The Red Cape Diaries

It took over a decade of evolution and mutation in the memetic stew of the Internet before Sovpunk made its way to old media, through Salnikov's novel. Perhaps this is how it earns its "punk" label: dredging up the analog visual culture of a world marked by a notoriously restrictive information regime, only to let it prosper on what used to be the free-for-all of post-Soviet cyberspace.  Sovietpunk (as it was more commonly called) first appeared on an obscure forum before finding new homes on Vkontatke, YouTube, and Reddit.  In all these spaces, Sovpunk is marginal, but its proponents often use it to lay claim to more mainstream post-Soviet pleasures, from well-known videogames and transmedia franchises (such as S.T.A.L.K.E.R.) to hit TV series (Chernobyl: Exclusion Zone, of course) and even, stretching the aesthetic ties to their breaking point, the blockbuster cartoon Masha and the Bear.  In other words, Sovpunk is actually popular, but the people who like it don't know that this is what they're seeing. 

In  October of 2015, a LiveJournal user going by the handle "siesit siesit" posted a brief history of Sovietpunk (https://siesit.livejournal.com/53758.html) , which was then rewritten and republished  a few months later (without attribution) on the Russian Orthodox website eparkhia.ru (https://eparhia.ru/useful/?id=150452) (the eparkhia version has the advantage of being more compact, but the LiveJournal post has more illustrations). Siesit siesit traces Sovietpunk back to  the now-moribund forum lomasm.ru, which hosted a discussion in 2007 about creating a thread for fans of the USSR.  Their initial name for this community was "Soiuz man'iak" ("Union maniac") was perhaps too ambiguous (and too aggressive); siesit siesit claims that the "Soiuz man'iak" aesthetic was obviously a real phenomenon, but the term describes a person rather than a set of tastes.  "Sovietpunk" and "Sovpunk" would prove more useful and appropriate. 

Siesit siesit divided Sovietpunk into three categories: style, genre, and history. "Style" concerns mostly illustrations and video games; anything that reproduces Soviet realia in its background ends up counting as Sovietpunk. Most of the examples he cites could simply be chalked up to Soviet nostalgia (which, indeed, he sees as the foundation of all varieties of Sovietpunk), with one intriguing exception:  the now-defunct Internet meme featuring a "superhero" called "The Red Cape" ("Krasnyi plashch').[1]. A character implies something more than a mere style; a character might have a story.  Granted, the Red Cape memes do not pretend to form anything like a coherent narrative, but at the very least, the Red Cape functions as a folk hero with a set of traits making him recognizable from one meme to the next. 

For a character who emerged from a Soviet nostalgia forum, the Red Cape has a surprising tendency towards political ambiguity.  To begin with, his appearance is less heroic than it is off-putting. We only see him from the waist up, a Soviet flag draped across his shoulders and a green gas mask covering his head. He is as far from the smiling, spandex-clad classic superheroes of comics Golden Age as could be; in real life, his presence would likely cause panic ("Why is he wearing a gas mask, and how can I get one?"). Surrounded by the trappings of Soviet life, he is both a throwback to another time and a visitor from a postapocalyptic future.   

No matter the subject, all the Red Cape memes are too ironic to be taken entirely at face value.  In one of the rare memes based on a drawing rather than a photo, a young Red Cape is walking with his mother and father, all three wearing the familiar gas mask, accompanied by a text that rhymes in Russian ("His parents raised/ The Red Cape, / Following  the precepts of Ilich" [Lenin]).  In another, the Red Cape examines a map of the United States placed on top of a drawing of a mushroom cloud: "Ah, Comrade Kurchatov, where are you when we need you?--the Red Cape" (Kurchatov was the father of the Soviet atomic bomb).  In a third, he looks out over a bleak urban landscape and thinks, "Every day life is getting more joyous!"  Even  the Red Cape's alleged heroism is more humorous than serious. One meme has the Red Cape sitting alone at his kitchen table, resting his head against one hand while staring down at an empty plate and a bottle of vodka: "The Red Cape spent the whole day saving the Soviet Union. And now he's a little depressed."

If this is nostalgia for the good old days of the Soviet Union, it is a nostalgia that must always take a back seat to irony. Much of the pleasure to be found in a Red Cape meme comes from the contrast between the Cape's function as an (at times, literal) icon and his visual appearance, which is always somewhere between the ominous and the ridiculous. In one meme, a young boy waving a Soviet flag stares at the icon of the Red Cape on the wall: "Happy New Year, Beloved Red Cape."    In another, the Red Cape points to an instructional display about proper gas mask use, but his finger's position is reminiscent of Russian Orthodox saints. The tag line under the picture combines the diction of Leninism and the New Testament: "And let he who has no gas mask sell his clothing to buy a gas mask.  The Red Testament of the Red Cape" (the word for "testament" her is the same one used for Lenin's "precept" in one of the memes discussed above).   Yet the Red Cape is no friend of the Church: "They say you said something negative about the ROC [Russian Orthodox Church]? "  "Me? Like I could give a shit?"  If the Red Cape is leading his viewers on a path to Soviet nostalgia as a political program, it is the same path originally taken by the Alt-Right appropriation of Pepe the Frog:  with irony paving the way for something deadly earnest.  In any case, the Red Cape is out of Pepe's League:  he survives as a historical curiosity in the development of Sovpunk rather than as an effective tool for post-Soviet red-pilling.

Note

[1] Or maybe not so heroic. I  have been unable to access the complete gallery of "Red Cape" memes included on siesit siesit's page; my Internet provider classifies the website as malware. Fortunately, The Red Cape has a Vkontakte page (with only four members, including siesit). It seems likely that whoever siesit siesit is, he is also the author of The Red Cape, talking about his creation as if he were merely a critic (like Nadya Tolokonnikova and Ekaterina Samutsevitch did when they first gave a public lecture about Pussy Riot before the group ever appeared in public).