"The Wages of Syncretism: Folkloric New Russians and Post-Soviet Popular Culture"

sociopolitical and historical concepts, or on real-life personalities or groups, but on the representations of these phenomena in mass culture. From the 1960s on, the officially defined values of Soviet civilization were increasingly "delivered" into the Soviet popular consciousness via mass-produced texts, especially film and television narratives. The 1960s and 1970s in the USSR saw not only the coagulation of a way of life (social, material, and intellectual) that provided ample fodder for satire, but also the appearance of a series of texts that provided source material for the topical anekdot cycles that to this day constitute a large portion of the Russian jokelore corpus. El'dar Riazanov's 1962 film, Hussar 's Ballad (Gusarskaia ballada), for example, spawned a cycle about fictional nineteenth-century ballroom lothario Lt. Rzhevskii.30 Vitalii Mel'nikov's 1966 film Head of Chukotka (Nachal'nik Chukotki) helped to inspire a cycle about the Chukchi, one of the "small peoples" (malye narody) of arctic Siberia.31 Shtirlits, the protagonist of Tat'iana Lioznovo's 1973 television miniseries, "Seventeen Moments of Spring" ("Semnadtsat' mgnovenii vesny"), became the hero of an enormous cycle. Two animated series from the late 1960s and early 1970s-one featuring Winnie-the-Pooh (Vinni-pukh) and Piglet (Piatachok), and the other, Crocodile Gena and his furry, big-eared sidekick, Cheburashkagenerated large cycles that are still popular today. The last Soviet visual text to inspire a significant cycle was Igor' Maslennikov's 1979-86 series of television films based on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories. The most famous cycle of the anekdot's golden age, of course, was inspired by Georgii and Sergei Vasil'evs' 1934 film Chapaev, which enjoyed a renewed surge of popularity beginning with the 1964 celebration of its thirtieth anniversary, after which the film was frequently shown on television and in children's matinees.32 The Stagnation-era anekdot's intertextuality was not limited to cycles that explicitly refer to concrete cultural texts. Many political anekdoty of the time play off official textual representations in much the same way as the above-mentioned "cultural" cycles did. The Lenin jokes of the early 1970s, for example, typically targeted not Lenin's political activities or policies, but the state's packaging of the 1970 Lenin centennial celebration.33 29See http://www.podolsk.ru/newsf.php3?detail=n985061017.news. 3Later, Rzhevskii was often depicted in encounters with another fictional character, Natasha Rostova from Tolstoy's War and Peace, Sergei Bondarchuk's famous screen adaptation of which appeared in 1966-67. 31There is no consensus on the Chukchi cycle's origins. A recent television retrospective of Soviet history named 1972 as the year of the cycle's birth, claiming it was most immediately inspired by a popular song of that year by an indigenous singer from the Chukotka region named Kola Bil'da. The chorus of Bil'da's song went: "An airplane's all right, but reindeer are better!" (Leonid Parfenov, producer, "Namedni-72," NTV, 1998). 32The fact that three of the cycles mentioned-Rzhevskii, Shtirlits, and Chapaev-grew out of films about the Russo-Soviet military past indicates the prominence of that topic in Soviet cultural discourse of the 1960s and 1970s, and also the largely masculine associations of the anekdot (associations that inform the New Russian cycle, as well). 33One of the best-known Lenin jokes of the Stagnation period, which saw both the Lenin Centennial (1970) and the fiftieth anniversary of the October Revolution (1967), was a list of commemorative souvenirs: talcum powder ("Lenin's ashes"), cologne ("Spirit of Lenin"), a triple-wide bed especially for newlyweds ("Lenin is always with us"), and This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:41:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms The Wages of Syncretism 45 Brezhnev jokes, too, were inspired as often by the various composed mythologizations of the general secretary's persona as by the political decisions and actions of his administration. The cumulative model of Russo-Soviet history, society, and national character represented in official texts of all varieties provoked, in response, a parallel model, represented in anekdoty. A key question for an analysis of the New Russian cycle is to what extent the cycle also represents a popular collective critical engagement with mass media images and discourse, at a historical moment when all cultural forms are negotiating an ideological interregnum. The Soviet anekdot benefited from having a clearly identified, predictable font of texts to which to react. A related issue, also having to do with intertextuality, is what existing anekdot cycles, motifs, and protagonists were conscripted in the creation of the New Russian cycle? Visually the New Russian is among the most recognized Russian social types of the 1990s: he sports a flat-top buzz cut (strizhka-ezhik);34 he is clean-shaven; his neck is adorned with gold chains; he is thick (muscular or corpulent) in the torso; and his sports jacket is crimson (the proverbial malinovyi pidzhak). He carries a cell phone and/or wears a pager.35 He and his brethren communicate using distinctive slang, as well as a nonverbal lexicon (most famously, the "fanned fingers" [pal'tsy veerom], in which the index finger and pinky are extended, with the other fingers tucked under as in a fist). By far his most indispensable accessory is his car, almost always a Mercedes-600, occasionally a BMW, very rarely a Jeep Cherokee or a Cadillac. He has bodyguards and travels freely around the globe. The anekdot-al New Russian is a type defined by a cluster of behaviors and accessories associated with a single demographic category: the rich. Other standard attributes of the type-stupidity, violence, drunkenness, amorality-are important, but secondary, even optional, but material wealth is de rigueur. The major source of criticism, again, as with nouveaux riches in other contexts,36 is the "old money," represented in the case of postSoviet Russia by the impoverished intelligentsia, which previously held, if not enormous amounts of material wealth, at least a measure of discursive "capital" in Soviet Russia and-just as important-in the West's image of Russia. It is this intelligentsia perspective that is responsible for the jokeloric New Russian's lack of grace and refinement; the jokes, writes Levinson, are "the views of those who are cultured, but poor, toward those who are rich, but uncultured."37 Like other national varieties of nouveaux riches, the New Russian is not merely wealthy, but incompetently and vulgarly wealthy: condoms in the shape of the heads of Lenin himself ("Lenin in you") and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia ("Naden'-ka," a pun on the Russian diminutive for Nadezhda and a colloquial way to say "put it on!"). 34The Moscow English-language satirical weekly The eXile coined the term "flatheads" to describe young, thuggish New Russians. 35He has not necessarily mastered the use of them, however: A New Russian says to his wife in surprise, "My Tamagochi is pregnant!" "What?" "Look!" She looks at the display screen, which reads "I'M PREGNANT," and says, "That's not your Tamagochi, stupid. That's your pager!" 36The French rendering of the term "New Russian"-nouveau russe-is a play on nouveau riche. The Russian transliteration of the French-nuvorish-was used before "New Russian" came into common usage. 37Levinson, "'Novye russkie' i ikh sosedi po anekdoticheskim kontekstam," 385. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.35 on Mon, 29 Aug 2016 04:41:40 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms