cinema freaks

Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema Volume 2 Number 3 C 2008 Intellect LtdArticle. English language. doi: 10.1386/srsc.2.3.281/1

Of Freaks and Men: Aleksei Balabanov'scritique of degenerate post-Soviet societyFrederick H. White Memorial University

of Newfoundland, Canada

Abstract KeywordsThis article argues that Aleksei Balabanov's Of Freaks and Men is a postmodern Balabanovcommentary on post-Soviet society, displaying the themes of voyeurism, pornog- postmodernraphy and perversion within the simulacrum of the Russian fin de si6cle. This is degenerationsubstantiated by cultural quotations from Fedor Dostoevskii, degeneration theory St Petersburgand the St Petersburg myth in order to depict the demise of Russian civilized soci- Dostoevskiiety, which will be saved by the West. post-Soviet

Aleksei Balabanov's Of Freaks and Men (Pro urodov i liudei, 1998) may initiallybe seen as a period drama, set during the turn of the nineteenth century, buta closer look shows that it also offers a postmodern commentary on post-Soviet society. Having failed to realize a communist utopia after nearly70 years, and struggling with the transition to a western democratic model,Russian society devolved into abject lawlessness in the 1990s. Criminalitypermeated all facets of society, and Russian culture experienced nostalgia forits imperialist past: autocracy, orthodoxy and nationality trumped westerncapitalism and democracy. In response to this idealized past, Balabanovoffered a de-romanticized Russian fin de sWcle of pornographers and sexualdeviants, suggesting that the present realities of the post-Soviet dystopiawere only a more recent emanation of a persistent national pathology.

Unwilling to completely engage Balabanov's cultural bricolage, mostcritics have concentrated on his better known films, reluctant to delve toodeeply into cultural references when provided with clear examples ofdegenerate post-Soviet society in Brother (Brat, 1997), Brother 2 (Brat2, 2000), and War (Voina, 2002) (see, for example, Beumers 1999b: 83-8 7;Hashamova 2007b; Larsen 2003: 504-11; Trofimenkov 2007; Youngblood2007: 213-15). Other critics have ignored the director's cultural clues,viewing Of Freaks and Men as a dark comedy or the product of a RussianDavid Lynch (for example, Horton 2000; Gillespie (2003: 54-55) consid-ers it 'a comedy of the blackest sort'). When placed in the context ofBalabanov's critical discourse, however, it is evident that the film employsa complex web of cultural intertexts to take aim at Russia of the 1990s.

Characters and plotSet in St Petersburg at the turn of the century, Of Freaks and Men is thestory of two families who fall prey to pornographers. The engineer

SRSC 2 (3) pp. 281-297 C Intellect Ltd 2008 281

Radlov, a widower, is raising his daughter Liza alone, while maintaining arelationship with his maid Grunia. Liza anticipates going to the West,which her father has been promising since her mother's death. The Westfor Liza seems to offer a better life and is represented by the steam trainsthat are fuelled just outside her window.

Grunia's brother, Johann, has just returned from the West and paysworking-class women to be photographed in sadomasochistic (mainlyspanking) poses; the photos are subsequently sold to all layers of StPetersburg society, including Liza herself. The young Putilov works forJohann as his photographer and, eventually, his cinematographer. Putilovis originally introduced to Liza by her father, who likes the young man andagrees that cinema is the wave of the future.

Unexpectedly, Radlov suffers a heart attack when Johann asks for Liza'shand in marriage, and Grunia hastens Radlov's death when she shows himthe pornographic pictures that Liza has kept hidden in her wardrobe. Radlovbequeaths everything to Grunia in his will, and she allows Johann to takeadvantage of the young Liza: he rapes her and forcibly involves her in hispornographic photographs and primitive films. Putilov initially promises Lizathat he will save her from Johann, but he later records her in a spankingfilm, proving to be an ineffectual defender of her virtue.

In the second family, Dr Stasov, who had been treating Radlov's heartcondition, is the adoptive father of Siamese twin boys. The doctor is in aloveless relationship with a wife who is blind. Parallel with the corruption

Figure 1: Johann (Sergei Makovetskii). Photo courtesy of CTB.

Frederick H. White282

of Liza, Johann's assistant Viktor Ivanovich seduces Dr Stasov's wife sothat he can gain access to the Siamese twins. Eventually, he incorporatesthe boys, Kolia and Tolia, in the pornographic business as well as display-ing them in a freak show for bourgeois St Petersburg society. The boys areforced to drink alcohol and, as a result, Tolia becomes an alcoholic. As anadded insult, Viktor Ivanovich has the doctor's wife spanked in front ofmale clientele, after Johann kills her husband.

