Russians embrace a longing for alll things Soviet

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MOSCOW -- At the Petrovich Club in downtown Moscow, diners pay to eat bland food in rickety chairs around wobbly wooden tables. Modeled after the once-ubiquitous stolovayas, or canteens, the decor is a deliberate throwback to the grim and lean Soviet years.Customers couldn't be happier.Photos of red-cheeked and red-tied Pioneers adorn the walls and the shelves are stacked with empty bottles of Portveyne, a ghastly sweet wine once made in Odessa, containing 17.5 percent alcohol and 9.5 percent sugar. The Soviet memorabilia makes customers wince in memory -- and brings them back time and again.Its founder, Andrei Bilzho, a former psychiatrist-turned-political cartoonist, opened the club to preserve the cultural artifacts from a regime that died 17 years ago.Bilzho said he's not interested in glorifying the Soviet era. Both his grandfathers were executed during the Stalin regime. The club has no photos of Stalin or Lenin, nor are there any political symbols from the communist era.But he said the bland food, grim clothing and made-in-the-Soviet-Union appliances that routinely broke down -- all these items were unique because they were developed for -- and sprang from -- a closed society. "It's about preserving an aesthetic," he said, during a tour of his club, which has the feel of a museum."The culture and food of the era showed that we were behind a curtain. We had Soviet things and now we are losing those things," Bilzho said. "Now, we are a part of the world again, so there is nothing special."It's part of a wave of nostalgia for all things Soviet that is sweeping Russia. Restaurants such as the Petrovich Club, serving the plain dishes of the Soviet era -- often glued together with heaps of mayonnaise -- have sprung up in Moscow and St. Petersburg. Pop singer Oleg Gazmanov's hit anthem "I Was Made in the USSR" is popular with listeners old and young, some of whom wouldn't remember when Ladas ruled the roads. And on May 9, the day Russians celebrate their victory in World War II, there were Soviet-themed parties where men and women swirled to music from the 1940s.The nostalgia movement isn't a rallying cry to return to the Soviet era. Its followers don't miss the endless lines, the prison camps, the censorship or sealed borders. But they still miss the sweeter moments, because, despite its horrors, they say, the Soviet Union did have its charms."It's more like an inside joke," said Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of Russia Today, an all-news English-language television network. "There is a lot of making fun of ourselves, making fun of how naive we were. It's ironic."Others say the longing to see and buy Soviet goods runs deeper than mere fashion. For some, the feelings are complex; their memories, a blend of longing and revulsion. Many older Russians, who grew up in the Soviet system, miss the era -- warts and all -- because it represents their youth."Of course it was not a great system," Bilzho said. "But for a lot of us, it coincided with the period when we were young, when we were children. It's impossible to forget that time of your life."Younger Russians blog and use chat rooms to reminisce about their Soviet childhoods and swap photos of iconic Soviet memorabilia, including badges from the Komsomol (communist youth) and sidewalk vending machines that dispensed sparkling water."I think everyone has a certain nostalgia for the Soviet Union," said Zhanna Sribnaya, 37, a Moscow writer. "It's trendy because people my age, they can buy what they see, and they want to see their happy childhoods. We remember when ice cream cost 7 kopeks and we remember Pioneer camps (similar to Scouts and Brownies) when everyone could go to the Black Sea for summer vacations. Now, only people with money can take those vacations."It's been 17 years since the Soviet Union collapsed, bringing freedom to Eastern Europe and independence to former republics such as Ukraine, Georgia and the Baltic states.But in Russia, many still view communism's collapse in terms of what it cost their country: the economic chaos of the 1990s, two brutal wars in Chechnya and the jarring end to its status as a world superpower.And while many agree that the current nostalgia wave is a fashion trend akin to the 1950s craze that gripped North America in the 1970s, many Russians interviewed said they still grieve for their long-lost country.Enough time has passed since the 1991 collapse of the once-mighty empire to give Russians a cooler eye through which to view their former lives.It was an era of tyranny, fear and mistrust, they concede. Yet the communist regime brought a measure of security and social cohesion that was lost when their society opened up."From kindergarten, we knew that everything would be free: kindergarten, school, university," Sribnaya said. "After that, our government would tell us where we would work."(jarmstrong(at)globeandmail.com)(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)