Ex-USSR Republics : did the Berlin Wall really fall ?

The Berlin Wall fell. Really ? According to various documentary and fiction productions of the last few years in the countries of the ex-USSR, the old demons are not quite dead yet. In fact, they are still alive and well, in new dictatorships, in new crises and lapses of memory. To construct memory is a way to deal with the present. DocPoint is thus presenting several films which prove, self-consciously or not, that the past has not completely gone away. The themes, however different, converge towards the same point : the impossible rebuilding of states which were under Soviet rule, and the active participation of liberal democracies in their excessive slowness to modernize.

From a social point of view, one finds - in Russia, in Turkmenistan, in Belarus - the same causes and effects : in Shadow of the Holy Book, A. Halonen notes that whilst the country produces a significant portion of the world oil supply, it suffers from an unemployment rate of 60%. In Russia, alcoholism always seems to be the major cause of social problems. In Boys by Valeria Guy Germanika, the children who drink beer in the streets and destroy letter-boxes are hardly ten years old, and their parents have just given up on them. More seriously, the state itself has relinquished its mission, for example by not providing financial support or modernizing infrastructures in Bam, Shadow of the Holy Book, and Kalinovski Square. People develop “their anger against life” in the present and the past as one witness says.

Throughout these documentaries, one notes that misery makes some long for the past : Bam is rather curious in this respect. Jouni Hiltunen narrates the construction of the Trans-Siberian under the USSR ; without extolling Stalinist virtues, the horror of present times casts a shadow of regret on the past. "Nobody works for an ideal now" one witness says. The present does not succeed in bringing relief or preventing nostalgia. And the feeling of decline is not exclusive to the nostalgic folks : it also exists in the political field. Halonen did rather remarkable work in his report on Turkmenistan. Ruled with an iron hand by Niyazov, the country displays all the trademarks of ex-USSR politics - propaganda everywhere, worship of the personality, indoctrination of the youth… the same influence as in Belarus. Here, the director examines the electoral fraud and repression that took place during and after the presidential elections of March 2006. Each documentary-maker becomes a historian, letting the opponents speak to denounce well-hidden truths.

Hidden by whom ? By the ex-Soviet States themselves obviously, but the denunciation goes further : obsessed with their past, these countries do not get much help from Western democracies. The media, when they are not censored, do not say much more. Foreign companies such as Bouygues, Gazprom and Chrysler take advantage of the economic context to delocalize, thus tacitly supporting authoritarian regimes. This past returns in various forms but remains omnipresent : the filmmakers punctuate their films with interviews (pensioners in Herbarium, teenagers in Boys, hard-working immigrants in Moscow…) ; they can’t help but look back to the USSR. The absence of education amongst children is connected with adult illiteracy : thus the support of certain fringes of the population for the regimes is directly related to the lack of political education.

The importance of these films is that they give words to those who cannot speak, and reveal political situations that Europe, in particular, tends to forget or hide. After all, isn’t cinema’s main and only purpose, that of showing ?

Ariane Beauvillard