Ernst’s “Russian Project” as cultural therapy for the post-Soviet Russian masses

In 1995, Konstantin Ernst took over the job of head of ORT (future Channel One) after the murder of List’ev. As the former junior member of the Vzgliad team, Ernst had clear ideas about the state of legacy Russian TV stations and their future aesthetic and political direction. On the one hand, through shows like Matador he cultivated an image of himself as an elitist cinéaste with an affinity for bold, edgy, contemporary art. On the other hand, like many of his peers on post-Soivet television and in the intelligentsia milieu, Ernst was deeply concerned about the question of post-Soviet collective identity and believed in the need to generate mass scripts through which a sense of collective wholeness could be (re)constructed after the fall of Soviet institutions. Ernst’s snobbishness and his sense of public mission came together in his role as In his new role as head of ORT, where he was a demiurgic general producer with a large resource base that drew on both state infrastructure and oligarchic capital, and where he could use his power to pursue what was essentially a moderately conservative cultural nation-building agenda, told through a combination of populist, post-modern, and occasionally somewhat avant-garde devices. The best examples of such projects produced by Ernst in 1995-1997 were Old Songs About the Most Important (Artifact #00043), Namedni (Artifact #00046), and The Russian Project, excerpted here.

Aired as a series of “social advertisements,” the goal of The Russian Project was to inspire the mass viewer with positive thoughts about one’s Russian identity and social belonging, at a time of economic hardship and seemingly neverending political crisis. To generate these positive thoughts, Ernst produced a series of two-minute-long films (with occasionally intertwining storylines) about self-evidently shared, self-evidently non-politicized subjects of collective agreement. The three vignettes excerpted here give a good sense of those shared subjects. “That’s My Country” shows Russian cosmonauts pining for home while carrying out their awe-inspiring space duty; “Remember Your Near and Dear Ones” shows a mother worrying about her son on honor guard duty at the Kremlin; “Believe in Yourself” depicts the youth of Russia’s most famous 1990s pop icon, Alla Pugacheva. In all three vignettes, as well as most other ones, the protagonists are depicted as simple people dealing with their sincere human feelings. Unlike quite a lot of post-Soviet Russian TV entertainment, the vignettes try not to be overly Moscow-centric– the cosmonauts are from the Volga heartland, the Pugacheva story is set in some provincial setting; even the vignette the Kremlin is not really about Moscow. All three vignettes draw on old Soviet scripts and topoi, such as the innate virtue of the worker-and-peasant folk (narod), prowess in the space race, stalwart military duty, and sepia-toned nostalgia for the 1970s. At the same time, similarly to the formula of Old Songs, Ernst tried to cast the most famous, instantly recognizable celebrities of the late- and post-Soviet eras in his vignettes. Thus, the cosmonauts are played by the A-listers Nikita Mikhalkov and Vladimir Mashkov, while young Pugacheva is played by her popstar daughter, Kristina Orbakaite.