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I remember a sunny day from the late 1980s, before my family moved to the US. (For some reason, all my recollections of life in the Soviet Union are set to good weather.) My grandfather and I are looking at a children’s book on the Cyrillic alphabet (an azbuka / азбука). The very first page is a drawing of Lenin surrounded by school children.

 

from google image search: “lenin with school children”

 

I asked my grandfather (a staunch communist – ostensibly to the end of his life) who that was and why all the kids? “He’s the father of our nation” was the reply. Lenin is still there, in the center of town, near the railway station. My grandparents are not. Neither am I.

 

Moskovskiy Prospekt, Pushkino, Russia (from google street view – https://goo.gl/maps/iiScdS9sW9RUtJzR8)

 

Lenin close up – Moskovskiy Prospekt, Pushkino, Russia (from google street view – https://goo.gl/maps/iiScdS9sW9RUtJzR8)

 

Flower shop on the opposite corner from the statue – Moskovskiy Prospekt, Pushkino, Russia (from google street view – https://goo.gl/maps/iiScdS9sW9RUtJzR8)

 

History has since ended and ended yet again. This rhetorical/conceptual/ideological endpoint of the early 90s has been cited by both Russia and Western diplomats as both an impetus for the current hot and cold conflict and as a call to restore liberal humanistic dreams of those decades past. The dream of the 90s is still alive, albeit not in Portland.

 

Adam Curtis’ excellent TraumaZone captures what that ending wrought in Russia specifically. The footage speaks for itself in lieu of Curtis’ usual voice-over narration. Title cards occasionally add necessary context, but the overall trajectory of the montage elucidates the threads of the film. Power, corruption, and lies were the tenuous bedrocks of Russia’s attempt to form a free, capitalistic society in the 1990s. Power, in the sense of a center seeking to (re)establish its control over a sprawling landmass, being a dominant thread in Russian political history since the beginnings of Russia as a political entity.

 

Scenes from TraumaZone (BBC)

 

A significant portion of TruamaZone follows post-Soviet Russian political power attempting to articulate that power through several means, including war, and ultimately buckling to the supra-governmental power structure of the oligarch class. The documentary wraps up in the late 1990s as Yeltsin is about to resign and VV ascend. History didn’t end at the end of the 20th century, at least not in the articulation envisioned by Fukuyama and that ilk. There’s been enough virtual ink spilt about the how’s, why’s, etc.

 

 

What’s poignant about Curtis’ interjection into / revisitation of that historical moment is the sheer totality of despair and ruin that the film captures. There’s always a “..but wait it gets worse” lurking in the next cut. And that’s the point. Watching the film from afar (both 30+ years removed from the 90s and on the other side of the world) made fresh that time for me again. Despite being so young and only a transitory presence in Russia in the 90s (coming for summer vacations), the over all mood/atmosphere/aura of the place in time is meticulously and adequately captured and telegraphed into the present. “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

“Из-под черных рубах рвется красный петух,
Из-под добрых царей льется в рты мармелад.
Никогда этот мир не вмещал в себе двух:
Был нам Богом отец, ну а чёртом -“

“From under black shirts, a red rooster bursts forth,
From benevolent tsars, marmalade pours into mouths.
This world has never held space for two:
Our father was our God, and as for the devil…”

ДДТ – Родина / DDT – Motherland