“If Putin says he’s against ‘Ukrainianization,’ you can translate that as meaning he opposes media freedom and real elections,” says Boris Nemtsov, a liberal politician.

He was reacting to Putin’s recent statement that ‘We must continuously think about improving our political system… but we must act with extreme caution [and] not allow our political culture to follow a Ukrainian scenario.”

According to Fred Weir’s piece in today’s Christian Science Monitor, which chronicled an unprecedented public disagreement between Putin and Medvedev over the direction of Russia’s democracy, ‘many in Russia’s liberal opposition community [believe that] Ukraine, for all its economic difficulties, is one of the few post-Soviet states that still enjoys competitive democracy, including press freedom and open, combative election campaigns’.

That view of the country’s politics might come as a surprise to the actual citizens of Ukraine, where ‘political infighting, corruption, government deadlock and economic recession brought the country to a standstill’ since 2004 and where, according to the Global Post, ‘representative government itself is viewed by many as the root of the problems’.

Ukrainian disillusionment with its brand of democracy comes across clearly in a recent authoritative report from the Pew Research Center, where Ukrainians’ assessment of the change to democracy started out at 77% in 1991 (the highest of any republic save the Baltics) but fell to 30% by 2009 - the lowest of any post-Soviet state.

Russia’s view of its transition, incidentally, fell only 8%, from 61% to 53% favourable.

Yes, Russia needs deep political reform and democratisation. But the liberal opposition will win themselves few votes by suggesting politcally crippled Ukraine as a model worthy of emulation.

An epic sci-fi tale set in the 22nd century on fictional planet Pandora and its alien Navi civilisation wins the hearts of  millions of fans.  Then, 40 years later, James Cameron makes Avatar.

That’s right, this week Russian newspapers were rife with allegations that Cameron stole the idea for his blockbuster film from a series of popular Soviet science fiction books by the Strugatsky brothers in the mid 1960s.

According to the Guardian,

It was the Strugatskys who came up with the planet Pandora – the same name chosen by Cameron for the similarly green and lushly forested planet used as the spectacular backdrop to Avatar. The Noon Universe takes place in the 22nd century. So does Avatar, critics have noticed.

…There are clear differences between the two Pandoras, both are home to a similarly named bunch of humanoids – the Na’vi in Cameron’s epic, and the Nave in Strugatskys’ novels, read by generations of Soviet teenagers and space-loving scientists and intellectuals.

So is Boris Strugatsky seeking to take Cameron to the cleaners for a well-earned piece of the second highest grossing movie since Titanic?

After all, that’s exactly what JK Rowling did when she launched huge copyright lawsuits against the Russian Tanya Grotter and Belarussian Porry Gatter books.

Yet unlike the billionaire Rowling jealously chasing down each insignificant Harry Potter upstart, humble pensioner Strugatsky simply “shrugged off suggestions of similarities between Avatar and his Noon Universe, and denied reports circulated last week that he was accusing Cameron of plagiarism”.

Could there be a wider cultural difference at work?

Russia is a frequent target of American copyright suits, but Russians themselves seem to be much less protective with their own intellectual property.

For example, two of the country’s leading and best selling literary  novelists - Viktor Pelevin and Vladimir Sorokin - have made most of their books available free of charge on their websites.

In fact, Pelevin put his entire oeuvre on the internet for free in 2006, (including english translations and audio books) specifically in protest at the notion of  copyright in the arts.

Vladimir Putin himself had allegedly plagiarised his entire university thesis.

And let’s  not forget the most famous case: General Kalashnikov, whose iconic gun has become the world’s most prolific weapon but who received not a penny in royalties.

So what can explain this attitude?

Perhaps it comes from Russia’s experience with culture in the 20th century.  The official Soviet position denied artists ownership over their outputs, just as people had no ownership of land or other commercial properties.

But ironically, the opposition to Soviet officialdom was even less proprietorial.

Predating the way information is handled in the internet, dissidents shared underground-published works and liberally copied and re-typed books written by other dissidents or smuggled in from the west.

