Television - Tales of post-perestroika chaos make tragicomic viewing, writes Andrew Billen
The State of Russia season (More4)
On Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, More4 showed documentaries about contemporary Russia. Wherever they plunged their dipsticks, they came up dirty. What was surprising was the degree to which Russia has degenerated from the world's great threat to its largest joke nation. According to More4, it has taken only the 18 years from the beginning of perestroika to Vladimir Putin's second term to transform Russia from a tragic nation to a tragicomic one.
Despite the programme's grim, hyperbolic title, we might have predicted laughs in Death of a Nation (9pm, 20 March) if only because the reporter hailed from the family Theroux. Son of the raunchy novelist Paul and brother of Louis, the sly documentary-maker, Marcel Theroux showed himself to be as good at telling a story as either of them, and the tale he had to tell was an epic one. Russia, he summarised, has a third-world mortality rate and a first-world birth rate - a disastrous equation. Over the past ten years, male life expectancy has fallen from 63 to 56 (the same as Bangladesh's). Aids, long seen as a western disease, is on the brink of becoming an epidemic. Meanwhile, at the other end of the life cycle, ill-health has rendered ten million Russians infertile, every other baby is diseased at birth, and abortions outnumber live births. By the middle of the century Russia could have lost half its population: there may simply be too few Russians to keep the country going.
Yet, despite this crisis, Russia is still determined to expel swathes of its people, an irony not lost on Theroux, who visited the country's southern border to speak to some of the 30,000 Meshket Turks about to be exported to the United States. In the middle of an interview with a group of them, Theroux and his crew are kidnapped by a cadre of distinctly threatening Cossacks. Their holding cell turns out to be Viktor the Cossack's grocery shop, where he gets out the beers and invites the Brits to join in some rousing Cossack songs. The afternoon grows long and the evening longer. "It was," says Theroux later, "like being cornered by the local nutters in the pub" - except in this case Viktor, the white supremacist, had just been put in charge of a thousand armed paramilitaries.
Tuesday night's highlight was Tania Rakhmanova's prizewinning French documentary How Putin Came to Power. This, too, proved to be a comedy of sorts, in which the nonentity from the secret service outsmarts his puppet masters. In the early days, Putin of the KGB, or its successor, the FSB, had been useful to Boris Yeltsin's family when it came to blocking an investigation into a multi- million-pound scam they were pulling over the restoration of the Kremlin. The Yeltsins' potential nemesis was the prosecutor general, Yuri Skuratov, whom they attempted to destroy by issuing a sex video of him cavorting with two naked prostitutes. When the Russian people doubted that it was Skuratov on the tape, they got Putin to announce that oh, yes it was. Soon, the media oligarchs were promoting the hitherto unknown suit, first for prime minister and then president.
There was plenty of humour in this film, too, even if its presiding tone was more like bewilderment. But nothing was as retrospectively amusing as the story of how the businessman Boris Berezovsky flew to Biarritz, where Putin was holidaying, to persuade the nonentity to stand for election, assuring him that once he was elected Yeltsin would run the country for him. The former Kremlin "godfather" has since fled Russia, Yeltsin is out in the cold, and the president is pursuing his own Soviet-style nationalism. The only advice he appears to be listening to is Catherine the Great's, that it is a sovereign's patriotic duty to be autocratic.
I was expecting a concluding laugh from Once Upon a Time in Siberia (9pm, 22 March) and the American director Paul Berczeller obviously thought he was delivering it in his study of a provincial mob boss, Vitaly Dymochka, who had become a film director. His only subject was his own swashbuckling career as a gangster-entrepreneur: "The film starts with stonewashed jeans and ends with me going to jail for the first time," he explained, yet Berczeller bigged up his subject like mad, comparing him from the off to a Siberian tiger. "Here was a real chance to confront him about his past," he said bravely halfway through, but as Dymochka was busy confronting it himself, in a movie shot with all the technical panache of a 1970s episode of The Swee-ney, it was hard to see what Berczeller was hoping he would cough to. "I don't do regret," Dymochka explained, mystified.
By the end of the week, I was left wondering what Russia's greatest problem was: its dying population, its president or its self-glorifying gangsters. I wondered what Mussorgsky would have made of it if he were composing Khovanshchina, that grand opera about Russian politics, today rather than in 1880. The plotting goes on, the Church still wields too much power over the people (a geologist-turned-millionaire interviewed by Theroux had opportunely found God) and the old country goes on suffering. The only difference might be that the Muscovite chorus would every now and again burst into "We're in the Money" and offer the audience the chance to purchase a nationalised industry.
Andrew Billen is a staff writer for the Times
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