Petrovich the Soviet everyman survives post-Soviet Russia at Kommersant

When post-Soviet Russia’s first business-focused newspaper, Kommersant, launched in 1990 (a pilot issue had appeared in December 1989), it positioned itself, on the one hand, as an inheritor of the pre-Soviet publication of the same name, and, on the other, as a resource for post-Soviet, business-savvy “new Russians.” The Soviet era was sidelined in both claims, but Kommersant represented it, too, through Andrei Bil’zho’s one- or twice-weekly “Petrovich” cartoons. Recalling these cartoons, which depicted a Soviet everyman with the generic name “Petrovich,” film journalist Leonid Parfenov has described Bil’zho’s character as the “bit of an old Russian that persists in every new Russian.” Meanwhile, the paper’s first owner and director, Vladimir Yakovlev, has stated that “Bil’zho, er, Petrovich was no different from anyone else at Kommersant, back when the newspaper was made by people who weren’t professional journalists. It’s hard to say why Petrovich was necessary. It was an absolutely genius invention. … It was that sort of irony, that sort of humor that made living possible.”

Who is Petrovich? In the roughly 200 cartoons that came out between 1992 and 1993, half have little to do with any sort of political rhetoric. Instead, Bil’zho depicts Petrovich as the sorry protagonist in scenes of everyday violence, alcoholism, sexual failure, and general uncouthness. In the other half of Bil’zho’s cartoons, this hapless, despicable man does experience post-Soviet politics, both as their victim and as their deranged actor. As a victim, Petrovich often ends up in full body casts as a result or recent events, such as the devaluation of the ruble relative to the dollar, or the emergency congress of People’s Deputies in March 1993 (when the standoff between Yeltsin and an oppositional legislature intensified, eventually leading to the October Constitutional Crisis). Meanwhile, when Bil’zho’s Petrovich acts, he often does so on the anti-Yeltsin side– for example, as a crazy man calling fellow inmates “to the defense of the insane asylum,” just like the parliamentarians in the Russian White House in October 1993. Whether as a passive or active political subject, Petrovich remains certain that social life outside of his deranged consciousness is fully contiguous with his inner state: hence, he readily accepts that “the basic law of the country” is “to drink.” This disposition is inimical to Kommersant’s commitment to celebrating the rise of a successful post-Soviet capitalist order. Petrovich is the newspaper’s imaginary adversary, the Soviet-made “old Russian,” who in his idiocy and nihilism brings about all the failures of post-Soviet capitalist democracy.