2
The Rise and Fall of Sovok
When it came to catchiness, the word sovok had every advantage. First, it involved the repurposing of an already existing word (dustpan). Second, it phonetically resembles the object of derision (the Soviet). Third, and most important, it circulated the same way as the best critical or anti-Soviet cultural phenomena did during Soviet times, as folklore. “Homosos” was the product of a single author, whose tendentious work could not have been all that widely available as samizdat and who, in any case, has neither the moral urgency of Solzhenitsyn nor the inspired whimsy of Vladimir Voinovich (falling uncomfortably, and unproductively, somewhere between the two). Sovok, in contrast, belonged to everyone who used it.
This does not mean that no one has claimed authorship. On the contrary, there are at least four people who are often credited with inventing the term.1 The Soviet singer-songwriter Alexander Gradsky (1949–2021) recalled in a 2009 interview that, at some point in the mid-1970s, he and his friends went looking for a place to drink (his mother and Yuri Shakhnazarov’s grandmother wouldn’t let them drink at home). So they all sat down in a sandbox but didn’t have any cups or glasses. Rather than drink straight from the bottle, they gathered up the sandbox toys that someone had left behind and used them instead: a toy shaped like a bunch of grapes, a little house, a pear… . Gradsky ended up using a toy dustpan with the words “Dustpan. 23 kopecks” on it, which was “the most Soviet possible situation.” Gradsky admits that he cannot prove this story, and in any case, he is not happy with how the word has developed: “It was supposed to be an affectionate nickname. Like an explanation of the hopelessness and senseless of struggling, an attempt, as it were, to invite people to raise their hands and shrug: ‘What are you gonna do? We’re all like that.’ Then some idiots made it an insult. But that’s not what it was.”2
The critics Pyotr Vail’ and Alexander Genis are frequently credited with coining the term, something that Genis categorically denies. Instead, he claims that he first heard the term on Brighton Beach, as an insult describing visitors from the USSR who bought everything they could find, “like vacuum cleaners” (pylesosy), which somehow got shortened to sovki. This explanation makes little phonological sense (how do you get from pylesos to sovok, which have only two letters and no syllables in common?), but at least we can cross Vail’ and Genis off the list of potential authors.
The third potential author (or fourth, if Vail’ and Genis count as two) has the weight of philological authority behind him: the philosopher Mikhail Epstein. After all, inventing words is part of his stock in trade, and he (like Vail’ and Genis) has written a great deal about Soviet culture, which would suggest that unlike in Gradsky’s case, the word sovok would have arisen as part of a larger philosophical or analytical framework. And, indeed, this is what Epstein himself has claimed in numerous interviews and essays. The clearest elaboration of his case can be found in a 2008 online essay, “Sovki i drugie.” He rejects the connection between sovok and its literal meaning (dustpan) at the heart of Gradsky’s explanation: “If we replace it with ‘shovel’ (lopata or lopatka), also used in children’s games, we see that calling people who are Soviet through-and-through ‘shovels’ would be strange and inappropriate.” In other words, the term is based entirely on phonetic resemblance.
According to Epstein, he came up with the term in 1984, when he began work on his book, The Great Sov’—Sov’ being a made-up term for a nation, analogous to Kievan Rus’. Of course, Sov’ was meant to be a stand-in for the Soviet Union, in this case inhabited by sovichi, who were divided into various castes, including the passive, ordinary working people called sovki (the plural of sovok). The book was published in 1988, and in 1989 Epstein read parts of it aloud over the BBC’s Russian service, which he assumes is how the word spread.
All the same, Epstein is not happy with how the word ended up being used; he intended it to be “lyrically ironic,” even mildly affectionate. Because of the mockery and scorn that he feels usually accompanies the word, and quoting Lev Anninsky’s opinion on the subject, Epstein states, “I’ve come to hate this term, and have said so publicly and in print, and would never use the word on my own” (“Sovki i drugie”).
With all due respect to Epstein, it seems more likely that he facilitated the word’s spread rather than definitively coining it; given the number of claims of the word’s earlier use, we are probably faced with a word that arose independently more than once. Epstein’s own explanation of his authorship would support the likelihood that the word sovok could have been invented more than once, since its memetic success appears to be predicated on how much it sounds like the word “Soviet.” The fact that it also means “dustpan” may well be a happy accident. But who, or what, is a sovok?
A Sovok Is a Person, Place, or Thing
The first problem with defining a sovok is that it is actually three things at once: an object (a dustpan), a person, and an entire country. The object is the easiest part, but it is worth noting that there is something appropriate about the fact that a largely derogatory term pertaining to the Soviet Union conjures up images of trash and abandonment, particularly once the Soviet Union was no longer a going concern.
Nowadays sovok as slang for “Soviet” is probably used most often to describe the Soviet Union and the Soviet way of life. When I searched the Universal Database of Russian Newspapers, the term unsurprisingly declined in use in the past decade or so, and when it did appear, it was almost always in relation to the country and system, and not as a description of a person. This makes a great deal of sense when you consider that one of the more prominent concerns of late Putinism is whether or not the Russian Federation, out of nostalgia or geopolitical scheming, is sliding back to Soviet ways (and whether or not that is a good thing). In other words, are the leaders of Russia trying to “drag us back to sovok” or “revive sovok”? Posing the question in this way encodes an attitude toward the outcome; if asked unironically, it assumes that going back to sovok is a bad thing. The object of anxiety, then, is the country, not individual people.
