Where Did All the Normal People Go?: Another Look at the Soviet 1970s

Once upon a time Soviet cinemas were full of almost superhuman heroes—men and women who conquered the Arctic, survived against all odds in brutal battles, and overcame insurmountable handicaps in their service to society.¹ The world off-screen was more mundane: people trying their best to survive, live, and participate in the Soviet project. The extraordinary illusory world on screen offered guidance, escape, and inspiration, not a mirror of their ordinary lives. Then came the 1970s and the new Soviet realism. The film of the decade, Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears, owed much of its success to the fact that people could find themselves in its flawed heroes. They recognized the brownish color of the wallpaper, the standard issue furniture, the layout of the apartment, and even the crockery used in the kitchen. Ordinary lives had, at least to a certain extent, made it onto the screen.

Had Soviet cinema really converged with Soviet society? If we look closely at some of the texts that have recently appeared on life in the Soviet 1970s, one has to wonder how much "ordinary life" remained in the real world as opposed to "on screen." Over the last two years, the early messengers of what promises to be an avalanche of Soviet 1970s studies and memoirs have appeared in print, giving a tantalizing glimpse of a period full of contradictions and sketching a picture of late socialist Soviet life that oscillates between mind-numbing boredom, frantic activity, and unintended hilarity. Rather than examining these works individually, it might be worthwhile to look at their common themes, assumptions, and conclusions. It will become apparent that it is in the sum of their parts rather than separately that they have most to offer for our understanding of late Soviet society and life.

While taking different viewpoints and representing different genres, Il´ia Kabakov, Vasilii Boiarintsev, Sergei Zhuk, Chris Ward, and the contributors to the volume Eti strannye semidesiatye seem to agree on one thing: ordinary life was on the retreat. Indeed, ordinariness appears only as the "other" in these studies. The protagonists of these stories all have some kind of extraordinary racket going on, in one way or another. They are underground artists, dissident writers, adherents of pop culture, Ukrainian nationalists, dealers in deficit goods, perpetrators of more or less serious crime, fanatical bitlomany, self-proclaimed hippies, or engaged in some other kind of pursuit that clearly deviated from Soviet norms—norms that, despite widespread infractions even in earlier years, had hitherto served to signal what was "normal" and "ordinary." That leaves Don Raleigh's account of the Soviet Baby Boomers as the exception to the rule. His generation, whose early adulthood coincides with the years of so-called stagnation, live in ordinary Moscow and Saratov apartments, work in ordinary, well-regarded jobs, and have normal ambitions and leisure pursuits. Yet they all went to an elite...