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Russians Find Sweet Escape in Soviet Celluloid

File Photo

Soviet-era films, such as "Ballad of a Soldier," starring Shanna Prokhorenko and Vladimir Ivashov, are popular fare on Russian television.

MOSCOW -- For Nadia Avenarious, a teacher, an evening on Russian television offers a host of choices, from the soap operas "Santa Barbara" and "Dynasty," to the game show "Name That Tune," to such crime thrillers as "Escape" and horror films like "Nightmare on Elm Street."

But Avenarious said she would much rather watch "Spring on Zarechnaya Street," a 1956 Soviet-era classic about a beautiful young literature teacher who comes to work in a bleak industrial town and falls in love with the hero, a simple factory worker.

The film, produced just as the post-Stalin period known as "the Thaw" was beginning, is deeply evocative of young workers striving to improve themselves, imbued with the values of hard labor and optimism for the future.

"I can rest; the film calms me down," she said. "There are no monsters, no vampires, no murders. Arnold Schwarzenegger? I'm not even able to watch him. We had enough blood in Chechnya, enough violence in the papers every day. I know life was hard then, but these old films are a way out of a dead end."

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"The Cranes Are Flying," starring A. Shvorin and Tatyana Samoilova.

The Soviet era has passed, but its legacy in movies remains at the forefront of contemporary Russian society. According to surveys, old Soviet movies are among the most watched programs on Russian television. Their reappearance on the airwaves in the last few years is indicative of a deeper wave of nostalgia for aspects of Soviet life that has enveloped Russia.

The nostalgia is a reaction to the breakneck pace of change here over the last decade. After so much uprooting in their personal lives and the life of the country, Russians are reaching out for old comforts. They have been saturated with jeans, soap operas and candy bars from the West, and now they are looking for symbols of their own identity.

But the search is a complex one. Many of the most popular Soviet films are layered with propaganda of the era. Their stilted socialist-realist message is far from the wild capitalism of the new Russia. In effect, Russians must root not only through the attic of their memory, but through that of a country and a system that no longer exist.

"This doesn't mean that people want to go back to that life," said Alexander Gelman, a playwright who had an important early role in the policy of glasnost, or openness, of the last Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev. "I think it's even to the contrary; this nostalgia means it's impossible to go back to that life. The more nostalgia there is, the fewer chances that society will return back. Nostalgia begins when there is no opportunity to turn back."

"These are good films, made to some kind of Hollywood standards," he said. "They are sad, but not very sad. Or, they have a happy ending. These are not films that show the truth of life. Since life right now is complicated and difficult, people watch these fairy tales with pleasure."

Russian television is blanketed with old Soviet movies of this genre. Four of the five most popular films shown on Russian television in 1996 were Soviet classics, according to Russian television market surveys.

The top-rated film was "Striped Voyage," a late 1950s comedy about tigers who are set loose accidentally on a transport ship. In second place was the 1984 American hit "Police Academy." In third was "Hard to Educate," a mid-1950s Soviet comedy about a girl who gets an assignment from her cell in the Communist Youth League, the Komsomol, to improve the morals of two fellows who are considered "difficult." In fourth place was "White Sun of the Desert," about a Red Army soldier fighting in Central Asia during the Russian civil war, and ranked fifth was "Carnival Night," a 1956 musical in which a bureaucrat tries to cope with the carefree atmosphere of a New Year's Eve party.

Moreover, Russian television still frequently broadcasts such Soviet classics as "Cossacks of the Kuban," a 1949 movie about collective farm life set in a rural trade fair that is filled with sugary smiling faces and a holiday atmosphere. The devastation of Stalin's collectivization of agriculture never intrudes.

The film ignores the hardships of the period at the end of World War II and portrays the hard-working farmers as enjoying abundance. It opens with scenes of vast, golden harvests, mighty threshing machines and brightly singing workers that are familiar to generations of Russians, even if they were at odds with the reality of the era.

"We used to watch the same films with different feelings," said writer Vladimir Voinovich. "With irritation, maybe with enmity. We refused to accept what they were trying to feed us. But now we watch them like fairy tales -- the political message no longer matters. `Cossacks of the Kuban' is kitsch of the Soviet times."

Many Russians offer practical explanations for the interest in old movies. One is that the Russian film industry remains in a deep financial crisis and contemporary home-grown films are few. Street kiosks sell pirated and poorly dubbed foreign movies. Russians also have been overwhelmed by cultural and consumer offerings from abroad. "We've just been saturated with foreign food, clothes and cinema," Gelman said.

Yet another factor is that many people have found the last decade of change dizzying and look to old films to reassure themselves. Yulia Baskina, a psychologist at the Moscow Gestalt Institute, said: "People feel good when everything is clear, where there's no confusion, where there is some ideal reality which all of us seek. The old films are like that."

Leonid Parfyonov, a young Russian entertainment mogul, was one of the first to spot the Russian nostalgia for the Soviet era. He staged a dazzling New Year's Eve extravaganza featuring popular singers, re-creating scenes from old musicals. He also recently launched a new program on NTV, Russia's commercial channel, reviewing 30 years of history, year by year.

"The period of the inferiority complex at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s has ended," said Parfyonov. "It was a time when we were receiving humanitarian aid in the most direct sense of the word, when food was being sent to us. We've come out of the situation of absolute crisis. Things are starting to normalize. Passions about the Soviet past have calmed down."

"People understand that that time wasn't all bad," he added. While some critics have said that Parfyonov represents a gilded version of the past, a sentimentality stripped of the pain and fear of Soviet rule, he responded, "That's not true."

"I think the writers and viewers don't want a return to the past," he said. "They know it's impossible to return to the past. The genie has been let out of the bottle, and it can't be put back in."

But Parfyonov argued that Russia cannot be easily Westernized, that it has its own unique culture. "We're too different from others to accept all of the world's mass culture," he said.

Lev Razgon, a writer and historian once imprisoned by Stalin, noted that the wave of nostalgia may gloss over the painful truths of the Soviet years. "This is an attempt to make people forget the past," he said. "It's true there are a lot of old movies and programs about old times. And we do have wonderful films, actors whom people adore and fascinating music that still lives in us.

"But self-dedication, love and compassion were only one part of our life," he added. "There was still another part, too, like special army units that stood in the rear of the front line and gunned down everybody who turned back in battle during the war because Stalin had ordered not a step backward. There was the atmosphere of fear and lies in which we had to live. Now, we see this past only in an idyllic light, though in fact it was full of fear."

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company