Socialism in One Bedroom

Next to Goodbye, Lenin!, The Man Who Couldn't Die looks like a much grimmer affair, despite their shared premise.  World War II veteran Alexei Afanasevich Kharitonov has spent the past fifteen years confined to his bed after a stroke. His wife and step-daughter are taking care of him, but not just out of a sense of filial obligation: they need his pension to get by.  True, the children in Goodbye, Lenin! at one point are also in a budgetary bind thanks to their sick mother (she can't remember where she has hidden a substantial amount of cash that is about to become worthless once the country switches to the Deutschmark), but their devotion to her survives the financial disaster Christiane inadvertently causes.

But it is the time frame that makes the most significant difference.  Goodbye, Lenin! takes places in the months between the fall of the Wall and German reunification, when young people like  Alex could still be excited about their future.  The Man Who Couldn't Die unfolds years after the collapse of the USSR, and optimism is in short supply.  Alexei Afanasevich's bedroom is dismal and oppressive, but the world outside his window is hardly joyous.  Alexei Afanasevich's stepdaughter Marina gets wrapped up in a corrupt election campaign for a candidate who has decided that bribing voters is simply paying for services rendered, and crass, rich New Russians show off their dubiously accumulated wealth.  

Her mother (and Alexei Afanasevich's wife) Nina Alexandrovna  is completely at a loss to understand the new society that has supplanted Soviet everyday life. For her, and to a lesser extent, for Marina, the timelessness of the old man's bedroom has become something of a refuge.  Indeed, everything they do for Alexei Afanasevich can be viewed as a kind of displaced self-interest: are they keeping him alive because they love him, or because they need his money?  Their years-long maintenance of the illusion of a perpetual Brezhnev era starts out as a way to avoid a fatal shock to the old man's system, but it is the women who start to find comfort in their simulation. Alexei Afanasevich spends most of the novel trying to figure out how to kill himself with the little voluntary muscle control he has left. 

The Man Who Couldn't Die takes place mostly during the aforementioned election campaign, but its temporal scope is much broader.  At Marina's instigation, the two women began to curate Alexei Afanasevich's reality years before the Soviet collapse: 

at the first historic tremor, [Marina] had divined in the decrepit general secretary’s replacement by a younger, more energetic one not a pledge of Soviet life’s continuity but the beginning of the end. She immediately began preserving the substance of the era for future use and purging it of any new admixtures, no matter how harmless they seemed at first. So it came to pass that their good old Horizon television—on which only impressionistic bursts of static were still in color—showed the farewell to that great figure.

Compared to the machinations of Alex and his friend in Goodbye, Lenin! , their scheme starts out low-tech: “Nina Alexandrovna was charged with reading the paralyzed man specific articles, which Marina made fat deletions in and supplied with handwritten insertions. Nina Alexandrovna carried out these instructions, although she was embarrassed by both the articles and her own voice." Their task becomes more complicated when the gap between their simulation and the reality of Perestroika grows too wide: “Very quickly, outside time became so altered that there wasn’t even anything in Pravda for Marina’s pen to rework."  Eventually, with the help of "computer whiz Kostik," they begin to make their own fake news broadcasts: "they got so good at it that they were able to create the Twenty-Eighth and Twenty-Ninth Congresses of the Soviet Communist Party for the paralyzed man."

Alex and his friend in Goodbye, Lenin! may occasionally enjoy themselves while maintaining an illusory East Germany, but their sense of purpose does not waver: their job is to keep Christiane alive.  On at least two occasions, the film hints that their efforts might not be as necessary as they think (first, when we learn that Christiane had been willing to consider defecting to the West, and second, when Lara's revelation of the truth does not cause her to immediately drop dead), but Christiane is always at the center of the simulation, as both inspiration and audience.  The Man Who Couldn't Die complicates the relationship between the deceivers and the deceived almost from the very beginning.  Alexei Afanasevich is mute, so his family can only guess not only about the effectiveness of their work, but even its necessity:

No one could say for certain whether their playacting was fooling the sick man, of course. Nina Alexandrovna, at least, thought she picked up a certain agreement, a semblance of approval in the signals emitted by his asymmetrical brain. Of course, Alexei Afanasievich had always not so much liked as considered it proper that his innumerous family wait on him hand and foot, so he may simply have been pleased with their efforts and the theatricalized fuss occasioned by his illness. ”

