Despite its equestrian-themed title, misfit-spies motif and occasional reference to “Moscow rules,” Peacock’s new espionage thriller “Ponies” has little in common with Apple TV+‘s “Slow Horses.” Set in Cold War Moscow, “Ponies” falls, intriguingly and occasionally uneasily, somewhere between FX’s “The Americans” and underappreciated female-empowerment comedy film “The Spy Who Dumped Me.”
Which is not surprising since it was created by Susanna Fogel and David Iserson, co-writers of “The Spy Who Dumped Me,” which the former directed and the latter executive produced.
Opening with an attempt to extract a CIA asset from the clutches of the KGB, the series centers on Moscow’s American Embassy circa 1977 (with a soundtrack and brief glimpses of a young George H.W. Bush and, later, Elton John, to prove it).
As the American operatives engage in the obligatory shoot-‘em-up car chase, two women meet in a market. Though they are each less than thrilled with their almost nonexistent lives as wives of envoys to the associate of the U.S. ambassador (i.e. the spies from the opening sequence), their contrasting attitudes and sparky, odd-couple chemistry is immediately, and a bit ham-handedly, established.
Polite, rule-following and Russian-fluent Bea (Emilia Clarke) believes her husband, Chris (Louis Boyer), when he lovingly assures her that this posting will be over in a few years and soon she will be putting her unidentified Wellesley degree to better use. (Note to whoever wrote the Peacock press notes: A Wellesley degree does not make a woman “overeducated.”)
Tough-talking, streetwise Twila (Haley Lu Richardson) is not so deferential or deluded; she pushes Bea to face down an unscrupulous Russian egg merchant with profanity-laden elan. Unsurprisingly, her marriage to Tom (John Macmillan) is more than a little rocky.
Still, when their husbands die, ostensibly in a plane crash, Bea and Twila are grief-stricken — they have lost not only their husbands but their careers as foreign service wives.
Back in the U.S., Bea is bucked up by her Russian, Holocaust-surviving grandmother (the always welcome Harriet Walter), while Twila realizes she fled her hardscrabble Indiana background for good reason.
Determined to find out what really happened to their husbands, the two return to Moscow and confront station head Dane Walter (Adrian Lester), convincing him that their status as wives — the ultimate Persons of No Interest, or “PONI” in spy parlance — offers the perfect cover.
Ignoring the historical fact that both countries have long had female undercover operatives, Dane decides (and convinces then-outgoing CIA head Bush, played by Patrick Fabian) that Russia would never consider two women (including, you know, one fluent in Russian) a threat and, by the middle of the first episode, we’re off.
Reinstalled as secretaries, Bea’s mission is to get close to new asset Ray (Nicholas Podany), Twila’s to … be a secretary. She, of course, decides to become more involved, enlisting the aid of Ivanna (Lili Walters), an equally tough market merchant.
Everything gets immediately more complicated, and dangerous, when Bea catches the eye of Andrei (Artjom Gilz), a murderous KGB leader who may be able to lead the CIA to the surveillance facility that Chris and Tom were trying to find when they died.
Clarke, returning to TV for her biggest role since her career-making turn as Daenerys Targaryen in “Game of Thrones,” is the obvious headliner. And in early episodes she does, in fact, carry the series, evoking, with as much realism as the relatively light tone of the writing will allow, a woman whose self-knowledge and self-confidence have eroded after she was sidelined into the role of wife.
Richardson, who many will remember as Portia, long-suffering assistant to Tanya (Jennifer Coolidge) in Season 2 of “The White Lotus,” is given the opposite task. Twila is, in Hollywood parlance, a “firecracker” — you know, the tough-talking dame who inevitably nurses a wounded heart. While drafting Bea as a spy makes a certain amount of sense, Twila’s skill set, as she is told, is being “fearless.” Her real talent, however, turns out to be standing up for “ordinary women,” including a string of prostitutes, murdered and forgotten.
Since neither woman receives the kind of training even most fictionally drafted civilian spies get in these kinds of stories, Bea and Twila are forced to rely on their wits, and the yin-yang balance of their good girl/tough girl relationship.