But before we get to people, we should acknowledge an intermediate use for the term, somewhere between people and place. In the 1990s, sovok could be used as an explanatory shorthand for why something is poorly run, or why a person behaves badly. Here sovok describes an ongoing, systemic condition that has an impact on daily life. Detached from a specific object, sovok becomes a diagnosis of a familiar, lamentable condition.
In all these cases (sovok as dustpan, as USSR, and as referent to systemic dysfunction), the word requires little by way of specification. People may argue vehemently about how appropriate it is to call the Soviet Union a sovok, as the writer Zakhar Prilepin did in a 2016 Facebook post generating hundreds of comments. When conservatives and nationalists rage against using the term sovok, it is only a matter of a very short time before the victory over the Nazis is deployed as a rhetorical cudgel against those who would dare be dismissive of Soviet accomplishments.
But the rejection of the word is about pride and moral one-upmanship, not about the definition of the term itself. Prilepin (and the numerous Zavtra columnists who make the same point) wants to cancel out the sovok, eclipsing it with the Great Victory and the very real sacrifices made by generations of Soviet citizens. These are competing narratives, but they are not arguments on substance. When the Soviet Union is called sovok, everyone knows what this means: economic deprivation, administrative incompetence, defective consumer technology, an intrusive public culture, bombastic rhetoric that is easily ignored, and widespread hypocrisy. Of course, this is not the entire story of the Soviet Union; neither is the Soviet victory in World War II.
Calling someone a sovok is another matter entirely. After all, one could theoretically live in a system one despises while rising above its flaws. But the polyvalence of sovok suggests the hegemonic power of the system, and its inseparability from the people who are its product. It is now a truism that, on the whole, Brezhnev-era dissidents were fundamentally Soviet in their anti-Soviet opposition (reliant on the same binary oppositions that operated in the Soviet system, and often just as categorical as the people they opposed). Sovok in its various definitions and manifestations did not describe dissidents per se, but it did recognize the difficulty of escaping Sovietness through simple rejection.
The paradox of the New Man was his dependence on the system to produce him: how could the Old Men create a world that would give rise to New Men? In the late Soviet era, that same paradox reproduced itself, but in reverse: how could the product of the Soviet system reject not only its values but the ways in which this system produced the very people who would oppose it? Sovok answers this question in the negative: it is simply not possible.
Singing a Declaration of War
The idea of the sovok spread throughout the Russian-speaking world largely as oral folklore, gaining greater notoriety when the bard Igor Tal’kov gave it a theme song. In the summer of 1998, he composed “Sovki,” an anthem that he would sing in concerts over the next several years until his murder in the fall of 1991. The original Russian consists of rhymed couplets and quatrains, but my prosaic translation of these excerpts should convey the song’s overall point:
They don’t think, don’t feel, don’t hear,
They can’t see a damned thing.
They don’t love, don’t suffer, don’t search,
Don’t strain their brains
Their hands are shovels, their eyes are coins,
And instead of faces they have square sovki [dustpans].
Sovki, we won’t give you our country!
Sovki, we declare war on you! …
They’re not to blame for their creation.
They were fostered by the authorities,
Who benefit from breeding degenerates,
So as not to accidentally collapse.
What have we come to after twenty centuries,
If all Russia is groaning because of the sovki?
Decades later, viewers watching clips of Tal’kov’s performance of the song on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9hTXmJZR2o) are less likely to notice his political boldness than what now appears to be an awkwardly dated Eighties look, not to mention the fact that the instrumental accompaniment is shamelessly stolen from the 1983 Yes song, “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” already five years old at the time of the song’s composition.
Tal’kov’s anthem declaring war on old-fashioned Soviets who were proud of their isolation from the West looks and sounds formally like the work of someone blindly copying Western models—the very phenomenon hard-liners condemned. The song is a vivid example of the sovok’s inescapable double bind: how do you reject sovok values in a way that does not make you look even more like a sovok?
A Tribute to Sovok of the Week
Given the folkloric origins and unofficial dissemination of the term, it should come as no surprise that definitions of the sovok vary from person to person. What all the definitions have in common is that they focus on whatever qualities the speaker identifies as specifically Soviet and, more often than not, negative or embarrassing. A sovok does not exist in a vacuum; not only is his definition dependent on the attitude of the person using the term, but he is also defined almost entirely in terms of his interactions with the world around him. This is why, despite the word’s apparent “anti-Soviet” flavor, it fits so poorly in terms of the Cold War paradigm that gave us Homo Sovieticus. A sovok is not brainwashed, nor is he a true believer who identifies entirely with the reigning ideology. Such ideas are not just simplistic; they are too focused on interiority.
The natural habitat of the sovok (person) was the sovok (country), formed by and interacting with sovok (the phenomena of the broken systems in which he operated). So let us first look at sovok in terms of consumer culture. Here sovok starts out at a distinct disadvantage, for it is not, technically, the individual sovki who are to blame for the drabness and poverty of Soviet consumer life. But sovki seem to be both entirely at home in their Soviet garb and Soviet decor while also embarrassingly envious of anything perceived as better or finer.
