1869, Ep. 155 with Eliot Borenstein, author of Unstuck in Time

9:20PM Dec 5, 2024

Speakers:

Jonathan Hall

Eliot Borenstein

Keywords:

nostalgia for USSR

time travel stories

Soviet nostalgia

post-Soviet uncanny

popular culture

alternate history

Soviet ideology

economic opportunities

crime fiction

literary fiction

historical fiction

digital piracy

sovereign citizens

Putin's brigades

Soviet documentation

Welcome to 1869, the Cornell University Press Podcast. I'm Jonathan Hall. In this episode, we speak with Eliot Borenstein, author of the new book, Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny. Eliot Borenstein is professor of Russian and Slavic studies and vice chancellor for global programs at New York University. His other books include Soviet Self-Hatred, Plots against Russia, Overkill and Marvel Comics in the 1970s we spoke to Eliot about how decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many Russians today still look back to that time as a golden age, how this nostalgia for the past manifests in popular culture through films, fiction and television series featuring time Travel and alternate history, and how even some Russians today refuse to acknowledge their current government and instead insist that the USSR still exists. Hello, Elliot, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you, Jonathan. Very happy to be here.

Well, I'm excited to talk to you about your new book, Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny. And first off, I want to congratulate you. This is your fifth book at the press. We're super happy to be publishing your work, and I'm excited to hear, what's the back story to this book?

Well, thanks. I really enjoy working with Cornell, and I couldn't be happy to have this book come out with you. So this is the result of I've been working on Soviet, post Soviet mass culture for about 25 years, and I tend to just accumulate topics and things that interest me, that I think I could write about, and then start seeing what can cohere into a particular book. In this case, in my head, this is part of a trilogy called Russia's alienations. But, you know, no one wants a trilogy of fresh and scholarly books, so I keep that part larger to myself. The first volume came out last year with Cornell, Soviet self hatred, about identity. This one's about time. The next one that I'm working on now is about geography and melancholy. But in this case, I didn't want to do just Soviet nostalgia, which is a really important topic that a lot of people were working on, and I didn't feel like I had a lot to say about that particularly, but I was noticing the ways in which certain types of time travel stories and interesting relationships to time were functioning in popular narratives in a way that seemed to have real significance for understanding how how People might think of their existence in the post Soviet era.

Okay, okay, so you talk about nostalgia, and we talk about the Soviet Union during that time. You point out in your book that many people downplay the difficult times that they were having in favor of a mythical future, but then once the USSR collapses, the coping mechanism disappears, so that nostalgia for this golden age of the USSR is very prevalent in the works that you researched, works of fiction, works of film, TV shows, things like this. Tell us more about this obsession with time travel back to the USSR as well as World War Two. Tell us a little bit about that as well, and how this manifests in popular culture,