Living together, Liza and the Siamese twins are treated as commodities forthe pleasure of upper-class society. Liza dreams of escaping to the West, whilethe Siamese twins plan to go East in search of their father, representingRussia's long-standing identity crisis, caught between Europe and Asia.Recurring shots of a steam train symbolize their hope and longing for escape toa better life. It is while waiting for the train to arrive one night outside thewindow that Kolia convinces Liza to give herself to him, while Tolia is passedout drunk beside them. In this film, there is no real concept of love, but a con-fused power relationship with sexuality and a need to flee the present situation.

Motivated by his feelings for Liza and efforts to help his brother, Kolia killsViktor Ivanovich while Johann is suffering from an epileptic attack, enablingthem to flee from their captors. Unfortunately, Liza and the twins have beencorrupted to the point where they cannot lead normal lives. After returningto a freak show, Tolia dies of alcohol poisoning. Similarly, Liza is drawn to asadomasochistic lover in a town resembling Amsterdam's red light district, as

Figure 2: Liza (Dinara Drukarova). Photo courtesy of CTB.

Of Freaks and Men: Aleksei Balabanov's critique of degenerate post-Soviet society 283

the only type of love she knows. Having lost Liza, Johann steps out onto an icefloe, and is carried out to sea and certain death. Only Putilov has escaped tothe West to become a successful cinematographer.

Russian postmodernismThe film is full of freaks and appears to be an apologetic explanation forwhy Russia was so ripe for revolution and apocalyptic change in 1917.Yet, this reading of the film seems too simplistic. Fredric Jameson refers tosuch a cinematic process as a pastiche, wherein the dilemmas of history arerepresentative of a generalized crisis in modern culture (Jameson 1992:112-13, 126). Charles Jencks extends the notion of double coding bywhich a new reading of the past establishes novel ways of interpreting thepresent (Jencks 1996: 29-35; Jencks 1987: 338, 340-41). As such, OfFreaks and Men employs cultural quotations to comment on contemporarysociety. Petre Petrov (2005) more specifically argues that, beginning withRussian Thaw cinema, time and space were inverted so that communica-tion existed between two synchronically present states of existence. These'co-present' states exist on a timeless vertical axis of ethical values. That is,life before and after the Soviet experiment is collapsed into a uniform the-matic sameness intent on exposing the depravity of Russian society.

More to the point, Jameson maintains that nostalgia films feign his-torical authenticity in order to appropriate the ideology of a previous gen-eration. This creates intertexts that transform the historical narrationinto commentary on the present. History thereby defamiliarizes our rela-tionship with the present, allowing the audience distance from its ownimmediacy (Jameson 1991: 18-21, 280-84). However, unlike Russianfilms that valorize the pre-Revolutionary past, such as Nikita Mikhalkov'sThe Barber of Siberia (Sibirskii tsiriul'nik, 1998) or Aleksandr Sokurov'sRussian Ark (Russkii kovcheg, 2002), Balabanov's films are much morecritical of both the past and present. I therefore argue that references tothe St Petersburg myth, to Fedor Dostoevskii's novels and degenerationtheory result in implicit parallels, purposefully highlighting issues of soci-etal decay relevant to 1990s Russia.

Mikhail Epstein identifies Russian postmodernism as '[q]uotationalityinstead of self-expression, simulation instead of truth, the play with signsinstead of the reflection of reality; difference instead of contradiction:such is the post-individual, post-tragic, post-utopian world, fascinated byits own secondariness' (Epstein, Genis and Vladiv-Glover 1999: 466-67).In this characterization we can identify Balabanov's own cinematic vocab-ulary for Of Freaks and Men: quotations from Russian culture, the simu-lacrum of the Russian fin de siecle, and signs of pseudo-scientificdegeneration theory within a dystopian cityscape that make no attempt tobroker a solution or provide hope for a better tomorrow. Balabanov specif-ically undermines the notion that help will arrive from the West, leavingviewers to engage their present reality.

Anna Lawton, however, views the film as a break for Balabanov frommainstream thrillers in an exploration of cinematic formalism, arguing that'critical commentary is deliberately absent' (Lawton 2004: 205-06). It isimportant, however, to view this film within the director's cinematic oeuvre.Balabanov consistently serves various audiences with both highbrow


intellectual fare such as The Castle (Zamok, 1994), The River (Reka, 2002), ItDoesn't Hurt (Mne ne bol'no, 2006), and abeyances to popular culture as inBrother, Brother 2 and Dead Man's Bluff (Zhmurki, 2005). Arguably, evenwith these variations in genre, Balabanov's fims are self-referential, estab-lishing a consistent thematic unity1

The Petersburg mythOf Freaks and Men should be classified as one of Balabanov's highbrow offer-ings. The film is set in St Petersburg and draws upon the mythos of the cityto construct his cultural quotation.2 In 1703, Peter the Great began to builda city in the frozen bogs at the mouth of the river Neva to commemorate hisvictory over Sweden. Despite a great cost in lives and money, it was com-pleted and officially made the capital in 1712. Peter then forced the nobilityto relocate from Moscow or lose title and wealth. Even with such tyrannicalmethods, during the eighteenth century Peter was depicted as Neptune inclassical poetry and St Petersburg was called the Northern Rome.'

