Zagranitsa

Zagranitsa (Russian: заграница; IPA: [zəɡrɐˈnʲit͡sə]; lit. “across the border” or “abroad”) refers to the real and imagined borders of an idealized, imaginary West that lays beyond the borders of the Soviet Union during the late Soviet period. The concept of zagranitsa exercised a great amount of influence on Soviet life and culture from the 1950s until the 1980s. It manifested itself in a widespread fascination with Western manufactured goods, films, music, fashion, and ideas.

Alexei Yurchak, in his 2006 book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation, describes zagranitsa in the late Soviet period as an “imaginary elsewhere” that was “simultaneously knowable and unattainable, tangible and abstract, mundane and exotic”. The idea of zagranitsa as utopia, at once an aspiration, a negation, and a reflection of the Soviet Union itself, became embedded into Soviet culture and identity.

Once travel to the United States became more accessible with Perestroika, the “imaginary West” lost its mythical connotations, resulting in disappointment and disillusionment. As Svetlana Boym writes of the 1985 hit song “The Last Letter” (also known as “Goodbye Amerika”) by Russian rock group Nautilus Pompilius, bidding farewell to America— that is, “the beloved Amerika of Soviet underground culture… the mythical West of the Russian imagination”—was as painful as bidding farewell to Soviet culture itself and the “utopian fantasy land of one’s youth”.

According to Maurice Hindus (writing in 1953), the very word zagranitsa had always “exercised a spell” over ordinary Russians, due to the vastness of the country, the enforced isolationism of living in villages, and the restriction of movement under Soviet rule. For centuries, Russians had been granted glimpses of zagranitsa and the West through the “window" opened by Peter the Great, as well as the reports of the privileged few who were able to go abroad and the rare appearance of aliens that crossed the border into Russia. The majority of the population remained generally closed to foreign influence until World War II. The war brought an influx of Western goods into the Soviet Union due to foreign relief efforts and the Lend-Lease policy enacted in 1941, and the “traditional hunger for knowledge of the mysterious zagranitsa was sharpened”. Hindus writes:

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