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UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Tales of Russianness: Post-Soviet identity formation in popular film and television Souch, I.S. Publication date 2015 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Souch, I. S. (2015). Tales of Russianness: Post-Soviet identity formation in popular film and television. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:29 Sep 2021 TALES OF RUSSIANNESS POST-SOVIET IDENTITY FORMATION IN POPULAR FILM AND TELEVISION IRINA SOUCH UNIVERSITY OF AMSTERDAM 2015 Tales of Russianness: Post-Soviet Identity Formation in Popular Film and Television ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. dr. D.C. van den Boom ten overstaan van een door het College voor Promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Agnietenkapel op woensdag 3 juni 2015, te 12:00 uur door Irina Sergeevna Souch geboren te Zagorsk, Sovjet Unie Promotiecommissie Promotor: prof. dr. M.G. Bal Universiteit van Amsterdam Copromotor: dr. E. Peeren Univerisiteit van Amsterdam Overige leden: prof. dr. R.L. Buikema Universiteit Utrecht prof. dr. E. Rutten Universiteit van Amsterdam prof. dr. W.G. Weststeijn Universiteit van Amsterdam dr. J.W. Kooijman Universiteit van Amsterdam dr. B. Noordenbos Universiteit van Amsterdam Faculteit der Geesteswetenschappen CONTENTS THANKS 1 INTRODUCTION 3 Post-Soviet identities 5 National identity and the other 10 Family fantasies 13 Popular imaginations 17 Outline 20 CHAPTER ONE From paternal authority to brotherhood: Soviet identity myths in transition Introduction 23 The subject’s (self-)recognition and the role of the affirmative look 27 In the absence of true fathers 36 Brotherhood re-considered 42 Finding identity: individual quest versus collective preoccupation 49 Soviet identity myths in transition 55 CHAPTER TWO Us versus them: fantasies of otherness in the construction of post- Soviet identity Introduction 57 Self-assigned superiority and Russian “truth” 62 The other in a disaffected society 65 The cultural specificity of otherness 73 Uneasy dialogue with the other 78 Fantasies of otherness in the construction of post-Soviet identity 86 CHAPTER THREE Double thinking: negotiating adjustment to societal change Introduction 89 Double thinking as a communal practice 93 Unexpected coercion and negative adjustment 99 Negative adjustment and hysteresis 107 Post-Soviet subjectivity as a site of conflicting discourses 112 Negotiating adjustment to societal change 120 CHAPTER FOUR The waning family: gender and generations in post-Soviet society Introduction 123 Dissolving the patriarchal myth 126 Death and the affirmation of gender roles 134 The shortcomings of “natural” expectations 140 Intergenerational clashes and the assertion of individual identities 148 Gender and generations in post-Soviet society 156 CHAPTER FIVE Towards new forms of sociality: laughter as a socially productive force Introduction 159 The play of the jolly and the witty: RLL and genre resignification 163 Social critique and the healing quality of stereotypes 173 Envisaging social alternatives 183 Laughter as a socially productive force 194 AFTERWORD 197 BIBLIOGRAPHY 203 LIST OF FIGURES 217 SUMMARY 219 SAMENVATTING 223 THANKS Mieke Bal for taking me up as your supervisee, for trusting my academic capacities, and, more importantly, for making me believe in them myself. Esther Peeren for setting the academic standard from day one, for your rigorous intellectual guidance over the years, and for being the model of a scholar I could look up to, learn from, and aspire to become. ASCA for supporting my project, and special thanks to Eloe Kingma and Jantine van Gogh for tirelessly helping me out with countless practical matters and for your ever warm and cheerful presence. Mireille Rosello and Sudeep Dasgupta for organizing the ASCA Theory Seminar, which proved to be an inexhaustible source of intellectual stimulation. Adam Chambers, Aylin Kuryel, Niall Martin, and Hanneke Stuit for the shared experience of organizing the ASCA international workshop in 2011, Practicing Theory: Imagining, Resisting, Remembering. My first officemates Erinç Salor and Levent Yilmazok for the atmosphere of comradeship and calm discipline, which helped me to find my work rhythm and stay focused. The ever-changing international crowd of my fellow PhDs in the PCH room 101 and adjacent offices for welcome distractions, and a relentless readiness for helping to find solutions to problems, be it academic or practical. Irina Basiliya, Katya Bondarenko, René Does, Vladimir Kolkov, Menno Kraan, Erinç Salor, and Tim Yaczo for helping me to lay hands on the Russian films, series, articles, and books that made it possible to complete this project. Ania Dalecki for the genuine interest you took to my explorations and for always making time for an enthusiastic chat about Russian film. Hanneke Pentinga for always lending a sympathetic ear to my mix-ups and meltdowns. Anna Mrozewicz for so many things we have in common. Ton for living through it all with me. Without you being in my life this would simply never have happened. 