This positive response towards the city changed with AleksandrPushkin's poem 'The Bronze Horseman' (1833), providing literary associ-ations of St Petersburg with death, insanity and the supernatural.Pushkin's thematic additions were not new, as popular culture hadalready begun to form an opinion about Peter's creation. As an urbanspace, the constant flooding gave inhabitants the feeling that they wereliving in a doomed city that must be cleansed constantly of its sins.Geographically, St Petersburg was on the edge of the Russian territory andcould be over-run, giving a feeling of dangerous liminality. Because it wasalso a decidedly planned stone city, it enacted a continual clash betweenman and nature, especially when compared to ancient Moscow, whichwas built mainly of wood in the heartland of Russia.

The cultural myth of St Petersburg continued to develop in the works ofNikolai Gogol', who introduced a fantastical duality to a city that outwardlyappeared quite civilized, although it was haunted by demons and devils. Itwas Dostoevskii, however, who fully engaged the socio-economic tensions. InCrime and Punishment (Prestuplenie i nakazanie, 1866), a St Petersburg teemingwith prostitutes, cheats and criminals plays an important part as both his-torical context and figurative metaphor; the urban decay of the city reflectsthe murderer Raskolnikov's own fragmented and disturbed psyche.

In Dostoevskii's The Possessed (Besy, 1872), Stavrogin regularly beatshis physically and mentally delayed wife, Maria Lebiadkina. In a sectionoriginally censored out of the novel, but surely known to Balabanov,Stavrogin describes how he watched as a little girl accused of stealing hispenknife was whipped with the twigs of a broom. Stavrogin admits tobelieving that he is beyond the reach of God and his sexual deviance leadsto the death of the young girl.

In the works of Dostoevskii, St Petersburg is a living entity that caninfluence the actions of its inhabitants. It affects the soul such that thedenizen is consumed by questions of good and evil, right and wrong, holyand unholy. It is Dostoevskii who unites the threads of cultural discourseon urban space and whom Balabanov most often quotes in his film(Hashamova 2007a: 107). Yana Hashamova argues: '[Of Freaks and Men]reminds the Russian viewer not of Dostoevskian faith and salvation but of

1. As an example, in'Postcolonialismor not?' Kristensen(2004) argues thatthe main characterin all of Balabanov'sfilms enters an alienspace and Is forcedto negotiate theunfamiliar.

2. Day assertsthat althoughBalabanov's HappyDays (Schastlivye dni,1991), Brother and OfFreaks and Men areset at different timesduring the twentiethcentury, 'they allquestion the modernrelevance of thePetersburg text'(Day 2005: 613).

3. For a detaileddiscussion of the rolethat St Petersburgplays in the Russiancultural conscious,see Buckler (2005)and Crone and Day(2004).


his discoveries of the dark and irrational sides of human nature'(Hashamova 2004: 63).

DegenerationBeyond the myth of St Petersburg, Balabanov's simulacrum reflects thepseudo-scientific discourse of the final decades of the nineteenth century,when Russia was experiencing its own decadent period of cultural degen-eration. The assassination of Alexander II in 1881 caused a tidal shift inthe popular perception of Russian society. Following the regicide, the pressfrequently referred to crime and sedition as a plague infecting Russiansociety. At this same time, Vladimir Mikhnevich chronicled contemporarylife in the capital as Plagues of Petersburg, a series of tales about the moraland social diseases of contemporary Russia. With this shift, social pathol-ogy and infection became the prominent cultural themes in the popularpress of the late Imperial period (Beer 2007: 539-40).

In the following decade many writers, including Valeril Briusov,Konstantin Bal'mont and Fedor Sologub, willingly depicted the perceiveddespair, perversity and degradation of contemporary Russian society inpoetry and prose. Olga Matich argues that it was in reaction to degenera-tion theory that some Russian cultural figures rejected the impulses ofthe body and embraced an apocalyptic mythos of the end of the world(Matich 2005).

Simultaneous with this cultural response, science was developing waysto identify and classify medical conditions that supposedly reflected thehealth of an entire society. Theories about disease, pathology and socialchange became the main subjects of both scientific and popular discourse.Cultural pathologies were explained by way of scientific analogies, oftenincluding references to either development or decline (Chamberlin 1981:687-99). This captured the Russian imagination, helping to explain therise and fall of entire civilizations, and led to sweeping generalizationsabout the health of the nation.

