Please wel­come our new author Vadim Costyrin with his first but seri­ous post on the present days of those born in the USSR, brought up by the Yeltsin’s coup and now left to seek their national and cul­tural iden­tity all by themselves.

Once the USSR inspired us with fear, now this coun­try does not exist. We have the big Rus­sia and a lot of small and not so small, whim­si­cal republics, for the right to include which in the sphere of their influ­ence there fight politi­cians of the super­pow­ers. Together with the Soviet Union we have lost Rus­sians — our antipodes — against whom we willy-nilly matched. It may seem that it is a vic­tory — but Rus­sians want the USSR back, and after only two decades there are much more fears and threats.

We have been fear­ing the Sovi­ets sin­cerely and for a long time. But they have split.

We have lost our enemy — com­mu­nists with their “Satan” and “Kuzk­ina mat”, and at once have found a new enemy that is even more global — ter­ror­ists. As a first approx­i­ma­tion a ter­ror­ist is the same as a com­mu­nist — since in our world view all Rus­sians were com­mu­nists and pro­fessed a wrong ide­ol­ogy. And now all Mus­lims are cer­tainly ter­ror­ists, and we must strug­gle with their ideas. I only have a nat­ural ques­tion: “Who are these “we”? It seems to me there are sim­ply no “us”, and in order to unite me and you in some­thing which would look like “us”, it is nec­es­sary to frighten “us” prop­erly. Rus­sians have a say­ing: “Devil is not so black as he is painted” — and indeed, inside the coun­try looks dif­fer­ently, and its dwellers, too, are not absolutely sim­i­lar to the com­i­cal images imposed on us by our “inde­pen­dent” press.

So why invent exter­nal ene­mies for us? The answer seems to be on the sur­face — I expe­ri­enced it myself: when you have a headache and put a lemon peel on your tem­ple the pain recedes — bal­samic oils irri­tate the skin, and it switches your ner­vous sys­tem over to other irri­tant. Some­times it seems to me that we are dis­tracted by chat­ter­ing about inter­na­tional prob­lems from the prob­lems which are inside our head.

Why don’t we want to notice behind the first per­sons of the states, their inhab­i­tants? Did it ever occur to you that every­thing is not so sim­ple with Rus­sia? The USSR, for exam­ple, is con­sid­ered by its inhab­i­tants to be a huge strong coun­try which they really love.

And if we dare look more atten­tively at this strange phe­nom­e­non of a mys­te­ri­ous — “Russ­ian soul” we might see in a dif­fer­ent light not only Rus­sians, but our own selves as well.

Talk­ing figures

Run­ning the risk of seem­ing bor­ing, I will nev­er­the­less begin with the sta­tis­tics — it is one of those cases when fig­ures are more elo­quent than words. Accord­ing to the poll pub­lished by the All-Russian Cen­ter for Pub­lic Opin­ion Study­ing in the author­i­ta­tive Russ­ian news­pa­per “Kom­m­er­sant”, in the rat­ing of the most out­stand­ing events of the XX cen­tury after the Great Patri­otic War (16 %) there is Yuri Gagarin’s space flight (13 %). Dur­ing ten years the share of those who con­sid­ers this event to be espe­cially sig­nif­i­cant, has reduced almost twofold. It is fol­lowed by the Moon land­ing (5 %). 4 % believe that the most out­stand­ing event of the twen­ti­eth cen­tury is the Great Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion. Putin’s com­ing into power and com­puter inven­tion got 2 % of votes each. The inven­tion of a nuclear bomb, cel­lu­lar con­nec­tion, TV, as well as sport achieve­ments of our coun­try and the Moscow Olympic Games of 1980 received 1 % of Rus­sians’ votes each.

Ten years ago in the rat­ing of the most tragic events of the last cen­tury the First and Sec­ond world wars (43 %) were in the lead. Today on the first place there is the Great Patri­otic War (36 %). The sec­ond place is occu­pied by the Cher­nobyl dis­as­ter (9 %). The wars in the Chechen Repub­lic and Afghanistan are con­sid­ered the most tragic events by 8 % of respon­dents. The Octo­ber Rev­o­lu­tion of 1917 and nat­ural cat­a­clysms received 4 % each. Then there is the tragedy in Beslan and cap­ture of the Nord Ost musi­cal (3 % each), putsch of 1991 and explo­sion of the twin tow­ers on Sep­tem­ber 11 (2 % each), destruc­tion of Kursk sub­ma­rine, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Yeltsin’s rule, Stalin’s rule, exe­cu­tion of the impe­r­ial fam­ily and inven­tion of nuclear weapon (1 % each). The least tragic event in this rat­ing is the story of Titanic. How­ever, both ten years ago and now the great­est dis­ap­point­ment of the last cen­tury, accord­ing to Rus­sians, is dis­in­te­gra­tion of the USSR (17 %).

