aspects include ideologies, regimes, or social movements. These symbols, or myths, must be enlisted because any group either earnestly agitating or propagandizing cynically for utilitarian purposes for a cause or outcome cannot hope to directly confront or change a durable opinion or widely accepted cliché by opposing it or openly trying to change it.

In societies such as Russia and the United States, where multiple voices attempt to express themselves or influence public opinion simultaneously, some in earnest and others cynically, many different individuals who identify as part of one large national in-group form their identities around the same set of overarching symbols, opinions, or myths while belonging to smaller disparate groups. What this short article explores is Russian people’s search for some durable symbols useful for the formation of a continuous Russian identity after the symbolic and material crises inflicted on them by the fall of the Soviet Union, and, once some of those had been settled on, ways in which people have related to or used these symbols since, whether those uses are attempts at realizing personal agency and increasing personal freedom, or at manipulation and the associated limitation of others’ freedom.

The problem posed by the influence and circulation of myths and symbols is particularly salient in post-Soviet, post Transition Russia. In the Soviet Union oppositional politics was inadmissible at any level and could be repressed by simple force through the efficient totalitarian bureaucracy. Any ethical complaint could simply be silenced, as the basis for social truth was rooted nominally in the authority claimed by the Soviet government in its promise, however poorly executed, to provide full employment, housing, and other necessities. In modern capitalist Russia and in similar countries there can be no such ethical claims to authority to undergird a regime. Social, ethical value is swapped out for exchange value and competition, and multiple symbolic values can carry currency. For those maintaining power and authority, the diversion and cooptation of context and of social movements based around these symbols becomes crucial for maintaining a status quo.

Surviving Transition

When Mikhail Gorbachev disbanded the Soviet Union with his resignation on December 25, 1991, the Yeltsin era saw the implementation of social reforms that were, in the words of one historian, more radical than “the Bolsheviks’ clean sweep of tsarism in 1917, and even the Chinese Communists’ Great Leap Forward of the 1950s.” The effects of “shock therapy,” the rapid transition from a command economy to a free market, saw industrial production fall by up to 25% with inflation reaching a high of 30% a month in 1992. The poverty rate in Russia reached 40%.

A health crisis accompanied the collapse in the economy and in government services. Among other factors that reduced life expectancy, this included skyrocketing rates of HIV/AIDS cases, alcoholism, suicide, and cardiovascular disease. The population plummeted from 150 million in 1991 to fewer than 145 million by 2002. This was despite positive yearly immigration into Russia from neighboring republics numbering in the tens of thousands. The impact of these cascading collapses on the average Russian created a crossroads following the changes in attitudes that were unleashed during the years of Gorbachev’s ambitious program of Perestroika reforms.

The vacuum left by the near absence of government in these years of transition did not only manifest as material want. An entire system of meaning way of organizing private life that Soviet citizens had cobbled together from positions and behavior that could be plotted along a spectrum of nominally dissident behavior that was in some fashion informed by its opposition to or avoidance of official Soviet norms or laws was emptied of its symbolic efficiency overnight with the elimination of the repressive system that it antagonized.

The anthropologist Alexei Yurchak describes the ways in which the rituals of Soviet daily life structured the activities of the conformist and the nonconformist alike. Yurchak writes that “during Soviet late socialism, the performative dimension of authoritative speech acts and rituals became particularly important in most contexts and during most events.” The importance of, for example, raising your hand when a vote needed to be taken during a Komsomol (communist youth) meeting, was more important than the constative meaning of the act, that is, whether the person voting was actually for that which they voted. What became important was the act holding the vote so as to bring an end to the meeting. By voting in the affirmative for each motion, committee members signified to the others that they understood one another and were not going to make life difficult for the group.

Vaclav Havel, the dissident playwright and first president of the independent Czech Republic, described much the same phenomenon in his essay “The Power of the Powerless.” He wrote, “The manager of a fruit and vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: ‘Workers of the world, unite!’ Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world?... I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions… He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble.”