This makes for some great banter and fish-out-of-water moments, but it muddies the tone — are they being taken seriously as spies or not? — and requires significant suspension of belief (as does the Moscow setting created by Budapest; everyone keeps talking about how cold it is, but it never seems that cold). Fortunately, compared with their professional counterparts in most espionage dramas, the career agents on both sides appear, at least initially, to be quite limited in their spy craft as well.
An emerging plotline involving sex tapes and blackmail adds all sorts of tensions, as well as historical accuracy, and, as things get rolling, the spies become sharper and the notion of surveillance grows increasingly complicated and tantalizing.
Still, “Ponies” is obviously less interested in the granular ins and outs of gadgets, codes and dead drops than it is in the personal motivations of those involved and the moral morass that is the Cold War. “You came to Moscow to find truth?” an asset scoffs.
The cast is uniformly strong, the performances solid and engaging (Walter’s Russian grandma reappears midway through to show everyone how it’s done). If “Ponies” takes almost half of its eight-episode season to equal the sum of its parts, Fogel, who also co-wrote “Booksmart,” is a master spinner of female friendship, and Clarke and Richardson make it impossible not to instantly recognize, and connect with, Bea and Twila.
Their chemistry, and the absurdity of their situation, propels the story over any early “wait, what?” bumps and confusing tonal shifts into an increasingly propulsive and cohesive spy drama, with plenty of “trust no one” twists and turns, and the kind of period detail that would make “Mad Men” proud. (OK, yes, I am old enough to have tried the shampoo “Gee Your Hair Smells Terrific.”)
Fortunately, even as it moves with increasing assurance into “Tinker, Tailor” territory, “Ponies” remains a story of love. Which, as spies know only too well, can exist only when you accept, and share, the real truth about yourself. With a cliff-hanging ending, “Ponies” is betting that Bea and Twila will get another season to find their truths, even in Moscow.
The ryumochnaya is a purely Soviet phenomenon. It is a special snack bar in a Spartan format. It specialized in strong alcoholic drinks, with sandwiches served as appetizers or snacks. At some point, these “snack bars” turned out to be a form of “cultural recreation” available to most Soviet people.
“Men who usually drank port by their building entrances, like revolutionaries who gathered for a meeting in the basement or under a painted wooden mushroom figure on a children’s playground, could now go to a proper establishment, knock back a shot and intelligently [sic] have a bite of sandwich as a snack. Such a thing was not even dreamt of at that time,” journalist Leonid Repin wrote in ‘Stories about Moscow & Muscovites throughout time’.
The first USSR shot bars opened in Moscow in 1954. According to Moscow historian Alexander Vaskin, this was a political move by the new head of state, first secretary of the CPSU Central Committee Nikita Khrushchev. He had to quickly win the people’s love and authority.
“The idea to open shot bars in Moscow was not just good — it was fantastic! By creating a network of shot stores, the Party and the government showed great care for the health of the people and their cultural leisure,” Leonid Repin wrote.
They were designed to make lovers of liquor and vodka products more “cultured”, so that they did not drink in public places. But, some places became a refuge for citizens who could not find a place for themselves in the post-war USSR.
“At the corner of Mayakovskaya and Nekrasova streets [in Leningrad – ed.], there was a terrible drinking parlor full of legless invalids. It smelled of damp sheepskin, misery, shouting, fighting… it was a terrible post-war shot bar. There was a feeling that the people were deliberately made drunk there – all those ‘stumps’, ‘crutches’, former officers, soldiers, sergeants. They couldn’t find a way to keep these people warm and busy and this was one of the ways out,” writer Valery Popov speculated.
Cheap and cheerful
They poured vodka, port wine, liqueurs, wine and cognac in shot bars. Each shot was served with a modest snack – a sandwich with sausage, cheese, eggs, herring or sprat. There were four sprats on a sandwich, which was supposed to go with a 100 ml shot.
“There was only one inconvenience: after one drink, I wanted to drink some more and I had already had more than enough sandwiches. In general, it all happened like this: men stood there, knocking over shot after shot while making the ‘Leaning Tower of Pisa’ out of piles of sandwiches,” recalled Repin.