In the 1830s the English physician James Cowles Prichard formu-lated the concept of moral insanity, arguing that derangement couldoccur in an individual's mental and moral faculties (Augustein 1996).In the second half of the nineteenth century, this idea was widely usedby Russian psychiatrists to refer not only to madness, but to some type ofamoral deviance (Bogdanov 2005: 256). Simultaneously, the physicianB6n6dict Augustin Morel developed the idea of mental degeneration.Although theories about degeneracy had existed previously, Morel suc-cessfully made relevant to various intellectual communities the idea thatcertain elements of society were devolving; becoming genetically weakerwith each generation, first showing signs of neurasthenia or nervoushysteria, then alcohol and opiate addiction, leading to prostitution andcriminal behaviour, and finally resulting in insanity and utter idiocy.

In Europe, leading psychiatrists of the nineteenth century associatedmental degeneration with sexual perversion and psychopathology(Richard von Krafft-Ebing), genius and atypical aptitude (Paul M6bius),and criminality (Cesare Lombroso). In America, George Beard popularizedthe diagnosis of neurasthenia, which was supposedly caused by the franticpressures of an advanced civilization. Max Nordau expanded the concept


beyond psychiatry, recognizing degeneration in the decadence and wilfulrejection of moral boundaries in fin de siecle Europe.

In Russia, degeneracy found continued support among Russian psychi-atrists.4 Isaak Orshanskii published and lectured extensively on physiog-nomy and pathology. His numerous publications included Our Criminalsand the Studies of Lombroso (1890) and The Role of Heredity in the Transfer ofIllness (1894).5 Nikolai Bazhenov studied the skulls and busts of criminalsand was appointed medical director of the Preobrazhenskil Moscow CityPsychiatric Hospital in 1904 (Sirotkina 2002: 61, 65). Pavel Kovalevskiiconducted psychological and anatomical research on famous people andstudied the effects of syphilis on the nervous system (ludin 1951: 138).Theories of degeneration especially influenced the work of most Russianpsychiatrists well into the twentieth century (Beer 2004: 468; Bogdanov2005: 262-63; Sirotkina 2002: 23-35, 57-65, 79-82).

Significantly, degeneration theory addressed the seemingly palpableregression of society. Rapid industrialization in Europe and the emancipa-tion of the serfs in Russia resulted in economic, social and culturalchanges - especially in the urban areas where socio-economic extremeswere more closely concentrated. Concepts of religion, morals, class andsexuality were interrupted. Urban living was leaving men and women vul-nerable to fatigue and disease, contributing to the generalized deviancyand regression of society (Greenslade 1994: 17). These scientific findingswere further bolstered by the mythos of St Petersburg and its associationwith degenerative illnesses and deviant behaviour.

The notion of progress and the possibility that Russia was headed inthe wrong direction had long been an obsession of the nineteenth century.Degeneration theory was an expression of this concern, and biologicaladvancement proposed that modernization itself might propel the popula-tion of the Empire into an abyss of moral and physical illness, crime, viceand sedition. In his speech to the First Congress of National Psychiatristsin 1887, Ivan Sikorskii underscored the contradictory nature of a techno-logically advanced society with steam engines and telegraphs that simul-taneously experiences physical, mental and moral decline. The cost ofmodernization, claimed the professor of nervous and mental diseases, wasfound in the increasing instances of suicide, insanity and nervous ill-nesses, all of which were indicators of the mental health of a populationsuffering from degeneration. This pessimistic mood pervaded all areas ofeducated Russian society (Beer 2007: 538-39).

Theory and practiceWith this in mind, we return to Of Freaks and Men with a better understand-ing of the cultural discourse underpinning this pastiche of bourgeois familieslaid low by immoral pornographers who turn the cellars of respectable peopleinto makeshift pornography studios. St Petersburg is an evil place, an unholycity built on the bones of thousands of innocent victims. The virtues of urban-ization go hand in hand with the problems of degenerative illness - crime,prostitution and moral depravity. Significantly, one of the elements of the StPetersburg myth is that time is transcendent. The Bronze Horseman appearsin Andrei Belyi's symbolist novel, while Dostoevskii's themes haunt thetaverns and bordellos of Aleksandr Blok's poems. This fluidity (and possible

4. Degeneration theoryfound a place earlyin the curriculumand practice ofRussian psychiatry.Morel's theorieson degenerationwere particularlyinfluential asProfessor IvanBalinskli (1827-1902)was establishing thefirst independentdepartment ofpsychiatry in 1857in St Petersburg. Adecade later, Balinskilorganized the firstpsychiatric clinic,which graduatedsome of Russia'sinitial psychiatrists.The most promisingof these studentswere given stipendsto complete theirstudies in Europeanlaboratories andclinics with eminentscientists working ondegenerative illnesses.

5. Biographicalinformation onOrshanskli canbe found on manywebsites includingthe online Russianbiographicalencyclopaedia,http://www.biograflja.ru/show_bio.aspx?ld=101640.


