Rita Ruduša, the screenwriter of the film “Homo Sovieticus”, and Ivo Briedis, the director, are also important participants in the film.
Screenshot from the movie “Homo Sovieticus”
16:38, September 4, 2021
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Sanita Grīna, “Culture Marks”, JSC “Latvijas Mediji”
The documentary “Homo Sovieticus”, although completed last year, premiered due to the pandemic on August 23, the anniversary of the “Baltic Way”, and a day when, driven by selfish populists, several thousand Latvians protested against compulsory vaccination against Covid-19. professions and the “situation in the country as a whole”.
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In the context of the film, both events seem significant, as director Ivo Briedis and screenwriter Rita Ruduša investigate why 30 years after the collapse of the USSR some of us feel nostalgia for the past and long for a strong hand government, and what to do with it?
The film was made in the studio “Mistrus Media”, one of the thematic niches of which is high-quality research documentaries on socially relevant topics, revealed through an original personal prism. The studio’s range of documentaries in recent years includes the successful “Spy Who’s My Father” (2019) and “Lustrum” (2018); Homo Sovieticus is a useful addition to the same conditional collection. Its producers are Gints Grūbe and Elīna Gediņa-Ducena, co-producers of the film studios “Monoklis” (Lithuania) and “Frame Films” (Czech Republic).
The author of the screenplay, Rita Ruduša, does not require introduction – her professional biography includes work in the newspaper “Diena” and radio “Brīvā Eiropa”, the Open Society Foundation and the Baltic Media Center of Excellence, but most recently – the position of the director of the Latvian Television Programs Department.
Director Ivo Briedis, on the other hand, has already considered issues related to the themes of “Homo Sovieticus” in the documentary film “National Touch” (2014), which also lacked paradoxical observations. The operator of “Homo Sovieticus” is the young talent Mārtiņš Jurevics, whose camera visually expands and continues the themes of the film, framing them against the still present architectural and everyday Soviet heritage (gigantic block houses that fill the entire frame, unusual panorama of Riga with the Academy of Sciences a high-rise building in the center, a market stand in Armenia, where a VEF radio can be bought, and a militia “timber”, etc.).
Mention should also be made of the composer Martins Bjalobžeskis from Lithuania, whose sound score creates claustrophobic, threatening, thriller-worthy moods.
Let’s think about ourselves
The work on the film “Homo Sovieticus” has lasted for several years, its first impetus came from the editor-in-chief of the portal “Delfi” Ingus Bērziņš, who at the age of 15 was one of the participants of the Russian TV journalist Vladimir Pozner’s talk show in 1991. young people discussed the future of the Soviet Union.
Meeting with several participants of this show 25 years later forms the core of the film, but during the making of the film it turned out that the so-called homo sovieticus, once ruthlessly defined by the Soviet writer and dissident Alexander Zinoviev, is a much broader phenomenon. After all, the film is conditionally made up of three parts: in the first part, Briedis and Ruduša talk about their experience of growing up in the Soviet Union, and about an important topic that is still largely taboo in our society – collaboration of their families .
In the second part, the authors try to describe homo sovieticus on a larger scale, meeting both their peers, the already mentioned participants in the Pozner discussion, and researchers of this phenomenon; while the third expands the horizons even further, capturing the manifestations of Soviet thinking in the modern world, beyond the territory of the former Soviet bloc, or, in the words of one of the film’s heroes, looking at the consequences of “Soviet biomass” entering the West after the collapse of the USSR. The structure of the film thoughtfully supports its central conclusion – self-reflection is the first step in getting rid of the Soviet mentality.
From the very beginning of the film, Briedis lists the qualities that the Soviet man has (and what he sees in himself) – the desire to hide, shrink, remain silent, slander – qualities that are useful for survival in totalitarianism, but become an obstacle in democracy. This description is later supplemented and systematized by other actors in the film. Sociologist Lev Gudkov talks about adapting to a repressive system that forces a person to relinquish responsibility, to separate himself from the state.
These mechanisms of the psyche seem to be closely related to the mentality of the victim – the feeling of helplessness and loss, trapped in the past. Not surprisingly, after living in an artificial state of war for decades, life in peace becomes unbearable and there is a need to find a new enemy. One of the most striking examples that illustrates this thesis in the film is the Latvian fighter from the Donetsk Republic, who admits that when he joined the Ukrainian separatists, he finally felt alive and necessary again.
The past is the present is the future
Homo Sovieticus is a great expression of the Soviet mentality today, but it pays little attention to the reasons why people long for immersion in Soviet nostalgia and how they have lacked to adapt to life in a democracy in 30 years. To reduce it to a failure to take responsibility and to understand that the country is made up of you would be too simplistic an answer. It seems that the set should also think about the inability or fear to demand responsibility from the state – as Gudkov says, individual change is not enough, change must be institutional.
In the film, American historian Anne Aplbaum says that people need an alternative that provides a sense of security and unity. It is obvious that the march of 9 May, the movement of the “immortal regiment” is a way for homo sovieticus to generate the lack of sense of community and security, or at least its surrogacy, as evidenced by the great emotionality and affect associated with the film.
We would have liked to hear the heroes of the film reflect on this phenomenon as well – now these shots serve as more than a clear proof that the Soviet mentality is still alive and even sprouting new shoots. Homo Sovieticus also outlines a number of paradoxes that raise questions about how the negative qualities of the Soviet mentality could be transformed into a positive effect. For example, passivity is becoming a relatively useful feature of Armenian Tigran’s answer to the question of how to fight corruption – simply by not engaging in it.
However, the film’s focused view and ability to preserve it is by no means a disadvantage; the fact that the topic has a place to expand only confirms its importance and complexity – it is woven thread by thread. Homo Sovieticus offers some such threads. We can each continue the topic in reflection and in patient, sensitive conversations with our loved ones, encouraging and reminding us of our inherent capacity and the fact that taking responsibility is part of the growth – on a personal and societal level – and it can be a very enjoyable process. I would like to believe that it is not too late.
Themes
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