The sovok-as-bad-consumer is by no means the only version of the phenomenon, but it is certainly the one most conducive to relatively good-natured humor. Naturally, such humor made its way to the Internet. For a brief, glorious time in the 2000s, a website established by three post-Soviet émigrés devoted itself exclusively to the topic of sovok. Titled Sovok of the Week, it was located at the now-defunct sovokoftheweek.com domain, which at this point is accessible only through the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. One of its creators, Vadim Jigoulov, self-published a book in 2014, A Record of Interesting Choice: Tales of a Post-Soviet Man in the West, which ended by reproducing a classic Sovok of the Week post: a Buzzfeed-style quiz to allow readers to assess their own levels of sovkovost’ (sovok-ness). As a compendium of sovok clichés, it is invaluable, and so I reproduce it in its entirely:
Your wife’s relatives are coming over for dinner this evening and there are no potatoes in the house. What do you do?
- Don your Turkish-made Adidas knockoffs and head down to the market to buy a kilo of potatoes.
- Don your Turkish-made Adidas knockoffs and lecture your wife about the need to plan ahead for dinner guests before heading down to the market for a kilo of potatoes.
Once you’re at the market, you see two rival potato-sellers whose booths are side-by-side. What do you do?
- Compare prices and quality of goods and then make your purchase accordingly.
- Look to see which potato-seller will throw in a free onion to sweeten the deal.
As the potato-seller is weighing your purchase on a set of rusted scales, her neighbor starts her sales pitch: “Young man! Young man! You should buy my potatoes, not hers. Mine are from Orel!” What do you do?
- Smile and tell the old woman that next time you’ll be sure to buy her potatoes.
- Tell the woman bagging your potatoes to shove off and go buy the rival’s potatoes. Potatoes from Orel always taste better. Everyone knows this.
Your wife has also asked you to pick up a little something from the market so she can make a salad tonight. What do you buy?
- Lettuce
- What’s lettuce?
On the walk home you bump into your friend Viktor Andreevich, who starts telling you about the hockey game he went to last night. What do you do?
- Listen to his story and then ask polite follow-up questions about the score.
- Interrupt him with an anecdote about the time you almost got tickets to see the Czech national team play Spartak.
On Saturday afternoons you like to visit the public library. Why?
- To read current newspapers and keep up-to-date on politics and world events.
- To read back issues of “Sovetskii Sport” [Soviet Sport] from the 1980s and enjoy the 27-ruble kotlety [cutlets] in the state-subsidized cafeteria.
After a long night of drinking vodka, you wake up with a furious hangover. What do you do?
- Take a few aspirin, drink a glass of water, and take a hot shower.
- Drink beer.
While walking through the park on a crisp fall afternoon you spot an attractive young woman sitting on a bench. What do you do?
- Smile and strike up a conversation.
- Warn her that sitting on a concrete bench will make her sterile.
Your friends are sharing photographs from their recent vacation to Bulgaria. What do you do?
- Display interest in their stories and listen attentively.
- Break out the old Soviet proverb: “A chicken is not a bird and Bulgaria is not abroad.”
Your neighbor’s car won’t start and he’s late for work. What do you do?
- Offer to let him borrow your jumper cables.
- Start telling an endless story about the time your car broke down when you were driving your sister-in-law’s stepmother to the airport.
You’re about to dig into a big plate of pasta. What do you put on top?
- Grated cheese and marina sauce.
- Ketchup
You’re riding on the bus when a ticket-collector starts waddling down the aisle collecting tickets. You, of course, don’t have one. What do you do?
- Pay the 25-cent fine and continue to your final destination.
- Get off at the next stop.
A legless war veteran is playing the accordion in a metro underpass. What do you do?
- Give him some spare change.
- Ask him if he knows “Den’ Pobedy” [Victory day]
You are attending a free performance at the local House of Culture. When the piece concludes, what do you do?
- Wait for the conductor to put down his baton and applaud politely while the orchestra takes its bow.
- Immediately start shouting “Bravo! Bravo!” and rush down the aisle to throw flowers on stage pushing the innocents aside.
During the concert intermission, you and your date head to the buffet. What do you do?
- Buy two glasses of champagne and two red caviar sandwiches.
- Split a bottle of mineral water and take the salo [pork fat]-and-butter sandwiches out of your back pocket.
After the buffet, you and your date promenade around the foyer of the concert hall. What do you do?
- Discuss the first half of the performance in a quiet, conversational tone of voice.
- Loudly lecture your date on the architectural style of the concert hall.
While your date is powdering her nose, you wait for her in the smoking gallery near the restrooms. What do you do?
- Smoke a filtered Davidoff and wait quietly.
- Smoke a Belomor Canal [Soviet cigarette brand] and strike up a conversation about America with the foreigners standing nearby.
You need to go to the bathroom but your roommate is using it?
- You patiently wait until he finishes.
- You walk in the kitchen and utilize the sink according to your immediate needs.
In the context of sovok lore, the first thing that is striking about the Sovok of the Week test is that it is so clearly meant to be funny. This is not to imply that the sovok is never a laughingstock; quite the contrary. But even though the sovok is the product of Soviet/Russian urban folklore, he does not usually fit the traditional genres associated with it. As a compendium of foibles, the sovok could reasonably have been expected to join the large cast of characters that populate Russian jokes: the ethnic stereotypes (the Georgian, the Jew, the Chukchi), the trickster/scamps (Vovochka), and the repurposed heroes of Soviet mass culture and propaganda (Chapaev, Shtirlits).