Figure 3: St Petersburg in Of Freaks and Men. Photo courtesy of CTB.

6. Day notes thatlocomotion (tramsand boats) iscontrasted with theemptiness of the cityin imitation of afuneral procession(Day 2005:613, 620).

continuity) of time in reference to a specific space then allows one to suggestthat St Petersburg of the Russian Silver Age can just as easily represent,reflect and provide commentary on the same contemporary urban space.This double coding of the city's mythos is as culturally productive today as itwas in the past. Balabanov's film thereby expresses the postmodernistimpulse to engage the historical continuum in order to reinterpret the present.

In this light, references to modernity (steamboats, trains, trolley-cars,photography and cinema) in the film must be viewed as the natural corol-lary to degenerative illnesses and deviant sexual pathology. It was Beard whodiscovered that neurasthenia resulted from the rapid pace of industrializedlife and who believed that over-fatigued individuals eventually succumbed tomore severe degenerative illnesses. Balabanov deliberately lingers on thescenes involving mechanized travel in order to underline the notion thatdeviant sexuality does not simply develop out of thin air; rather, it is a symp-tom of a society that is technologically advanced, but spiritually and physi-cally exhausted.6 Despite their escape from St Petersburg, then, Liza and theSiamese twins return of their own free will to freak and peep shows becausethey are victims of a civilization in decline, already infected with deviantpathology. Liza goes west and the twins go east, yet neither finds salvation,undermining the long-running westernizer-Slavophile debate in Russianculture. Here, the West is victimizer, not salvation. The East proves to be inef-fective, providing no new answers. Balabanov seems to want to challenge allof the reactive cultural clich6s in his depiction of Russian degeneration.


Accordingly, Balabanov's city is dead. In most exterior scenes, onlythe mechanized transport moves about in stark contrast to the lack ofhuman traffic. An early legend of the city claims that Peter's first wife,Evdokia, put a curse on St Petersburg, declaring that it would eventuallystand empty. In Belyi's Petersburg (1916), the city is deserted and its exis-tence is tentative, emphasizing the capital's inability to exercise controlover a Russia torn apart by radical political ideas. Vasilii Rozanov inThe Apocalypse of Our Time (Apokalipsis nashego vremeni, 1918) argued, asan impassioned indictment against the Bolshevik Revolution, thatRussia/St Petersburg was dead and that it had been emptied of humanity.7

As such, Balabanov's Liza echoes Dostoevskii's innocent victim ofRaskolnikov's murder. If there is any doubt, at the end of the film Johannwatches Liza in a pornographic film entitled Punishment for a Crime.Johann suffers from epilepsy, as did Dostoevskii and his literary characterPrince Myshkin, an obvious sign of degeneration. Johann returns from theWest, lacks morals or faith, abuses women and commits suicide, just asStavrogin did. Finally, the Siamese twins Kolia and Tolia represent thedeviant proclivities of upper-class Russian society as well as Peter's fasci-nation with human oddities.

In the Kunstkammer museum there are several examples of Siamesetwins (human and animal), which represent both freak attraction andscientific research material (Anemone 2000: 592). This duality is at thecore of Balabanov's thematic discourse: 'The physical freak is a freak,but the person, physically normal, is a person. It is about these two cat-egories that I shot the film' (Nechaeva 2002). Those who seem to behuman (Stavrogin, Peter the Great, Johann) are in fact the mostgrotesque, while the freaks (Prince Myshkin, Kolia and Tolia) are themost humane.8 The dual role of the Kunstkammer is emblematic of thisdilemma in defining deviant moral behaviour as invisible pathology.Besides housing living specimens with physical deformities, the acade-mic section of the museum exploited the 'sexually monstrous' for scien-tific and medical study (Anemone 2000: 594-95). Inherent in thiscollection of freaks is the notion that external oddities are monstrous,while the freakish proclivities of individuals fascinated by such deformi-ties are deemed normal. Clearly, the issue of deviancy is pertinent in thisdiscourse - an element of degeneration theory that was mainly con-cerned with visual identification of the ill.

Having examined these cultural quotations, we now ask how they relateto post-Soviet society. The association is on the level of intertextuality, ratherthan overt references, and gains credence when Balabanov's other filmsdepicting the decadence and moral perversity of post-Soviet Russia are con-sidered. Of Freaks and Men makes less sense as a (semi-)historical costumedrama when viewed in this thematic context, suggesting that there are par-allels between the perceived Russian moral bankruptcy of the 1890s and1990s.9 Balabanov employs a doubling of centuries to argue that like theSilver Age, post-Soviet Russia is plagued with social and moral degeneration.

