Parfenov’s “Namedni” as memory work in the 1990s

Leonid Parfenov (1960-), a fast-rising star of post-Soviet television, first hosted Namedni (Recently) in 1990 on the Second Channel of Soviet Central Television as a 6-minute-long news brief. The show had shut down by 1991, only to re-emerge in a new format on the post-Soviet channel NTV in 1993-1996. An entertaining, apolitical roundup, it reported on a disjointed panoply of curiosities taking place in Russia and around the world. A single broadcast might include a report from Madonna’s New York lingerie party, a celebration of the centenary of Formalist literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin (1895-1975), and an “interview” with an earthworm. In 1997, Parfenov changed the show’s format again, transforming it into Namedni. Nasha era (Recently: Our Era). From then on, every hour-long episode would center on one particular year, spotlighting its most memorable political and cultural events. Parfenov often made a point of going off the beaten path to explore a topic that may not have seemed “objectively” historically important, but that many people found memorable nonetheless. The show never made concrete arguments about the overall arc of recent history, but rather sought to convey the look and feel of a specific moment in the recent past. Originally, the period under consideration was 1961-1991, although Parfenov eventually expanded the project to include the years up to 2003.

The clip in this artifact exemplifies the show’s structure and aesthetics. The opening credits include Parfenov’s trademark device of playfully editing historical footage by inserting himself into it. Here, for instance, he appears as a Politburo member standing behind Soviet General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev (1906-1982) while the latter is giving a speech. We then see Parfenov on a set surrounded by a seemingly infinite number of filing cabinets, while an off-screen voice recites the episode’s “table of contents”—a panoply of events from 1991, which, like the drawers behind Parfenov, may seem mutually unrelated—but which are indisputably part of his viewership’s collective memory.

The first event the episode profiles belongs to what the average viewer might think of as “grand history”: the violent confrontation between the USSR and the Baltic states during their push for independence in January 1991. Similarly weighty is the next event, the crackdown on glasnost that occurred almost simultaneously with the revolt in the Baltics. Following these two sites of memory, however, are comparatively “minor” ones: the arrival of the Barbie doll in the USSR (not shown in this excerpt) and the appearance of “new Russians.” Each memory site gets its own succinct mini-account, sometimes augmented with expert analysis—in the case of the “New Russians,” the putative “expert” is Tatiana Drubich (1960-), the lead actress in the 1987 cult rock film Assa. The expert’s account attempts to be objective, listing as many attributes of the object under discussion as possible. Drubich, for instance, enumerates everything a stereotypical “New Russian” possesses, from a raspberry suit to a “600” (6L S-Class) Mercedes Benz. The overall tenor of each account in Namedni tends towards optimism about the present day—a time in which, as Parfenov says at the end of this episode, “history [istoriia] has ended, and contemporaneity [sovremennost’] has begun.”

Is Namedni a broadminded work of reflective history, a foray into dangerous political nostalgia, or some combination of the two? Curiously, at around this same time—that is, between 1995 and 1998—Parfenov also produced three episodes of Old Songs About What Matters Most. Namedni: Nasha Era shared that project’s disjointed, playful recollection of the past, except that Parfenov’s post-Soviet liberal audience was far less likely to accuse Namedni of neo-Stalinism or (neo-Brezhnevism) à la Old Songs.