Similarly, when rock bands proliferated in the 70s and 80s, they spread and shared their music secretly using reel-to-reel recorders in what became called ‘magnitizdat’. Either way, culture-whether official or underground-had never carried a commercial character.

Somewhere, James Cameron must be thanking God for the USSR.

Mommy, where do Putins come from?

Some liberal analysts have suggested that he was parachuted into Russian politics by a sort of malevolent stork.  More critical ones have insisted instead that he was asexually spawned by Yeltsin in his own image.

Yet in the latest edition of the London Review of Books, Neal Ascherson reviews a book that goes beyond casting blame on the 1990s era democrats and implicates the entire post 1989 New World Order.

The ‘pre-fab’ is not some Soviet style housing block, but rather one of three possible scenarios for the unification of Europe in the wake of the fall of the wall discussed in Maria Sarotte’s latest history of 1989: ‘The Struggle to Create a Post Cold War Europe’.

According to this scenario, ‘the West retained all its existing institutions and simply shoved them eastwards’. But there was a compelling alternative left in the dust of 1989: Gorbachev’s model of a ‘common European home’, a demilitarised confederation of capitalist and socialist states from the Atlantic to the Urals, without Nato or Warsaw Pact, organised around Helsinki institutions or the OSCE.

In the victory of the old fashioned pre-fab model over the ambitious/utopian ‘common home’, writes Ascherson,  “the chance to build a solid bridge between Europe and Russia was missed. ‘Pre-fab’ led to Putin”.

It didnt help, of course, that modern Europe was built on a lie: Kohl’s famous promise to Gorbachev that if he lets the GDR go, then NATO would not expand East of Germany.  Yet 15 years later, “Nato had reached Estonia, only 100 miles from St Petersburg…The West cheated [Gorbachev]“, Ascherson declares.

As a result, write Sarotte and Ascherson, “a new European order might have been created, with Russia as a willing partner. Instead, the expansion of Nato ‘perpetuated the military diving line between Nato and its biggest strategic threat, Russia, into the post-Cold War world’”.

Putin certainly exploited this Cold War situation to his advantage, but he did not create it. Rather, as Sarotte and Ascherson show, it created him.

This week was the Russian Orthodox Christmas. Twenty years after Communism and somewhat at odds with the newfound Christian ardour of Russia’s elites, it’s not a big stand alone holiday, falling relatively quietly in the middle of the 10 day vacation starting with the big Soviet milestone of New Year’s.

Yet at the same time, Russians are also not celebrating the centeniary of Leo Tolstoy’s death partly because, according to Luke Harding in the Guardian, “the writer’s criticisms of Orthodox religion and authority make him a dangerous figure for those in power – both in Tsarist Russia and also today”.

The question of what to celebrate and why exposes a crucial open sore: After a decade of Yeltsin and a decade of Putin, Russia is still struggling to find an identity.

This unresolved issue has seriously harmed the country’s international standing.

“Today, Russia’s brand is quite negative”, recently wrote an American and Russian academic in the Moscow Times. Their survey of Berkley students’ responses to what the word ‘Russia’ connotes was striking: “Their associations for Russia were overwhelmingly negative; communism (28 percent), cold (13 percent), vodka (7 percent) and corruption (7 percent) dominated the responses and placed Russia far behind the other four countries included in the survey (the United States, China, Italy and Britain)”.

The professors advice Russia to get a brand makeover, and suggest the following new (and rather implausible) buzzwords: Multicultural Russia, Eco Russia and Resilient Russia.

However, any such brand makeovers are meaningless without a fundamental settlement of the identity question.

In today’s New York Times, Alison Smalere counts what Russia means for some of its younger generation:

“This New Year, I spent a couple of evenings in the company of Natasha, mid-20s, just back from four years of study in London. Why return? “Because,” she said, “I wanted to be able to dance on tables.” Britain, she opined, was just too smooth and boring”.

But apart from this vague sense of difference, today’s Russia can boast only a rather directionless modernisation: “Walking down Kutuzovsky Prospekt in west-central Moscow, I see the Escada shop and the sushi restaurant of the present”.

