Zerograd: Life in Soviet Surreality

The Soviet Union’s control over its population began to wane in the late 1980s, ultimately falling by the end of 1991. Despite then-president Mikhail Gorbachev’s efforts to save the Soviet political and cultural systems through reforms, the Soviet empire dissolved. One such effort was his Glasnost policy which loosened cultural censorship—the hope being the Soviet Union could restructure itself and sustain control and relevance if it were more in touch with its populace. Because of this period of semi-freedom, directors who had been aching to make films that reflected their cultural experiences and political views had an opportunity to do so. Before, a studio/director submitted their scripts and awaited approval from the State Committee for Cinematography, which wouldn’t approve anti-Socialist scripts or work that disparaged the Soviet government. This loosening of censorship afforded a small window for satirical filmmaking to emerge in the final years of Soviet rule.

Taking advantage of this period of artistic semi-freedom, director Karen Shakhnazarov made Zerograd in 1988, a Kafkaesque satire of life under authoritarian rule. Aware of Gorbechov’s attempts to save the dying Soviet Union, Shakhnazarov made a film that drew attention to the surreal nature of a government actively attempting to resuscitate what was already on its way out. The narrative pays special attention to the fracture between one half of the population—more often than not older people—who clung to the dying empire as it fell and the other half who rejoiced in it. The film locates this fracture by exploring the dissemination of false realities and histories meant to manipulate a population into a dreamlike submission.

The film follows Alexei Varakin (Leonid Filatov), who is on a business trip from Moscow to visit an unnamed, smalltown mechanical plant to discuss an alteration his company would like to make to the air conditioning units the factory has been supplying. His plant wants to swap a backing on the units to cut costs. That’s it—a simple trip with a clear goal. From the onset of stepping off the train into a fog-drenched courtyard of this drab, unnamed town, something is off. No people are waiting to board the train and Alexei is the only passenger departing. The train arrives  out of frame, its home unclear, and its destination unseeable as it slowly departs and disappears into a thick fog. Alexei walks into an entirely new world.

Throughout the film, his simple efforts are thwarted at every turn, each as distorting and abstracting as the last. Once at  the mechanical plant, Alexei is confronted by a nude receptionist in the manager’s office. He averts his attention. He looks for comfort in the discomfort of other office workers passing through the office but finds no discomfort. When he eventually enters the manager's office he finds the courage to mention the receptionist and the manager shows no emotional signs of surprise or concern. The information is just new. He gets up to have a look for himself and after a few seconds of looking returns to his desk and resumes their conversation. Alexei thinks this a solitary, odd encounter. Perhaps it’s a cultural difference not worth interrogating. When he returns to his hotel he talks to a contact back home and laughs at the situation. What happened was so left field that he writes it off as an odd occurrence that he’ll soon not have to deal with. He turns a blind eye to it.

Not too dissimilar to Soviet Era authoritarianism, an individual calling attention to cultural dissonance is an issue. After being interrogated for his involvement in the suicide of a chef, who killed himself after Alexei wouldn’t eat a cake the chef made in his own likeness. Alexei tries to return to Moscow; the commonness of this surreal world is too much to bear. No trains depart until the morning, so he hops in an idle taxi and asks to be taken to the nearest railway station. The illusion of freedom grows more restricted as Alexei attempts to leave. The cab moves down a two-lane highway and immediately stops in the middle of the road, miles away. The driver says he can’t drive further and gestures towards a road sign indicating as much. Alexei must walk the rest of the way, the driver says. 

After walking down the road for what seems miles, the road ends, as a hedge has emerged out of the middle of the road, melding in with the surrounding forest. What seemed a functioning freeway just moments before ends abruptly, without warning, consumed by nature in a seemingly  manicured way. Just out of sight, Alexei spots a home hidden behind a spattering of trees. Once in the house, he’s met by a man who introduces the building as a regional museum and he its caretaker. Alexei inquires about the nearby rail station and the man says there are none. There aren’t even any buses running in this area. He says a woman occasionally runs into town and can take him in an hour. Alexei must go back the way he came if he wants out.