Yet this is not the case. The jokes about the aforementioned characters are not just numerous but represent categories that are endlessly productive. Young Russians today tell and invent jokes about Chapaev while only having the vaguest sense of who Chapaev was supposed to be. But my search for jokes about the sovok yielded only one page with a significant list (http://www.vysokovskiy.ru/anekdot/sovok/). It contains fifty entries, but that number is deceiving; many of them are about the Soviet Union rather than the Soviet person, a few are about dustpans, while others, though meant to be funny, do not match the format of the Russian joke (anekdot) (there are several humorous poems, for instance).
Thus it is telling that this example, though produced by Russian speakers, was written in English and marketed to an English-speaking or bicultural audience, using a form (the quiz) that is widespread both in earnest and as parody. The Russian anekdot is quite different from contemporary American humor, and its resemblance to the joke telling of previous American generations makes it seem dated.3 Since the 1960s, American stand-up comedy has become observational and is generally tied to the persona of the comedian. The Russian anekdot is impersonal and thus portable, continuing to circulate as oral folklore. Arguably, one feature of a sovok could be the insistence on telling and retelling anekdoty, whether the listener wants to hear them or not, while the sovok himself is ill-suited to the conventions of the anekdot genre.
Perhaps the sovok is not a distinct enough character type to sustain an anekdot, in that he is not entirely an other. Given how much of the humor centered on the sovok is about the sovok’s ignorance about consumer culture and taste, and given the timing of the sovok’s dissemination (the late 1980s–1990s), even someone sophisticated enough to recognize the absurdity of the sovok’s reaction would also be perhaps painfully aware of how short a distance they have come from sovok status.
Dressing for Failure
On sovokoftheweek.com, the sovok is surrounded by a set of clear consumer signifiers. Not Adidas but Turkish knockoffs. Ketchup rather than marinara sauce. Salo-and-butter sandwiches brought from home rather than expensive caviar and champagne. Belomor Canal cigarettes rather than Davidoff. All of this could suggest snobbery, but the narrative stance is bemused embarrassment over the “bad” brands rather than crass pride in the “good” ones. In stark contrast to the New Russians, the point is inconspicuous rather than conspicuous consumption. The next step in evolution from the sovok is neutrality rather than garishness, since the sovok’s own attachment to trashy consumer culture, against the backdrop of increasing consumer sophistication, ends up, in a perverse way, as ostentatious. The things that surround the New Russian are unavailable to the “neutral” narrator, while the accoutrements of the sovok are painfully familiar, because the narrator is only a few steps away from an existence that used to be unmarked, but now is unmistakably sovok.
This is why the sovok phenomenon is haunted by so much ambivalence. One wants to reject the sovok as tacky while also retaining an affection for the naive simplicity of a much more straightforward consumer lifestyle. Such simplicity is by no means value-neutral. The late Soviet media and educational system condemned what was called veshchizm; literally “thing-ism,” the word is most commonly translated as materialism, but as a Russian linguistic invention it manages to completely avoid any association with the philosophical materialism so fundamental to Soviet thought (dialectical materialism) (Chernyshova, 53–55; Epstein 1995, 363–64).
Starting with the campaign against the stiliagi in the 1950s, it became important to condemn those who chased after nice clothes and cool gadgets. The rejection of veshchizm combined expedience (there was no way the Soviet Union was going to satisfy consumer demand) with moral superiority (why should mere material objects matter so much?). Though the vocabulary used in the Soviet struggle against meshchanstvo (petty-bourgeois preoccupations) had long gone stale, it did not conflict with an appealing romanticism that could be found in everything from spontaneous gatherings and camping trips to the antimaterialist ethos of Soviet hippies.4 Condemning the sovok on the grounds of sheer consumer tackiness is a tacit admission that having nice material goods is good and that matter matters.
As the references to youth culture suggest, the sovok also had a role in intergenerational conflict; as perestroika wore on, young people were more open in their demands for nicer things, much to the consternation of many of their parents. Moreover, the ambivalence about the sovok—that is, the way in which the sovok is simultaneously embarrassing and endearing—is far more legible in the West if we compare it to phenomena associated with immigration. The cheapness and tackiness of the sovok find echoes in the fiction and memoirs of first-generation immigrants writing about their parents. Of course, the post-Soviet story is, technically, not one of immigration—we are primarily concerned with the culture of people who remained in the Russian Federation after the fall of the USSR. But the experience of the Soviet collapse is comparable to that of emigration, in that the adult citizens of one country (the USSR) found themselves struggling to deal with the new realities of another (the Russian Federation).
When this displacement is confined to the literal, everyday world (that is, stories of once-Soviet people trying to make their way in a no longer Soviet world), mockery of the sovok can cut too close to the bone. Where is the pleasure in making fun of old people whom the world has passed by? A much safer and more reliable source of humor about the gap between sovok styles and the new consumer culture is found in tales of the sovok traveling to foreign lands. After all, one of the joys of travel literature is discovering not just the “natives” of another country but the strengths and foibles of one’s own people that reveal themselves when one is abroad.
We will see our fair share of this at the end of this chapter, when we look at Yuri Mamin’s 1993 film, Window to Paris. For now, the tropes of the traveling sovok are well catalogued in Gennady Belostotsky’s 2009 review of the film Kostya Gumankov’s Paris Love: “Around one-quarter of the film plays out (for the nth time) the arrangements for sending Soviet tourists abroad, with a large part taken up by variations on the theme ‘sovok in Paris’ (sausage and salo in suitcases, the immersion heater in the hotel, the shopping trips to stores that have everything you could want!).”
