Authors

Anna Svetlova¹;  ¹ Jagiellonian University, Poland

Discussion

The aim of my presentation is to consider the ways how contemporary Russian TV depicts the Soviet Union, particularly the period of late socialism. In recent years the number of such nostalgic audiovisual texts has increased markedly, which seems to be even more symptomatic in the face of Russia's military aggression in Ukraine, when various ideological constructs from the Cold War era became crucial both for the politicians’ rhetorics and state propaganda. In my research I assume, however, that propaganda did not create the nostalgic sentiment by itself, but merely exploited the existing public demand. Following Z. Bauman’s theory on retrotopia (2017), I consider the popularity of such narratives as a response to the fear of future and the lack of an explicit ubiquitous ideology within Russian pollical model (especially before 2022), with no clear far-reaching goal. This lack is compensated for nostalgic, idealized representation of the bygone era of “stabilization”, appearing instead of the vision of future (see Boym, 2001).

In my analysis, I divide the material into three groups, based on common theme and focus on one representative example from each: biographical narratives (Анна Герман. Тайна белого ангела, 2012, dir. V. Krzystek and A. Timenko), TV series featuring historical events (Перевал Дятлова, 2020, dir. V. Fedorovich) and so-called “accidental time-travel” genre (Обратная сторона Луны, 2011-2016, dir. A. Kott). I analyse the series in terms of constructing the media image of the world: their narrative structure, visual themes and music used, characters’ personal conflicts and their relations with the state system, their resistance strategies and their attitude towards the “imaginary West” (see Yurchak, 2006), the idea of the Great Empire, the colonies and Moscow’s spheres of influence, the memory of Stalinist repressions and the Great Patriotic War, faith and religion. Concurrently, I take into account the contexts important to each text: the target audience, creators, and their declared intentions and the reception. Thus, I depict the ways of defining the inadequacies of contemporary world, the nostalgic discourse is trying to compensate for.

Bibliography:  

Bauman, Z. (2017) Retrotopia. Polity.
Boym, S. (2001) The Future of Nostalgia. Basic Books.
Yurchak, A. (2005). Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation. Princeton University Press.