Certainly, some academics, like SV Kortunov, think that Russia “can achieve more than merely modernization, a national state, and a materialistic civilization: it can be a country that combines the latest Western ideas (meritocracy, post- industrialism, etc.) with the traditions of Russian development, including Soviet traditions, and the achievements of Russian philosophical thought”.

But as of now, even 20 years after the end of the USSR, the talk remains “of victory, and starting over — what the popular journalist and author Yulia Latynina calls “news in the future tense.”

In 2009, did Russia celebrate or mourn 10 years of Putinism?

RUSSIA REBORN?

While experts can debate the extent,  there is no doubt that the country has grown at least a little bit richer and stronger under Putin.

However, as Daniil Kharms observed, the bigger the cucumbers in the shops, the better they can be used to bludgeon people on the head:

Tikakeyev took the biggest cucumber out of his bag and hit Koratygin on the head with it.

Koratygin clutched his head with his hands, fell over and died.

That’s the size of the cucumbers sold in the shops these days!

And indeed, during most of the last decade, Russia had in some ways come to resemble a rentier state. As long as high oil prices trickled down to the masses and a strong state provided security, people were expected to shut up and put up. But this year’s economic crisis disrupted this quid pro quo: as the size of cucumbers in the shops began to shrink, they also began to seem less scary in the hands of the state, and people started to stir.

Thus, a year that began with riots over used car tariffs and later massive rebellions in factory towns like Pikalevo saw Putin offer large concessions to striking workers and Medvedev give an interview to the dissident newspaper Novaya Gazeta. Moreover, whilst journalists and human rights workers continued to be killed, 2009 was notable for being the first time that anyone was ever convicted for the crimes.

THE UGLY:

For all its gleaming Moscow skyscrapers, 2009 painfully exposed Russia’s ageing Soviet-era infrastructure, attitudes to fire safety and vulnerability to terrorism.

As if that were not enough, the murders of Estemirova, Markelov and Baburova made Russia officially the most dangerous place for journalists.

Much of the trouble came from Russia’s achilles heel: the restive caucuses. Ironically, just shortly after Dmitry Medvedev delivered his own ‘Mission Accomplished’ speech regarding the conflict in Chechnya, Yevkurov, the president of neighbouring Ingushetia, barely survived a major assassination attempt. Things have gone downhill from there, with human rights NGO Memorial voting to resume their activities in Chechnya due to the rising violence. The cycle of revenge-fuelled violence will continue to smoulder well into 2010.

THE BAD:

His more conciliatory rhetoric did not prevent Medvedev from cracking down on domestic opponents, even if they were shouting nonsense slogans such as ‘Pull the blanket! Cut the Pies!’ like the arist-provocateur Loskutov.

Despite conclusive evidence of the disastrous consequences of climate change for the country, Russia continued to bury its head in the sand about global warming. In fact, many Russians would like to see their world get a bit warmer.

There were some unsettling signs of an unofficial rehabilitation of Stalin, even if some of these were blown out of proportion by Western media.

And 2009 also saw Russia return to its traditional sport of election rigging, with the questionable results in Sochi and Murmansk outdone by the massive fiasco that was the local elections, in which the ruling United Russia party scooped up 80% of the total votes and certain votes definitely disappeared.

The good news, if one is being facetious, is that a reliable poll showed that  “the majority (60%) of Russians said that the ruling party did not go far enough: that it would be better if the president controlled both the courts and the parliament…and nearly 25% said the Soviet Union had a better political system that the current Russian model (36%) or that in Western countries (15%). 26% believed that democratic governing was not suitable for Russia.

THE GOOD

But there were some genuinely good news for Russia in 2009, especially on the foreign policy front.

After a rocky start, the reset button looks to finally have taken effect in relations with the USA. Unusually for a democratic administration, Obama agreed to back down on the European ABM shield. And the two countries are on the verge of signing the first breakthrough arms control agreement since the end of the cold war. Russia is also playing a key and contructive role in the Iran negotiatings, even if it is not yet prepared to fully engage with the Nato effort in Afghanistan.