Nominally dissident activity, in other words, was often circulating in conjunction with a way of doing things that promised stability. While carving out spaces for small groups of in-group individuals to express themselves outside of the purview of the state and its arbitrary exercise of power, people depended on certain aspects of that power remaining in place.

Yuri Gagarin

Glasnost’ decontextualized late Soviet independent rock music, being that “official and nonofficial symbols and meanings became equally irrelevant.” Dissidents became difficult to define. In the post-Soviet period such organizing principles were even scarcer. The search was on for symbols and modes of being that still carried some stable social currency. New identities and social movements were tried, and old symbols were tested for their continued efficacy.

One such symbol and point of nostalgic pride that survived the transition to post-Soviet society intact was the figure of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin.

While young Russians were building new popular trends and social scenes, Soviet successes in the space race had lost none of their symbolic legitimacy, neither as the result of the disappearance of the oppressive Soviet regime, nor with the newly uncontradicted visibility of the Soviet Union’s collapse. In seeking to build new nightlife scenes, the organizers of Moscow’s first public raves teamed up with private companies as sponsors, as depicted in the flier featured here. This represented a departure from the independent rock scene of the late Soviet Union, a scene which had depended heavily on the construction of in-groups united by the intimacy of their gatherings and in the benign dissidence of their mutual participation in the unofficial gatherings that their concerts represented. It would have been unthinkable to allow such commercialization of these private, semi-secretive Soviet-era events.

The close-knit, rules-breaking, mostly private apartment concert scene lost cachet with the disappearance of the Soviet Union’s totalitarian bureaucracy because the rules of semi-secrecy and lack of hierarchy under which it operated were interrupted. It was replaced by a new dance scene that allowed the influence of money and celebrity in ways the previous Soviet Russian rock scene could not abide, providing a pathway for social legitimacy for the new class of capitalist kleptocrats as sponsors despite their ill-gotten gains and the collapse of institutions that accompanied and enabled their appearance. The figure of Gagarin helped legitimize this transition.

As with the Soviet Union’s World War II legacy, the figure of Gagarin continued to be able to resolve the contradictions presented by market-capitalist life. Where before gatherings of people brought together by music and a shared sense of identity and openness to one another were structured and informed by participants’ deliberate choice to eschew hierarchy between artist and audience in favor equality and access, with even top bands reluctant to charge high ticket prices, the new music scenes of capitalist Russia brought businesses or criminals seeking social cachet or mainstream legitimacy into the organization of events as sponsors and financiers. For this subsection of musically inclined society, commercialization fundamentally changed the constitution of such social gatherings and the way their communities worked.

This highlights a peculiar function of such key-symbols: They are ambivalent and free-floating, seemingly possessing in and of themselves an intrinsic nostalgic legitimacy that excuses them from the contradictions they later resolve.

Khrushchev recruits Gagarin for the Soviet space mission in the short film "The History of the Soviet Union for Children." "Советский союз детям"

Watch the short film: "A Children's History of the Soviet Union"

In the Internet meme film “A Children’s History of the Soviet Union” embedded above, Gagarin is the only historical figure who is not a Soviet leader given a name or important role in the action. Unlike the way in which Gagarin’s image was deployed by the aforementioned ’90s rave promoters to give culturally unmoored kids and New Russian businessmen an inclusive cultural umbrella under which to gather, Gagarin appears here as a simple farmer who is eventually selected by Khrushchev to fly into space. He is not the first choice, however. He is a replacement for the initially favored first choice, one more obvious because already in in a spacesuit. After a comedic conversation with the apparent astronaut, an exasperated Khrushchev finally tells Gagarin to put the spacesuit. Unlike Khrushchev’s first and most obvious choice, he does not have an obscene, foreign, suspicious, or unpronounceable name.

