The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

by Masha Gessen

In the film’s most bizarre moment, a man and a woman huddle in a tiny rowboat. “Do you know why your feet are so adorable?” he asks her. “I do,” she responds. “It is because our Soviet regime is so wonderful.” “That’s correct,” he says, and rises from kissing her feet to kissing her face—or so we assume, for the camera shyly pans away. The scene referenced Soviet-era spoofs of Soviet propaganda, which ascribed to the regime both unlimited powers and boundless magnanimity. But if the Soviet-era spoofs, which circulated in samizdat or simply as jokes, were edgy, this spoof of a spoof was soft and rounded. At the end of the film the entire cast, including the “rocker,” the bourgeois, and the convict, gather around a giant table at the center of which sits one of the unique edible symbols of Soviet privilege, a roast suckling pig just like the ones Zhanna’s father started receiving on New Year’s Eve once he became governor. In the reimagined Soviet past, everyone got a piece of the pig.4 Created by two men who were about to become the most influential people in Russian television,* Old Songs was a huge hit.

Haha. I love this. It is an important observation: a certain kind of honeydew storytelling that feels uncanny, strange, and played completely straight.