There was good news on the civil society front as well: Dmitry Medvedev followed up his interview with the dissident Novaya Gazeta by ensuring the successful trials of the killers of Novaya Gazeta journalists Politkovskaya and Baburova, even if there remains some doubt about these.

He has also injected some pluralism into the ruling party, which has lately been allowing some opposing voices to be heard in high policy circles, notably from Igor Jurgens.

And although polls have shown that most Russians feel disempowered politically, a group of plucky workers from the town of Pikalevo succeeded in grinding the country to a halt and extracting huge concessions from an embarassed Putin.

Despite a demographic decline, Russian society has become more developed since Putin has taken over. According to the most recent UN Human Development Index, ‘In the mid-2000s, Russia became a country with a high level of human development, achieving an HDI score above 0.800. The number of regions, where the index was at high levels, grew significantly – from 4 in 2004 to 12 in 2006, with Moscow moving ahead of Central & Eastern Europe’. Many problems remain, including vast inequalities between regions and income groups, but the development is a welcome sign.

Last but not least, 2009 gave us TAJIK JIMMY, Russia’s much awesomer answer to Susan Boyle.

PERSON OF THE YEAR

Following Time Magazine, which gave its award to Bernanke for solving a crisis in a way that was only successful when compared to an overblown hypothetical catastrophe (a full scale collapse of western civilisation) rather than on its own merits (a giant transfer of wealth to banks with few strings attached and little structural reform), FPA Russia blog names Yegor Gaidar its Man of the Year.

This recently deceased right wing economist was responsible for ushering Russia’s darkest period in living memory, tarnishing the words ‘democracy’ and ‘market’ for entire generations, and paving the way for Putinism.

Yet, compared to an imaginary hypothetical alternative that he dreamt up himself, his reforms werent so bad after all. ‘If we did not act decisively, in two or three months we would have an economic and political catastrophe, total collapse and civil war,” he said in December 1991′.

Lest we forget, no matter how statist the Putin-Medvedev model becomes, its essential economic underpinning - supply side based market authoritarianism - is Gaidar’s most lasting legacy.

MOST UNEXPECTED EVENT 2009:

-> United Russia wins 80% of local election seats.

ACTUALLY UNEXPECTED EVENT 2009:

-> Obama walks the talk of US-Russia reset, backs away from ABM system in Europe

IN 2010, WATCH OUT FOR:

-> What will become of Khodorkovsky. Ex-Oligarch’s fate will be a litmus test of Medvedev’s commitment to reform and relationship with Putin

-> The complete disintegration and collapse of the USA, according to Russian academic Igor Panarin (this will probably not happen, -ed.)

Like James Dean, Yegor Gaidar lived hard and died young.

But unlike Dean, the only victim of whose reckless driving was himself, the man who privatised Russia’s economy in the 1990s took his entire young country on a deadly joyride that wrecked millions of lives.

That’s no hyperbole: The Lancet has determined that the Gaidar-engineered mass-privatisation led to a 13% increase in the death rate, leading over 3 million people to die prematurely.

As if that wasnt enough, even Luke Harding points out that “in January 1992 [Gaidar] abolished state control of prices, wiping out the rouble savings of millions of ordinary Russians overnight. His reforms were described as shock therapy. They paved the way for the dubious state privatisations of the 1990s and the rise of the oligarchs”.

Predictably, the Voice of America’s headline for the obituary reads: Gaidar died believing in the inevitabiliy of Russian democracy”.

A man like Gaidar could only have emerged from the muck of Hobbesan early 90s Russia, a rancid petrie dish incubating malignant strains of bandits and opportunists.

But in fairness, he was not a bandit like Alfred Koch, or a bandit-opportunist like his stablemate Anatoly Chubais.  A minister in his early thirties, he was a romantic, Randian megalomaniac; carried away, like many smart young people, not by malice but by a conviction in his own infallibility and that of his free market shibboleths.  Chillngly, the young Gaidar was a lot like Larry Summers.

Like his grandfather, the Bolshevik and Soviet children’s writer Arkady Gaidar, Yegor believed that he was ‘on the right side of history’; but whereas Arkady’s writing provided some counterbalance of empathy, Yegor quickly lost any connection he may have ever felt towards those on the receiving end of his theoretical postulates.