Though the term sovok was popularized only in the 1980s, the phenomena it named had all been around for quite some time. Mocking someone as sovok only makes sense in the face of an alternative. The Soviet-era traveler with his immersion heater and his canned “Tourist’s Breakfasts” may look pathetic, but is he to blame? Stories like Kostya Gumankov’s Paris Love can turn the sovok of old into an object of bittersweet nostalgia rather than derision. But the sovok rejected by a member of the late Soviet counterculture, a black marketeer/future entrepreneur, or the privileged scion of the well-connected Soviet elite is another thing entirely. That sovok is always backward, and always in danger of being left behind.
The sovok’s plight becomes more pointed after 1991, when sovok-the-country is no more, but sovok-the-attitude and sovok-the-person could not have been expected to disappear as quickly as the system that created them. Now, in one of the many ironies that bracket the rise and fall of the USSR, the sovok would occupy a position homologous to the groups that, in the 1920s, were considered “holdovers of the past” (perezhitki proshlogo), largely people with petty bourgeois attitudes. The 1920s holdovers were bad subjects in part because they placed too much emphasis on wealth and creature comforts; the sovki-as-holdovers are bad subjects in part because they cannot master the codes of the new capitalist consumer culture. Marx defined class in terms of relation to capital, but the bad subjects of twentieth-century Russia are defined in relation to consumption.
This is why so much of the discourse around both the sovok and his subsequent offspring revolves around taste. As Pierre Bourdieu famously argued in Distinction, there is nothing natural about taste; rather, it is a function of cultural capital. The “correct” cultural capital is both signaled and constituted by the possession of “good” taste; while the scope of good taste may evolve over time, the possession of cultural capital allows individuals to develop their taste along with the rest of their class. But perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union, in addition to all of the material and political upheaval they entailed, provoked a crisis of taste. As the borders between Soviet culture and Western mass cultures fell, the values and behaviors of Soviet elites were inevitably challenged. Yesterday’s good taste could be today’s embarrassment.
The sovok is a problem of both value and values, particularly for those who are tempted to condemn him. Looking down on the sovok may appear to be simple snobbery, but it can verge on philistinism: how comfortable should we be when we laugh at people who are unwilling or unable to keep up with the demands of conspicuous consumption? In mocking the sovok, are we implicitly accepting consumer capitalism as the measure of all things?
Accepting the sovok is no less a trap. Does it mean aligning oneself with the self-righteous voices of Komsomol organizers lambasting a teenager for wanting to buy jeans? Or accepting the basic premises of Soviet economics, which neglected human comfort in favor of heavy industry, military buildups, and vague promises of a better future, all undermined by the obvious corruption of the well-connected elites? Or, even worse for members of the Last Soviet Generation, does accepting the sovok mean that their parents’ generation, the “Sixties people” (shestidesiatniki), who talked endlessly about humanism and morality, might actually be right?
The most destabilizing thing about the sovok is that he may simply be a typical member of the late Soviet intelligentsia. This is more or less the case made by Victor Pelevin in his 1993 essay, “Dzhon Fauls i tragediia russkogo liberalizma” (John Fowles and the tragedy of Russian liberalism). Using the British author’s 1963 novel, The Collector, as his point of departure, Pelevin compares the plight of the post-Soviet intelligentsia to that of Miranda, the novel’s kidnapped heroine. Miranda’s complaints about the soulless, money-obsessed people surrounding her remind Pelevin of essays in the (then) contemporary Russian press by outraged and confused intellectuals, whom he also compares to the pathetic protagonists of Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard. This last comparison, while not original to Pelevin, is particularly apt, since The Cherry Orchard is a play about the hapless members of a dying class forced to sacrifice what they thought they’ve always truly valued (the beautiful, the spiritual) for what turns out to be the only value recognized by the world around them—money.
Pelevin cites an essay by Genis, apparently from Nezavisimaia gazeta, but every reference I have found to it cites only Pelevin’s own essay. Therefore, I will use it the same way Pelevin does: as a point of departure. According to Pelevin, Genis took a brief detour into the “metaphysical aspect of sovkovost’”: “Freed from the laws of the market, members of the intelligentsia [intelligenty] lived in an imaginary, illusory world. External reality in the form of the beat cop only now and then would wander into their version lived according to the laws of The Glass Bead Game. Strange, blurry esoteric phenomena with no counterparts in the other, real world were born here.”
Pelevin argues that the sovok is merely a recent name for an old phenomenon, one that in Russia is usually associated with the intelligentsia: a sovok “is quite simply a person who does not accept the struggle for money or social status as life’s goal.” As such, sovok can only be superfluous in the Russia of the 1990s: “Now this nonfunctional appendix of the Soviet soul turns out to be an unaffordable luxury.” His conclusion inevitably leads us to the protagonists of chapter 4: the New Russians: “Of course, the sovok must be displaced [potesnit’sia], but the problem is that his replacement is not Homo faber but rather the dark, criminal guys who can be considered middle class only after a fifth shot of vodka. In addition, the majority of the ideological opponents of sovok can’t seem to understand that being petit bourgeois—and especially being enthusiastic about it—hasn’t gotten any less vulgar due to the collapse of Marxism.”
