The Glasnost Booth during the USSR’s last celebration of the October Revolution

In late 1990, months after the election of the Congress of People’s Deputies and shortly before the creation of the office of Russian President, the private media group ATV decided to contribute to direct democracy through a project called “The People’s Voice.” Under the leadership of journalist Ivan Kononov (1953-), a temporary, soundproof booth was installed on the Red Square, equipped with a camera but no human witnesses. Passerby were free to enter and say virtually anything, and a very lightly edited set of recordings would then appear on the Channel 1 show Press-Club. The project came to be known as the “Glasnost Booth,” and persisted until 1993, eventually touring various cities throughout Russia and the former Soviet Union.

The clip in this artifact is drawn from footage recorded on 7 November 1991, the last anniversary of the October Revolution to be celebrated in the USSR. The clip opens with Kononov himself performing as an amateur singer-songwriter in the style of the semi-dissident late-Soviet intelligentsia. It goes on to show ordinary citizens standing in a huge line to air their thoughts on the holiday and on Russia’s future. Kononov’s song expresses suspicion about the “painfully familiar, frightfully alien” “voice of the people” that he is about to record in the Glasnost Booth. The “voice of the people,” for its part, expresses similar anomie. Common threads in the testimony include melancholy about the state of everyday life in Russia and misgivings about celebrating the October Revolution—the lone exception being a young, idealistic anti-GKChP activist, who tells us “gentlemen” that “by following the path of radical reforms, Russia will soon rise to the level of all Western countries.” This new Russia, the activist continues, will resemble Imperial Russia just before the First World War, when “the ruble was accepted in European banks more readily than the American dollar.”

Even as “the people” comment on the commemoration of the Soviet Union’s originary event—the Bolshevik Revolution—their “voice” comes across as strikingly depoliticized. Many speakers critique the Soviet system, but none propose a meaningful alternative. The monologue by the last visitor in the clip is particularly revealing. A plain-spoken man in his 30s or 40s, he yearns for true competition among Russian political parties—apparently oblivious to the fact that such competition is already underway. This palpable hunger for political solutions, combined with a striking ignorance of ongoing political processes that might furnish these very solutions, highlights the difficulty of turning newfound freedoms of speech and assembly into institutions for expressing the popular will. This disconnect between free speech and collective action would resurface at every important political juncture of the 1990s, perhaps most of all during the Constitutional Crisis of 1993.