The blissful political incorrectness of Soviet comedies
thecritic.co.uk
thecritic.co.uk
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza!
Edit: just noticed a critic quoted on wikipedia called it "Mad Max meets Monty Python by way of Tarkovsky", which is a very accurate description.
This has English subtitles.
At a glance, they seem quite good, which is, in a way, hilarious. English speakers, when you see
"Without gravitsappa the pepelats can only fly like this"
it is a good translation, and you are getting the authentic Kin-Dza-Dza experience.
----
On second look, though,
"Guys, how do you roll out the pepelats without the gravitsappa? Not good."
should really be
"Guys, how do you take the pepelats out of the garage without a gravitsappa? Not good."
I'm also surprised one of the most famous Russian comedies, Sauna Blues, was not in this article. Even more since its main actor died this year. Sauna blues is a funny romance, yet it depicts Russian cities were buildings and furniture are similar and spiritless, so much that people can't recognize their apartment or their street.
In fact, just the year before, Krushchev had personally ordered the publication of One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is also quite hard to believe got published in Soviet times, even with redactions. The leash was pulled short again not long after that!
Anyway, legend has it that Krushchev also got a preview of "Welcome, or No Trespassing" and liked it. So he ordered it immediately released. I don't know if that's true, but it certainly could be.
> Khrushchev believed that once the stain of Stalinism was removed, the Party would inspire loyalty among the people.[129] Beginning in October 1955, Khrushchev fought to tell the delegates to the upcoming 20th Party Congress about Stalin's crimes. Some of his colleagues, including Molotov and Malenkov, opposed the disclosure and managed to persuade him to make his remarks in a closed session. > […] > Khrushchev told the delegates:
> "It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power ... he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party or the Soviet Government."
Sounds to me like someone who expected to be seen as ushering in a brighter future. I don't expect he would have allowed the film's release if he expected people to equate it with his own leadership. But that's just a guess.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#Leader_(1953...
I don't think it was just his self-image, I think I recall reading about the Cultural Revolution in China, and how some people there (Mao?) saw Khrushchev as kind of having betrayed the true path or whatever.
Edit: The most clear example I can recall is the "Alexander Nevskiy" film (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029850/). It's a historical drama about the early Russia's struggle against foreign invasions. The titular character makes a Bible reference at one point ("Who will come at us with the sword will die by the sword" referencing Mat 26:52) but since it's not a direct quote, somebody censoring this would have to admit reading the Bible and would be in danger oneself. So the quote remained in the film and most people recognize the reference.
Kin-dza-dza! (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y
'Sauna Blues' aka 'The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (1975)': Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVpmZnRIMKs
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmGPeowN-0
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a50qT9bW2Qo
Bootleggers (1961): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_-ehagcrBg
The Most Charming and Attractive (1985): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7PbeasXUbM
All have english subtitles.
there are couple of aspects here:
- the movie was allowed by Khruschev who had [to a significant degree] dismantled the "Gulag regime" of Stalin, so one could make a case at the time that the movie was a metaphor of that dismantled regime
- there is a kind of political poker with censorship - who the first would associate the satire work with a sensitive political metaphor. If the artist doesn't do it directly themselves, then it is the censors who should declare that they see say a USSR in such a grotesque work, and that would expose the censors' own disrespect of the USSR. It is better described by the joke from the time:
Stalin (who had a prominent mustache) orders to the great [in USSR WWII history view] Marshal (4-star general) Zhukov an impossible task : "Take the city by tomorrow morning!". Marshal Zhukov leaving the meeting mutters in frustration: "F-king ass with a mustache!" The KGB chief Beria overhears it and reports about it to Stalin. Stalin calls Zhukov back and asks whom Zhukov had in mind when saying that. Zhukov answers : "I had Hitler in mind of course!". Stalin turns to Beria and asks "And whom did you have in mind?"
Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVpmZnRIMKs
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmGPeowN-0
Other good films: Kin-dza-dza! (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a50qT9bW2Qo
Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-r9XNmqQHk
Bootleggers (1961): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_-ehagcrBg
The Most Charming and Attractive (1985): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7PbeasXUbM
All have english subtitles.
Here you go
Source: I grew up in Ukraine
Source: I grew up in Ukraine.
I think you made an excellent point. I see both sides and have no horse in this race.
I know Russian on native level and have visited friends in Lviv. Sure it is possible for me with Russian language to understand some things and with what I know it would be very easy to LEARN Ukrainian, but I don't live among Ukrainians, so I can't understand 90% of anything when I am watching something on yt when Urainians start to talk in moiva. I think, that there is a bigger chance for Polish people to understand Ukrainians, that for speakers of Russian.
It looks like your observation applies to Russians, who are already living in Ukraine and have some grasp of Ukrainian.
Бере-менна can not even be explained by Slavic language, or Proto... Baltic, but it can be explained by Swedish language, where bear-men was clear purpose of Rus women.
2. All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic - very similar to Russian(and possibly others that were known as Ruthenian, but I have no knowledge of Ukrainian, Belorussian or Rusyn to judge that).
