Everything, everywhere and after – Weekend – Kommersant
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The Cold War ended when it became clear that any “evil empire” consists of people, and they are all different. Not only faceless masses, peoples, historical forces, but also people – as in one of the most important documentaries of the last thirty-odd years, “Born in the USSR” by Sergei Miroshnichenko. This epic has become a portrait of an empire that has disintegrated into fragments, but still, above all, portraits of specific people. The film “Born in the USSR. 28 years ”was released in 2012, the next one had to wait ten years. Now the next series is almost mounted.
The Seven Years Older project was conceived in 1964 in the UK, when director Paul Almond made a film about seven-year-old heroes from different social strata. Director Michael Apted filmed the same people every seven years: they grew up with the audience and with the country. In 1989, Apted decided to create similar projects in the US and the USSR. Sergei Miroshnichenko was chosen as the director of the Soviet epic, by that time he had already become the winner of “Nika” for the film “And the past seems like a dream …”.
The first film “Born in the USSR” was released in 1990. Twenty seven-year-old children – in Leningrad, Vilnius, Irkutsk, the village of Dievo-Gorodishche, Tbilisi, Frunze, in general, as they once wrote in Soviet newspapers, “in all corners of our vast motherland” – went to first grade. Or did not go, if circumstances did not allow. The country began to shake, and the children, repeating the conversations of their parents, gave an accurate portrait of the time. When asked what adults do, the Leningrad twins answered: “Perestroika.”
Perestroika, reconfiguration, shootout. If we review The Seven Years today, it is clear that the director was interested in the destruction of eras, a failure in a system that seemed eternal. The film began with a musical school, with a metaphor of an out-of-tune orchestra, with children playing different instruments in different classes.
The seven-year-old heroes spoke quite intelligently—and therefore very funny, “in an adult way”—about perestroika, about Lenin, about Gorbachev. “What smart kids,” said British film editor Kim Horton. The British producer, having seen the episode where the children discuss Gorbachev, suspended work and began to find out from the director Sergei Miroshnichenko if he was for Yeltsin. “No, I’m for no one, I’m just a director,” Miroshnichenko explained.
But, of course, in 1990 it was impossible to remain “just a director.” The film “Seven Years” is a story primarily about the country, perhaps that is why the film was shown on Soviet television only once, at three in the morning. There are rich and poor children here, there is a grandson of the journalist who wrote Brezhnev’s memoirs, and a brother and sister leaving for Israel. There are those who go to parades, and those who do not go to school, because they need to help their mother with younger children. Seven-year-olds, following their parents, solved the national question for themselves – and this made the first part of “Born in the USSR” an extremely political film.
Although the next episode, “Fourteen”, which won an Emmy for the best documentary of the year, was no less political. To the question “What do you know about the collapse of the USSR?” a Bishkek teenager answered: “We don’t go through this.” The fourteen-year-old Muscovite reasoned: “We could do without all this, without tanks.” A fourteen-year-old Georgian from Tbilisi, who did not speak Russian in the previous episode, spoke about the consequences of the war: <...> There is no light, and everyone is very cold.”
The world was changing, it was difficult and cold for everyone, the heroes dispersed to different countries, the story became a co-author of the director. The characters were chosen perfectly: each fate told more about the country than volumes of memoirs. One of the heroes, a pupil of the Irkutsk orphanage, came to America, was adopted, but then the new family abandoned him. A girl from a large family, the daughter of a priest, spent her whole life working and caring for her younger ones, her world seemed to have frozen in the century before last, and loneliness for her was synonymous with freedom. All these people who work hard to feed their families, or who have gone to fetch their loved ones, jumping at rock concerts or burying their fathers, going down or up the social ladder – all these people, both at 7 years old and at 28, carried the Soviet matrix .
Sergey Miroshnichenko puts it this way: the heroes were 7 years old before another time came. “They have not yet fully drank the propaganda that began at school, but they have already received a social inoculation – internationalism, kindness, all the best that was in Soviet times. And then another life was superimposed on this matrix, they have this combination – the original matrix and the costume that we put on them. And this Soviet matrix will always shine through, they will look for a society of social justice.” The project, according to the director, is valuable because it shows a picture of the world common to people who were born in the same empire, but found themselves in completely different situations, in different countries, in different lives.
In the last two years, Miroshnichenko managed to buy the archive from the British, the entire chronicle of the Seven Years and the Fourteen Years, everything that was not included in the films. In total, there are now 826 hours of material – Miroshnichenko’s successor will have to spend several months just getting acquainted with the archive.
Miroshnichenko calls himself a “distant relative” of his characters. He is a witness, an observer, not an accomplice; First of all, he is interested in the “chronicle of thoughts” of the characters: he observes how the thoughts of his characters change with the birth of a child or with the death of a mother, with the creation or loss of a family. And, of course, how the thought of the country is changing.
In the next episode, 35 Years, the story will shine just as much as in the previous three: here, according to the director, there will be a “premonition that the world will go through a difficult moment” – although the shooting was completed long before the next historical breakdown.
“Born in the USSR” is a kind of anthropological study, a bit of a soap opera, certainly a political drama, an encyclopedia of unfulfilled hopes. A metronome that counts the breaks of epochs.
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