In the early 1970s, Italian film crews spread out across the USSR, capturing a vast, multicultural empire few had ever seen in such diversity. From urban commuters to village fêtes, Baku trawlers to Siberian reindeer herders, the cameramen aimed to capture the Soviet polity at a time when Westerners had a gray, monolithic image of what lay behind the Iron Curtain. Granted official permission, they managed to resist any push towards propaganda, even finding ways to slyly critique a system that proclaimed regional autonomy but controlled everything from the Kremlin. While planned as a monumental, multi-chapter TV series, only a few episodes wound up being broadcast on Italian TV, just once, following which the endeavor lay forgotten in the archives. If ever there was a project for Sergei Loznitsa, this was it.
In “Imperium,” working with 60 hours of 16mm, the master documentarian organizes this journey along geographic lines, starting in Moscow and heading east, then doubling back through “the Stans” and the Baltic republics until ending in what was then Leningrad. As with Loznitsa’s past films of this type, some snippets of conversation and music have been added, but otherwise the footage has simply been restored and edited together. What’s revealed is an immense state whose distinct regions still managed to hold onto unique traditions, notwithstanding an incessant centralized proclamation of unity.
While “Imperium” can be engrossing, its nearly three-hour running time is felt more than in Loznitsa masterpieces like “Maidan” and “State Funeral.” Perhaps that’s because in those films, one feels the force of history pushing us forward, inexorably heading to a watershed moment whose impact continues to resonate across the decades. With “Imperium,” the motivation is clear yet the concept is more diffuse. It’s also a film which will likely resonate best with those of us old enough to recall how the Soviet Union was discussed in the West at the time, a decade before Ronald Reagan’s “Evil Empire” remark — which simply gave a reductivist Star Wars moniker to the anti-communist propaganda suffusing American-driven global discourse since the end of the Second World War. For Loznitsa, of course, his interest is inside the country rather than how it was perceived from abroad, though it will be impossible for most audiences to separate the two.
The film kicks off with a classic parade in Red Square for the 24th Congress of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, with banners touting the same slogans from the previous forty years about production targets being met ahead of schedule. Next comes the GUM department store and window displays with tuxedos, shiny patent leather shoes and beaded handbags, making us wonder who in early 1970s Moscow was buying such luxury goods. Commercialized religion makes its first appearance with a lively trade in Christmas decorations, one of many reminders that despite an official policy of atheism, certain traditions were allowed to persist. (Vladimir Putin, of course, has done an even better job in harnessing religion to his oligarchic dictatorship.)
From the capital the footage moves east, where consumer goods are far more difficult to obtain. In Suzdal, an old woman washes clothes in an ice hole; shots of Vladimir show a town seemingly unchanged from pre-Revolutionary days; further south, residents come out for a winter carnival whose roots must date long before Leninism arrived. As the cameramen spread east, local customs become stronger: Bactrian camel races near the Mongolian border, reindeer sleds in the Sakha Republic. It’s here in Siberia where the footage most forcefully critiques Soviet policy, as a group of young Caucasian Russians (in classic 1970s fashion) play guitar and sing Russian songs, the local Yakut population looking on from the sidelines, discontented observers of this not-so-subtle form of colonialism.
The greatest takeaway from “Imperium” is just how stubbornly resistant centuries-old traditions were to the Soviet push towards uniformity. People still attended mosques in Bukhara and churches in Etchmiadzin, they held on to ways of life that had not been collectivized by Stalinist dictates. Today, however, rampant capitalism and the internet have changed Russia’s social landscape far more than anything Lenin or Brezhnev could have imagined, turning stubbornly multicultural populations that boldly resisted homogeneity into consumers looking West for their acquisitions.
It’s interesting to imagine what might have happened had Italian TV screened the majority of these films upon release. A sense of what life was really like in the Soviet Union was hard to come by then — in the U.S., a 1977 National Geographic publication “Journey Across Russia: The Soviet Union Today” was the first populist corrective to the sense of a uniform society of collectivized proletariat.
Italy, with its strong communist party, had a different problem, too often refusing to acknowledge Politburo abuses. An interesting companion piece to “Imperium” would be Federico Ferrone and Michele Manzolini’s 2013 documentary “The Train to Moscow: A Journey to Utopia,” also consisting of found footage but earlier, when a party supporter from Emilia Romagna discovered that life in the USSR wasn’t all solidarity and freedom. At the time, his Italian colleagues censored his revelations. All empires peddle utopias, but why do so many people believe them?
