Source

https://www.1tv.ru/shows/kollekciya-pervogo-kanala/search/starye-pesni-o-glavnom-muzykalnyy-film

Description

The most popular Soviet nostalgia project of the 1990s- "Starye pesni o glavnom [Old Songs About the Most Important"

Era

Post-Soviet

Date

1995

Annotation

On December 31, 1995, the TV channel ORT aired a New Year’s special, in which contemporary post-Soviet posters performed Soviet era popular songs, while at the same time acting out (atrociously poorly) a day in the life on a perpetually singing, well-to-do collective farm from the late Stalin era (the set was modeled on the 1950 film, “Cossacks of the Kuban”). The question on many critical viewers’ minds immediately was– how to think about this project? It was simple enough to think of it as a work of Soviet nostalgia, and a pointed one at that– after all, it was performed on the cusp of 1996, when the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) was in ascendance and its leader, Gennadii Ziuganov would have won the presidency, if not for Yeltsin’s falsifications, as well as a scorched-earth campaign executed on his behalf by colluding media oligarchs (see artifact #00034). The neo-Communist/Stalinist interpretation of the show seems even more salient, considering that of the 18 performed songs, at least 8 are taken from Stalin-era films, including two from Cossacks (which was explicitly denounced by Khrushchev as the apogee of Stalinist dishonest filmmaking). Moreover, all but three of the songs originate as stylized folk tunes, and as such they seem indelibly connected to the Soviet Party rhetoric of celebrating the “workers and peasants” supposedly in charge of the socialist state.
Running counter to this revanchist interpretation of Old Songs is the thoroughly ironic aesthetics of the project. It was produced and written by Leonid Parfenov and Konstantin Ernst, who in the 1990s were liberal, post-modern aesthetes. As one of Russia’s foremost popular documentary filmmakers, Parfenov in particular always was (and remains) fascinated by memory-work and has always experimented with playful appropriations of past images and styles. That playfulness dictates how the popstars appear in this TV special. In the 1990s, all of them were key players in the post-Soivet celebrity music industry that hyped up their capitalist glamour and naked sex appeal. On Old Songs, these popstars dress up in haphazard high-Soviet drag, which never for a second lets us forget that their performances are not meant to read as straight-faced performances of “the most important” old songs about love on collective farms and frontline service during the War. In the selected clip, we can see the TV special’s ironic style on full display, starting with the tone of the narrator and ending with the sexy leather boots on the legs of the “collective farm girls” who sing the show’s first tune– a (genuine) folk song set on a collective farm, which comes off as entirely incongruous with the singers who sing it.
The argument that Old Songs invites– does it stay at the level of ironic play, or does revanchism become the real meaning once the post-modern games are over?– is the kind of argument that regularly dominated the discussions of Russian cultural critics and public intellectuals in the 1990s.

Geography: Place Of Origin

Moscow

Associated People

Apina, Alena, Gazmanov, Oleg , Agutin, Leonid, Dens, Lada, Sukachev, Garik , Makarevich, Andrei, Orbakaite, Kristina, Presniakov Jr., Vladimir, Alibasov, Bari, Rotaru, Sofia, Kirkorov, Filipp, Malinin, Aleksandr, Sviridova, Alena, Leshchenko, Lev, Na-na, Dolina, Larisa , Otieva, Irina, Mazaev, Sergei, Fomenko, Nikolai , Rybin, Viktor, Nikolaev, Igor, Varum, Anzhelika, Titomir, Bogdan, Rastorguev, Nikolai, Yakubovich, Leonid, and Yakovlev, Yuri

Geography: Place Of Focus

Russia

Bibliographic Reference

ORT, Dec 31, 1995