Sure. So you know when, when it comes to the Soviet Union, you're absolutely correct that there was this tendency to downplay the problems of the present and in the name of creating something that in what's called the radiant future, the Soviet Soviet society, Soviet ideology was really very teleological. That is goal oriented. It's something that I think is inherent to most of Marxism, and certainly to Leninism, the idea that you are on this pathway to something better, and if, if the goal is to build something better in the future, that does justify a lot of suffering in the present. And this was something I think, you know, some people may have believed in, but it was also very much a part of the mass culture and a part of the ideology, and also is very available for people who are critical of the of the regime and the ideology to turn into satire, all of these people suffering for for a golden age that's never going to come. The Soviet Union was also very had a very interesting attitude, if you can say a country had an attitude towards time in that the approach of time was very voluntarist. There were also experiments with time zones and the calendar and the work week and even the work day. Time was something that was a resource and sort of malleable. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, things changed drastically. For one thing, I would say, in addition to all of the very important tangible things that people lost in the 1990s largely economic opportunities and and quality of life, I'd say Russians really lost a future. That is, there was no clear future awaiting Russia after 1991 there were liberals who were arguably. Creating a progressive normal country, a democratic country, all well and good, but they didn't have a good track record throughout the 90s of actually getting a lot done, and there wasn't a really well articulated feature that people were supposedly going towards. So the past starts to look really kind of good, and the present was also a problem. The most popular genre in Russia after 1991 and studying a little before them, is, for the most part, very present centered. And that's crime fiction, detective stories, mysteries. But if you think about that's not exactly the most positive, optimistic approach to the present, because if you are immersed in the crime genre, it just feels like people are being offed right and left and everywhere. But this was very appealing for a whole variety of reasons. But even as we continue into the 21st century, I would say that, you know, in particular, writers of what we might call literary fiction, but also people created popular dramas and so on and so forth, they tended to focus more on the past and on the present. The past had had a nostalgic appeal, you could do a lot with it, and also, in many ways, was safer than the present. As things got politically more complicated, though, I don't think that is the main reason that the present got so downplayed. So you have historical fiction, and then you have this thing with time travel. And so there was time travel stories in the Soviet Union, not that many of them, but one of the things that becomes hugely popular is this sub genre of science fiction that we don't have a name for, but we recognize when it's explained, and that is someone who accidentally ends up in the past, or they could also end up in the future, in another dimension, but usually it's the past. And the Russian term for this is papadansi, which describes the people who go to the past, the people who accidentally end up in the past. I call them time crashers for complicated and stupid reasons that I talk about in the book, but it's a way of having something to say that isn't a foreign word. And so I was noticing, you know, and I'm not the first to notice this, how often the time crashers ended up at really key points in Russian and Soviet histories. Certainly World War Two was one of the most popular ones. But also sometimes the Napoleonic Wars, sometimes further back, and a lot of times the Brezhnev era. And this was the, you know, we have this everywhere. You know, you could argue that the genre is perhaps initially American, if the first example people point to is Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. But in the English language, we've never had a need to describe as a genre, because it's never come together as this big thing, whereas it is, it has its own virtual bookshelves and all of the on all of the e book sites and all of that everybody knows about Papa danse. So this is hugely popular. This there's also, you know, amateur fiction, and then, because it's one of the nice things about fancy and science fiction is that these are genres that can move across media. And so while this is primarily a prose phenomenon, there are examples, in particular in television, which means that people who aren't necessarily science fiction fans are also exposed to this kind of narrative, and in particular, with going back to World War Two, it all ends up being very, very ideologically laden, and is obviously, in many ways, a way to comment on the present. Interesting,

interesting. What are some of the most prominent ones that you saw that were of interest to you as far as films?