Our com­pa­tri­ots put this event on the fourth place in the rat­ing of the most tragic events. Per­e­stroika, poverty and ill­nesses dis­ap­pointed Rus­sians less than dis­in­te­gra­tion of the USSR. It is fol­lowed by the crash of the com­mu­nism ideas. “In the list of the great­est dis­ap­point­ments of the last cen­tury this time Rus­sians did not name unem­ploy­ment and social and eco­nomic reforms, spir­i­tu­al­ity decline, prob­lems with drug addicts and ecology” — “Kommersant” writes.

It seems that the Soviet Union which was called “The Empire of Evil”, can be missed only by the older gen­er­a­tion, how­ever from the moment of the USSR dis­in­te­gra­tion there has been formed a new gen­er­a­tion who never lived in the USSR. So why the sta­tis­tics keeps say­ing what the inhab­i­tants of the for­mer USSR still feel nos­tal­gic about the for­mer times? The phrase “What a coun­try is destroyed!” was heard by me repeat­edly, even from peo­ple who sim­ply can not remem­ber the USSR. Why even among youth that can hardly be accused of feel­ing lik­ing towards total­i­tar­i­an­ism, “the Soviet child­hood” is now fash­ion­able? “I want back to the USSR. Ah, those good old times — prob­a­bly, it was the best time in my life”— this phrase can be heard more and more often, and not only from vet­er­ans who lived in the Soviet times, but also from those who are in their early thir­ties. These are peo­ple who in 1991 were in high school, and even in kinder­garten, who lov­ingly col­lect and quote the Soviet films and proudly show old radio-gramophones and vinyl records.

In the Russian-speaking Inter­net the USSR topic is one of the most pop­u­lar, and it is pop­u­lar among its most active users — young peo­ple. You don’t need to be a soci­ol­o­gist or “an expert on Rus­sia” to see that the atti­tude to life in the USSR even among youth changed from very neg­a­tive to very pos­i­tive. For the last cou­ple of years in the Inter­net there have appeared a lot of resources devoted to every­day life in the Soviet Union. “76 — 82. The Ency­clo­pe­dia of our child­hood“ is one of the most pop­u­lar ones. Its name tells about its audi­ence — it con­sists of those who was born in 76 — 82.

The com­mu­nity with the same name in Live­Jour­nal belongs to the thirty of the most pop­u­lar ones. “We are lucky that our child­hood and youth ended before the gov­ern­ment had bought free­dom from young peo­ple in exchange for rollerblades, mobile phones, “star fac­to­ries” and rusks (by the way, soft for some rea­son) … With their own con­sent … For their own (seem­ingly) good …” — it is a frag­ment from the text with the name “Gen­er­a­tion 76 — 82”. Many Rus­sians and the inhab­i­tants of the for­mer USSR republics eagerly place it in their blogs. It has become a kind of the generation’s manifesto.

How­ever, only two decades ago the same peo­ple who now with ten­der­ness rec­ol­lect the sym­bols of that epoch, rejected all con­nected with the Sovi­ets and tried hard not to resem­ble their “ances­tors”. ”The local amne­sia“ extends to the recent past. Dur­ing the per­e­stroika times — at the turn of the 90ies — a con­sid­er­able part of young men dreamt to leave — some­where where there was an ele­men­tary sta­bil­ity and the absence of finan­cial shocks.

Eco­nomic insta­bil­ity has turned the gen­er­a­tion of the end of the 70ies into the peo­ple not needed by the state. And those who were brought up on social­ist ideals (which, by the way, if cleared of the ide­o­log­i­cal tin­sel, are not that bad), have appeared in the posi­tion of fishes thrown out to shoal. Com­mer­cial rela­tions were hard for them and were — and often still are — dis­gust­ing for many. Here under no cir­cum­stances it is a habit to accept money even from acquain­tances. Instead they use spe­cific small gifts as pay­ment for ser­vice, for exam­ple, sweets or alco­hol. Prob­a­bly, a wide “Slavic soul “does not accept mean­ness pecu­liar to many aspects of busi­ness rela­tions. It does not mean that Slavs do not have com­mer­cial abil­i­ties, they just have an essen­tially dif­fer­ent sys­tem of val­ues, but it is a topic for a sep­a­rate article.