Yet today’s Russia remains built in his image, evidenced by the fawning official reaction to his death: Putin called Gaidar’s death a “heavy loss for Russia.”

But Gaidar, ‘who served as acting prime minister for just six months in 1992 before public anger forced Yeltsin to fire him’, continues to be despised by most Russians, so there was no populist gain to be had in singing his praises. And yet today the Kremlin finds itself on the same side as its favoured liberal punching bags Nemtsov et al. Why?

Because the Putin government is the direct descendant of the Gaidar-Yeltsin right-wing economic philosophy. Thus it came as no surprise to read that “after leaving politics, he remained influential behind the scenes, offering informal advice to Vladimir Putin on a range of economic issues”. Or that his daughter had become a cog in Putin’s power vertical.

Because, for all the political animus between Putin’s siloviki and the liberal democrats, they are bound together by their Gaidarist love for capitalism and contempt for the people.

So what to make of the man Mark Ames eulogised a decade ago as “the frog-faced architect of ‘reform’ and ’shock therapy’ and every other curse word associated with capitalism in Russia…the guy responsible for shaking down the entire russian population and handing over their belongings to a few well-placed comrades, [who] will go down in Russian folklore as one of the most terrifyoing villains ever to set foot on Mother Rus - [and whose] name will be invoked by parents to scare children into going to bed and brushing their teeth.”

It’s about time Russians started taking care of their teeth.

I love the BBC to bits, but I have had enough.

Yet another report, the second ‘profile’ in a week about the resurgence of Stalin’s legacy in the former USSR, has put my knickers in a twist. This time, we see a Stalin look-alike treated ‘like our own dear Queen’ in his hometown of Gori, Georgia.

Certainly, there are troubling signs of a ‘Stalin rehabilitation’ in Russia and elsewhere, which have rightly been treated seriously in the Western media and have been closely scrutinised on this blog.

There is no doubt: Stalin-love is being whipped up in Russia and Georgia by cynical politicians to foster nationalism and raise support for strong-arm right-wing politics.

But the sanctimonious ‘look-at-those-weirdo-non-European-value-orientated-Stalinists-over-there” anglophone media coverage is fast becoming an equally cynical exercise in feel good anti-Eastern prejudice. The implication is clear: We would never think of supporting such tyrants!

There are big problems with outsiders ‘exposing’ the crimes of other countries. Such accounts are all too often coloured and motivated by ulterior motives. And usually, a good litmus test of pure motives is whether the person highlighting the crimes in another country is as critical and incisive about those committed by his own.

For example, during the cold war, all the Western scholars who criticised the Soviet bloc with the same vigour with which they criticised their own countries could comfortably share a Mini. Most mainstream American and British historians of Russia (Gaddis, Service, Applebaum) have always been right-wing patriots and credulous believers in ‘Western democracy and capitalism’ with an axe to grind against those daring to enact alternative ways of socio-econonic organisation.

In a classic essay, Mark Ames once wrote why US columnist and historian Anne Applebaum is nothing like murdered Russian reporter Politkovskaya:

Applebaum is a special case, one of those moral crusaders, the American Anna Politkovskaya, who has made a living courageously exposing state crimes committed by…get this…not her own country, oh heck no! Because her own country only does good!

Nope, Anne Applebaum makes her living by sitting in the safety of Washington DC, and exposing crimes committed by a country on the other side of the globe! That country being Russia of course. Hey, give that woman a Pulitzer, will ya?!

Hence her book Gulag, packed with all the affected moral outrage that you’d expect. Indeed, one thing that has always filled Applebaum with rage is wondering why Russians don’t take her seriously (a question she poses as more abstract — ie, why don’t Russians care about the Gulags as much as Anne does?).

Here’s why: Can you imagine how much moral authority a right-wing Russian journalist’s book about the American genocide of Indians would have in America? Answer: about as much as Anne’s book has in Russia. None.

That kind of thing is not dispassionate history but rather Orientalism in its most classic sense, defined by Said as ‘a cultural apparatus [which] is all aggression, activity, judgment”.