1 2 INTRODUCTION “Next year our city will have more and more soup kitchens for the needy and the elderly.” The Promised Skies (dir. El’dar Riazanov) On 28 August 1991, a week after the failed attempt of the reactionary Soviet leadership to remove Mikhail Gorbachev from his post as the president of the Soviet Union, the triumphant defenders of the government building, the White House in Moscow, attended a screening of El’dar Riazanov’s film The Promised Skies (Nebesa obetovannye). As the director recollects in his memoir, the audience cried, laughed and applauded, and gathered, after the viewing, at an improvised meeting: “They saw the film as a kind of prediction, a prophesy. […] An extraordinary feeling of brotherhood, unity and victory joined us that day” (n. pag., my translation). A few months later, in December 1991, the Soviet Union ceased to exist. Along with radical political and economic changes, the decomposition of the communist state inaugurated the unravelling of state ideology and the dismantling of existing norms and conventions, producing “a lasting impact on individual and collective identities, modes of social exchange and forms of symbolization” (Oushakine 2009: 1). In the face of such sudden, disorienting changes, Russians “began to lose their inner confidence in who they were and where they were going” (Billington 2004: xi). Notably, in a review after the public premiere of The Promised Skies at the beginning of 1992, film critic Tatiana Moskvina called it the last Soviet film, remarking: “Thanks to Riazanov you understand that there was such a thing as the people of the Soviet Union. It has its own history, its achievements and crimes, its heroes and saints, its spiritual and emotional life, its full-blooded characters and solid personalities” (1992: n. pag., my translation). Riazanov’s film features a group of former middle class Soviet citizens who find themselves living as tramps in a desolate scrapyard full of old cars and railway carriages on the outskirts of Moscow (figure 0.1). One evening, their elected “president” (Valentin Gaft) calls his “brothers and sisters” to a meeting to declare that he and another of the community’s members, the Jewish violinist Solomon (Viktor Kartsev), were approached by alien visitors who invited them to their planet in order to live “in a human way.” When they declined, explaining that they cannot leave without “their own people,” the aliens insisted: “Don’t be silly. The air in your place is poisoned, the earth polluted and the water decaying.” 3 Accompanied by the gathered crowd’s affirmative exclamations, such as “Yeah, it has all gone to shit here” and “You never know what you might die of,” the president finally announces that the aliens agreed to collect all forty-three inhabitants of the scrapyard in a larger space ship as soon as blue snow begins to fall. Unfortunately, while the tramps are waiting for this to happen, their living space is endangered by the intrusion of an American developer who, with the consent of the local authorities, seeks to build a condom factory. In the end, the aliens do arrive when the blue snow falls, but they are immediately frightened off by an armed police force that has gathered around the settlement to evict its inhabitants. Chased by the police, the tramps manage to escape in an old steam train that miraculously lifts from the tracks and sets off into “the promised skies.” Figure 0.1: Screenshot from The Promised Skies (dir. El’dar Riazanov) The film, which was enthusiastically received by Russian audiences, can be seen to indicate how the majority of Russians felt on the eve of the irreversible downfall of the Soviet regime. Therefore, it allows me to bring into focus the antagonisms, concerns and desires around which this study revolves. By analyzing popular cinematic and televisual narratives of everyday post-Soviet Russian life, I investigate how processes of individual and collective identity formation proceeded and what kind of transformations the existing modes of orientation underwent in the years after Riazanov’s prophetic film.