Petrovich, the Soviet everyman, survives post-Soviet Russia in “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 the successor of the eponymous pre-Soviet publication, 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 (1960-) has described Bil’zho’s character as the “bit of ‘old Russian’ that persists in every ‘new Russian.’” The paper’s first owner and director, Vladimir Yakovlev (1959-), has stated that “Bil’zho, er, Petrovich was no different from anyone else at Kommersant, back when the newspaper was produced 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 invoke no political rhetoric whatsoever. 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 of recent events like the devaluation of the ruble relative to the dollar, or the emergency Congress of People’s Deputies convened in March 1993, when the standoff between Yeltsin and an oppositional legislature intensified, eventually leading to the October Constitutional Crisis.

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” in a parody of the parliamentarians defending the Russian White House in October 1993. Whether as a passive or active political subject, Petrovich remains certain that the social life unfolding outside his unhinged consciousness is fully contiguous with his inner state. Hence, he readily accepts that “the basic law of the country” is “to drink,” a disposition inimical to Kommersant’s celebratory attitude toward the post-Soviet capitalist order. Petrovich thus becomes the newspaper’s imaginary adversary, the Soviet-made “old Russian,” who, in his idiocy and nihilism, brings about the failures of post-Soviet capitalist democracy.