And it cuts to the crux of the BBC story about Stalinism in Georgia. From my experience of Rupert Wingfield-Hayes’s reporting, he is a middle of the road liberal Brit, with a healthy respect for the Monarchy, Winston Churchill and his neighbourhood pub. And that’s OK!

But if a Russia Today camera crew were to bring a Churchill lookalike to a London school (assuming any of the English pupils, with their notoriously abysmal history knowledge, would even recognise him) and film their incredulity whenever anyone called him a great WWII leader rather than pointing out his enthusiastic gassing of Arabs, repatriation of Russian POWs to certain deaths in the Gulags, complicity in the Bengal famine, brutal crackdowns on domestic anarchists and striking workers, casual sexism or unhealthy body mass index, they would not be taken very seriously, even though all those things about Churchill are very much true.

Like Ivan the Terrible and Tamerlane, not to mention Wingfield-Hayes’s beloved British Royal Family, Stalin killed a great many of his own people. But Wingfield-Hayes is very wrong when he attributes the adulation of Stalin by young people to the ignorance of his crimes. If anything, the older generation that lived under Stalin is even more likely to feel nostalgic for those days.

This is partly because most of those who disliked Stalin did not survive to tell the tale, but also for some other, more difficult reasons. For example, many Soviet families saw sons of someone murdered by Bolsheviks in the revolution later joins the Red Army and becomes a Stalinist. My grandfather was just one such person.

It is difficult for a 21st century middle class British person, a legatee of two centuries of peace, democracy and industrial development, to fully understand a context in which the deaths of thousands of people occur routinely; a yardstick, not a terrifying aberration. In his masterful history of the Russian Revolution, A People’s Tragedy, Orlando Figes describes the horrific brutality of daily life under tsarism and how it was almost seamlessly followed by the horrific brutality of Stalinism.

In their brutality, the regimes were very comparable; the Bolsheviks were simply more productive owing to better mechanised and more rationally implemented terror than their Tsarist predecessors.

For most long-suffering Russians, the only real difference between them was tsarist Russia was brutal and autocratic, as well as backward, poor, constantly losing wars, disrespected and disintegrating. Whereas Stalin’s USSR was brutal and autocratic, but also modernising, strong, proud; cobbling together a new empire, defeating Germany and Japan, building a nuclear bomb, sending men to space, feeding and educating its people. Yes, the violence and brutality were a constant, but they was not the whole story.

Most importantly, Russians and Georgians believe that Stalin not only brought their backward countries greatness but also liberated their country from the Nazis genocide, a gratitude that is very difficult to understand for British and American people, who (barring Pearl Harbour and a relatively light Blitz) have never experienced an invasion in living history. This achievement should not be underestimated, especially considering everything the British have forgiven their Churchill for his more modest war-time successes.

Of course, Churchill’s imperial arrogance, racism and casual slaughter of non-Europeans should be viewed in the context of his statesmanship in WWII and great-power diplomacy. That does not excuse them. But sensitivity to this context is what prevents intelligent people from other countries from wondering why Churchill, or George Washington for that matter, are considered heroes rather than villains (although of course the scale of their villainry was smaller than Stalin’s), in the same way Wingfield-Hayes does.

None of this is to say, or course, that such ‘contextualisation’ is benign when done by the Russian government. Promoting Stalin’s achievements appears designed to make young Russians believe that brutal and autocratic policies could be ‘worth it’ to achieve ‘a strong country’ (whatever that means) at any price, with clear implications for Putin’s grips on power.

Yet according to Figes, who believes that the government is rehabilitating Stalin, the Kremlin’s aim ‘is not to deny Stalin’s crimes but to emphasise his achievements as the builder of the country’s “glorious Soviet past”. It wants Russians to take pride in their Soviet past and not to be burdened with a paralysing sense of guilt about the repressions of the Stalin period’.

But there is a difference between knowledge of one’s country’s crimes, and guilt-induced paralysis. While I cannot support the Kremlin’s historical revisionism because of its whitewashing, spurious scholarship, right-wing political subtexts and ulterior motives, neither do I believe that Russians should be made to renounce their entire 20th century history.