In the absence of the kind of feedback that Christiane provides her children, the simulation in Slavnikova's novel seems to exist for its own sake, or, more properly for the sake of the very people who have engineered it. Alexei Afanaseivich's bedroom, nicknamed the "Red Corner" after the Soviet propaganda displays that were encouraged in the country's early decades, becomes a shrine to the undead Soviet past as embodied by Leonid Ilich Brezhnev, the long-dead Soviet leader who, in the book, is as functionally immortal as Alexei Afanasievich himself: 

These properties had something to do with immortality. The general secretary’s rejuvenated photo—half documentary print and half retouched and clearly made during his lifetime—was striking for that very quasi-drawnness you see only in a dead person’s features. [...] But what was amazing was this: the general secretary, whose death had here been reversed and whose longevity had become a natural feature that only kept increasing, had somehow borrowed an authenticity from Alexei Afanasievich that Brezhnev himself had never possessed.

Soon Nina Alexandrovna finds herself falling sway to the illusion, shocked "at the distinct sensation that Brezhnev’s funeral had indeed been a deception, a film someone had spliced together, that the years were still divided into five-year plans and the country, with all its heavy industry, was continuing to build communism in the heavens above—where it was already half ready, its façades glittering..”

Of all the Soviet leaders who could have been chosen for the role of immortal icon, Brezhnev is the most appropriate for Slavnikova's purposes.  Once glasnost took hold under Gorbachev, one word that would doggedly attach itself to Brezhnev and his era: stagnation ("zastoi").  The word is equally applicable to the stifling bedroom that houses Alexei Afanasevich's body, which, like Brezhnev's in his last years, seems stuck in a liminal state between life and death.  Marina's Soviet charade is so good that "her stagnation had achieved perfection":

Apparently, the period of stagnation preserved in the Red Corner would not allow for forward movement, so everything had fallen back in place; now that was even more true. At night, the window sealed shut for the winter would crackle and tinkle as if holding back the press of some growing mass, as if the paralyzed immortality were flexing an invisible muscle

After years of pretending to live in a never-ending Brezhnev Era, both Marina and Nina Alexndrovna occasionally  find themselves confused about basic questions of reality.  Marina starts to see her political candidate, Apofeozov, as a threat, "the embodiment of the realest reality, was the opposite of the immortal little world she was defending.”  Nina Alexandrovna sometime has the feeling that "Brezhnev’s funeral had indeed been a deception, a film someone had spliced together, that the years were still divided into five-year plans and the country, with all its heavy industry, was continuing to build communism in the heavens above."  

Their confusion is thematically appropriate.  In keeping the Brezhnev Era alive, they are inadvertently recapitulating that era's salient feature: simulation itself.  Countless jokes from the last years of Brezhnev's life play on the idea that the General Secretary is little more than a vegetable. But even more jokes highlight the gap in the Brezhnev Era's reality and its contemporary representation.  One classic story about Soviet leaders on a broken-down train (updated each time a new leader came to power) contrasted each leader's absurd approach to problem-solving .  When the train stops moving, Lenin calls for a voluntary work day to get it fixed, Stalin demands that all the train workers be executed, and Khrushchev posthumously rehabilitates them.  And Brezhnev?  He proposes pulling down the shades on all the windows, rocking back and forth, and pretending that the train is still moving. 

Later versions of the joke are extended to include Gorbachev and Yeltsin, but the whole point of the family's deception is to act as if the joke could not possibly be updated. No one else is every going to get on that train.  Alexei Afanasievich's bedroom is more than simple a sanctuary for a nearly extinct Soviet habitat; it is a simulacrum of a simulation.  The stagnation in this apartment is more perfect than the Brezhnev era could ever be, because it has divorced itself from time (the past several decades) and even biology (Alexei Afanasievich cannot (be allowed to) die.  The novel's indictment of Soviet nostalgia (realized here as an apartment-sized Brezhnev theme park) could not be more cutting, for the entire project represents the ever-shrinking horizons of a dying man in a simulated world that, whatever appeal it might have, can only be stifling.  Small wonder that Alexei Afansivich is suicidal; he is the last vestige of a world that self-destructed long ago. 


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Sim City Socialism