While he waits, Alexei reluctantly takes a tour of the museum. The collected “artwork” and exhibition are made up of a combination of false truths and fabrications, orated by the dutiful tour guide with such confidence that falsities and the truth merge in an indecipherable harmony. The two encounter a sarcophagus containing the alleged remains of a Trojan king. When asked how a Trojan ended up in Russia, the tour guide says it’s irrefutable that some of the Trojans went north and found a settlement there. This of course isn’t true. But Alexei doesn’t challenge it; he’s feigning politeness to not bury himself further. The two walk by a poster that reads, “The source of our strength lies in historic truths.” In a society plagued with the dissemination of falsities, it’s incumbent on the individual to sustain the mirage of truth, to give life to the lie of a history, and to impress upon those who push back that they’re the ones without reason. 

The tour guide leads the two to a bed where Atilla the Hun supposedly had sex and whose semen was found on the bed and was used to make a lifelike recreation of him, a scientific anomaly that Alexei again accepts out of a lack of options to do otherwise. Near the Atilla bed is a hyper-local installation honoring the town's first “Rock’N’Rollers,” next to which, in a bright red frame, adorned with flashing light bulbs , is a portrait of, “Smorodinov, Secretary of the town’s Young Communist League, who had them expelled.” This juxtaposition of fantasy and pride in the expulsion of individuality reveals the ideology that sustained the authoritarian Soviet state: a manufactured, unwavering nationalism meant to scramble the individual’s brain enough to coerce both submission and fealty. From claiming Ukrainian  history as their own to broader historical revisions of their occupation in Central and Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union was sustained by those who grew up and believed these lies because they were told they needed to. It would fall because of those young enough to identify the rot in this system. 

This complicity is manifested in the museum: the statues/figures in the exhibit are all played by actors. The film doesn’t reveal whether or not they are actual people playing the parts, but the audience sees that they are clearly people holding still, frozen in their exhibit’s required depiction. In designing an entire museum to this town's latent revisionism, Shakhnazarov shows how a population becomes complicit in sustaining these falsities, not just out of ignorance, but with an understanding that refuting this delusion pulls out reality’s foundation. Each person must do their part—in this case literally; their chests rising as they take small breaths. Later in the museum, there is a scene depicting a night when Joseph Stalin, escaping from exile, stayed the night in a railroad worker’s apartment. The scene is adorned as if in iconography: Stalin, and those at the table with him, are in a gilded frame with the phrase, “Soon comes the dawn, soon the sun will rise, this sun will shine for us,” surrounding them. Behind Stalin a golden sun, its rays descending. A brighter future couldn’t be had. The town’s collective effort amounts to an actual merging of the real and the false. It isn’t a juxtaposition this time; the town has made iconography of a false history.

Alexei’s journey through the mire of this unnamed town deepens as he continues to fight the current. Totalitarianism only works so long as you can deceive, or at the very least, uphold your mirage with total unwavering confidence. Under this regime, influence sustains itself on the backs of those unwilling to investigate authoritarian control further than they need to. In playing up the comedic dissonance inherent in these realities, Shakhnazarov reveals the absurdities that dominated Soviet life. Through satire, the audience can laugh at the poorly built façade of the Soviet Union, illuminating their autonomy in the process. But Shakhnazarov knows the struggle intrinsic to the process of self-liberation. Before leaving the police station, after having been interrogated for his culpability in the death of the chef, Alexei says, “If I‘d known it would turn out like this, I’d have eaten his ill-fated cake.” Even knowing his innocence, Alexei recognizes his total powerlessness in this town; he knows the advantage of conformity in a culture that dictates it—notable that Shakhnazarov became, and remains, a trusted representative of Vladimir Putin. 

Zerograd is available to purchase at Deaf Crocodile or to stream for free through Kanopy.

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