“No Way to Live”: Imperial nostalgia as a post-Soviet Russian project

As late perestroika approached its post-Soviet endgame, Russia and the Soviet republics all experienced skyrocketing crime alongside collapsing economies and the rise of lawless proto-capitalist practices. At the same time, perestroika’s free-speech policies had opened the floodgates to social and historical critique of Soviet power. Some of this critique ended up on all-Union nightly television, airing on shows like the youth program Vzgliad. Regional television sometimes had more leeway to show grittier material like Alexander Nevzorov’s (1958-) Leningrad-based criminal roundup show 600 Seconds. In filmmaking and book publishing, the perestroika-era culture of critique fueled the rise of chernukha (gore, literally “black stuff”), a genre that pushing 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 (1936-2018) filmed the documentary No Way to Live, the first part of a projected trilogy of radical truth-telling. The next film was a paean pre-revolutionary Russia (The Russia We Lost, 1992), while the final installment was an indictment of early Yeltsinism (The Great Criminal Revolution, 1994).

A Soviet fiction film director who rose 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 a prominent shaper 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.

No Way to Live applies these theses to the dead end of late-Soviet life. First, we learn that the problem of Soviet crime can be traced to the original sin of Bolshevism: the brutal killings of the Romanov imperial family and, more broadly, the destruction of the Imperial bourgeoisie. These actions, Govorukhin tells us, sparked the devolution that reached its apogee in the Soviet social failures of his day. 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” embodying the conservative values of the Russian Orthodox Church and lost tsarist-era culture. Toward the end of the film, the Soviet comedy performer Mikhail Zhvanetsky (1934-2020) pithily sums up Govorukhin’s project. “I keep wondering if they're using us as an example.” In an allusion to the film’s title, Zhvanetsky continues: “The whole world pointing [at the Soviet Union] and saying, ‘See that, kids? That’s no way to live!’”

No Way to Live is ambivalent on whether capitalism—which Govorukhin depicts as at least half-criminal petty mercantilism—will be a force for good in post-Soviet Russia. The filmmaker further developed this point 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 that undertaken by Pyotr Stolypin (1862-1911), who served as Prime Minister under Tsar Nicholas II.