Petrovich the Soviet everyman survives post-Soviet Russia at Kommersant
When post-Soviet Russia’s first ‘business’ newspaper, Kommersant first launched in 1990 (the pilot came out in December 1989), it positioned itself on the one hand as an inheritor of a pre-Soviet business newspaper of the same name, and on the other hand as the resource for the forging of post-Soviet, business-savvy “new Russians.” The Soviet era was sidelined in both claims, but Kommersant represented it as well, once or twice a week, with the caricatures of the ‘everyman’ Petrovich, drawn by Andrei Bil’zho. Recalling these caricatures, the film journalist Leonid Parfenov describes Petrovich 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 everyone at Kommersant, back when the newspaper was being made by people who weren’t professional journalists. It’s hard to say why Petrovich was necessary. It was absolutely a genius invention. … It was that sort of irony, that sort of humor that made living possible.”
Who is Petrovich? In the roughly 200 cartoons by Bil’zho that came out between 1992 and 1993, half have little to do with any sort of political rhetoric and simply position 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 a mini-civil war that October). When Petrovich is questioned by his doctor on “how many times a week [he] engages in political intercourse,” his answer is, most likely, “very little.” We might say that his “intercourse” mostly consists of ironic use of political rhetoric while drinking. But Petrovich is not only a victim– he is also a crazy man calling fellow inmates “to the defense of the insane asylum,” just like the parliamentarians in the “white house” in October 1993. In another cartoon, Petrovich is a newspaper editor who won’t permit critique, or he is a national leader at a summit, who doesn’t know how to sign his memorandum. Whether he is 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 is told 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 of the failures of post-Soviet capitalist democracy.