Nostalgia and Criminality: Reconstructing Perestroika in Zhora Kryzhovnikov’s 'Slovo Patsana'

• In Event: Memory and Perestroika: Remembering the Past and Negotiating the Present in Soviet and Post-Soviet Film

Abstract

“A modern nostalgic can be homesick and sick of home, all at once,” argues Svetlana Boym, in her seminal book The Future of Nostalgia, advocating that one’s return to their “homeland” might not cure the said emotional illness. In the context of ongoing war, immigration, sanctions, limited import of foreign media, increasing censorship, and unstable future, both literal and figurative return to the recent pre-war past became impossible for the Russian public. The nostalgia for stability, however, did not manifest itself through longing for the time before full-scale invasion, but rather turned to the period of Perestroika and the 1991 collapse. The catalyst for this romanticization of the late Soviet years was the Russian youth-crime TV show Slovo Patsana (The Boy’s Word – Blood on the Pavement) (Zhora Kryzhovnikov, 2023), which quickly became the most popular media, spawning an active fanbase, and triggering a release of more media set in the same time period (e.g. Kombinatsiya dir. Nikita Vlasov, 2024) So why does this “outbreak of nostalgia,” to use Boym’s words, become directed at the time and place many of the younger audiences have never lived or experienced? This paper will examine how the TV series reconstructs the historical context of Perestroika through the topic of criminality and creates a new form of “imagined community” for contemporary audiences in the turbulent political context of today’s Russia.

Author

• Maria Natalyuk, U of Pittsburgh