On the battleground of market capitalism, then, the sovok is a metaphysical conscientious objector. Pelevin’s approach was revived over a decade later (in 2005) by Dmitrii Bykov in an article for Moskovskaia pravda. Expanding on the idea that the sovok lives in an imaginary world, Bykov adds: “His country is imaginary, and that is why romanticism is possible there. Today’s Russia, where there is no place at all for idealism, is a place that the sovok has nothing to do with: now it’s hard to imagine that, for an entire generation, The Master and Margarita was a cultural event, and the Taganka [Theater] was a spiritual luminary.”
All the different understandings of sovok-the-person share a sense of backwardness, of being left behind, but they vary according to the speaker’s attitude toward the nature of the post-Soviet order, the Soviet past, and the extent to which “the Soviet” is identified with something lofty (defeating Hitler for conservatives; “high culture” for intellectuals). Yet framing the sovok as a member of the intelligentsia is at least as much a trap as simply looking down on him as a bad consuming subject. The sovok-intelligent depends entirely on accepting the opposition between market and culture that was so important to the intelligentsia itself. It requires an acceptance of a late-Soviet intelligentsia outlook, one that looks increasingly limited with the passage of time. Are our choices really between the Soviet-style intellectual and the thug? For an answer, we need look no further than the two men who appear to be making this argument. If anyone has had a career demonstrating that intellectuals and the market can come to an arrangement, it is Victor Pelevin and Dmitrii Bykov. Each is hugely popular, and their work is taken seriously in intellectual circles; even when a book by Pelevin or Bykov is raked over the coals, this only shows that ignoring them is not an option.
Neither Bykov nor Pelevin could be called “romantics,” so their defense of the sovok as an outmoded intellectual is intriguing. They were young enough and flexible enough to bridge the gap between the Soviet and the post-Soviet, and to express highbrow concerns with the tropes of mass entertainment. Perhaps for them the sovok is a holdover of a different kind: for writers who have made it big in the post-Soviet world, the sovok is a poignant reminder of those who have been left behind. They never had to face the choice to sell the cherry orchard, but they were old enough at the time to recognize that something important was being lost.
“I’ll Buy the Wife Some Boots”
Pelevin’s invocation of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard to explain the pathos of the sovok is apt for many reasons, not least of which is that it once again connects the sovok with geography. We have already seen that the sovok is forced to share a nickname with his country of origin, suggesting a synecdochal relationship: wherever sovok-the-person goes, he brings sovok-the-country with him. This, too, is a play on classic elements of the Russian national myth, which emphasize that the great-souled Russian is at home only in the wide-open spaces of his motherland. Reaffirming this myth in the 1990s is by no means neutral; it is one thing to trumpet the glories of home when you cannot leave, and another when the entire world is suddenly open to exploration. The post-Soviet traveler who visits exotic Europe or America, only to realize there’s no place like home, is practically its own genre in the first post-Soviet years. Even commercials get into the act. When Lyonya Golubkov, the salt-of-the-earth protagonist of the serialized commercials for the MMM pyramid scheme, uses his newfound wealth to take his brother with him to California for the 1994 World Cup, they are impressed that everything there is not like at home (vse ne po nashemu). But his brother Ivan, in what amounts to their exit interview before leaving the states, declares, “American beer is good. But our vodka is better!”
The MMM ad campaign was a brilliant piece of marketing, exploiting the Russian viewing public’s near-insatiable appetite for soap opera.5 The campaign featured a cast of characters designed to appeal to every significant demographic targeted by the pyramid scheme: the single woman, Marina Sergeevna, who trusts no one; Lyonya Golubkov, the unemployed crane operator; Igor and Yuliya, a young married couple; and the seventy-year-old retiree Nikolai Fomich. The word sovok is never uttered, as is to be expected; it is, after all, a derogatory term. But the aesthetic of the MMM commercials is sovok from start to finish. Everyone wears typical Soviet-style clothes, from Lyonya’s track suit to the pensioner’s shabby coat, and all of them are established as models of audience identification who carefully keep derision away.
Lyonya the crane operator is accused of being a khaliavshchik (freeloader) and an oboltus (lazy, useless idiot); his profession evokes the tropes of Soviet honest labor, but the accusations point to their inverse: the shoddy hackwork of the exertion-avoidant sovok. Lyonya responses by appropriating the language of MMM itself: “I’m not a khaliavshchik. I’m a partner” (MMM’s preferred term for investor). The pensioners unable to find their bearing in the harsh, capitalist 1990s are the epitome of the backward, pathetic holdovers of a bygone era. In the early days of the commercial campaign, all their desires are petty and materialistic, hence Lyonya’s famous initial response to MMM’s promise of a rapid return on investment. With a thoughtful look in his otherwise vacant eyes, Lyonya smiles and says, “I’ll buy the wife some boots …”
Small wonder that the reaction in the mainstream press was so different from the testimonials of MMM’s “partners” themselves. MMM purchased full-page advertisements in the national newspapers, chock-full of testimonials from satisfied investors (whether real or fake is impossible to determine). Op-ed writers had little but contempt for Lyonya and his ilk. The dreams of MMM’s heroes were petty and embarrassing; everything about them was low-class. Presumably, that was exactly the point. Pelevin identifies the sovok with the intelligentsia, but that is by no means the primary understanding of the phenomenon. MMM’s commercial soap opera reproduced the sovki as pure lumpenSovietariat, with gentle humor but little subtlety creating a simulacrum of its target audience as people deserving of both sympathy and success. MMM cast a wide demographic net, but the cultural representations it spread over the airwaves did not include the intelligentsia.
