Putin's pro-natalism meets format television

Close to the end of his second term, the now-former president Vladimir Putin publicly began to emphasize the severity of the demographic crisis in the Russian Federation. The media often describes Putin as the man who had brought short-term stability to that country through oil and gas revenue. Journalists also argue that his main goal is to reclaim the so-called great power status for Russia within the international arena. Yet, as Putin himself had announced, the state's efforts may only be sustained by a healthy population growth. (See my May-06 blog No Children. No Future.)

Instead, the opposite is true. After the collapse of the USSR, millions of ethnic Russians remained in the former Soviet republics - from the Baltic to Kazakhstan. More important, Russia's death rate (in part - a result of alcohol-, tobacco-, and pollution-related factors) significantly exceeds its birth rate. Combined with a Gastarbeiter-migrant flood from the former non-Slavic Soviet territories and beyond, the state became rather alarmed (its seeming lack of effort to repatriate those ethnic Russians notwithstanding).

It is not uncommon for the modern government to be actively involved in promoting pro-natalism, most overtly in an immediate postwar setting. (See Mary Louise Roberts' article "The Dead and the Unborn: French Pronatalism and the Abortion Law of 1920", for example.) A new state may also require a growing population to physically sustain its industry and mentally uphold its ideals. (See David Hoffman's Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 about state advocacy of strong, patriarchal families in the 1930s.) What, then, was Putin's solution to the Russian demographic crisis?

Most immediately, the now-former president's pro-natalist program involved various types of financial benefits granted to new and future mothers. While critics scoffed at the program's long-term effects, there was a spike in the Russian birth rate last year. Less obviously, the state has been attempting to construct and promote a new Russian identity through various means, including the consolidation of history teaching in schools. (One has to consider that from the mid-1930s and until 1991, Soviet schools taught a curious blend of ethnocultural patriotism and dialectic materialism. By contrast, many texts published in the 1990s went too far in the opposite direction.) Most recently, a plethora of blockbuster films regarding accepted patriotic subjects, including Alexander Nevsky and the Polish invasion of Moscow in 1612, has been released.

Yet, I wondered whether the state would use mass cultural methodology to address the subject of children more directly. And, it did!

While post-Soviet Russian television had borrowed much from its North American counterpart, including the proliferation of reality content, it also exhibits certain differences. For example, one of the most popular types of content to broadcast is a series, which is essentially an extended film with no possibility of a sequel. This format ranges from as few as four to as many as sixteen episodes. Expectedly, all such series are driven by plot and advertising alike. Here, Russia's "serious" film actors and A-list celebrities frequently play major roles. So, their star power combined with exciting, unrealistic plots, is capable of attracting a wide audience.

One such four-part series is Atonement - Starting All Over. Marta. (Искупление - Начать сначала. Марта.) - an over-the-top, sappy "chick-flick". Maria Poroshina (known to the North American audiences through her role in Night Watch and Day Watch) plays Marta. An attractive, successful forty-something, this woman evaluates her life: she recalls that success did not come easily: abandoned by her husband, she spent years in poverty. One of the ways in which she had earned money was through...........surrogate motherhood. Not once. Not twice. THREE TIMES: repopulating the early post-communist Russia one surrogate baby at a time.

Throughout the series, Marta and her best friend debate the pros and cons of being a surrogate mother and have endless discussions about the biological gift of motherhood and the joy of raising children. She searches for the three that she had once carried to term for other parents and tries to have a baby of her own. Most important, Marta reconnects with the prince charming from her past, who uses martial art skills (!) he evidently picked up in Soviet-era Afghanistan (!) to teach the bad guys a lesson or two (or THREE?!). The ending is, of course, very happy.

This particularly terrible example of Russian format television was created by a Russo-Ukrainian production and distribution company, Star Media. One of its major partners is Russia's most prominent state-owned television, the First Channel. The connection between such exaggerated case of pro-natalism is not only conceivable but also - likely.

Whether this type of mass cultural propaganda ends up contributing to the aversion of a demographic catastrophe remains to be seen. I just hope that the Russian state's next effort involves a better screen play.

Sex...machineguns!

Anchang. Sex Machineguns.

A clever man once proclaimed that he needed no instructions to know how to rock. I, on the other hand, need no instructions to know how to contribute to my illustration Rockfolio! :)

There is a God of Death on my bookshelf!

Actually, there are four!