A new cult of the old

Today the Soviet past in many coun­tries of the for­mer USSR has become a myth. It has acquired touch­ing leg­ends and has turned into a fine fairy tale about the Golden Age of the mankind. The gen­er­a­tion of the end of the 70ies wants to believe in it so much that it is ready to ampu­tate its own mem­ory and to ignore the his­tory. I will try to explain why — we often con­demn Rus­sia, for­get­ting to put our­selves on the place of Rus­sians. Per­son­ally I would not like to live in a coun­try cap­tured by chaos, to be deprived of a pos­si­bil­ity under any cir­cum­stances to take credit, to receive qual­i­fied med­ical aid (because expen­sive med­ica­tions are nec­es­sary, and med­ical insur­ance sim­ply does not exist), to live “from the salary to the salary” the largest part of which is eaten up by infla­tion. These are only some delights of life in the new coun­tries which have arisen on the immense open space of the for­mer Soviet Union; only dur­ing the last years the sit­u­a­tion has begun to sta­bi­lize. It is pos­si­ble to say that Rus­sians have already endured sev­eral eco­nomic crises, and now they are fully armed — because they have devel­oped cer­tain schemes of behav­iour in such sit­u­a­tions and have sim­ply got used to liv­ing under the con­di­tions of instability.

If we think of insta­bil­ity we will under­stand, why so many peo­ple warmly rec­ol­lect the USSR. In this coun­try peo­ple lived not just behind the Iron Cur­tain but behind the stone wall — they knew pre­cisely how much every­thing cost: prices did not change for years; every­one was con­fi­dent that they would receive their wages or salary in time, and so on. Now inhab­i­tants of the for­mer USSR coun­tries try to find out before­hand if the firm for which they intend to work will pay the salary — because, as they say, they may be done out of their money — that is not receive the pay for their work. It is a wide­spread prac­tice — since con­tracts are not habit­ual there, and the employer can sim­ply forge your sig­na­ture on doc­u­ments, and it will be hard for you to prove any­thing in court. Although in Moscow this prac­tice is not so pop­u­lar, in the sub­urbs there is a huge cor­rup­tion of the author­i­ties and impunity of busi­ness­men who bribe the offi­cials. Explain­ing this phe­nom­e­non, one my col­leagues from Ukraine said: “You have a lawyer, and here every­one has a pub­lic pros­e­cu­tor or a judge”.

How­ever, it is impos­si­ble to explain by insta­bil­ity so many warm mem­oirs of so many young men of the coun­try which they have hardly seen. Soci­ol­o­gists assert that one of the rea­sons is banal: nos­tal­gia about the Soviet Union is in many respects explained by nos­tal­gia about child­hood. Ide­al­iz­ing of the child­hood years is pecu­liar to all. Bad things are for­got­ten, good things remain. How­ever the rea­sons for such a “not child­ish” nos­tal­gia are deeper than just melan­choly for the lost youth. By ide­al­iz­ing the Soviet past, the thirty-somethings unwit­tingly show what they dis­like about the present.

What “free­dom” is

I will prob­a­bly dis­ap­point you but there is no uni­vo­cal under­stand­ing of the word “free­dom”. We think that we live in the free coun­try, but we are not free inside: we just do not know that it can be dif­fer­ent. One needs to be an odd fel­low, like Jeremy Oliver, crazy about what he does, to make us, die-hard con­ser­v­a­tives, notice that, for exam­ple, we eat unhealthy food. But if we look at the coun­tries of the for­mer USSR, we will see the gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple who can com­pare, who have no “con­sumer blinds”. We got used to pounds, while they dur­ing two decades had the names, the design and the pur­chas­ing capac­ity of money changed sev­eral times. “In the child­hood we drove cars with­out belts and safety pil­lows.… Our beds were painted with bright paints with high con­tent of lead. There were no secret cov­ers on bot­tles with med­i­cine, doors and wardrobes often remained unlocked. We drank water from the col­umn located around the cor­ner, not from plas­tic bot­tles. And nobody could think of dri­ving bike in a helmet!” — this is an excerpt from the same “man­i­festo”. “We became less free!” — this shout of despair can be heard from many blogs. Here is one more cita­tion: ”I recall that time, and the main sen­sa­tion is the feel­ing of utter­most free­dom. Life was not sub­or­di­nated to such tight sched­ule as it is now, and there was plenty of free time.

Our par­ents’ vaca­tions lasted for month and if some­one was ill he could eas­ily be on a sick leave, instead of con­tin­u­ing work­ing being half-alive. You could go any­where you wanted, and nobody would ever stop you. There were no coded locks and on-door speak­er­phones, there were no secu­rity guards at each entrance, in each shop. The air­port was an extremely inter­est­ing place from where travel began, instead of being a part of the high secu­rity zone. In gen­eral, there were very few tablets with inscrip­tions like “No tres­pass­ing!”, “For per­son­nel only”, “Stay away” etc.

