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79 3 The Rebirth of Russian Comics Perestroika and the “First Wave” of Komiks When the fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev—the first Communist Party general secretary born after the Revolution—assumed power in March 1985, few predicted the depth of change the Soviet Union would undergo in six short years, leading to its collapse and the restoration of Russia as a quasicapitalist , quasi-democratic country. Gorbachev’s policies of a new engagement with the West, ending the disastrous military venture in Afghanistan, economic reform, and loosening of censorship transformed Soviet society and opened vast new opportunities for (sub) cultural activities long suppressed . The era of Perestroika (“restructuring”), for the first time in six decades , offered comics the chance to come in from the cold. Soviet publishing reaped the rewards—and bore the brunt—of Glasnost (“openness”), Gorbachev’s radical new policy of free expression in the media. Hitherto taboo topics—including criticism of the party—were now permitted , the better to rejuvenate the culture, face up to the mistakes of the past, and build a more transparent society.1 Nothing like this had been seen since the 1920s. To this end, from 1986 onward the Soviet press and book market was increasingly liberalized; the first cooperative publishers appeared in 1987, and by 1990 almost a tenth of all books were produced by nonstate publishers .2 Following global norms, these presses favored consumer demand over ideological prescription. And the Russian readership made its desires clear: at first the forbidden works of the past (Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn) and, as the decade wore on, “trash” (Western genre fiction, self-help). As Lovell noted, “The Soviet people was rather more concerned to develop a mass culture than to plug the many gaps in its knowledge of high culture” (76). 80 Historical Background KOM In any case, almost immediately after their implementation, Perestroika and Glasnost led to the beginnings of a Russian comics industry, which took root through the efforts of a young staff artist at a popular entertainment weekly, Vecherniaia Moskva (Evening Moscow). In September 1988, Sergei Kapranov,3 a lifelong dabbler in comics, approached the VM editor-in-chief Alexander Lisin for permission to found a “Komiks Klub” of artists and to introduce comics stories to the magazine . Lisin agreed, and an invitation to artists soon appeared in the weekly. This announcement attracted trained artists, rank amateurs, closet comics fans, and the curious. The club started meeting on Thursdays at the VM offices. KOM, the first collective of Russian artists convened to produce comics works, would eventually include Askold Akishin,4 Dmitry Spivak, Andrei Snegirov, Andrei Ayoshin, Alexei Kapninsky, Igor Kolgarev,5 Yury Zhigunov, Sasha Egorov, Mikhail Zaslavsky, Ilya Voronin, Konstantin Yavorsky, Ilya Savchenkov, Yury Pronin, Olga Kozlenkova, Alexei Iorsh, Alim Velitov, and the oldest, Vladimir Spiridov.6 KOM material began appearing in late 1988, within the pages of the magazine and as supplements. The stories ranged from short gag strips to three-page narratives. Some featured continuing characters such as Bovik (a trouble-making kid) and Barik (a puppy). Though some of the works were “kid-friendly,” and all were humorous, many seized the spirit of Glasnost to deal with adult themes, mock social institutions like the family (Kolgarev’s “Hearth and Home”), or address “problematic” areas such as alcoholism, the superiority of Western consumer products (Savchenkov’s “Gum Made in the USA”), and AIDS (Sviridov’s “The Golden Lie”). A casual attitude to sex also figures in some of this material, as seen in Kolgarev’s “The Little Fish,” in which two fishermen (inadvertently) undress a nubile snorkeler by hooking her bikini. In content and form, these early KOM works reflected a more Westernized approach to sequential storytelling. And by Soviet standards, they were indeed rather bold. Savchenkov’s “The Kids” (Malchiki) pushes the sociopolitical critique further than most. In eight brisk panels, the artist tackles class differences in a supposedly classless society. Marinka and an unnamed boy are playing in a sandbox, when the stylish Vadim appears. A privileged son of the nomenklatura, he shows off the extravagant presents his father has brought him from France: a jacket and a walkman . He boasts of the new videocassettes his family received, and invites Marinka to come watch them. She accepts, leaving the other boy to exclaim, “But Marina, what about our sand castle . . . ?” Walking off with Vadim, she replies, “Ah . . . you’re boring!” The boy then attacks Vadim, who calls out, “Papa-a-a-a!” The final panel shows the...

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