Tag: Soviet Union

Grand Theft Auto

Grand Theft Auto aka Watch Out for Cars! (Eldar Ryazanov, 1966). In Russian, with English subtitles

The restoration of the film was performed by a team of professionals from Mosfilm’s Computer Graphics Group. Learn more at https://cg.mosfilm.ru

Film comedy. Insurance agent Yuri Detochkin—a completely wholesome and naive man—driven by a sense of justice, steals cars from people living on illegal income, sells them, and gives the profits to orphanages.

Director: Eldar Ryazanov
Screenplay: Eldar Ryazanov and Emil Braginsky
Film Score: Andrei Petrov
Camera: Vladimir Nakhabtsev and Anatoly Mukasei
Production design: Boris Nemechek and Lev Semyonov

Starring: Andrei Mironov, Oleg Yefremov, Anatoly Papanov, Lyubov Dobrzhanskaya, Innokenty Smoktunovsky, Yevgeny Yevstigneyev, Georgy Zhzhonov, Tatiana Gavrilova, Olga Aroseva, Gottlieb Roninson, Sergei Kulagin, Viktoria Radunskaya, and Boris Runge

Source: Mosfilm (YouTube), 21 June 2016. Annotation translated by the Russian Reader

The wife’s all-time favorite Soviet comedy and certainly well up there among my Top 10, Beregis/Auto has survived into the new millennium and continues to flourish as a New Year staple on Moscow TV—which is sorely strained these days to offer viewers something, indeed anything, to laugh about.

What strikes me today, while looking back at the mini-review below—in the role of a post-post-Soviet appraiser eyeing a post-Soviet impression of a mid-Soviet comedy—is not just how other-worldly both of these recent pasts can now seem (which of course they do), but how much the human mind (and heart) want to keep these eras, with their flawed but well-understood mores, sensibilities and now-appreciated modest virtues, from being erased altogether.

Because part of you, you recognize, goes off the chalk board with them—the part the new nihilists desperately want you to abandon as they clumsily and ahistorically attempt to redesign the past, social and political, to serve their nefarious present purposes.

Orwell was not only right, he was right twice, in stages. Put briefly, we need to remember both why Beregis/Auto worked so well when we first saw it—and then why it could still serve as an anchor in reality while a new generation of bad guys was busily turning their sad and saddening unreality into a Double Plus Good fake-reality that nobody could call out in public. And now decidedly can’t.

But praise be: Beregis/Auto is still there, on celluloid and on television, to remind Muscovites and everyone else that decency could and did appear and persist in consecutive yet differently indecent times—and can now raise our hopes that it will reappear as this dark period finally gives way to dawn.

Source: Mark H. Teeter (Facebook), 2 January 2024. Thanks to Mark for his kind permission to repost his somber New Year’s reflection and the eighth-year-old movie review (below) which prompted it on this website.

MOSCOW TV TONITE: The USSR’s Auto-Robbin’ Hood

Берегись автомобиля/Grand Theft Auto (USSR, 1966)(Dom Kino, 19:00)

If you get the joke at the heart of Beregis’/Auto, you get the Soviet Union, a society in which irony knew no limits and “found humor” was literally all around you, just daring you to laugh…which was the risky part. The movie is based on the jocular metaphor of a Soviet Robin Hood – a morally upright socialist citizen who is pursued by the police, naturally, for taking morality into his own hands: he steals cars from “bad people” (who make “illegal income”) and gives them to good ones (OK, orphanages).

With this suggestive premise E. Ryazanov began an unbroken string of 7 serio-comic Mosfilm hits that ran through Гараж/Garage (1979), with the latter affirming that even if you could steal automobiles in good conscience, as in Beregis’/Auto, there was still no safe place to park them!

The Ryazanov Septet corresponded with the onset, entrenchment and fossilization of late-Soviet Глубокий застой (“Deep Stagnation 9”) and neatly defined the predominant modi vivendi of High Brezhnevism – gaming the system and/or simple theft – but did so, remarkably, without getting the director incarcerated or, even curiouser, blackballed by Goskino. Eventually somebody’s dissertation will tell us why.

Beregis’/Auto was ER’s first collaboration w/ screenwriter E. Bagrinsky and one of the best: the two carefully crafted a “good-hearted saddening comedy” (“добрую, грустную комедию”) about two “friendly enemies,” one representing the state and the other the individual. They are doomed to find themselves eternally at odds, the viewer understands, as the social system they inhabit can’t cope with abstract legality any better than it can abstract art.

