Soviet Collapse Kid Art

That’s me on the left as “Johanna Muscle”

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Not long ago, I digitized some 8mm cassettes that contained proof that my adolescent art music band “The Broads” (Бабы) actually existed.

I founded “The Broads” with my friend Katya, whom I met and bonded with at a boarding kindergarten our parents exiled us to at age four. The band didn’t exist for long and never performed outside an apartment. We just made a few music videos and mockumentaries on pop stars when we were twelve and thirteen years old. We didn’t have editing tools, so we had to do live editing — just turning off the camera and turning it back on when we were ready to shoot the next scene. This was sometime around 2002 — the beginning of the end of the wild and chaotic Yeltsin Era. I rewatched it recently, and I found it funny how little I actually changed. I was a satirist already then, working in the same kind of film genre that I’d start returning to more a decade later. What surprises me even more is that I actually had critical distance from my society at such an early age. Even back then, I laughed at the ludicrous and macabre image of the ideal woman that was pushed on us in post-Soviet Russia — a bimbo with a big bosom, bright makeup, short skirt, and dumb songs to boot. Sometimes those women were called “singing panties,” but for our generation — raised in a media saturated capitalist Russia — they did seem like a paragon to emulate.

Back then my friend and I watched MTV Russia religiously and were listening to all the usual pop trash girls our age were exposed to, and we had very little parental or societal supervision in terms of our media consumption. We also went to movie rental stores and got any film we wanted without anyone asking any questions, including, for example, Romance by Catherine Breillat that we watched at thirteen or fourteen and which turned me off pregnancy for a very long time.

Back to “The Broads.” Here is a song we did called “Hairy Armpit.” I put subtitles on the video, but it’s easy to guess what it’s about: the curse of having hairs growing on our armpits. We dress up to look like vulgar hookers here with socks stuffed into our bras, and I remember that we thought it was so very funny — because it was very far from our fairly protected little world where no one was prostitute or even a housewife. Our mothers were a lawyer and a translator. Yet I think without our unconscious awareness, we did channel something real and quite scary that we saw around us, as many girls in Russia our age or a bit older were underage hookers in one way or another.

This prostitutization of a whole generation of women during and after Soviet collapse — this is something I think about quite a lot today, and it’s strange to see that it was present in my thinking even when I was a kid. For it to seep into the mind of a child shows how prevalent it was. I was obviously not the only one thinking about it. A lot of adults were, too. The plight of women during collapse is pretty much the main theme of the all the Russian films we’re screening as part of our Soviet collapse cinema this summer.

Here is an art explications I wrote as a parody for this video:

The song is a reaction of two young girls who just hit puberty to the aggressive Western pop culture that flooded Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 90s.

The image of a glamorous diva that was all over Russian MTV and other TV channels was an example of the woman you should aspire to become — a sexy object in a miniskirt and a provocative top with heavy make-up on. “The Broads” was conceived as a parody of those divas.

In essence, “Hairy Armpit” is a product of the very early feminist awakening that led Katya and Evgenia to develop this satirical gaze on the female body and its objectification. By assuming a diva identity and exaggerating femininity to the point of grotesquerie, the girls expose the artifice of the female ideal presented by the media.

Katya and Evgenia switch between very contradictory characters in “Hairy armpit” — alternating between sexy divas and grandmothers too poor to even afford bread. As grandmothers, they perform a sassy synchronized dance that adds another layer to the quality of the satire. While “Hairy armpit” is a parody of a pop music video, it also serves as a social critique of the abominable condition of elderly women in Russia at the time. There is a striking contrast between the objectification of young women and the complete neglect of old ones — a dichotomy that is still very real in Russia.

Invoking the Deleuzian notion of “becoming-woman,” Katya and Evgenia, then just girl-children on the verge of womanhood, channeled all the angst they had from abusive media that surrounded them into “The Broads,” creating a counter-narrative to this broken culture.

—Evgenia

P.S. I need to make subtitles for a mock press conference that “The Broads” did for the release of their debut album. Maybe sometime later…

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Buy tickets to our SOVIET COLLAPSE CINEMA SERIES in Brooklyn. First screening is on Sunday, June 28th. Space is limited.

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