Perestroika brought an end to censorship and lifted the Iron Curtain, and in the 1990s, led to the introduction of the long-awaited market.
Money, which up till then had, strictly speaking, meant nothing, now meant everything. And the high priests of this cult of cash were the engineers of the 90s: the gangsters and the “New Russians”. Both groups were mobsters, really — the latter were just a touch more humane and refined: instead of Adidas trainers and raspberry-red jackets they wore black Calvin Klein jeans. Russia suddenly switched from a position of “everything is forbidden” to “nothing is off limits”: one sixth of the world’s surface found itself in a state of actual anarchy. The government reacted only to the day-to-day political agenda, and all the rest was just left to its own devices, with the mantra being “grab as much as you can”.
Every Sunday night, as many as 180 million Soviet television viewers–children and adults–tune in Walt Disney’s cartoons. From Odessa to Vladivostok, teen-agers switch on their radios each week to hear the U.S. Top 20 counted down by a disc jockey from Wyoming who speaks fluent, if accented, Russian. And up to 70% of the films showing in Moscow movie theaters are from Hollywood. Now in the center of Moscow, over the head of the statue of the greatest poet, Alexander Pushkin, is a huge Coca-Cola sign. Russia’s greatest cultural father is doomed to stare straight at McDonald’s. Rock’s founding fathers, like Elvis Presley, are as popular as the heavy metal groups Bon Jovi and AC/DC. Margaret Mitchell’s “Gone with the Wind” and James Dean dress-alikes abound, as do Madonna wanna-bes. Many peddlers wear baseball hats, T-shirts and sweat shirts with logos of U.S. sports teams, universities or even the U.S. flag. Teen-age girls with long, stringy hair and hippie-style clothes eat Baskin-Robbins ice cream as they stroll the mall. A Dixieland band plays tunes as Soviet couples dressed in Levi’s or fluorescent warm-up suits wander by. “Elvis is my idol,” says a man, 45, whose long curly hair is streaked with gray. He sees Presley as a rebel. “I’m trying to dress like him because he thought for himself,” “He always did what he wanted to do, no matter what the authorities said. When I was young and these clothes were in fashion in America, the police would give us hell if we dressed like this.” But now, “with my clothes, I want to show the independence of Russian people from the socialist ideology of our Communist Party bosses. It’s my way of protest. The 22-year-old Nikolai Baranov sells Russian souvenirs to tourists–but he looks more like an advertisement for America. With short-cropped blond hair, a U.S. flag bandanna around his neck, black Levi 501 jeans and Reebok high-tops, Baranov could fit in on any Midwestern college campus.“I have an American flag above my bed,” says Baranov. “I like everything American–American philosophy of life, American politics, the American work ethic.
Maybe it’s because that’s where I really want to be.”
