16 August 2002
From Clem Cecil in Moscow
LONG live grandfather Lenin! Russia is reliving the Soviet era through
fashion and a wave of nostalgia. The reopening of a communist-era beer
bar in central Moscow, with waiters in USSR T-shirts, signals the trend
for Soviet chic. It has taken a mere ten years for Russia to stylise its
past. Teenagers who barely remember communism have transformed Lenin's
legacy into retro fashion, donning their dads' USSR T-shirts.
The fashion designer Denis Simachev heralded the craze by creating shirts
with Soviet emblems last autumn. In Paris this year his models' T-shirts
bore portraits of President Putin framed in flowers, echoing the Stalin
cult of personality.
Mr Simachev fitted out the waiters at the Zhiguli beer bar with their
T-shirts while the cleaners wear housecoats and headscarves, evoking memories
of the Soviet babushka.
Zhiguli, named after the Soviet Union's cheapest beer, was one of the
most popular bars in the 1980s, a place where non-party youth could drink,
as long as they could afford a five-rouble entrance bribe to the bouncer.
"People miss some things about the old times, and this bar is one of
them," says Yuri Kabargin, manager of Zhiguli. On Friday nights the bar
is heaving with young and old, drinking beer and listening to records of
popular Soviet songs such as Railway Ticket to My Childhood.
Many older Russians relish souvenirs of their childhoods. Portraits
of Lenin sell like hot cakes in the Moscow antique shop, Roza Azora. The
shop specialises in Soviet memorabilia. Here the nostalgic can find mugs
with the portrait of the astronaut Yuri Gagarin, busts of Marx, and the
red headscarves once worn by young Communists. One customer, Elena Kulikova,
42, said she found having a picture of Lenin in her sitting room "pleasant
and soothing".
The Times (UK) 16 August 2002 Editorial
A generation yearns for the bad old days
Lenin smiles down, bald and malign; the cleaners, drab in headscarves and
downtrodden mien, scrub and mop; the waiters give a passable impression
of idle malevolence, slopping down the plates and badmouthing the customers.
Moscow is rediscovering Soviet chic, and the Zhiguli beer bar is thriving
on it. A decade after the collapse of communism, the Russians are yearning
nostalgically for the foibles and frustration, the slogans and stupidities
of a system that was built on fear, ran on hypocrisy and fell apart amid
cynicism and ridicule. Young Russians do not remember the era. The moment
the Soviet Union broke apart, an iron curtain descended over the past,
as an elder generation, used to leaders suddenly turning into Orwellian
non-persons, dropped an entire system into the memory hole. Anatoli Chubais,
architect of Russia's privatisation, tells of a friend's 17-year-old son
watching newsreels of Brezhnev woodenly addressing party gatherings. "You
mean this man was really President for 17 years?" he asked incredulously.
"How stupid you were to keep electing him."
But Russia misses the jokes. Dictatorships need safety valves, and political
jokes were never funnier than when they were taboo. Arguably Lenin's legacy
was destroyed long before 1991 by the ridicule heaped on his doddering
successors. And it is human nature to laugh at former misery, rejoicing
at the ability to rise above the awfulness. With the jokes go the kitsch
- the red Pioneers' scarves, the tired slogans, the busts of Marx and the
adulation of Yuri Gagarin, symbol for a generation of Soviet man who, if
only briefly, triumphed over the Americans.
Nothing is as subliminally nostalgic as scents and sounds. There was
a distinctive, acrid-sweet smell to the Soviet Union that would betray
the presence of Russians even in groups abroad. And the music - the obligatory
Internationale, the clumping proletarian triumphalism, the heroic soundtracks
to all those war films. They all stopped in 1991, as suddenly as when Soviet
music was banned in China in the Sixties after the two communist giants
fell out. Even now, a generation of Chinese cannot hear the tunes of their
youth without tears. Even in Brezhnev's day Russians were sentimental for
the music of harsher times - the songs of the Gulag that Vysotsky sang.
There is little that is romantic about deprivation, but it can intensify
memories of shared experiences. Older Britons were nostalgic for the war
years, and Dad's Army profited. Older Russians remember the days when they
too were deemed a superpower. And if the symbols are watery beer, baggy
clothes and sloppy service, any enterprising restaurant can recreate the
atmosphere.