There is a strange meta­mor­pho­sis of mem­oirs. In the Soviet Union there were much more fright­en­ing inscrip­tions like “No trespassing!” — but child­hood mem­o­ries erase them, and mem­ory about what was seen a cou­ple of days ago com­pletes these noto­ri­ous tablets.

Objec­tively the Soviet soci­ety was less free than the present one or than our, West­ern, soci­ety, and not only in terms of pol­i­tics. Human life moved along the strictly planned route: local kinder­garten — high school — institute/army — pre­scribed work, with min­i­mal vari­a­tions. The same thing was in every­day life. Every­body ate iden­ti­cal dishes, rode iden­ti­cal bicy­cles and spent hol­i­days in the same pio­neer camps. Young man’s long hair a cou­ple hug­ging in the street could draw atten­tion of mili­tia or people’s guards. Now Rus­sians live in one of the freest soci­eties in all the his­tory of mankind.

And it is not about pol­i­tics but rather about cul­ture and the way of life. The state min­i­mally inter­feres with these people’s pri­vate lives. Noto­ri­ous “power ver­ti­cal”, which in Rus­sia pen­e­trates the polit­i­cal process, never crosses a house thresh­old. And the soci­ety has not yet devel­oped strict norms and can­not tell the cit­i­zens what to do and what not to do.

So where does this sen­sa­tion of non-freedom come from? Most likely, it starts from within. Russ­ian thirty-somethings put their own selves in very tight frame­works. They are obliged to work and earn, to look decently, to behave seri­ously, to have the most expen­sive mobile, to eat only healthy food, to drive a Ger­man car and to read books by Paolo Coelho. Obliged, obliged, obliged! Only to whom? Every­body damned the Soviet Union all which tried to equal peo­ple in their rights and duties — while we, as well as Post-Soviet Rus­sians, equal­ize our­selves even in our interests.

A real free­dom for Rus­sians is not a free­dom of speech or meet­ings — first of all it is a pos­si­bil­ity to live securely and sta­bly, hav­ing a lot of free time. And it was expected from them that they would become the first gen­er­a­tion, free from “Sovok”, a gen­er­a­tion of vig­or­ous cap­i­tal­ism builders. In the begin­ning of the 90ies it looked like this indeed. Young men were enthu­si­as­tic about doing busi­ness, career, they ecsta­t­i­cally plunged into the world of con­sumer plea­sures. But grad­u­ally the enthu­si­asm started to decline, and finally they just “burnt out”.

Fine rela­tions in the past

Today for the major­ity of them work and career remain the main ref­er­ence points in life. How­ever there is already no eager­ness which used to be an inte­gral part of their life in the 90ies. The major­ity still esti­mates suc­cess in life as a pos­si­bil­ity to con­sume as much as pos­si­ble: “The bet­ter “apart­ment, car, clothes” are — the more suc­cess­ful the per­son is”. But many things are already bought, impres­sions are received, ambi­tions are sat­is­fied. As to rela­tions, to build them, accord­ing to many inhab­i­tants of the Post-Soviet coun­tries, is much more dif­fi­cult. In the Soviet period nobody could even think of “mar­ry­ing” a cap­i­tal or real estate. True, some peo­ple lived a bit bet­ter, oth­ers — a bit worse, but over­all there was an ana­logue of our mid­dle class. Com­mu­ni­cat­ing with mod­ern young men and women from the already inde­pen­dent states which used to be the USSR parts, you get a sen­sa­tion that they are going to sell them­selves for a good price, ini­tially not believ­ing that there can be “some love”. Every­thing is about money and sex with which by mass-media are filled. In the Soviet Union, nev­er­the­less, they man­aged to shoot films about fine rela­tions which played heart­strings and caused emo­tions, instead of giv­ing life to ani­mal instincts. You don’t need to be a film critic to under­stand, after watch­ing a cou­ple of Soviet films, what kind of rela­tions were con­sid­ered real by Rus­sians. Maybe that is why “in the USSR there was no sex” — because every­one made love?

Prob­a­bly it is for this rea­son that Russ­ian young peo­ple so will­ingly watch old Soviet films, just rather as a fan­tasy — because they will seem­ingly soon for­get what is to trust and feel. The major­ity of young peo­ple are dis­sat­is­fied with their pri­vate life, often sub­sti­tute it for work, but do not see any real pos­si­bil­i­ties to change any­thing. To change some­thing time is nec­es­sary, and there is an eter­nal lack of it. If your fast run­ning stops you will be thrown to the road­side in a minute — and nobody can afford it. Aren’t these all suf­fi­cient rea­sons for nostalgia?