Rich Sovok, Poor Sovok
The most expansive artistic vision of sovok would appear one year before the MMM commercials: Yuri Mamin’s 1993 comedy Okno v Parizh (Window to Paris). A joint Russian-French production (called Salades russes in France), Window to Paris retains some of the sympathy for its subjects shown by Ryazanov in Nebesa obetovannye (The promised heavens, 1991) but with a much stronger satirical bent. And, like The Promised Heavens, its subjects (nearly all sovki) range from crass proletarian slobs to refined otherworldly intellectuals, all while Mamin avails himself of what was already becoming a classic trope, the sovok abroad.
The hero of the film—Nikolai Chizhov, a teacher in a school that has transformed itself into a lycée—is a quirky, charismatic music instructor who wants to bring art and joy to the lives of his young charges (whom school officials seem determined to transform into the business leaders of the future). Wild-eyed and wilder-haired, Chizhov is played by Sergei Dontsov, who, under his birth name Sergei Dreiden, is best known to Western audiences as the Marquis de Custine in Alexander Sokurov’s 2003 Russian Ark. There is an appealing symmetry to Dontsov/Dreiden’s star turns in these two films, produced ten years apart. The title of Mamin’s movie is an obvious reference to Pushkin’s The Bronze Horseman, which describes the creation of St. Petersburg as the fulfillment of Peter the Great’s desire to open a “window to Europe,” while Sokurov’s title suggests a Russia that must close itself off to weather a global catastrophe.
In Window to Paris, Dontsov gives us an intelligent, kind-hearted sovok who can embrace the beauty of the unfamiliar (Paris) while rejecting any suggestion that he abandon his Russian home. Window to Paris ends on a strong note of love for Russia, but it is a clear-eyed love that sees both charm and blight at the same time. In Russian Ark, Dreiden’s Custine is a haughty, Russophobic Frenchman who can see the beauty of the Hermitage’s Western treasures only while rejecting the possibility that Russia has anything of its own to offer. Sokurov’s deployment of Custine is nakedly polemical; the love for Russia embodied in Russian Ark is defensive and reactionary. The best that the West has to offer is preserved in the “Russian ark” of the Hermitage Museum; it is the only “window to Europe” that Russia really needs.
The premise of Mamin’s film is the discovery of a window in a St. Petersburg communal apartment that allows people to travel back and forth to Paris instantaneously, at least until the window closes again for another decade. The movie’s own global distribution traveled a path that was equally magical, playing throughout Europe and the United States to positive reviews. And like the window in the film, Mamin’s own window to international stardom was closed off abruptly. There had been talk of putting Window to Paris forward as the Russian Federation’s nominee for the Best Foreign Language Film in the Academy Awards, but all such hopes were scuttled by the intense campaign of a much more powerful opponent: Nikita Mikhalkov. The chair of the nomination committee stepped down in frustration, to be replaced by Andrei Konchalovsky. Konchalovsky, also known as Mikhalkov-Konchalovsky, is, in addition to being a renowned filmmaker in his own right, Nikita Mikhalkov’s brother. Mikhalkov’s Burnt by the Sun was selected as Russia’s Oscar entry and ended up winning the award.
The irony of Mikhalkov’s triumph over Mamin starts with politics, since the nationalist, anti-Western Mikhalkov edged out a liberal director for an American award. But it does not end there. As we will see in the conclusion, Mikhalkov became obsessed with winning the Academy Award for best picture, producing a mostly English-language, aggressively nationalist melodrama that barely made a ripple abroad. He also made a sequel to Burnt by the Sun, a box office flop in Russia and an utter non-event in Europe and North America. Mamin, who articulated a premise in Window to Paris that naturally left the door (or window) open for a sequel ten or twenty years later, was reduced to unsuccessful attempts at crowdfunding a follow-up in 2014.
Mikhalkov’s combined obsessions with Russian nationalist content and Western validation make him a fine example of a certain type of sovok, bringing together the tacky aesthetics of excess and stereotype with the privileges of post-Soviet wealth. By contrast, Mamin, at least when it comes to Window to Paris, looks like his own sovok hero: underpaid, with few possibilities to take advantage of the new economic and cultural nexus around him, he is obliged to try to crowdfund his sequel, like Chizhov and his students performing on the streets of Paris in the hopes of donations (Dazhunts). Sadly, Mamin was less successful at this sort of fundraising than his characters were.
Mamin’s film never made it to the Oscars; perhaps looking for a window to Hollywood in addition to the Window to Paris is just asking for too much. And in any case, Mikhalkov and Hollywood are a much better fit. Mamin’s film brings its hapless characters to what for Russians is the traditional capital of world culture, all the while embracing their essential tackiness as something almost lovable.6 Mikhalkov’s aesthetic is all about a tackiness that pervades his work while remaining unacknowledged. He wants to make his own War and Peace, but with all the stylistic restraint of Moulin Rouge and the moral nuance of Battlefield Earth. When Mamin’s Russian communal apartment dwellers start hawking Russian chachkas on the streets of Paris while singing “Ochi chernye,” he is inadvertently previewing Mikhalkov’s own strategy for making it in Hollywood.
