Contemporary Documentary Cinema and the Nostalgia for the Soviet Past in the West and Russia

Bulgarian Historical Review, 54 (2026), No. 1, pp. 195-229
DOI: https://doi.org/10.71069/BHR1.26.SE10

Simona Evstatieva

Simona Evstatieva - M.A. of the Department of Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University; Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Institute for Historical Studies, 52, Shipchenski Prohod Blvd., Build. 17, Sofia 1113, Bulgaria; ORCID ID: 0009-0009-5916-8071, E-mail: evstatievasimona@gmail.com

Abstract: In contemporary media and artistic practices, there is a “documentary turn” and a growing fascination with the Soviet past and its social utopias. The present study proposes an in-depth comparative analysis of the Sovexport collection from the EYE Film Institute in Amsterdam with the production techniques, cinematic representations, and expressed ideas in a selection of contemporary documentaries from Russia and the West. Nostalgia not only for Soviet aesthetics and art, but also for the social organization, welfare benefits and everyday life in the former Soviet Union, can be seen both in Russia and, perhaps on an even larger scale, in the West, for example in the work of artists and documentary filmmakers such as Hito Steyerl, Anri Sala, Ilya and Emilia Kabakov. In their work there is a tendency to create documentaries by mixing archival material and fictional stories, offering a new reading of the Soviet reality. By building on the semio-pragmatic approach toward documentaries and thus pinpointing what works could be analyzed as such, I argue that the unrealized Soviet project must be examined critically in future documentary filmmaking.

Keywords: Soviet cinema, Soviet past, contemporary cinema, documentary, propaganda.

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