Nos­tal­gia about own child­hood at times smoothly turns into nos­tal­gia about polit­i­cal sys­tem. The Soviet Union began to be asso­ci­ated with the state devel­op­ment, scope, impe­r­ial power, as well as with a quiet, sta­ble and happy life: it was the time when there was no unem­ploy­ment, ter­ror­ism or national con­flicts, when human rela­tions were sim­ple and clear, feel­ings were sin­cere, and desires were simple.

Back to the past?

His­tory knows a lot of exam­ples when nos­tal­gia about the past was quite a pow­er­ful motive power of polit­i­cal devel­op­ment. For exam­ple, return­ing of social­ist par­ties into power in some East Euro­pean states dur­ing the Post-Soviet period also was in many respects caused by nos­tal­gia about the Soviet period. It seems that in mod­ern Rus­sia noth­ing like this can hap­pen. “The gen­er­a­tion 76 — 82” is too apo­lit­i­cal, too immersed in their non-existing pri­vate life to pro­vide seri­ous sup­port to any polit­i­cal force. That is why strong power is OK for them. It is really their choice. They want order which we our­selves cre­ate but which in Rus­sia so far needs to be cre­ated declar­a­tively — prob­a­bly because, hav­ing lose the sup­port of the USSR, peo­ple also lost their ref­er­ence points, includ­ing the moral ones.

Instead of active actions the gen­er­a­tion of the 70ies chooses gen­tle melan­choly about the time of their child­hood — a wish to con­nect the irrev­o­ca­bly per­ished past with the ruth­less present not always can be inter­preted in the tide­way of polit­i­cal actions. After all in the child­hood we do not know what kind of polit­i­cal sys­tem we have and how many par­ties there are, nos­tal­gia about child­hood is not inter­ested in pol­i­tics —teddy bears and first kisses seem much more excit­ing. It is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine a rev­o­lu­tion under the slo­gan “Return to me the right to drive a bicy­cle and be happy!” (Although in 1968 the French stu­dents built bar­ri­cades under the slo­gans like “Under the road­way — a beach!” And “It is for­bid­den to forbid!”)

The mat­ter is that the Soviet world allowed peo­ple to be human, unlike the present times. After all social dis­as­ters of the XX cen­tury for the first time it becomes clear that in any polit­i­cal sys­tem the main and the only impor­tant fig­ure is a human. And vio­lence of con­sumer instincts is a fake, just like com­mu­nism promised by the year 1980. Rus­sians do not have any illu­sions that the state will help in a dif­fi­cult moment — it is really ridicu­lous and naive.

It seems to be the first gen­er­a­tion of Rus­sians who remained face to face with their own selves. With­out ide­ol­ogy crutches, with­out a magic life­saver — the West. And that is when mem­oirs of the Soviet past really start to burn souls down with ruth­less fire of envy.

Pos­si­bil­i­ties to feel per­sonal value of a per­son in those days were scarce, but they all were per­fectly known to every­one. Every­one knew, what books should be read, what films should be watched and what should be dis­cussed in the evening in kitchen. It also was a per­sonal ges­ture giv­ing sat­is­fac­tion and installing pride. Today’s times with their infin­ity of pos­si­bil­i­ties make such a ges­ture almost impos­si­ble or mar­ginal by definition.

The gen­er­a­tion of thirty-somethings in the for­mer Soviet Union, as well as our soci­ety, has now lost the right to the habit­ual pro­noun “we”. This con­fu­sion is dic­tated not by time with its eco­nomic strict­ness, but rather by the look at the reflec­tion in mir­ror. Who am I? What do I want? It is the start of pros­tra­tion and “eter­nal mem­ory” of yes­ter­day, the search for answers to painful ques­tions where the per­son began as a per­son­al­ity. But it is not a travel to the Soviet past. It is a travel to depth of one’s own soul and consciousness.

Do you still remem­ber the begin­ning of the arti­cle and the soci­o­log­i­cal poll? What do you think, will any­body in our coun­try name among the most impor­tant prob­lems spir­i­tu­al­ity decline, like Rus­sians did? Do we have a right to impose on them our way, and does it exist at all, the only true way for each of those “us” who do not exist?

Related posts:

1. Soviet Union Admin­is­tra­tive Division
2. Myth Bust­ing: Free Med­i­cine, You Say?
3. The 50^th Anniver­sary of the Soviet Union in Old Amer­i­can Mags
4. Best of Win­ter 2009  –  2010
5. Fash­ion in the USSR. DIY.