https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Spm2rsNPncQ
Tak zhit' nel'zia [Can't Live Like This], excerpt from Stanislav Govorukhin's influential documentary on the late Perestroika malaise and the way out of it
Perestroika
1990
As the late Perestroika approached its post-Soviet endgame, Russia and the Soviet republics all experienced a manifold rise in crime, alongside a collapsing economy and the rise of free-wheeling capitalist practices. Meanwhile, the free speech (glasnost) policies of Perestroika opened up the floodgates of social and historical critique of Soviet power. Some of these critiques ended up on all-Union nightly television, aired on shows like Vzgliad. Regional television sometimes had more leeway to air grittier material, such as Alexander Nevzorov’s Leningrad-based criminal roundup television show, “600 Seconds.”In filmmaking and books, the culture of Perestroika critique fueled the rise of chernukha [‘black stuff’], a genre that pushed at the limits of public taste by its commitment to staging highly naturalistic scenes of violence, poverty and social malaise. At this time, Stanislav Govorukhin filmed Can’t Live Like This, which would go on to serve as the first installment in a “trilogy of lies”– three documentary films dedicated focused on the late Perestroika, the Russian Revolution, and early Yeltsinism, respectively.
A Soviet fiction film director who came to fame in the 1960s-1970s with crowd-pleasers like “Vertical” and “The Meeting Place Cannot Be Changed” (both of which starred the late Soviet cult actor/songwriter Vladimir Vysotsky), Govorukhin was among the figures who shaped the mass ideology of the Soviet ‘middle class’ of urbanized, educated engineers and mid-managers. Brought to bear on the subject of crime in late Soviet Russia, this ideology clearly reveals itself as conservatively inclined to law and order, vehemently anti-Soviet, and nostalgic for the lost epoch of “honor and valor” exemplified by Tsarist Russia. In the clip selected here, we see the key theses of Govorukhin’s– and by extension also his audience’s– regarding a way out of the dead end of late Soviet life. For one, the entire Soviet experiment has been a criminal enterprise from start to finish and thus must be wholly scrapped. For another, the “Homo sovieticus” is a genetic monstrosity that has to be reshaped into a new, anti-Soviet ‘man,’ under the influence of conservative values (especially the Church and lost Tsarist culture) for Russia to have a future. Interestingly, it is not at all clear in Govorukhin’s film that capitalism– here always depicted as at least half-criminal petty mercantilism– will be a force for good in that regard. Govorukhin will develop this point further after Yeltsin’s power grab, which he will describe as The Great Criminal Revolution (1994). In the 2000s, Govorukhin will join Putin’s ruling party, “United Russia,” and in 2011-2012 he will campaign for Putin’s election to a third (but really fourth) term in power amidst the first significant wave of mass protests against Putin’s rule. Govorukhin’s eventual Putinism is fully consistent with his 1980s-1990s celebration of the pre-Soviet Russian Empire and especially its paragons of ‘pragmatic’ (i.e. semi-authoritarian) conservative reform, such as Pyotr Stolypin.
Govorukhin, Stanislav , Vysotsky, Vladimir, Nevzorov, Aleksandr (Alexander), and Tsar Nicholas II
Moscow, Leningrad, Cheboksary, Azerbaijan, Armenia, USA, and Germany
Mosfilm, 1990