Russian Class Mobility: Mother Responsible for Lumpenproletariat Revolution?

Natascha Drubek, University of Regensburg

“Vagabonds, pickpockets, tricksters, gamblers, pimps, porters, tinkers and beggars”  were described by  Marx as the Lumpenproletariat.  This déclassé layer of society was of no use to the revolutionary struggle, whereas the  Russian anarchist Bakunin believed that the revolutionary forces are to be found exactly among these “rags” of society. In Russian culture these characters “with dubious means of subsistence and of dubious origin”  occupy an interesting place, and how they are represented and understood depends on political ideas and the current zeitgeist.

In Zviagintsev’s film Elena we see how in contemporary Russia a very unrevolutionary member of the Lumpenproletariat is able to achieve, following an untimely death, and thanks to his mother, Elena, a substantial wealth re-distribution inside their extended family.

Elena at the same time tells an intimate and sad story about an elderly man and woman who—even though married—find themselves on opposite sides of the new Russian class system. The man owns a well appointed apartment in the centre of Moscow and we slowly discover that the woman we see cleaning and cooking for him is his former nurse, who probably comes from  a peasant background. The viewer feels a tension between the couple, expressed mainly through the dissecting long shots of Krichman’s  camera. The viewer would like to see the class difference between them diminished, so the two partners would be more equal. While we are wondering how this could be achieved we are introduced, following a journey to a second, totally different space, to where the lumpen live. We understand that Elena has a second family life, separated from her marriage not only by space as the camera accompanies her when she leaves her husband to take the elektrichka train and delve into the truschoby blocks of Moscow suburbs, but by architecture, which highlights the economical, aesthetic, and maybe even moral barrier between her two families.

With the death of the man, his wealth is taken away from his family (his daughter) and the poor in-laws move into his apartment. The takeover of the property is shown as a highly unsatisfying fulfillment of Bakunin’s dream of a lumpen revolution.

In Elena no real revolution takes place—the surprising development of the film’s events show either the strength of blood ties or a darwinist survival of the fittest: the rich man’s daughter refuses to have children whereas Elena’s lumpen offspring reproduce continuously. According to this logic the lower class family will move into the bigger apartment—just as it was in the case of uplotnenie in early Soviet times.

Only here it is not the (Bolshevik) State but Mother who makes this happen. Stately Elena without a doubt is Mother Earth, rodina-mat’, and a powerful cook raised in a society where “every cook shall govern” (Lenin). Zviagintsev’s analysis of the ambivalent impact of gendered images purveying national identity is devastating and demands from the plot that Elena becomes a killer. Elena is a fearful allegory of Mother Russia’s tender care and gentle poisoning.

June 2013