UC Berkeley

This dissertation reveals the centrality of death in the late Soviet imagination and considers its relationship to the demise of the state. The public decline of General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and the party gerontocracy is only the best-known aspect of a culture that was dying in many ways. In some of the late Soviet Union’s most popular songs, stories, and films, characters were shot, drowned, suffocated, and stabbed. By the early 1980s, many of their creators were dead too, leading audiences to conflate their lives with those of their doomed heroes. How did sickness, decay, and death become so prevalent in the culture? How did visions of the end shape the final hour?

The first chapter links Brezhnev’s prolonged senility to the late Soviet biopolitical project to extend the life of the population, which was reflected in science fiction about extreme longevity. As Brezhnev continued growing old on the country’s new television screens, stories and jokes began to question the trope of eternal aging. This shift to embracing death is the subject of the rest of the dissertation. Subsequent chapters explore the evolution of painter Viktor Popkov, whose funeral canvases reflected his generation’s turn from imagining the future to abiding with the lost; Siberian prodigal son Vasilii Shukshin, who created existentialist films and short stories about suicidal men in search of meaning; the semi-underground singer and actor Vladimir Vysotsky, whose attraction to the edge combined the era’s sardonic laughter with its melancholic tears and brought both to their breaking point; and Soviet-Polish pop star Anna German, whose image as a consumptive heroine evoked Soviet socialism’s yearning for an elusive ideal, projected on women’s bodies and its largest satellite.

Recent scholarship has challenged longstanding views of late socialism as a time of decay, calling attention to its dynamic social milieus, consumption habits, and other signs of vitality. This study unites new and old approaches by considering the late Soviet Union’s abundant leisure time, strong social networks, and cultural effervescence together with its aging leadership and sense of sickness. While previous examinations of death in late Soviet culture have tended to focus on works by the experimental underground or the outpouring of morbid imagery from perestroika onwards, I reveal how images of death flourished from the late ‘60s onward in cultural productions that were popular among mass audiences and supported by the state.

During late socialism, Soviet citizens were more urbanized, better educated, and living longer and more comfortable lives than ever before. As the specter of mass death receded into the past, morbid visions helped create new sources of identity in the present. Stories of abjection and despair held particular appeal for audiences who used them to frame experiences that fell outside the emotional norms of official Soviet culture, in which passing tears were tied to state myths. Audiences’ tendency to equate expressions of mourning and melancholia with truth and authenticity reveals a growing exhaustion with late socialism’s ideological calcification and atmosphere of irony.

The sense of cultural crisis heightens over the course of the chapters as key figures’ deaths appear increasingly preordained and grieving fans use their work to diagnose Soviet society itself as sick. The dissertation concludes by tying the dreams of death that flourished over the long 1970s to perestroika and the collapse, when the lamentations circulating widely in the culture were unleashed on the political stage and accelerated by the younger generation. Late socialism’s association of truth with death and suffering helped shape the increasingly pessimistic direction of Gorbachev’s glasnost, as corpses proliferated in the media and the intelligentsia led the populace in mourning the country’s ruin. By shaping the view that the Soviet Union provided “no way to live,” visions of the end served as an unwitting accomplice in the death of the state.