More than 15 years have passed since the collapse of one of the largest and cruelest empires of the modern world. Yet its former subordinates, living in countries stretching from Belarus to Russia’s Vladivostok, still feel nostalgic for their past life, a life that was filled with repressions, abuses of human dignity, constant lying, and shameless demagogy, as well as a pathological desire for the further expansion throughout the world of its ideological influence, if not its borders.
All these activities claimed the lion’s share of what was earned by the so-called citizens of the USSR. Wars and purges reigned in Ukraine in those days — the extermination or incarceration of people with the slightest trace of an opinion, half-starved existence, humiliating living conditions, or their complete absence, endless lines for consumer goods, absolute lack of freedom of speech, massive recruitment of informers, and the supremacy of the party card over education, talent, intelligence, and honesty.
I recall my parents whose youth coincided with the onset of revolutionary events of the 20th century. They lived through so much in their lifetime: World War I, revolutionary Bolshevik apocalypses, the famine of the 1930s, World War II, occupation and famine, postwar famine and poverty, and Stalin’s regime. And demagogy over and over again! That was the fate of millions of people.
Now that life has changed one way or another, completely or incompletely, and turned onto the path of democracy, many people — innocent victims of the past era — are feeling great nostalgia for the Stalinist and post-Stalinist regimes and shutting their eyes to the positive changes that have occurred in Ukraine.
Why is this? Why aren’t people happy with the winds of change? Why do they yearn for the return of Stalinism? Why are they, as a wise man once said, “Adding drops of honey to the poison that they once drank?”
One of the reasons for this anomaly is the fact that the totalitarian regime consistently conducted the upbringing of millions of people by means of coercion and sheer deceit. Everything served the lie: fiction, starting with children’s fairy tales, fantastic statistics pointing to success in all spheres (even in agriculture), and many other things. But the top place was occupied by the Soviet cinema. Oh boy! What brilliant movies they were! The system built up an entirely refashioned world where all those terrible realities of life in the Soviet Union became something lofty and noble.
As for the actors, the system hand-picked them to be beautiful, noble, and good, but mainly they were masters of sincerity. They stepped off the screens “into the masses” and became the living embodiment of perfect people. Most importantly, they made the System humane, cheerful, and reassuring. The system worked impeccably — it created a brilliant and overwhelming phantom paradise on earth. Those Ukrainians who now hanker for the Soviet lifestyle are actually missing that cinematic fiction, not the drab and dangerous Soviet reality.
One of the system’s perfect phantoms was the creation of a gigantic, false cinematic version of the Great Patriotic War, which was circulated in hundreds of variants. Of course, they could not show people all the horrors that had taken place in reality. Thus, “only old men went to war.” Gradually, the real wartime events faded and were replaced by war movies that were considered wonderful even by war veterans. On numerous occasions I listened to veterans’ reminiscences in which they avoided recalling the terrible, fatal, and often humiliating realities of war, or what had happened to them. They preferred to discuss mass-scale events — fronts and victorious offensives — just like in the movies.
In the same “truthful” manner the cinema featured the leaders and events of the 20th century revolution, collectivization, and industrialization — beautiful and courageous people fighting or working for the people’s wellbeing and justice, guided by the infallible party.
All this boils down to the fact that good cinema can “turn the masses” in any direction. That is why it can and should be not so much a figment of the imagination as a genuine educator of society. This is something that Ukrainians are especially lacking now, in the period of “great turning points.” Although a considerable proportion of Ukrainians still professes Stalinist political morality, neither society nor the authorities have made any attempt to banish the phantoms of the past regime (provided we do not regard the “all-out struggle” in the media to be education). Because of the dearth of new and reliable information, many people still live according to the criteria, notions, and primarily images that were imposed by Soviet cinema and television: what existed before the 1917 revolution, what the “proletarian revolution” was, who the Bolsheviks and kurkuls were, and what collectivization was, etc. The same goes for World War II and other Soviet facts of life.
But the Kyiv cinema studio has been silent all these past 15 years, as if it has nothing to show people after all those changes that happened to us during these fateful years. There is no one to write screenplays, direct, act, and show what really came to pass in our Ukraine since 1917 (older history is another topic). No one wants to use the lives of real people as examples to make films about the Holocaust or the lawlessness and horrendous repressions in Ukraine; no one wants to film the places of imprisonments, camps, exile, or follow the sad destiny of suffering families.
We have no time for this, we are hedonists — we are screening anything but the Ukrainian history of the times of the “blessed” Soviet Union. There are no screenwriters, no producers, and no sponsors. Everyone knows what is playing in movie theaters and on TV. In the early 1990s the former Soviet cinema made a few attempts to cover the era that had just ended in cinemas and on television. These attempts were not very successful, but in a short while all other similar initiatives were ousted by totally different products. Was this done spontaneously?
Recently, a Ukrainian TV program featured a talk with the Russian actor and director Stanislav Govorukhin, who expressed his disgust with the low level of Russian cinema and television programs. He said that as a member of parliament, he is absolutely against banning American films from Russian movie theaters — American films are more respectable and less harmful to viewers than Russian ones.