Well, films are probably a better start, because one of the one of the joys and real annoyances of the work that I do is how much crap I have to read. I mean, most of the stuff that I am writing about is really awful, and so I have to kind of push my way through it. Sometimes it's hilarious. I mean, if it things like, you know, but Soviet tank drivers ending up in mortar fighting on the side of Sauron with the orcs, you know, that's hilarious. And the book covers are amazingly awful and funny, but it's like, each of these is like, 400 pages long, and they're just kind of turgid. But there are some television shows that are also, for the most part, bad but but at least shorter. And so there, there are a couple different there are a couple different mini series about young Russian men who are leading sort of callow, dissolute life, and they end up accidentally being back in World War Two and learning the the real values of patriotism and brotherhood and and how bad Ukrainians are. So there's that. But then there are these two TV shows that I actually enjoyed for the most part, even though they're not, you know, they're not, you know, they're not exactly Russia's answer to the wire or something, that also are time crasher stories. And one of them is interesting enough, a remake of the British television series Life on Mars. So Life on Mars, for many, as many of listeners might know, was a story about a police officer, probably in the early 21st century, who wakes up and suddenly he's in an accident, and suddenly he's in, I think 1970s London. Rev, I think it's London, somewhere in the UK, rather than where he lives, and he's trying to get back. Back, and it's not clear if it's a fantasy world or anything like that. And it's an interesting premise. And a lot of the fun is about the contrast between the present and the past, and how, you know, unenlightened the past seems but this has been adapted in a number of other countries, really badly, in the US, where they had to make to discover that you really are on Mars at the end, rather than just being a David Bowie reference. But also in the Czech Republic. I haven't seen it, I think in Korea and in Russia. And when you when you take this premise and move it, let's say to to Russia and the Soviet Union, it means something so much more than it does in the British case, because in the British case, it's still the same country, granted, there's the whole Maggie Thatcher stuff and all of that. But in the case of this Russian remake, which is called Dark Side of the Moon, Pink Floyd was huge. Dark Side of the Moon A a cop in 2011 that's Medvedev. When Medvedev was president, a cop is in an accident, and he wakes up in in 1979 as a cop, but in the body of his father, which makes things weirder. But also he's in a different country, and it's the Soviet Union and so, so the contrast is really, really fascinating, but at the same time it never, it never allowed stuff to ask the interesting questions, like, you know, are the laws he's enforcing really worth enforcing? He just sort of goes with it. That's the first season. The second season, he seems to wake up back in the present, but it turns out he's in an alternate present where the Soviet Union never ended. And so now it's 21st century Soviet Union, and you get to see this vision of what the world would be like if the Soviet Union hadn't collapsed. It's filmed in Minsk and Belarus, because Minsk and Belarus passes for the Soviet Union on a good day anyway. And there you have this, you have this fantasy of a Soviet Union that's actually thriving while the rest of the world is miserable. And people there, people are trying to sneak into the country and trying to get away from the miseries of France and the United States, and everybody's trying to join the Soviet Union. And it's a wonderful wish, fulfilling fantasy of you know, if only the Soviet Union and the United States could have had their roles reversed in all our stories. If the Soviet Union is doing well, that means horrible things happen to America. They can't both be thriving. So America is going down the tubes. And the same in a series called Chernobyl exclusion zone, about a bunch of obnoxious teenagers who from Moscow who end up going to Chernobyl, and then it turns out they go back to the past, and then they accidentally change the change history. And so now, then the present day, 21st 21st century Soviet Union, the nuclear accident happened in in Pennsylvania and on Ukraine, and the Soviet Union is thriving in America as a hell hole. And I think there's a great deal of satisfaction in seeing an American hellhole.

Now are these available to watch? Like, how did you watch these?

Oh, so Russia is, is kind of the motherland of digital piracy, sure. So it's very easy to get these things through torrents. They're also sites, legal sites you can watch them on, but that's how I found them. And the problem for non Russian speakers is, again, it's most of the stuff that I read and watch is crap. No one's bothering to translate it. There are, there are a couple of novels that I could recommend that are very good, that are dealing with similar stuff, but most of the stuff that I'm writing on is just so bad. I wouldn't, I wouldn't even bother to Google translate it.

Okay, so, yeah, so I know that there are some sites that offer translations for film. Maybe those could be for for English translations. What are a couple of the books that you recommend?

So there is this novel by, I think in English. It's called Evgeny Vodolazkin, V O, D, o, l, a, z, k, i n, called The Aviator, and it is. It's not quite a time crasher thing. It's more of a Rip Van Winkle scenario where this guy is frozen in the 1930s in the Soviet Union and thought out in 21st century Russia. And so the premise is familiar. I mean, this is Woody Allen sleeper, among other things, right? But the contrast is quite obvious. But what's really refreshing about is he doesn't really want to spend a whole lot of time talking about the past and and going on for the Soviet Union. When he's asked questions about he says, Well, you know, the smells were different and, you know, there were different kind of flowers. And then he starts to degenerate. It turns into kind of version of Flowers for Algernon, but it's a really, it's a beautiful novel that is using this premise, but using it to tell to really create this perspective of this character in a much more nuanced way than the stuff I spend more time talking about. Interesting, interesting,

Cool. So thanks for that recommendation. So that's popular culture, that's film, movies, TV shows, but there's also, like an actual, concrete impact that all this fiction has, that you found that there are many older people today who lived in during the time of the USSR, and think that the USSR is still. Going on and they're not paying their electric bills, like that's like they're living in an auction out world. Tell us more about this.