Churchill himself wrote in 1935 that “[History] is replete with examples of men who have risen to power by employing stern, grim, and even frightful methods but who, nevertheless, when their life is revealed as a whole, have been regarded as great figures whose lives have enriched the story of mankind. So may it be with Hitler.”

That many in the former USSR may say the same of Stalin should not inspire such self-righteous incredulity at the BBC.

In the 1990s, the Russian film landscape had come to resemble something straight out of Tarkovsky’s Stalker, with stray dogs wandering through Mosfilm studios in Eisenstein’s footprints and actors and directors stumbling around a menacing no man’s land in search of money and meaning.

What happened before, and after, is the subject of an engrossing (and plenty flawed) BBC documentary entitled Movie Nights in Moscow on Radio 3, in which Oxford professor Rana Mitter travels to Russia and speaks to directors, academics and viewers to determine the state of cinema in Russia today.

This state can best be summed up by the following exchange between rising auteur Alexey Popogrebsky and renowned Soviet director (and current head of Mosfilm) Karen Shakhnazarov.

For Popogrebsky, the 2004 fantasy blockbuster Nightwatch was the turning point for Russian cinema, when

Young people said: maybe its not so bad to go watch a Russian film, because in terms of the return on their money, they were getting as many special effects per square foot as any other Hollywood blockbuster. Because people want to be entertained, they want to be impressed.

But for Shakhnazarov, who directed the iconic Glasnost youth movie The Courier and whose new film The Vanished Empire evokes 197os USSR, that is precisely the problem with modern Russian cinema. Speaking with an accent that lends heightened poetry to his words, he lays the blame even more on the viewer than film-maker:

In Soviet period, we had Idea. You can say it was bad idea, ok. You can say it was good idea, somebody says that. But it was an Idea. Around this idea was the fire; some life was around this idea. Somebody support this idea, and others not support it, those called dissidents. But, I mean, this was the really big idea. Now, it’s vanished. And so we have, in my opinion, our society have no anything to live for. Because its impossible to live just for have a lot of sausages in the shops. There’s no real idea for the people, you see?

I don’t think [viewers today] are searching for something like the Idea, I suppose. Or, very few of them want to find in cinema something that is called Idea. Just they want to go to see entertainment.

Of course, Mitter delves into the recent high quality Russian art-house fare such as the internationally acclaimed Paper Soldier, Volchok (Wolfy) and The Return.

But at a time when even commercial movies are seen only by elite upper middle class audiences who can afford to spend $10 on a ticket, the viewership of such ‘idea-films’ is so negligible that they can not hope to speak to the population at large.

And while Mitter proclaims the new cinema to be a renaissance equal to the colossal flowering of creativity and boundary-pushing under Glasnost in the 1980s (which he doesnt spend nearly enough time talking about!), he is wrong.

This is because the cinematic awakening under Glasnost was truly inclusive, rather than elitist; challenging films that today would be the preserve of art house audiences involved the general public in dialogues about their own pasts and debates about their futures.

Millions of ordinary people flocked to cinemas to see movies banned since the 60s, such as Kommissar and Abuladze’s anti-Stalinist Repentance, or new social realist films depicting the dark undersides of ‘Socialist utopia’ such as Little Vera (first Soviet film featuring nudity!); or films that re-examined the place of young people in society, such as Bykov’s The Scarecrow, Shakhnazarov’s The Courier, Igla (a film about drug abuse featuring Soviet rock legend Victor Tsoi) and the groundbreaking Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young.

While many of those films were heavy and depressing, (their darkness serving as a political rebellion against the culture of official cheerfulness that marked Socialist Realism), so many quality films were not: for example, the above-mentioned Courier or the satirical comedy Kin Dza Dza.

And there was not the same kind of apartheid between highbrow ‘chernukha’ like Wolfy and commercial trash like Night Watch that we see today.

They were for the most part politically engaged and philosophically committed.

In the final scene of The Courier (2:55 in), the main character, Ivan, a high school senior, is watching some dudes breakdance in the park and asks his pal Basin: What do you dream about in life?