Unlike the example of Gagarin being used to provide nostalgic cover for the chaotic reorganization of youth music communities to include, rather than exclude, monied influences, the image of Gagarin is deployed in this film as an explicit symbol of nostalgia for the Soviet Union itself. In this video, Soviet history is reduced to little more than the facts of the succession of the Soviet Union’s leadership and Gagarin’s flight into space. The video concludes with the fall of the Soviet Union under Gorbachev. Although problems with egalitarianism are alluded to with the tongue-in-cheek exchange between Khrushchev and the astronaut with the suspicious name, the country’s demise is attributed solely to Gorbachev’s efforts to be liked abroad rather than expending greater effort in to prevent the country’s dissolution in his absence. The narrator concludes that Gorbachev “didn’t have time for us, and the Soviet Union fell apart.” In this quirky little meme movie, Russians, “us”, are still at heart Soviet citizens failed by their leader. Rather than the comfort of nostalgia, an return to that country seems possible.

The nostalgia for the Soviet Union into which the image of Gagarin is herein implicated performs a task diametrically opposed to that described by Yurchak in his recounting of the development of post-Soviet dance culture in the 1990s. Rather than being deployed to aid in the creation of a new type of comprehensive culture, the cosmonaut’s unimpeachable figure instead anchors the recovery of something that was lost when the USSR was dissolved. This is a refutation of the society and government that appeared in the 1990s. The flexibility or ambivalence of Gagarin as a symbol of Soviet achievement is made apparent in the opposing uses to which he is put in these two scenarios.

Viktor Tsoi and KINO

Another symbol of the Soviet era that continues to be renegotiated for currency in contradictory ways is the legacy of rock musician Viktor Tsoi and his band KINO. Arguably the biggest, most popular rock star of the late Soviet rock scene, Tsoi, who died in a car crash in Latvia in August of 1990, continues to be celebrated with birthday tribute concerts, film dramatizations of his life, album re-releases, and even recently, when COVID-related restrictions had required too many postponements of the band’s planned live concert performance to the accompaniment of audio and video recordings of their front man, a crowdfunded concert video and album

Tsoi was a symbol of glasnost youth. He was one of the musicians known internationally for having been featured on the “Red Wave” compilation released in the United States by California expatriate in the Soviet Union Joanna Stingray. A performance of his song “Peremen,” Russian for “Change” and an anthem of perestroika reform, featured as the end titles music in the 1987 Sergei Solovyov Soviet New Wave film Assa. This film was a breakthrough in perestroika popular culture, not least because it was a sanctioned film release which featured many formerly banned musicians. Tsoi was a veteran of the unofficial kvartirniki apartment concert circuit, and by the end of his tragically short life he was selling out stadiums at officially sanctioned events. One such concert is featured in the 1994 concert film KINO: The Last Concert at Luzhniki Olympic Stadium 6/24/90.

Assa, the nonlinear story of a young and hopeful underground musician murdered for his involvement with the much younger nurse and lover of an older criminal businessman, would prove morbidly prophetic, as Tsoi would die just over a year before centripetal forces released by perestroika’s liberalizing reforms forced Gorbachev to disband the Soviet government in December of 1991. The context within which the Soviet rock scene had operated suddenly ceased to exist. Tsoi’s one-time mentor and fellow underground musician “Mike” Naumenko of Zoopark was mugged in his courtyard and succumbed to his injuries in August of 1991, new scenes and ways of organizing popular culture were invented, but over time Tsoi and his catalog have become imbued with a value-neutral nostalgia that has been seized upon by people seeking contradictory aims.

Some of the uses for which the Tsoi legacy has been exploited are the aforementioned concert film released shortly after his death, and the 2018 Russian Kirill Serebrennikov-directed, Americans Mikhail and Lili Idov-written musical Leto (Summer). This film presents an idyllic picture of young artists honing their talents and gaining popularity in the pre-lapsarian Soviet Union. Following the release of Leto, director Kirill Serebrennikov was sentenced on a 2017 allegations of embezzlement of funds awarded in a theater grant. The work that had resulted from this grant had offended church authorities.