Yeah, yeah, I wouldn't say it's a result of the fiction. I say that they both are results of the same thing, which is a sense of a kind of sense of a malleability of what reality is. And here, what you have is people who will point to a couple things. One, if you think about it, in 1991 when the leaders of the three Slavic republics, Russia, Belarus and Ukraine, met and signed a document saying the USSR no longer exists. Who gave the authority to do that? There were 12 other republics the there was nothing in the Soviet Constitution that said you could do this. Most systems don't have a an exit clause, right? Like this is how you dismantle the system. But so one immediate reaction of that is, like You and what army? Well, that's kind of the point, no army. Why do you get to say this and it and sort of weird, just because someone said there's no USSR. Now there's no us, sir. There are other reasons why there was no USSR. But, you know, there's an argument to me that there was no legal status, no legal justification to being able to do this. So there's that that's sort of the starting point for it. And then it gets to much more Baroque, conspiratorial things, in particular, the notion that at some point the bureaucracy that dealt with passports and birth certificates and things like that, merge with another bureaucracy on migration. And so people are saying, Oh, so now we're migrants in our own country and all of that. And they're pointing out things like, you know, the serial numbers here, they actually mean something weird, and these aren't real passports. And so a few different people on YouTube start talking about how, you know, we why should we believe that this Russian that this Russian Federation is legitimate, the Soviet Union was never legit. Was was betrayed. I declare myself a citizen of the Soviet Union, and therefore, you know, I'm not going to pay my bills. And the appeal is largely, but not exclusively, to old people on pensions. And there's a double appeal there. One is that the most likely to be directly nostalgic for this particular time. And two, they're living on a fixed income, so not paying your electric bills is kind of nice. They're still accepting their pensions, though, right? But this group, really it is kind of a Russian version of a type of mood that exists elsewhere in the United States and in Germany. In Germany, in the United States, the sovereign citizens movement that basically says the federal government has no right to say anything about me. I am a sovereign citizen. Your documents are basically some satanic plot to try to put me into some kind of horrible system. Same thing. They say the same thing in the in the Russian context, and this German organization does pretty much also the kind of the same thing. So it's all kind of familiar with a few differences that the in the in the case of sovereign citizens, they pretty much reject all documentation, right? It's all just about me and God's law and all of that. And in the case of these Russians, they reject Russian documentation, but are practically obsessive about Soviet documentation and so and one of the things they do is the people behind these movements, they sell Soviet internal passports. Internal passports are basically IDs, so you can pay money, Russian money, and as Russian Federation money to buy your Soviet internal passport as a sign that you are not being brainwashed by the satanic government that is putting things in your passport that's there to show that you've sold your soul to Satan and so on and so forth.

That's crazy. Well, that's awfully judgmental of you, but yes, yeah, sorry, it is crazy. No, I'm with you there. It's really fascinating. It's also connected this larger phenomenon. There are all of these really fascinating fringe movements involving grandmas, like, there's this movement run by this man, but it's basically, it's called Putin's brigades, and it's these old ladies who do things like burn pictures of Biden and talk about how COVID is an American conspiracy, and they're going to fight the spell that America has cast in them. And they're mostly like, I think they're in their their their YouTube presence is something people enjoy, something that's laughable, but they're there, you know. And some of these people who are the equivalent of sovereign citizens, they've been involved in crimes and assassination attempts and protests. It's not a significant phenomenon, but it's an interesting

one. Yeah, this is, this is such a fascinating topic, and I'm so glad that you did this deep dive into this time travel obsession within Russian culture. And I want to thank you for writing your new book Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny.

Thank you. This has been a real pleasure.

Thank you, Elliot. That was Elliot Bornstein, author of the new book Unstuck in Time: On the Post-Soviet Uncanny. You can purchase Elliot's new book as an affordable paperback at our website, cornell press.cornell.edu, and use the promo code 09POD to save 30% off. If you live in the UK, use the discount code CSANNOUNCE and visit the website combined academic.co.uk. Thank you for listening to 1869 the Cornell University Press podcast.