Parfenov’s Namedni as memory-work in the 1990s

Leonid Parfenov, a fast-rising star of post-Soviet television, first created “Namedni [Recently]” in 1990 as a weekly show about apolitical events, but in 1997 he radically changed the show, turning it into “Namedni. Nasha era (Recently: Our Era).” Every episode would dedicate an hour of footage to one particular year, spotlighting its most memorable events, whether in politics or culture, and often making a point to go off the beaten path and speak about the appearance of something that did not necessarily seem historically important, but that was nevertheless memorable to a lot of people. The show would never make much of an argument about the overall arc of recent history, but rather wished to give over the look and feel of a given moment of the past, which was originally bounded by the years 1961-1991 (though eventually Parfenov would expand the project up to 2003, turning it into a yearbook, of sorts).

The clip presented here gives some good examples of the show’s structure and its aesthetics. The opening credits show a good example of Parfenov’s trademark device– playfully editing historical footage by inserting himself in it. We then see Parfenov on a set surrounded by infinite archive cabinets and we hear the table of contents– an entire panoply of 1991 events, which, like the drawers behind Parfenov, have little to do with one another, but which are, indisputably, a part of “our” recent memory. The first event in the show is undoubtedly an example of what we normally think of as “grand history”– the violent confrontation between USSR and the Baltic states during their push for independence in January 1991. The subsequent event (not shown in this excerpt) also seems weighty– it is the clamping down on glasnost’ at about the same time as the events in the Baltics. But these two memory sites are then followed by events like the arrival of the Barbie doll to USSR (also not shown in this excerpt) and the appearance of “new Russians.” Each memory site gets its own succinct mini account, sometimes even an analysis by an expert– in the case of “New Russians,” the expert is Tatiana Drubich, the lead actress of Assa. The expert’s account attempts to be as objective as possible, trying to list as many attributes of the object of discussion as possible– in this case, everything a stereotypical “New Russian” possesses, from a raspberry suit, to a “600” (6L S-Class) Mercedes. At the same time, the overall tenor of each account in “Namedni” tends towards a kind of optimism about the present day, in which, as Parfenov says at the end of this show, “history has ended, and contemporaneity has begun.”

Is Namedni a work of broadminded, reflective history or a work of dangerous political nostalgia, or both, and how do we distinguish one from the other? Curiously, at about this time (between 1995-1998) Parfenov also produced three episodes of Old Songs About the Most Important. Recently: Our Era shared something of the other project’s disjointed, playful recollection of the past, but it would be quite unlikely for Parfenov’s post-Soviet liberal audience to accuse Recently of neo-Stalinism or (neo-Brezhnevism) à la Old Songs.