Writing in 2004, Oleg Kovalov viewed Of Freaks and Men as the middlepiece of a cinematic triptych, between Brother and Brother 2. This pre-sented problems because Balabanov's contemporary Robin Hood-like con-tract killer Danila did not seem to correspond to the pornographer Johann.

7. For a more detaileddiscussion of thisissue, see Crone andDay (2004: 100-03).

8. A similar argumentcan be made formost of Balabanov'sfilms in which ourunderstandingsof normalcy andhumane are disrupted.Examples of thisare evident in thehumane depiction ofthe lepers in The River(Reka, 2002), themyth of the goodcontract killer inBrother, the deviancyof the policeman inCargo 200, and manymore situations inwhich Balabanovinverts the narrativeexpectations of theaudience.

9. In 1999 Broudewrote that she hopedthat this historicalperspective was not aforeshadowing of thefuture although OfFreaks and Men wasquite topical for thepresent day (Broude2001: 85).


Figure 4: The Siamese Twins Kolia and Tolia. Photo courtesy of CTB.

Kovalov therefore suggests that the unifying theme is 'the inability todefend [civilization] from the invasion of new barbarians', not so muchtaken by force, but given away. Here, Kovalov unwittingly uses the lan-guage of degeneration theory - the fall of Rome to the barbarian invadersdue to self-destruction rather than military weakness - in order to unifyBalabanov's films.

Post-Soviet RussiaGraeme Turner argues that audiences understand the societies depicted infilms through their own experiences, thereby constructing analogiesbetween what is portrayed and what is known (Turner 1993: 79).Balabanov echoes this idea when he states: 'Cinema reflects life, but it doesnot influence life itself. [...] It, like a mirror, reflects what is happeningtoday in our country' (in Protorskaia 2002). As such, one can argue thatBalabanov offers fin de siecle Russia as a postmodern double for the deca-dence and depravity of contemporary society, undoubtedly understood bymodern Russian audiences.

In 1991 inflation in Russia was estimated at 250 per cent a month andbartering was an accepted (and often the only) means of financial pay-ment. Shops were empty and resembled the famine years immediatelyafter World War II (Kotkin 2001: 119). By 1994, life expectancy forRussian males had dropped to 57 years and deaths were twice as commonas births (Specter 1995: Al). Alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed, as did


those from parasitic and infectious diseases. Soviet-era hospitals andschools were decaying and prisons were overflowing with criminals, manyof whom suffered from drug-resistant diseases which were graduallyspreading throughout mainstream society (Kotkin 2001: 187). For mostRussians, the 1990s signalled the end of civilized society and a descentinto a primitive survival of the fittest. As with degeneration theory a cen-tury before, illness and disease - both physical and spiritual - seemed to beintertwined in a process of biological and national regression.

In 1993, Boris Yeltsin illegally dissolved the country's legislature and,in reaction, the legislators barricaded themselves in the parliament build-ing. Yeltsin pushed the country to the brink of civil war by destroying thebuilding and forcefully clearing it of its elected officials. A year later, Russiabegan a military campaign in Chechnya in order to stop the region fromseceding from the Federation. Russia's inability to bring the Chechensquickly to heel further illustrated the weakness of a once great power. Inthe 1996 presidential election, voters selected from a disappointing arrayof candidates. Yeltsin was elected as the lesser of several evils. Finally, in1998, Russia faced a major financial crisis as the value of the rouble col-lapsed, once again causing hyperinflation and a seeming return to thedarkest economic days of post-Soviet Russia.

In many respects, there are cultural parallels between post-Soviet andfin de sWcle Russia. The latter was a decadent social environment in whichpolitical freedom resulted in pornography, violence and social deviance. Inthe 1990s, Soviet decency was replaced by a freewheeling black market inwhich drugs, money and prostitution were often more readily availablethan basic necessities. Russian literature reverted to a kind of intellectualdecadence in the works of Eduard Limonov, Vladimir Sorokin and VenediktErofeev. In the new Babylon, crime was without punishment, displayed incinematic offerings such as The Needle (Igla, 1989), Luna Park (1992), andThe Rifleman of the Voroshilov Regiment (Voroshilovskii strelok, 1 9 9 9 ).10 Anepidemic of social degeneration and political anarchy augured the rapiddecline and fall of Russia.

Paul W Goldschmidt argues that the proliferation of pornography inpost-Soviet society clashed with the belief that 'the welfare of the staterelies upon the welfare of its people, not only on their material well-being but also on their spiritual purity. The purity of the state is the col-lective sum of the citizen souls' purity' (Goldschmidt 1995: 910).Acting on this assumption, Soviet and post-Soviet governments battledpornography, albeit unsuccessfully, as a means to suppress dissidenceand achieve a conservative idealism. Significant in this debate aboutcollective national morality was the question: 'What is pornography?'Goldschmidt states that despite the findings of an expert commission in1988, the term remained elusive in the 1990s and, while applied arbi-trarily, the law governing pornography was espoused to be in the bestinterest of society (Goldschmidt 1995: 915-20). In Of Freaks and Men,Balabanov arguably engages this polemic by providing an ironic artistic(rather than pornographic) film about the decline of morals during theRussian Silver Age.