Yet however telling its plot and finely tuned its direction, Beregis’/Auto still wouldn’t succeed without its exceptional cast. The праведник-hero – a childlike naïf nicely dubbed Detochkin – is played by the only person who *could* have played him, in retrospect: I. Smoktunovsky, the actor of his generation, who could do (and did) everything from Chekhov to Shakespeare – indeed, he had just done his stunning turn as Hamlet for G. Kozintsev (Lenfilm, 1964) when Beregis’ came out, making the movie’s amateur play-within-a-film staging of the melancholy Dane a big “inside” joke that every contemporary Soviet viewer got immediately.

Supporting, indeed matching Smoktunovsky as Detochkin’s Inspector Javert is O. Efremov in one of the great roles of a great career, making you *believe* in a Soviet police detective who both does his job and regrets its consequences – the only appropriate response there was to the Detochkin case – and on whose office wall in place of the standard Dzerzhinsky photo hangs a picture of…Stanislavsky! Beyond these two beacons of Soviet cinema, Beregis’/Auto offers a collection of supporting players that’s hard to match in *any* film of its era: A. Papanov, A. Mironov, E. Evstigneev, G. Zhzhenov – even D. Banionis (later the hero of Solaris) has a cameo (undubbed) as a bribe-taking Baltic pastor!

Enough. Add Beregis’/Auto to your must-see list and tune it in this evening (or watch on YouTube below).

Oh, and some free advice: if you (try to) drive in the Greater Moscow area, remember to keep your nose clean and your car insurance paid up. If today’s anti-corruption Robin Hoods start stealing cars, there’s no guarantee they’ll distinguish between your Škoda and Alexei Miller’s Lamborghini.

Source: Moscow TV Tonite (Facebook), 2 January 2016

A More (or Less) Perfect Union

Russian naval vessels on parade on the Neva River in downtown Petersburg, July 2022. Photo: Alexander Petrosyan

I dreamt that all wars had ended and a united humankind was amicably celebrating good’s victory over human nature’s age-old curse.

Since my dream took place in Petersburg, the warships had been turned in recreational vessels, equipped with swimming pools, gyms, spas, dance halls, hotels, bars, restaurants, etc.

The towering masts were outfitted with convenient spots for those wishing to photograph the city’s river embankments from above. The deck was dotted with deck chairs, and the holds, instead of rockets and shells, housed barrels containing every variety of alcohol from around the globe!

I remember strolling around one of these ships, shooting a reportage about the triumphantly heavenly lives of its inhabitants, but I was not able to finish the dream. As always in the morning, the cat’s meowing and the children waking up on time woke me up. Otherwise, I would have been late for my next photo shoot.

Source: Alexander Petrosyan, Facebook, 25 July 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

[…]

I never would have thought that I would speak out in defense of the Soviet Union. But now I am forced to do it.

I grew up in a small village in the middle of Russia. The adults in my life did not read samizdat and tamizdat, nor did they oppose the system — they just lived their lives. But from their conversations, loose talk, and slips of tongue, I was able to draw conclusions. I realized that I didn’t have to unconditionally believe the agitprop posters and the folks on the TV. Life was more complicated and, apparently, worse than the picture that the big bosses were trying to foist on us.

And yet there were certain things I took for granted. I knew that my country had clear, intelligible notions of good and evil, of how everything should work, and I considered them correct. Socialism had to emerged victorious. We didn’t seem to be doing everything right, but we knew what we were supposed to being doing.

To a large extent, of course, this belief was also based on a complete ignorance of how people actually lived outside the socialist bloc. There were simply no people in our midst who had seen it and could tell us about it. In our village, perhaps the only person who had visited this capitalist hell was my grandfather. He was in Vienna when the war ended. But he died before I was born, and besides, as my elders told me, he was a taciturn person and did not like to reminisce about his life.

I knew — just like Leonid Brezhnev, the guy on TV, who had fought in a real war — that it was wrong to even hint at using nuclear weapons. Nuclear war was terrible and the end of everything.

I also knew that we would never attack anyone. The Soviet Union had a militarist bent, and a sense of the coming war’s inevitability filtered into my childish mind. But there was only one possible scenario: the enemy would come to us, maybe even occupy our country, but then we would throw them out, win the war, and clean up the motherland. There was no other way. We wouldn’t attack first.

