My Perestroika

The Reform that Failed?

May 22, 2012

12:25 p.m.

My Perestroika will confirm as well as confound the impressions spread by American media about life in the Soviet Union during its final decade. The archival footage is as priceless as the interviews with Russians, now in middle age, who came of age in the '80s. The documentary by Robin Hessman (out on DVD) opens with scenes from a choreographed youth rally in Red Square, with row after row of Young Pioneers in their red kerchiefs as Lenin looked on from a battleship-high scarlet banner and the Brezhnev regime feebly waved approval from the reviewing stand. “I was completely satisfied with my Soviet reality,” says Lyuba, a woman looking back on those years. “It was a good life. When the TV showed protesters and shootings in the West, I'd say, “My God, I'm so lucky to live in the Soviet Union.'” Abruptly, although not without warning to those who looked for portents, the Soviet reality evaporated. Some of the '80s kids remember things a little differently than Lyuba, including her husband and fellow history teacher, Borya. He prefers to recall the small gestures of rebellion against conformity, including wearing American t-shirts and listening to rock music. Adds their friend Ruslan, one of the country's early punk rock musicians, “My childhood was fine, but I couldn't buy the music I wanted.” The mass murder and forced labor of Stalinism had long receded into the shadows by the '80s. Only activists were locked up and in most any society, activists are a minority. None of the interviewees, products of what could have been called the middle class in the ostensibly classless Soviet order, put themselves in harm's way. Even those among them who gathered on Moscow streets in defiance of the failed 1991 coup by hardliners admit they weren't heroes. None of them really expected to stop a bullet or a tank. Lyuba was something of a true believer in the system as an adolescent while many of her friends were more acutely aware of the distance between their society's stated ideals and the shabbier reality. And yet no one went hungry or feared for her paycheck, they reflect nostalgically. That would come with democracy. One thing they all shared as kids was a voracious appetite for books. Television was a boring tableau of official imagery and the newspapers were compounded from empty slogans and meaningless statistics. Regrets are offered for a younger generation too busy tapping away on their smart phones to read anything of substance. Andrei, a successful businessman importing expensive Western men's clothing, supports the shock economics of the Yeltsin era. After all, it worked for him. The others decry the imposition of American values, which they see as nothing more than making money at the expense of all else. Ruslan dropped out of his big-selling punk band, sick of their phony attitude. Nowadays he's busking on subways. “Maybe it wasn't good, but it was less stressful,” says Olga, who earns a living servicing coin-operated pool tables. As for Putin, the reaction registered by My Perestroika is a cynical shrug.