My Perestroika

Westerners tend to imagine the massive changes in Russian life since the end of the Cold War as headlines and abstractions: Gorbachev and Putin, a new breed of capitalists and profiteers, a new wave of emigration by Russian Jews. But we have little access to the personal lives of ordinary Russians living through upheaval. In her marvelous and eye-opening documentary, director Robin Hessman—an American Jewish television producer who worked in Moscow for nearly a decade—weaves together the private hopes, disillusionments and realities of five everyday Russians who came of age as Soviet teenagers, witnessed the USSR’s collapse and now are forging lives in a brave new post-perestroika world. At the center is the Meyerson family—Borya, who grew up under a cloud of anti-Semitism; and his wife Lyuba, so patriotic a Soviet child that she saluted the television when the national anthem played. They now teach Russian history with a candor unthinkable in their own childhoods. The trajectories of their middle-class Moscow friends are equally surprising and complex: rebel musician Ruslan, struggling single mother Olga, and successful menswear merchant Andrei. Hessman intercuts her intimate portraits with period news footage and rare Soviet-era home movies to give us a remarkably personal glimpse inside one of the great social and political transformations of our time. Premiered at 2010 Sundance Film Festival.