The Soviet Union, by the way, was bashful about its wars. It concealed its involvement in conflicts abroad. Only the Afghan War broke through the curtain of lies. I don’t know whether it was because of the magnitude, or because the giant was on its last legs and had even forgotten how to tell a fib.

Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu (far left) and Russian military officers at the consecration of the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces, 14 June 2020. Photo courtesy of Spektr

Modern Russia is not shy. Go to the Main Cathedral of the Russian Armed Forces in Patriot Park. It is worthwhile and instructive. There are mosaics depicting Russian soldiers and heroes — the heroes of the Battle of Kulikovo, the Patriotic War of 1812, the Great Patriotic War … and a huge panel depicting the heroes of the wars that the Soviet Union waged after the Second World War. The figures in the foreground are easily identifiable as “Afghans,” but the picture’s authors quite clearly hint that it’s not just about veterans of the war in Afghanistan.

Soviet ideology was putrid and phony, but there was also a real humanism in it that filtered through the rot and falsity.

Modern Russia doesn’t even have this going for it.

[…]

Source: Ivan Davydov, “An apology for the Union: which USSR Vladimir Putin is resurrecting,” Republic, 21 July 2022. Translated by the Russian Reader

Un exiliado en Rusia

In 1973, 16-year-old Víctor Yáñez travels from his home in Chile to the former USSR to study agriculture. But when a military coup strikes at home, he’s stranded in Communist Russia . . . for the rest of his life.

Transcript

Martina: It was the fall of 1988, when Víctor Yáñez found himself listening to his radio in secret. In a tiny Russian town 2,000 miles from Moscow, Víctor and his friends were listening to one of the few American radio stations to reach the Soviet Union. Finally, the piece of news they were waiting for: the referendum in Chile.

Víctor: En la Unión Soviética no se hablaba de Chile porque era una dictadura de derecha. Los periódicos extranjeros estaban prohibidos. Era el año 1988 y todavía no había internet. Si querías saber de Chile, tenía que ser en secreto. Fue así como me enteré del referéndum.

Martina: When the results came in, Víctor was stunned. Through the static, he learned that 54% of Chileans had voted General Augusto Pinochet out of power. The dictatorship was falling. Although Víctor lived half a world away, the results had huge implications for him. As a Chilean, he would finally be able to go home.

Víctor: Yo había llegado a Rusia quince años antes, en un viaje de estudios durante el gobierno de Salvador Allende. Cuando empezó la dictadura de Pinochet, ya no pude volver a mi país. Yo había vivido la mitad de mi vida en Rusia, sabía muy poco de Chile y estaba lejos de mi familia. Ahora iba a tener la oportunidad de volver a casa, pero yo tenía una duda: “¿Cuál era mi país en realidad?”.

Continue reading “Un exiliado en Rusia” →

Svetlana Alexievich’s Dead Ends

DSCN2329Repeated endlessly by the Russophone liberal intelligentsia over the past three decades, claims that Russians are genetically programmed Stalinists and thus inevitably suspectible to Putin’s nonexistent charms and his neo-authoritarianism are false and pernicious cognitive dead ends that have done untold amounts of damage to the country’s grassroots democratic movements. Photo by the Russian Reader

With all due respect to the writer Svetlana Alexievich and her imaginary addressee, the late Anna Politkovskaya, Ms. Alexievich’s letter to Politkovskaya, published two days ago in the Washington Post, is the kind of reckless Russian liberal intelligentsia nonsense that saps people of the will to resist in the first place.

It also happens to be wildly wrong in the sweeping claims it makes, both objectively and subjectively.

“Now it is Putin who talks to them; he’s learned from our mistakes. But it’s not about Putin alone; he’s just saying what the people want to hear. I would say that there’s a little bit of Putin in every Russian. I’m talking about the collective Putin: We thought that it was the Soviet power that was the problem, but it was all about the people.

“The Soviet way of thinking lives on in our minds and our genes. How quickly has the Stalinist machine set to work again. With what skill and enthusiasm everyone is once again denouncing each other, catching spies, beating people up for being different . . . Stalin has risen! Throughout Russia they are building monuments to Stalin, putting up Stalin’s portraits, opening museums in Stalin’s memory.”

