The Glasnost Booth on the last October Revolution anniversary in the USSR

In late 1990, months after the election of the Congress of People’s Deputies and shortly before the creation of the presidency of the RSFSR, the private media group ATV decided to contribute to the project of direct democracy through a project called “The People’s Voice.” Under the leadership of journalist Ivan Kononov, 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; a very lightly edited set of recordings would then air 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 are 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 related, frightfully alien” “voice of the people” that he is about to record in the Glasnost Booth. The “voice of the people,” for its part, exhibits equal anomie. Common threads in people’s 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,” and will in that way resemble Imperial Russia prior World War I, when “the rouble used to be accepted in European banks more easily than the American Dollar.”

Even as “the people” comment on the commemoration of the Soviet Union’s originary event—the Revolution—their “voice” comes across as strikingly depoliticized. Although speakers express criticisms of the Soviet system, none propose a meaningful alternative. The monologue by the last visitor in the clip is particularly revealing in this respect. A plain-spoken man in his 30s or 40s yearns for competition for the best party platform for Russia—apparently oblivious to the fact that such competition is already underway. This combination of people’s palpable sense of need for political solutions, combined with a striking lack of awareness of a political process that might furnish these solutions, highlights the difficulty of turning newly-found freedoms of speech and assembly into institutions for expressing popular will. In one way or another, this disconnect between free speech and collective action would resurface at every critical political moment of the 1990s, and perhaps especially the impasse of 1993.