And this is part of what makes Window to Paris the great sovok text of the 1990s: Mamin’s film is about products of the Soviet system trying, failing, and ultimately refusing to adapt to two different new worlds: post-Soviet St. Petersburg (which has replaced their natural habitat) and Paris (one of the most storied sites of Russian emigration). The window of the title is a magical object that allows for a new spin on an age-old Russian question: should I stay or should I go?7
Chizhov, the music instructor, is devoted to his country’s future in the form of the young children he teaches. Unlike his superiors, Chizhov is more concerned with his pupils’ souls than he is with their job prospects. He is otherworldly even before the window gives him access to another world. Witness his comical, but slightly creepy, ability to make his children follow him wherever he goes when, like the Pied Piper, he plays his flute. Like the Pied Piper, and like so many of the fairies of myth, he could rob his “village” of its future; indeed, when he brings the children to Paris, and they initially want to stay, he very nearly does just that. Instead, he uses both the power of persuasion and the power of his flute to bring them back home, all the while urging them to make their home a better place than it is now. Like the would-be builders of communism who would never actually be the ideal residents of the world they wanted to create, Chizhov knows that the only way he can improve the fallen world around him is to set its young natives on a better path.
Chizhov, then, is Pelevin’s version of the sovok: the member of the intelligentsia who rejects the cash nexus as the be-all and end-all of his life. First, he declines a well-paying gig in Paris because it turns out that it is for nudists and would require him to conduct without wearing pants; then he passionately convinces his young charges that the material temptations of life in France do not outweigh their duty to improve their country. This positive spin on the sovok gives us a charmingly impractical man with an unfailing moral compass, appropriating for the intellectual one of the very qualities national folk mythology usually reserves for the “ordinary” Russian: unsophisticated by a set of standards that are perceived as inherently alien, he wins us over because he has a good heart.
The other adult Russian characters conform much more closely to the less idealized image of the sovok. These are the residents of the communal apartment that houses the mysterious window. Chizhov moves in with them after an elderly woman supposedly dies (she’s actually just gone off for her regular, once-per-decade jaunt to the French capital), and they are as crass and coarse as Chizhov is refined. Rarely speaking in anything lower than a shout, they drink, fight, and, once they find the window, antagonize their French neighbor, who eventually learns a few choice Russian swearwords in order to communicate. Once in Paris, they become a walking, dancing, singing embarrassment: playing the hurdy-gurdy on the street for money, hawking souvenirs, and generally exploiting every Russian stereotype that comes to mind. For them, Paris is not a place of beauty or wonder; it is a collection of easy marks.
They are not the only tourists in the history of art and literature to miss what is right in front of them. In E. M. Forster’s Room with a View, one of the men remarks, “You know the American girl in Punch who says, ‘Say, Poppa, what did we see in Rome?’ And the father replies, ‘Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.’ There’s traveling for you.” But the Russians in Window to Paris take Philistinism to new heights by combining it with a naked greed for consumer comforts. In the film’s most memorable scene, they actually dismantle a Citroën in order to bring it back to St. Petersburg through the window, piece by piece. At another point, the drunken communal apartment dwellers have racked up an 8,500-franc taxi bill, but they manage to pay it by convincing the French Communist Party to lend assistance to this “Russian delegation.” Meanwhile, when their French neighbor accidentally finds herself in St. Petersburg, she may as well have entered the ninth circle of hell: surrounded by drunks and boors, covered in the filth that the city seems determined to heap on her, she ends up in jail, weeping desperately until Chizhov finds and saves her.
Yet embarrassing as her Russian neighbors may be, the communal apartment dwellers manage not to cross the line into pure loathsomeness. On the contrary, they are warm, intermittently fun to be around, and, above all, resourceful. They are picaros, tricksters, and folk heroes. The sophisticated post-Soviet viewer might look down on their bad taste while still smiling at their familiarity.
Sovok without a Home
The protagonist of the 2019 science fiction novel, Famous Men Who Never Lived by K. Chess, is a survivor of an alternate timeline, one of the thousands who narrowly escaped a nuclear apocalypse. A New Yorker now living in a version of the city that is just familiar enough to feel like home and just alien enough to instill in all her fellow Universally Displaced Persons a sense of profound wrongness, she lives a funhouse version of the refugee experience. She speaks the language, but it is full of unfamiliar slang, and the political order of her new world (our world) is incomprehensible. She is always home, and she will never be home.
Window to Paris, with its own fantastic device of instantaneous travel, highlights a motif common to the sovok texts we have examined. When the sovok travels, he is made painfully aware that he is in the wrong place. He needs to be at home, even though his natural habitat no longer exists in its original form. The sovok is always nostalgic, but never entirely at home. For Chizhov, return home is a geographic imperative—he blithely brainwashes his students and hijacks a plane to make it happen. But it is also a question of temporal deferral. His old world is gone and, for Chizhov, that is not entirely a bad thing, but the new world will probably only be ready when he is no longer around to enjoy it. This makes him a parody of both the New Soviet Man and the Bolshevik dreamers who were trying to pave his way. The degraded offspring of the man of the future is stuck being a holdover from the past.
The sovok, like the “new” Soviet man, had a built-in limit on his life span. As the Soviet past began to recede, the culture found new ways to stigmatize categories of “backward” people without anchoring them to a specific, now vanished, moment in time.