Amidst tirelessly attempting to complete the readings of the fifty-some books for my cultural history PhD minor, my collection (!) grew. In the past couple of months, I've been: reading all about the boundaries of commodification (apparently - a negative term!) and the evils of capitalism (!) that most scholars emphasize in a sustained ideological assault on my brain; memorizing disturbing amounts of information about 19th century sewing machines and farming equipment; finding out all about American coffins, managerial patterns, and female working class fashions in the early 20th century; most of all - learning that I apparently have the obligation to spend my hard-earned dollars using my social conscience (read: fitting the left definition of morality). Strangely, all these texts did not preclude me from desiring more Ryuks. Fusing Marx and Freud, scholars call it "commodity fetishism". So, my apparently immoral purchase of this doll doesn't save rainforests, cure AIDS, or ban sweatshops. But, his carnivorous grin sure is cute!

Ryuk is a God of Death from a popular manga-turned anime-turned movie-turned endless merchandise Death Note. My only miniscule feeling of guilt comes from the seeming incompatibility of my age and such a childish interest. Of course, this interest speaks to the sheer success of Japanese cross-platform media production and cross-border marketing. Interestingly, the mighty resource, Wikipedia, suggests that the notion of a God of Death, as loosely referenced in Death Note, actually came to Japan from the West in the 19th century. And, here I am, consuming this God of Death in the West through a Japanese lens. Remember those evils of globalist capitalism in all their multivalent glory! (More specifically, "hypercapitalism" via the web, according to those aforementioned scholars.)

I've never considered myself a collector, despite owning hundreds of (largely heavy metal) CDs. The closest I've come to this coveted status is the multiple Orthodox and Catholic miniature icon reproductions, which happen to sit on my other bookshelf. (I am way ahead of you: I don't consider myself a book collector either, despite certain noticeable patterns!) Or, perhaps, my Russian tin soldiers qualify. In contrast to the icons and the soldiers, I've actively sought out Ryuk. My strategy even included transparent gift hints (including this one)!

Stranger yet, I've never been interested in other anime-related media. Sure, like any aware film fan, I enjoy a Japanese comedy or two: some would say that I have a curious sense of humor when it comes to over-the-top splatterific gore as administered by a huggable drill bra (!) in Machine Girl. But that's where it ends. I swear.

So, what is it about this God of Death that leaves me wanting to "collect them all"? His wobbly yellow eyes? His insatiable appetite for..........red apples? Perhaps, the fur around his neck subliminally reminds me of those fashionable twenty thousand shirtwaist worker women who went on strike in New York in 1909-1910, as my readings tell me.

Salmon, death of the West, and Eco's runaway beard

I didn't even recognize him until he began speaking, shaved face and all. He seems to really dislike publicity photos and has a Baudrillard-like attitude toward the media. The presenters greedily emphasized that Travels in Hyperreality predated Simulacra and Simulation. I wasn't surprised, considering how the latter is academically privileged over the former across the board.

Attending a lecture by Umberto Eco has been on my "top ten things to do before I die" list ever since I was introduced to his work in 1998. A decade later, I had purchased and consumed all of his fiction, read a large bulk of his cultural criticism, starting from his republished PhD thesis on medieval aesthetics, and took a crack at some of his strictly academic work in the field of semiotics.

Even my teenage days of standing in line in subzero midwestern temperatures to get concert tickets and be "rokken-like-dokken" couldn't match my literary fandom in this case. I changed my schedule and worked two full shifts with an hour of sleep in between in order to attend this event. Then I withstood the strategic, repeated bag-kicking and foot-stomping attack by an angry old lady, who evidently wanted our seats.

During this round table discussion, Eco focused on some of his more recent essays from the Turning Back the Clock collection. His talk included issues of technology: degrading from Vista to XP and politics: using 19th century methods to solve 21st century concerns. He took multiple jabs at Berlusconi and urged for a bilateral solution to the problem of migration and ethnic replacement in Europe.

The most surprising part of the lecture was not this scholar's runaway beard, but rather his demeanor. Beyond the level of cosmopolitan erudition, one of the most stand-out aspects of Eco's fiction is his subtle, clever sense of humor. I wasn't expecting it to translate well into the live environment with spontaneous audience questions. After all, some of my other literary favorites like Zoschenko and Iskander are also funny men. Yet, at least according to the Soviet rumor mill, they are publicly known to have unpleasant, dreary personalities. Charming and quick-witted, this Italian academic destroyed my expecations by having the audience laughing out loud throughout the entire lecture.

In the true, but inadvertent spirit of turning back the clock, I recycled an old illustration of mine to make Eco a thank-you postcard. I took away some hair, but the token beard stayed!