“Loving Fatherland does not mean kissing Birches”: Why Sergei Dovlatov and Alexander Gelman rejected the Glorification of the “Russian Tree” in the late USSR

Abstract

The article is deals with the contradictory attitude of some Russian citizens towards the demonstration of love for the “Russian birch” in the mass culture of the last decades of the Soviet state. It raises the following questions. Where does the critical attitude of writers such as Sergei Dovlatov and Alexander Gelman towards the appeasement of fellow citizens at the sight of a white-trunked tree come from? How widespread were both phenomena - the love of the birch among the population of the RSFSR and the critical perception of this love by individual contemporaries? How can they be explained and described? Using mainly Soviet poetry and ego-documents, the authors outline the extent and intensity with which the veneration of the “Russian tree” was expressed in late Soviet Russian mass culture. The article proposes a theoretical toolkit that provides an adequate language to describe the love for the “Russian birch” and the concern for its popularity, and formulates a general hypothesis about the timing and motives for the final transformation of the birch into a “Russian tree”. The authors argue that the victory in the Great Patriotic War, the population's fatigue from hardships of the first half of the 20^th century, the conservative turn in state policy and the massive growth of nationalism among the political and cultural elite and the general public in the 1960s to 1980s provided the birch with a solid “Russian home” and conditioned, on the other hand, the emergence of a critical and ironic discourse concerning the process.