What’s engaging about the 2010 documentary, My Perestroika, and that was largely absent from my own visit to Russia isn’t so much the views of Moscow but the captured moments of real Russians, those not selling anything to tourists or trying to be pleasing in the hope of gaining a tip. The film follows a handful of schoolmates, from their childhood years when they were drilled on procedures in the event of a nuclear attack from the enemy (the United States) and sang patriotic songs in Red Square, through the period of perestroika—the economic and political forms that predated the fall of the Soviet Union and the establishment of modern Russia—to today. Some are better off; others long of the days when careers were spent at one place and retirements were good. Some can’t quite determine how their lives turned out as they did; others realize that they wouldn’t have thrived as they had had the system remained the same.
I imagine a filmmaker could take a handful of American adults who grew up in the ’70s and make a very similar film about them. Some do well out in the world from a monetary point of view; others won’t. Stable careers and even better retirements are part of our past, too. The only difference might be that many of our apartments aren’t quite so small or nearly so crammed as those of many of the subjects of the Russian film.
Moscow always seems a bit rundown, and I am mindful that Russia long felt like a less-glamorous cousin of Europe. A long-awaited more open society hasn’t quite generated freedom for everyone. On the day that I write this, the New York Times reports the house arrest of an opposition leader. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
© Lori Tripoli