Overkill: Sex and Violence in Contemporary Russian Popular Culture

Preface

PREFACE The average human body contains between five and six liters of blood. The average Russian novel and film contain far more. Nor is blood the only bodily fluid that threatens to spill out onto the page and the screen: contemporary Russian books, films, and televisions shows abound with beautiful women who are sexually available by definition—indeed, that would often appear to be their primary narrative function. Yet just twenty years ago, this was not at all the case. Late- and post-Soviet culture, in opening itself up to sex and violence, adopted an aesthetic of boundlessness. This most recent Russian popular culture has had many virtues, though restraint has not been among them. The culture’s focus on sex and violence did not arise in a vacuum, and it reflects the very real changes that have happened in recent years; yet these preoccupations suggest something more than a simple response to changing realities. Both the unrelenting excess of recent Russian popular culture and the periodic decrying of perceived lapses in morality and taste are part of a process that has defined the field of mass culture and entertainment in the post-Soviet period, particularly in the 1990s. This process simultaneously thematizes and evokes anxiety about the fate of the nation, identifying both entertainment and truth with the pessimistic and the extreme. Contemporary Russian slang suggests a number of terms to characterize this cultural moment; for the convenience of the English-language reader, I have chosen to call it overkill. In the last decade of the twentieth century, the people of the Russian Federation had to cope with the multiple and interdependent shocks and traumas of their new social order. In addition to the economic and political hardships of postsocialist life (unemployment, poverty, social stratification, and widespread corruption), the collapse of the seventy-four-year-old Soviet system opened up the possibility that both public and private life could be radically transformed. Russia had lived through such a decade of transformation immediately after the 1917 Revolution, but if both the 1920s and the 1990s were periods of chaos and vast social dislocation, the first post-Soviet decade did not seem quite prepared to present a grand narrative of optimism and progress. After the initial euphoria of the early Yeltsin years subsided, there was little sense that the country’s hardships heralded the advent of a “new post-Soviet man.” The misery of the 1990s was undeniable: ethnic violence , terrorism, sexual slavery, increased morbidity, and organized crime could not be ignored. It would be naive to expect that the media and culture industry would not incorporate these themes, but Russian popular culture of the 1990s went beyond the mere representation of previously taboo subject matter. Explicit sex and violence had an obvious novelty in the late- and postSoviet years, but their pervasiveness as the 1990s drew to a close suggests that novelty alone could not explain the prevailing content and tone of postSoviet popular culture. Rather, Russian popular culture was heavily invested in portraying a dangerous, violent, and cynical postsocialist world. The logic of cultural pessimism demanded a constant intensification of post-Soviet decline, resulting in a popular culture that indulged in the depiction of increasingly ingenious debauchery and crime. In 1995, Daniil Korestkii published a best-selling novel called Antikiller, which served as the basis for Egor Mikhalkov-Konchalovskii’s blockbuster movie seven years later. The novel contains a memorable set piece, only partly (but graphically) reproduced in the film. Watching a man’s severed hand spurt blood on a chopping block in a meatpacking plant, a mob boss decides that human dismemberment is probably a first even for this particular butchery , a longtime site of scandal and crime. His thoughts drift back to an orgy that took place there a few years before, when the plant’s director “demonstrated his male strength” to his guests by penetrating a drunken woman with the help of a bull’s penis, “specially stocked” for that purpose: But that wasn’t the end of it: the girls were placed on the counters with their legs spread, like chicken carcasses, while the guys moved along, trying each one in turn. . . . It was crude entertainment, but fun. (Koretskii, Antikiller 79–80) x Preface Though Koretskii’s fascination with bestiality made him virtually unique among writers, filmmakers, and television producers in 1990s Russia, his penchant for scenes of...