This film’s vision of Tsoi reclaims or looks back on the Soviet milieu within which he developed his career as a lost idyllic youth, untouched by either any real authoritarianism or crisis. It’s a world full of people open to and equal to the world whose idealism is intact. There is as yet no ‘90s crisis, nor is there a post-millenial conservative-authoritarian turn. Everyone’s heroes are still alive, and an unknown type of change is still possible for Russia. Russia’s actually existing present can still be avoided.

Just last year in 2020, Soviet rock scene documentarian and film director Aleksei Uchitel’ directed a new entry in the Tsoi filmic pantheon. Entitled “Tsoi,” the new film is a road movie that doesn’t actually feature the musician. It depicts the dysfunction among the musicians, friends, family, and lovers in the dead singer’s orbit as they accompany his body over land from Latvia back to St. Petersburg after his fatal car accident. Illustrating the importance that Tsoi holds, members of Tsoi’s generation and milieu have reacted with venom to the negative depictions of themselves and others in the film. Famous Soviet rock critic Artemii Troitsky wrote a scathing review of the film, in which he insists that the film is blasphemy against the characters of the people associated with Tsoi, and therefore by a property of association against Tsoi himself. He is certain “that this product has no moral right to exist,” and he concludes by exhorting readers to boycott the film entirely. Tsoi remains such an unimpeachable myth that even dramatizing his milieu in an unflattering light is a bridge too far.

A paradoxical aspect of this backlash against the film from a generation that valued a democratic lack of hierarchy is that despite the fact that Tsoi is revered as a reform-era figure, his son Aleksandr not only filed suit against the filmmaker, but also wrote directly to Putin to ask for his intervention to impede the film’s release. Aleksandr is the same person who organized the aforementioned crowdfunding effort to produce a new album and performance of KINO material to accompany his father’s canned performances. For some, nostalgia is too sacred to alter in any way, even if it is in relation to one of the more politically ambivalent, popular reform evangelists of his day. This nostalgia is so sacred that such requests are made directly to Putin himself, a decidedly cynical, demoralized, and corrupted mode of addressing power that is more redolent of homo sovieticus than of the post-perestroika society from which Tsoi emerged.

As Russian society and government has taken a rightward slope in the Putin-era, Tsoi has not been overlooked by those aligned with this trend and those in power as a symbol whose continued currency it would be wise to exploit. Take the example of The 2017 Rossiya 1 television spy drama Sleepers. Its premise is that American CIA sleeper agents are embedded within Russia. These agents have been activated to wreak havoc on FSB and GRU efforts to keep Russia safe from terrorism. The counterterrorist intelligence team that is tasked with rooting out the American sleeper agents and their Russian collaborators counts among its number a young hacker sporting a t-shirt featuring the Tsoi’s likeness. If it was strange to see the entreaties from Tsoi’s circle for personal favors from politicians to protect Tsoi’s legacy, it is even stranger to see the likeness of the glasnost’-era singer of “Change” being invoked by Russian state media to justify the modern authoritarian Russian state.

A protestor holding up a sign that says "change" in reference to a Tsoi song — A man holds up a sign reading "Change", a reference to the Tsoi song, at a protest in Novosibirsk on April 21, 2021 taken from "Meduza"

Such ambivalence around cultural symbols with staying power continues unabated. A photograph from one of the recent pro-Navalny demonstrations in Novosibirsk features a man holding aloft a sign that reads simply “Change” clearly a direct reference to Tsoi’s song.

About the Author

Matthew Boyd, Ph.D. is a lecturer at Ohio State University. His areas of research include youth culture, popular music, and political activism in the countries located within the territories of the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union.

boyd.466@osu.edu

Funding

This lesson was funded as part of a federal grant [NCAE-C-003-2020].

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