Really? Throughout Russia? I would imagine these portraits, monuments, and museums (?) number in the dozens, if that many.

Meanwhile, I have it on impeccable authority that Last Address and the hundreds of ordinary extraordinary Petersburgers who have joined them have erected nearly three hundred plaques commemorating the victims of Stalin’s Great Terror over the last few years.

In fact, there are are three such plaques at the entrance to my building. I see people stopping, looking at them, reading them, and taking snapshots of them all the time.

It is an insult to everyone who has been involved in Last Address and the other myriad acts of resistance great and small over the last twenty years, including, of course, Politkovskaya herself, to claim “there’s a little bit of Putin in every Russian.”

In fact, there are millions of Russians who do not have even a teensy bit of Putin in them, whatever that would mean. If you don’t believe me, take a few or several or ten dozen dips into this website and its predecessor over their eleven-year, nearly two thousand-post run.

You will not see and hear what Russia is “really like,” but experience a few or several or ten dozen ways in which Russia is definitely NOT “Putin’s Russia.” You will read and hear the words and the stories of rank-and-file Russians who, remarkably if you believe Ms. Alexievich’s boilerplate, music to certain western ears, are nothing like Putin at all.

When will any of the wiseguys who dictate our opinions about everything from “Putin’s Russia” to the latest Star Wars movies tell us about those other Russians and other Russias? {TRR}

Minority Report

DSCN4634

But in 2000 Putin came to power. Now Putin was director of the FSB (KGB), the executive branch, as it were, of the Soviet government’s war against God. [In reality, Putin was director of the FSB from 25 July 1998 to 29 March 1999. He was acting president of Russia from 31 December 1999 to 7 May 2000, when he assumed the same office as the popularly elected president of Russia.—TRR.] or such a man to become president was therefore a profound shock and a stern warning for those with eyes to see and ears to hear. It was as if the head of the Inquisition had become head of the World Council of Churches, or Himmler, the president of Germany after the war.

Nothing similar would have been tolerated in a western country. But it was tolerated in Russia, first, because, as surveys showed, most Russians still considered the Soviet Union to be their native country, and Lenin and Stalin to be heroes; and secondly, because the west clung on to the stupid belief that over seventy years of the most terrible bloodletting in history (far longer and far more radical than Hitler’s twelve years in power) could be wiped out and reversed without any kind of decommunization, without even a single person being put on trial for murdering innocent people in the name of Soviet power’s collective Antichrist.

The tragic farce has reached such a stage that the KGB has become a hero of Russia literature and film, with its own church in the middle of its chief prison, the Lubyanka in Moscow, not, as it might be thought, to commemorate the martyrs who suffered so terribly within its walls, but for the executioners.

The west concurred with this filthy whitewash. The official Orthodox Church (itself run by KGB agents) concurred. The masses of the Russian people concurred by voting Putin into power repeatedly.

And then the rebirth took place. Without repenting in the slightest of his communist past, and while gradually reintroducing more and more Soviet traditions and symbols, Putin underwent a conversion to Christ. Or rather, from being part of the body of the Soviet Antichrist, which was anti-, that is, against Christ, he is now preaching a form of Communist Christianity that, as Makarkin puts it, copies Jesus Christ, placing its own ideas in place of Christ’s and passing them off as His. And if the copy is a poor one (just as Lenin’s stinking body is a very poor imitation of the fragrant relics of the saints, and the murderous “Moral Code of the Builder of Communism” is a very poor imitation of the Sermon on the Mount) this does not matter, so long as the masses are taken in by it or, if they are not taken in by it, at least convinced that Christ and the anti-Christian state are now on the same side.

So the Russian revolution has mutated from one kind of anti-Christianity to another, from Lenin’s anti-Christianity, which was openly against Christ, to Putin’s anti-Christianity, which pretends not to be against Christ but to copy Him and take His place.

There can be no doubt this new, more sophisticated kind of anti-Christianity is more dangerous than the former, and closer to the kind that will be practised by the actual Antichrist himself at the end of time. For of that Antichrist the Lord said, “I have come in My Father’s name and you do not believe Me: if another shall come in his own name, him you will believe” (John 5:43). In other words, you have rejected the real Christ, and as a direct result you will accept an imposter, a man-god, for the real thing, the God-Man.

But we must not be deceived, remembering Putin’s words: “Once a chekist, always a chekist.”