Equally important is what Nancy Condee notes as a phenomenon of'recuperating and re-integrating lost or repressed elements of cultural

10. See Lawton'sdiscussion of whatshe characterizesas the New Babylon(Lawton 2004:101-68).


11. For a discussion ofmedia epresentationsof the Chechenconflict see Ram(1999).

12. One only has to thinkof the film Intergirl(Interdevushka, 1989)to understand thatfemale sexuality wasoften one of onlya few options thatRussian women hadat their disposal.

history into a more inclusive and less tendentious model of nationaland cultural identity', which was ongoing when the film was made(Condee 1994: 75). Writers of the Silver Age, long forgotten orrepressed, were republished and often read for the first time in parallelwith contemporary authors during the 1990s. This phenomenon drewthe two time periods closer into one singular discourse on the decline ofRussian society. In fact, temporal doubling was not new to Russian cin-ematic audiences. For example, Mikhalkov filmed A Few Days from theLife of LI. Oblomov (Neskol'ko dnei iz zhizni LL Oblomova, 1980) at theheight of Soviet stagnation, and Sergei Bodrov Sr. created a contempo-rary version of Prisoner of the Mountains (Kavkazskii plennik, 1996),(re)animating the nineteen-century notion that both the Russian sol-dier and the noble Chechen savage were victims of a repressive Russiangovernment. "

More specifically, Mark Lipovetsky writes that by the late 1990s,postmodernism was the mainstream form of expression in Russia, point-ing to the literary works of Viktor Pelevin, Boris Akunin and the films ofBalabanov, among others (Lipovetsky 2004: 359). Akunin provides aninteresting parallel as his first historical novel, The Winter Queen (Azazel'),was published in the same year that Of Freaks and Men was released.Similarly, both Balabanov and Akunin undermine the post-Soviet ideal-ization of pre-Revolutionary Russia, thereby providing a veiled critiqueon contemporary society (Baraban 2004: 397-98, 411).

Armed with this perspective, scholars are asked to rethink many ofthe questions raised by Hashamova when discussing Of Freaks and Men,such as why the male characters seem impotent and their authorityundermined (Hashamova 2007a: 106). Masculinity took a direct hit inthe 1990s as male role models were redefined by the image of the mafiahit-man. Criminality was equated with masculinity, leaving many law-abiding men feeling impotent and ineffective. Jameson argues that post-modernism was a reaction to the new wave of American military andeconomic domination and, certainly, post-Soviet society tragically suf-fered as a result of Cold War brinksmanship (Jameson 1991: 5). Thissocio-economic chaos, in turn, required women to be the dominant fig-ures within the household, expected to provide for the family, while try-ing to repair the shattered masculinity of their sons and husbands. Thishelps to explain why in Of Freaks and Men 'Russian women [are] exposedto Western capital and the perceived emasculation of Russia'(Hashamova 2007a: 108).12 Criminality, male impotence and the pivotalrole of women in this redefinition of social norms is found in both fin desiecle and post-Soviet Russia.

Hashamova notes that Balabanov 'ironically subverts social struc-tures', whereby the servants become the masters (Hashamova 2007a:107). Degeneration theory developed in a post-Darwinian world in whichthe upper class was made uneasy by poverty, crime, public health issuesand numerous crises in national identity. Decadent artists in turn reflectedthese anxieties in their syphilitic, criminal, depraved and insane charac-ters. Empirical science offered an explanation for normal and abnormalbehaviour that took on binary oppositions such as civilized or primitive,healthy or depraved, contented or melancholic. As a result, degeneration


became a panacea by which the respectable classes could articulate theirhostility for culturally subversive elements of society.

This social upheaval was also undoubtedly evident in 1990s Russiawhere doctors and professors earned less than bodyguards and petty crim-inals. The social paradigm was upset; intellectual sophistication was virtu-ally meaningless in a culture of unscrupulous business practices. Theservants had become the masters, both in 1914 when Grigorii Rasputin,an uneducated peasant monk, was rumoured to run the government, andin the 1990s when men like Sergei Mikhailov, a Russian crime boss, builtorganized crime structures that crippled Russia's ability to maintain a civilsociety.

