A recent article in the New York Times reported on a Moscow riot by angry smokers protesting about an acute shortage of cigarettes. To pacify the mob, a dozen cases of cigarettes were urgently dispatched to the nearest tobacco shop. "They bring something, sell it in ten minutes, and again there is nothing," commented a protester. "This is the way we live."
Stanislaw Govorukhin's most recent documentary puts it more forcefully, This Is No Way to Live reads the title, and it refers to something far less frivolous than cigarettes. It mourns the wasted potential of the country and its people. The film's debut was hailed by both the public and the press as a sensational event. Devoid of rhetoric or calculations, and frightening in its honesty, Govorukhin's film draws the viewer into a collective lament over the degradation of life in a society on the brink of moral and material collapse.
Soviet audiences in the last two years heave been exposed to an array of documentaries throwing light on every possible dark corner of political and social life, including past history and present contingencies. The trend rivaled the position papers, analyses, opinions, investigative reports - collectively called publitsistika - that flooded the press and attracted an increasingly alert readership. One would think, therefore, that the public had been desensitized. But the Muscovites who saw Govorukhin's film when it premiered in June were shocked and deeply moved. And so was I. So heartrending is the author's grief over the devastation of the motherland that I felt the film was not for foreign eyes. It is too private, too intimate - like a family tragedy.
The commentary points out the main paradox: "A vast country. A vast and rich country. Forests, waters, fish, fur 50 percent of the world's black soil, colossal mineral resources, oil, gas, gold … and appalling poverty, shameful and humiliating poverty denigrating human dignity." Crosscutting between the vastness and beauty of the Russian land and the misery of urban and rural life, Govorukhin stresses his point. Prostitution, vagrancy, racketeering, and blackmarketeering are shown as being conspicuous landmarks on the cityscape. Queues, too, are becoming longer and more numerous while supplies dwindle. In the countryside, the situation is even worse. Those who can, leave the land, rendered sterile by decades of collectivization. A touching scene shows Govorukhin interviewing three old women left behind in an abandoned village with no food other than potatoes. They are philosophical about it, but express a strong desire for a bar of soap. The nearest shop is miles away, and therefore inaccessible to them without transportation. But even if the old women were able to reach it, their wish would not come true. The next scene shows us the rural store with half-empty shelves. This section is poignantly entitled "How the System Mocks the People."
A more blatant illustration of the same point involves a tour of the Exhibition of Economic Achievements, the pompous ensemble of ornate pavilion, built under Stain in the 1930s to mask the poverty of the country with a façade of false grandeur. An abrupt cut brings us to an elegant street in a Western German city. Pointing at the scintillating shops, Govorukhin comments: "These are real economic achievements, and they are available to the people."
The Soviet masses have never been affluent, but nowadays they are losing even that which was once
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