Excerpted from Vladimir Moss, “Putin, the Communist Christian,” 23 February 2018. Mr. Moss’s text has been lightly edited to make it more readable. Photo by the Russian Reader

Pavel Pepperstein: Post-Socialism as Ecosocialism

n-RUSSIA-FOREST-large570
Russian taiga

I was born in Moscow in 1966, at the height of the Soviet space program. We might regard that year as the zenith of Soviet power. Two years after I came into the world, Soviet tanks laid waste to the Prague Spring, and the Soviet project began to slowly verge towards decline. A few years later, Brezhnev would remark in one of his speeches that a new supranational community, the Soviet people, had taken shape. Brezhnev was almost right: this people really had formed in all the central regions of the USSR. But the ethnic hinterlands—the Caucasus, the Baltics, Western Ukraine, Moldova—remained. The stronger older nations destroyed the young Soviet nation by exploding it from within as soon as they could. Nevertheless, I can say for myself that I am part of that nation that died in infancy and of which Brezhnev spoke. I am a Soviet person and I wish to remain one until the end of my days. It suits me to be part of something that has disappeared.

The Soviet world as I knew and understood it arose after Stalin’s death. It was founded on two powerful forms of ignorance: ignorance of capitalism and ignorance of communism. There was something defective and sickly in this ignorance, but there was also something heavenly, a kind of apophatic wisdom. In the Soviet idiom, the combination of these two forms of ignorance was called “socialism.”* This was not an idiotic name. Socialism is curious because it is an economic form that denies its own economic essence. The largely paradoxical nature of Soviet socialism was reflected in such odd Brezhnev-era slogans as “The economy should be more economical.” To a certain degree, words played the role of money under Soviet socialism. As a whole, the Soviet Union was a triumph of language, a militant albeit complexly organized logocracy. It would be wrong to call this system ecological: “wordless” nature was polluted by the toxic wastes of word production. In those days, all of Soviet industry (especially the arms industry) was engaged in the gigantic, messy, and poisonous servicing of “Soviet words.”

Only the interim between Soviet socialism and capitalism was ecological. It was a time of crisis: the factories stood idle, and the air became cleaner. It is a pity, but those days (the nineties) came to an end, and now (under cover of patriotic speeches) our country is becoming a colony of international capitalism.** They try and persuade us this is success, but it is not true. We should (my dreams tell me, and I believe them) put our beautiful country to a different use, for example, by turning it into a colossal nature and culture reserve. (After all, our country, like Brazil, produces the most valuable thing on Earth: oxygen.) We should close the borders to foreigners (but let anyone leave as they like), carry out a program of deindustrialization, and limit the birth rate.

Source: Pavel Pepperstein, “A Critique of Dreams (Dreams and Capitalism).” In Viktor Mazin and Pavel Pepperstein, The Interpretation of Dreams (Moscow, 2005), pp. 697–700.

∗ We should verify whether the “sickliness” and “defectiveness” that was contained in post-Stalinist Soviet socialism was, in fact, its shortcoming. It is possible that it was a virtue wisely camouflaged as a “shortcoming.” However, either the oriental nature of this wisdom, of this ascetic camouflage, was gradually eroded during the course of the irreversible, “creeping” westernization of the entire Soviet society (this took place over the entire post-Stalinist period), or the people who instituted this camouflage themselves fell victim to this “effect of unsuccess,” which was originally conceived as a clever disguise, as a form of the sagacious ambiguity that marks the “dialectics of socialist survival.”

∗∗ This could be said with certainty after Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000. The Putin regime is analogous to the Latin American juntas. Clothing themselves in nationalist and statist rhetoric, the “organs” (which in Russia are a caste with the same relationship to central authority as the army in Latin American countries) are gradually repressing the final albeit paradoxical obstacle to colonization of our country: the criminal, “shadowy,” undisciplined, disobedient, “savage” national capitalism generated by the Yeltsin era. The paradox lies in the fact that such Jews as Khodorkovsky, Berezovsky, and Gusinsky—post-Soviet Russian financial adventurers—are the last flowering of the “Russian national spirit.” They are the last form of the alternative effect that the authorities must eradicate to bring Russia into the orbit of the “integrated world of today,” a world that it essentially joins as a new economic and political colony.

Translated by the Russian Reader. Photo courtesy of Reuters