There were no tables or waiters in shot bars. Visitors lined up, received simple orders from the barmaid and then went to the bar tables.
Soviet writer and publicist Daniil Granin described a shot bar: “This is a glorious place – the smell of vodka, cigarettes, only men and without the forced drunkenness of bars, without molestation, sticky lingering conversations. Drank a shot, ate a sandwich, quickly and delicately.”
Simplicity implied low prices, so almost any citizen could afford to go to a shot bar. Prices and sandwich varieties were the same throughout the Soviet Union, recalls Alexander Vaskin.
“Prices were just kopecks. Everything happened in silence, with a sense of dignity. You drink up and then move on home or to see somebody or to the Philharmonic,” St. Petersburg historian Lev Lurie describes the advantages of a shot bar.
Overheard over a shot of vodka
In general, the visitors of such places were mostly decent.
“A factory worker and a journalist, an engineer and a plumber could all get together in a shot bar. It was not only a men’s club of interest, but also a place that attracted different people. It was possible to conduct sociological surveys and study the structure of society in them,” says Alexander Vaskin.
And the state did study it. As Lev Lurie notes, in the 1950s, almost half of political cases were initiated because of freethinking at shot bars.
“The ryumochnaya remained a haven for skilled, intelligent workers, who determined the social appearance of the city: serious, hardworking men who go fishing, watch soccer, take vacations in their factory’s preventorium or at the dacha. These establishments for visitors who had finished their work shift played the same role as pubs did in England,” he writes.
Shot bars today
In 1985, Mikhail Gorbachev, general secretary of the CPSU Central Committee, initiated an anti-alcohol campaign. Its active phase lasted for two years, with the country reducing the production and sale of strong alcohol.
The measures also affected the shot bars.
The next blow to them was the collapse of the Soviet Union. The formation of the restaurant market in the country and the emergence of new formats of catering reduced the shot bars to the role of “nostalgic” establishments, frequented by an aging, but loyal audience.
“Rumochnayas were never rebuilt nor did they disappear anywhere. They remained, like the Rostral Columns, Zenith and ‘White Nights’, without changing their function. <…> The average age of visitors now is close to the retirement age: almost all of these people were brought up, knowing the simple and raw nature of a shot shop from childhood. All those who drank a lot, died, having failed to survive the 1990s. Only tough veterans now remain, who know their limit and are used to ‘cultured’ drinking,” Lev Lurie characterizes the situation in St. Petersburg.
He emphasizes that it is in the Northern Capital that the shot bars have retained their popularity: according to Lurie, there are more of them than in Moscow, yet it is difficult for old places to attract a new audience.
“Shot shops don’t lend themselves to stylization. There have been several attempts to create something in this genre for a younger and better-off audience. They’ve all failed. Young people drink much less than their fathers and grandfathers and they are not hooked on vodka. Local hipsters prefer to have a ‘shot’ in a trendy bar somewhere on Dumskaya or Fontanka. But, real connoisseurs of the genre have not rushed to the new establishments – it is expensive. The shot bars are still alive, but they are slowly dying out along with their customers, like thick table magazines or a game of dominoes in the yard,” concludes Lurie, a St. Petersburg resident.
In Moscow, St. Petersburg or any other city in Russia, it is not a problem to find a shot bar: establishments in this format continue to open. Nevertheless, not all owners adhere to the principles of “old-school” shot bars; namely, simple, cheap and democratic. And any Soviet-styled “neryumochnaya” (non-shot bars) will still correspond to modern restaurant realities in terms of its interior and menu.
In the meantime, the genuine Soviet “ryumochnaya heritage” is hidden under inconspicuous signboards, in basements, visited by “their own” kind. It is cheap and cheerful, not fashionable at all, but authentic. The only difference is they have normal tables and chairs now.
Source: Yulia Khakimova, “The ‘ryumochnaya’: A bar of purely Soviet invention,” Gateway to Russia, 11 August 2023. Some of the claims and “factual” assertions, made above, should be taken with a grain of salt, although the overall picture painted is true to life. ||||| TRR
