Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone — Adam Curtis’s exceptional collage of conflict and collapse

There is no omniscient narrator telling us that what we’re viewing is “a fantasy”. There isn’t the faintest echo of a Brian Eno track in the background. But from the first piece of archive, showing a group of Soviet models singing an ode to Coca-Cola, Russia 1985-1999 TraumaZone is unmistakably an Adam Curtis documentary. And an exceptional one at that.

Eschewing most of his trademark stylistic gimmicks, Curtis sets about capturing “what it felt like to live through the collapse of communism and democracy” in seven dense hours of footage. Unlike the hugely diverting HyperNormalisation, his latest filmic collage can seem gruelling.

It demands patience and stamina, and rewards with an opportunity to bear witness to life in every stratum of one of the most closed, complex and contradictory societies. These fragments of a broken country — occasionally contextualised with captions — take us to febrile cities and Arctic hinterlands; imperial palaces and rustic shacks; the exploded core at Chernobyl and the no-less noxious halls of the Kremlin. To watch is to be utterly immersed in time and place.

A thread of chronology keeps us from getting lost in the sprawl of images, interviews and excerpts. The first half of the series follows the break-up of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, and looks at how his policy of perestroika exacerbated inequalities, galvanised independence movements and led to a military coup. The focus then shifts to the failures of Boris Yeltsin’s post-communist shock-therapy economics and the attendant emergence of a locust-like oligarchy and starving population.

Curtis’s detractors will have grounds to criticise his historical abridgments and convenient causalities. But TraumaZone excels in how it traces the reverberations of these macro paradigm shifts from Moscow throughout this vast land. And as it presents us with the testimonies of ordinary people — collectively desperate, fatalistic, grieving — the series begins to evoke the polyphonic, oral histories of the Soviet Union collated by Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich.

But much of the storytelling here is also of a tacit kind. Frequently, Curtis teases out polarities and hypocrisies through revealing juxtapositions: a shot of people doing laundry in an icy lake in Siberia, for instance, is swiftly followed by scenes of an opulent restaurant, while details of an ambitious space programme dovetail with examples of crumbling everyday infrastructure. Some indelible images, such as one of bathers knowingly wading into contaminated waters, seem to take on an allegorical significance.

Curtis makes connections between decades past and the present day without needing to comment explicitly. Putin may appear only in the final eight of 420 minutes, but by then the series has already compelled us to see how the roots of his regime lie in the systemic corruption and public distrust for democracy, and the trauma-born apathy that emerged in the 1990s.

Footage from the first Chechen war — shelled cities, slaughtered civilians, conscripts decrying a “senseless conflict”, nationalists braying about “historical land” — could be mistaken for the atrocities enacted by Russian forces in Ukraine today. It’s a painful reminder that a tragic history doesn’t tend to repeat as farce, as Karl Marx once suggested, but as tragedy again.

★★★★★

On BBC iPlayer from October 13

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