As Time Goes By

Most people tend to take life for granted and then lament after experiencing their lost. Yet, feeling regret over their ignorance is all that one can do as time cannot turn back on its own. Undoubtedly, the collapse of USSR leaves tremendous impacts on people lives. “My Perestroika,” a documentary film directed by Robin Hessman, gives insight into the last years of the Soviet Union. Through five Russians’ perspectives, the movie reveals the difference between childhood and reality, the effect of this event and the changes people had to make after their world turned upside down.

The film begins with a parade of students, who were all wearing white shirts with epaulettes along with scarves and red caps. They all looked the same. One student, perhaps a class president, was given an enthusiastic thanks to the Soviet leader at the time, Leonid Brezhnev, “for the fact that [they were living] in the Country of Happy Childhood.” Yet, at the camera starts to pan across that sea of similarity, a woman’s narrator says, “I cannot say I wanted to be like everyone else, it was not that exactly, I simply was like everyone else.” That voice belongs to Lyuba Meyerson, a History teacher at Moscow’s School No. 57 and one of the five Russians that were being interviewed in the movie. Yet, Lyuba and her husband, Borya, remain as a core characters. Perhaps the reason lies on ideas that they are both history teachers and were children when the USSR collapsed. Thus, they could easily connect the dot and missing information regarding how this event changed everything in Russia, while putting personal details of the effect on their lives.

With other three classmates, these five people are known as a “stagnation generation,” as they all grew up in the Brezh...

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... of his seventeenth store selling exclusive French men’s shirts and ties, he is considered as a successful demonstration with the new Russia system. It is perhaps because unlike those four, Andrei knows how to adapt to the new society. Instead of lament the collapse and childhood, Andrei moves on. Sharing a contradict viewpoint to Olga, he believes that this new society creates a better living condition. If in the past, nobody was able to achieve his or her dreams; dreams were merely fantasies. The new regime enables the impossible.

Different perspectives of five Russians, who are known as a “stagnation generation,” create a unified theme for the documentary. Not only illustrating the impact of the collapse of USSR on people’s lives, at the same time, the movie offers an idea that the change can be positive or negative depends on each person’s path to deal with it.