Everyone remembers the episode in Bulgakov's Master and Margarita when, in the bedeviled Variety Theater, the chorus cannot stop singing the patriotic “Lake Baikal.” The chorus, by then an established institution of official popular culture, represents the height of Stalinism with its heroic tunes and a powerful collective voice. Constantly transmitted over the radio through my childhood in the fifties, it gave me an allergy to choral sound for years to come. But the female choir featured in Eldar Ryazanov's 1987 film, Forgotten Melody for a Flute, definitely sings a different tune. How the choir's tune and the “forgotten melody” of the solo flute represent the changing times will be the focus of my analysis of the use of official and unofficial popular culture in this early film of perestroika.

As we can see from the title, memory is important in this film, where the transition from the old to the new is in its nascent stages, confusing for everyone. The recovery of historical and cultural memory became a central concern of literature and art in the early period of glasnost, when the long years of repression gave way to revelation. As the “forgotten melody” (nezabyvaemaia melodiia) for a flute is remembered in Ryazanov's comedy, what does it or can it tell? While the central story of the film is that of adultery and romance, the stock plot is a vehicle for pointing out the ills plaguing Soviet society — the play of power, problems of gender and class in a country supposedly free of both, and the depth of corruption in the sphere of cultural politics.