In this context, Of Freaks and Men fits into Balabanov's cinematic oeuvre.Hashamova finds a similar place for the film, but in the context of 'Russia asa victim of the West' (Hashamova 2007a: 18).13 However, this theme isonly one element of a larger critique of post-Soviet society in which similarnotions of moral and physical corruption result in the decline of an entirenation. The perversity of both post-Soviet and fin de sicle Russia are merelysymptoms of a much more insidious degenerative illness that ultimatelywill devolve an entire nation into imbeciles and miscreants. Balabanovsounds the alarm for a return to some semblance of civilized behaviour andthe need to abandon hopes of western political and economic salvation.After all, 1990s Russia seemed to be testing again Ivan Karamazov's notionthat if there is no God then everything is permissible.

Thus, critics have begun to reconsider the film, given Balabanov'smore recent assault on Soviet society in the form of a serial killer whouses his authority as a police officer to kidnap, rape and murder. In arecent interview, Leonid Parfenov asks if the new film Cargo 200 (Gruz200, 2007) is not like Of Freaks and Men, only without the 'men' andsolely about the freaks. Balabanov surprisingly defends his villain stating:'They are either human freaks, or freaked-out people. This maniac-policeman, he infernally tortures the girl, but he has this passion, this ishow he loves her. He calls her his wife. He is such a man. At that time' (inParfenov 2007).

Tony Anemone writes in his review of Cargo 200 that Balabanovdepicts a society in crisis, symptomatic of a larger social and psychologicalpathology, which recalls the themes and obsessions of DostoevskUl's meta-physical murder mysteries.

Balabanov seeks to transform a horrifying crime story into a symbolic por-trait of an entire society and civilization, and, perhaps, to suggest a way outof the current impasse. [...] [Balabanov's borrowings] are a testament to thedirector's seriousness, ambition, and his desire to engage in the national dis-course about post-Soviet national identity, in which Dostoevskii is, of course,a critical figure.

(Anemone 2007)Anemone's description could almost as easily be applied to Of Freaks andMen. It seems possible once again to suggest that Balabanov's earlier filmprovides important clues for understanding the director's conceptualiza-tion of post-Soviet society.

13. Hashamova furthernotes that the'subversive state ofRussian society andculture' vis-&-vis theWest is existent inboth fin de siecle andpost-Soviet Russia(Hashamova2004: 64).

Of Freaks and Men: Alekset Balabanov's critique of degenerate post-Soviet society 293

ConclusionAs such, if modernism concentrates on the moment when a societychanged, then postmodernism attempts to recuperate the past to subvertthe present. We cannot therefore expect postmodern discourse to provide areinterpretation of the past, but rather a reassessment of contemporaryeconomic and social realities (Jameson 1991: ix-x, 1-6). Of Freaks and Mendisplays the postmodern themes of voyeurism, pornography and perversionwithin the simulacrum of the Russian fin de siecle, substantiated by culturalquotations from Dostoevskii and the St Petersburg myth in order to depictthe demise (degenerative theory, cinema as dehumanizing commodity) ofthe Russian/Soviet utopia. A city inhabited by degenerates, criminals andsexual deviants in this case exemplifies the devolution of an entire nation,the demise of civilized Russian society that will not be saved by the West.

Of Freaks and Men is not an exercise in cinematic formalism devoid ofcommentary, as suggested by Lawton, but the philosophical touchstone forBalabanov's films about contract killers, soldiers-for-hire and deviantpsychopaths - all products of a nation in a state of economic and socialdecline, infected with a degenerative illness. It debunks the romanticizedversion of pre-Revolutionary Russia offered by many of Balabanov'scontemporaries and suggests that Russia should recognize its own inher-ent strain of deviant pathology.

Although the film resists interpretation, it is organized conceptually asa postmodern pastiche of moral degeneracy and its historical antecedents,employed to level criticism directly at Russian society. What Balabanovsuggests in Of Freaks and Men, and then more blatantly asserts in Cargo200, is that deviant sexual pathology is indicative of a generalized socialand economic malaise, resulting in the ubiquitous devolution of post-Soviet Russia.

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Suggested citationWhite, E H. (2008), 'Of Freaks and Men: Aleksei Balabanov's critique of degenerate

post-Soviet society', Studies in Russian and Soviet Cinema 2: 3, pp. 281-297,doi: 10.1386/srsc.2.3.281/1

Contributor detailsFrederick H. White is Associate Dean of Arts (Research and Graduate Programs) atMemorial University (Newfoundland, Canada). He has published in scholarly jour-nals such as Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie and Voprosy literatury, has a book in print,Memoirs and Madness: Leonid Andreev through the Prism of the Literary Portrait (2006)and is completing a follow-up study on narratives of mental illness by and aboutAndreev. Most recently, he has begun to examine the depiction of the Russian fin desWdcle in post-Soviet film.

Contact: Memorial University, A5015, St. John's, Newfoundland AlC 5S7, Canada.E-mail: [email protected]


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TITLE: Of Freaks and Men: Aleksei Balabanovs critique ofdegenerate post-Soviet society

SOURCE: Stud Russ Sov Cinema 2 no3 2008

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