What does it mean for the future of a nation that believes that its best days are in the past?
In Russian, the word nostalgia has a very specific meaning. It refers to being abroad and painfully missing the motherland. During the era of the Iron Curtain, when hardly anyone was ever allowed to leave Mother Russia, the enduring cliche was a White Army officer at a Paris restaurant, listening to the Gypsy chorus and drowning his nostalgia in vodka.
My family left the Soviet Union in 1974, with the first large batch of Soviet citizens to come out of the country since World War II. Since then the floodgates have opened and there is hardly a corner on the globe where there wouldn’t be found an ex-Soviet diaspora in one form or another. Yet, I can’t think of anyone I know who has ever expressed nostalgia for the USSR — either while that political entity existed or since.
But nostalgia for the Soviet Union is flourishing in Russia — and it can be easily observed on the Google-owned American streaming service YouTube. Every Soviet-era film, from the most popular to completely obscure, is accompanied by thousands of nearly identical comments. After praising the film and the actors (“they don’t make movies like this anymore”), they quickly move on to bemoan the amazing country that was lost and the wonderful folks who used to live there in harmony and peace.
“I’m fortunate to have lived in the Soviet Union,” “Born in the USSR and proud of it,” “We didn’t know how happy we were,” “I want to go back,” and so on.
It doesn’t make any difference whether the actors on the screen were showered with official accolades or persecuted and had their lives ruined — as was the case for so many. The late comedian Savely Kramarov, for example, gets the usual dose of Soviet nostalgia without a hint of irony. Yet his story is fairly typical—both in the dehumanizing repression and humiliations he suffered. His father, a Ukraine-born lawyer who was trained in Kyiv, was swept in Stalin’s purges — because he was a defense attorney in one of the show trials. He was tortured and spent eight years in the labor camp.
Three years after his release he was arrested once more on more trumped-up charges and sent to Siberia, where he worked as a street sweeper and where he took his own life.
Raised in Lviv by an uncle, Kramarov, a son of an enemy of the people, wasn’t allowed to embark on an acting career and got a break by sheer luck in the 1960s, at the age of 33. He promptly became popular and in a decade made more than 40 films.
But then his uncle emigrated to Israel and the actor himself found religion. Work suddenly dried up. He applied to emigrate but was able to leave several years later, after appealing to Ronald Reagan as a fellow actor. While he worked in Hollywood, for instance, starring alongside Robin Williams in Moscow on the Hudson, his films were banned in the Soviet Union.
Of course, the people who are watching Soviet movies on YouTube are at least 5o years old and most are much older. However, nostalgia for the Soviet Union is the staple of Putin’s propaganda. It gives many younger Russians a perverse vision of the USSR as a land of heroic selfless labor, fairness and justice.
It is curious what happened to Russia’s past over the past century. The early Bolsheviks were, in accordance with Marxist theory, all about building the future. The past was leading to that bright future but it was a burden, a dead weight that had to be gotten rid of. So they tore down monuments and churches, created new art, architecture and urban planning, renamed cities and streets and exterminated entire social classes. The past was shameful, it had to be purged before Russia was ready to enter the future.
But very soon, while still talking a lot about the future, the Bolsheviks started worshipping the past—first, by putting Vladimir Lenin’s incorruptible remains on display in Red Square. Josef Stalin then embraced many elements of the Russian empire (from separate education for boys and girls to grabbing old imperial territory). After the victory over Germany, he started to glorify the Russian military past, while Russian nationalism, which had been banished by the early Bolsheviks, re-emerged with a vengeance.
Curiously, Italian fascism had a similar trajectory. The fascist revolution was spearheaded by the futurist artistic movement, but quite rapidly Benito Mussolini began to hark back to the glories of the Roman Empire to which he declared himself an heir.
As George Orwell astutely observed, Stalin started to reshape history—a process that was enthusiastically embraced by his successors and which continues to this day. While Stalin was busy writing himself in, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev decided to write him out. Khrushchev announced the return to the “Leninist standards” of the past, claiming that Stalinism had been an aberration. He still paid lip service to the future, promising to build communism by 1980, but Brezhnev’s rule was marked by less talk about the coming of communism and by the glorification of the Civil War and the 1920s.
Starting in the late 1980s, the future disappeared entirely from the Russian discourse while the past began to loom larger and larger. During perestroika, there was an agonizing re-evaluation of the Soviet experience which was followed, starting in the 1990s, by its gradual rehabilitation and renewed rewriting. The ultimate impetus for this was given by Vladimir Putin in 2005 when he declared the collapse of the USSR “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
Nostalgia for the Soviet Union is fed by “the manic victory disorder” — the continued obsession with World War II which took place eight decades ago — longer than the Soviet Union actually existed. The nostalgia for the Soviet Union is now an amalgamation of communist myths about equality, altruism and brotherhood, wedded to the pre-revolutionary Orthodox faith and to post-Soviet goodies such as the internet, relative absence of censorship, full shelves in stores, and freedom to travel.
Alongside this USSR of the mind the clergy, who have replaced the Communist Party as the guardians of ideology, are building the past physically, covering the impoverished underdeveloped land in shoddily built churches.
This relationship with the past and nostalgia for the land that never existed would have been just another Russian idiosyncrasy had not Russia, yet again, in some perverse way charted the future for the rest of the world. The populist-nationalist movements that are popping up around the world are obsessed with the mythical past, with some never existing pastoral land of milk and honey that was insidiously taken away from them by their cosmopolitan overeducated elites. We see this even in countries that remain beacons of democracy for the rest of the world: in the UK with its resurgent Little England mentality and in the US, where Trump promised at a recent rally in Iowa to run again for president in 2024 under the slogan Make America Great Again — Again.