-Buying a winter coat

-What kind of dream is that?

-Winter is almost here and I’ve got nothing to wear; I went last winter without one and was sick all the time

-Cant your parents get you one?

-My dad’s paying alimony but my mum won’t give me a penny. Says I don’t need money. She is a sick person, there is no doubt. But what can you do?

At which point Ivan gives Basin the new jacket that his dad had just given him, and says:

-I won’t be needing it: I’ll get drafted into the army soon anyway. Wear it, and start dreaming of something greater.

He could have been addressing the new Russian cinema and its audiences.

The Global South, it seems.

According to a BBC poll published on the anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, “opinion about the disintegration of the Soviet Union is sharply divided. Europeans overwhelmingly say it was a good thing: 79% in Germany, 76% in Britain and 74% in France feel that way.

But outside the developed West it is a different picture. Almost seven in 10 Egyptians say the end of the Soviet Union was a bad thing and views are sharply divided in India, Kenya and Indonesia”.

This despite the fact that India and Indonesia, as well as Russia, have experienced unprecedented levels of economic growth since 1991.

What could explain such nostalgia? One factor might be a general disenchantment with free-market capitalism:

“More than 29,000 people in 27 countries were questioned. In only two countries, the United States and Pakistan, did more than one in five people feel that capitalism works well as it stands. Almost a quarter - 23% of those who responded - feel it is fatally flawed. That is the view of 43% in France, 38% in Mexico and 35% in Brazil”.

Much of the global dissatisfaction with capitalism, the report suggests, stems from that system’s production and exacerbation of income inequality. While economies based on high growth models may produce more wealth as a whole, its distribution is skewed overwhelmingly in favour of a small minority.

High inequality is much worse for a nation’s wellbeing than low growth. As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett convincingly show in their recently published scholarly work The Spirit Level (except from David Runciman’s excellent article in the London Review of Books):

Among rich countries, the more unequal ones do worse according to almost every quality of life indicator you can imagine. They do worse even if they are richer overall, so that per capita GDP turns out to be much less significant for general wellbeing than the size of the gap between the richest and poorest 20 per cent of the population (the basic measure of inequality the authors use). The evidence that Wilkinson and Pickett supply to make their case is overwhelming. Whether the test is life expectancy, infant mortality, obesity levels, crime rates, literacy scores, even the amount of rubbish that gets recycled, the more equal the society the better the performance invariably is.

No surprise then that, according to the poll, “there is very strong support around the world for governments to distribute wealth more evenly. That is backed by majorities in 22 of the 27 countries”.

My last post chronicled the large numbers of people (45% of Russians and up to 62% of Ukrainians) made worse off by the fall of the USSR. But what about the rest?

One man who certainly did not figure among them was Misha, the hero of a vivid, at times zany, groteque and poignant fictionalised account by Georgian writer and journalist Irakli Iosebashvili, the first part of which was published in the current issue of Guernica Magazine.  By following this post-Soviet ‘Gentleman of Fortune’,  the story paints a hustler-eye view of the absurdist, tragic and exhilitaring transition from state socialism.

Misha, the narrator’s streetsmart and charismatic Tbilisi father-in-law, was known even in Soviet times for his entrepreneurial spirit; in a nearly car-less society, he was called “Misha-you know, the one with the car”. As a result of his black-market prowess during the Brezhnev years, Misha “wore fedoras from Turkey and sheepskin coats bought in the Baltics, bell bottoms and shiny boots with big heels”.

Later, as Georgia spiralled into nationalist chaos, the “Soviet Union began to shiver and howl like some great poisoned beast, then went off to its noisy, drawn-out death”, and hyperinflation left Misha “suddenly bereft of one hundred thousand roubles”‘, he headed to Moscow to make dollars instead.

Iosebashvili evokes a Russia which freedom had hit “like a great slap, and people were still reeling from the shock”, where “almost every day, somebody took to the streets—Communists, ultra-nationalists, unhappy miners, cavorting paratroopers” and “pyramid schemes, faith healers, and nationalist movements, each stranger than the next, sprang up on a daily basis”.

This is required reading.