"Can't Live Like This": Imperial nostalgia as a post-Soviet Russian project

As late perestroika approached its post-Soviet endgame, Russia and the Soviet republics all experienced a manifold rise in crime alongside a collapsing economy and the rise of freewheeling capitalist practices. Meanwhile, perestroika’s free-speech policies opened the floodgates of social and historical critique of Soviet power. Some of these critiques ended up on all-Union nightly television, aired on shows like the youth program Vzgliad. Regional television sometimes had more leeway to air grittier material like Alexander Nevzorov’s Leningrad-based criminal roundup show 600 Seconds. In filmmaking and books, the perestroika culture of critique fueled the rise of chernukha (black stuff), a genre that pushed at the limits of public taste through its commitment to highly naturalistic scenes of violence, poverty, and social malaise. It is in this context that Stanislav Govorukhin filmed the documentary Can’t Live Like This, the first installment in а trilogy of what he saw as radically truth-telling documentary films. The next film was a paean pre-revolutionary Russia (The Russia That We Have Lost, 1992), and the final installment was an indictment of early Yeltsinism (The Great Criminal Revolution, 1994).

A Soviet fiction film director who came to fame in the 1960s and ’70s with crowd-pleasers like Vertical (1967) and The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed (1979), starring the cult late-Soviet singer, songwriter, and actor Vladimir Vysotsky (1938-1980), Govorukhin was among the shapers of mass ideology among the Soviet “middle class” of urbanized, educated engineers and managers. Brought to bear on the subject of crime in late Soviet Russia, this ideology clearly reveals itself as conservatively inclined to “law and order,” vehemently anti-Soviet, and nostalgic for the lost epoch of “honor and valor” exemplified by tsarist Russia. In the clips selected here, we see these key theses applied to the dead end of late-Soviet life. In the first clip, we learn that the problem of crime in the USSR originates in the original atrocities of the Bolshevik killings of the Romanov imperial family and the Imperial bourgeoisie. These actions, Govorukhin tells us, initiated the course of devolution that has reached its apogee in modern-day Soviet social failures. The entire Soviet experiment has been a criminal enterprise, which cannot be reformed and must be wholly scrapped. For the country to have a future, the genetic monstrosity that is the Soviet system’s main human product, “homo sovieticus,” must be reshaped into a new, anti-Soviet “man” exemplifying the conservative values of the Russian Orthodox Church and lost tsarist-era culture. The second brief clip, taken from the end of the film, is of the Soviet comedy performer Mikhail Zhvanetsky reading a pithy line that names Govorukhin’s project: “sometimes I wonder, maybe they just keep us around as an example. The whole world looks at us and points fingers, ‘you see, children, you can’t live like this!’”

Govorukhin’s film does not make clear whether capitalism—which he depicts as at least half-criminal petty mercantilism—will be a force for good in post-Soviet Russia. Govorukhin developed this point further after Yeltsin’s early 1990s power grabs, which his 1994 film described as a “great criminal revolution.” In the 2000s, Govorukhin joined Putin’s ruling party, United Russia, and in 2011-2012 campaigned for Putin’s election to a third (but really, fourth) term in power amid the first significant wave of mass anti-Putin protests. Govorukhin’s eventual Putinism is fully consistent with his 1980s-1990s celebration of the pre-Soviet Russian Empire and especially paragons of “pragmatic” (i.e. semi-authoritarian) conservative reform like Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911).