3. You and me are not going to decide the classification of languages, that are based purely on geographic distribution or in case of Rus languages(or as they are known to others - East Slavic) - common history being part of one nation and not based on similar ancestry.
> Russians do not have common ancestry in Proto-Slavic, because ancestors of Rus people in majority did not even speak Slavic languages
When historical-comparative linguists say "common ancestry", they mean common linguistic ancestry, not the genetic ancestry of the Slavic languages' speakers.
> All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic
This is not the case. The Novgorod birchbark letters that were excavated over the 20th century attest some early East Slavic, noticeably different from the Old Church Slavonic language that was borrowed into Russia/Belarus/Ukraine around the same time as a literary standard after the christianization of the region.
> You and me are not going to decide the classification of languages, that are based purely on geographic distribution
The distinctions "West Slavic", "East Slavic" and "South Slavic" aren't actually based on the geographic distribution. Rather, they are based on the isoglosses that set the Slavic languages apart from one another. The terms "East/West/South" for the basic post-Proto-Slavic isoglosses are used only because those isoglosses map roughly with those cardinal directions. Again, this is something covered in any basic textbook.
> Бере-менна can not even be explained by Slavic language, or Proto... Baltic, but it can be explained by Swedish language, where bear-men was clear purpose of Rus women.
No, беременна is a native Slavic word and not a Swedish borrowing; it goes back to the same root as беру. If it looks similar to a Swedish word, this is only because the Slavic languages and the Germanic languages both inherited the same Proto-Indo-European word. A detailed etymology for the Russian word can be found in Vasmer under the headword *беремя*.
Also I think you are confused about these terms in English, where Old Church Slavonic == Старославянский язык Church Slavonic == Церковнославя́нский язы́к
>The Novgorod birchbark letters that were excavated over the 20th century attest some early East Slavic, noticeably different from the Old Church Slavonic language
That is correct, however what I wrote was completelly different: "All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic."
Besides, they were neither early East Slavonic or even classified as modern East Slavic and they are not directly related to Russian as well. Many of those Slavic can be classified as early Western Slavic at best.
>No, беременна is a native Slavic word and not a Swedish borrowing It seems, that I was wrong in this one(as pregnancy in most of Slavic languages use different word, but I did not search further, where Bulgarians use similar word for pregnancy). Sadly, that also means that Old Church Slavonic replaced everything else.
"War with Russia" in which Ukrainian citizens fight against Ukrainian citizens. If you don't trust my word, just look at the lists of the latest prisoner swaps, not a single Russian citizen there. The war which has started with clearly unconstitutional use of military forces against its own citizens and in which the freshly installed government has targeted administrative buildings in the center of Lugansk with no armed rebels in it using a military plane (they have tried to launch a stupid fake about an exploded AC, but recently they have officially confirmed that it was indeed a warplane target).
Note that I do not deny Russian involvement in the Ukrainian civil war, but you do not call the Syrian civil war a "Syria-American war", do you? Foreign involvement in civil wars is more of a rule, not an exception.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVbe3vGOm1Q [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hk2fYkPeWy4
>Girkin (Strelkov) himself takes responsibility of starting the war who is russian
While he indeed played a big role in the uprising (though I think he tends to oversell his role), the cause was strongly supported by simple folk. (Don't forget about the last line in my previous comment.) The videos from the early stages with simple people blocking unconstitutionally deployed military forces is a good supporting evidence for this statement. You can call them "brainwashed by Russian propaganda" all you want, but it does not change the fact.
I see the following reasons: political discussions can be extremely long, and in any case are frowned upon here, and the chance of finding irrational stubbornness for this subject even here is high. So... we're agreeing to disagree then.
But you can't overcome the truth no matter how loud you scream.
It's the Russia who ruin everything around them to gain power and control.
This broken superpower still can't accept its loss and apologize for all evil it has done. It disrespects the world and the truth.
Then argue what exactly is not true in my previous comment, not simply yell loudly about me spreading "Russian propaganda". Everything I wrote can be easily verified and fact checked. If you can not do that, then it's you, not me who got blinded by a propaganda machine.
Oh, and there was an “insurrection” in US Capital in case you didn’t notice.
The only difference is that the first one has a very strong external support while the second one does not and, luckily, failed quickly.
It fits the US pretty good too.
Just like today, you are allowed to make fun of power, but you are not allowed to take it seriously.
'Sauna Blues' aka 'The Irony of Fate, or Enjoy Your Bath! (1975)': Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVpmZnRIMKs
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TmGPeowN-0
Other good films: Kin-dza-dza! (1986): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYHv8eJrW2Y
Ivan Vasilievich Changes Profession (1973): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a50qT9bW2Qo
Welcome, or No Trespassing (1964): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-r9XNmqQHk
Bootleggers (1961) (doesn't have dialogue, so no subs): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_-ehagcrBg
The Most Charming and Attractive (1985): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7PbeasXUbM
All have english subtitles.
Bootleggers (1961)
18 minutes of pure silliness, zero conversation.
"Yesterday those lobsters were so big, really big, but sold for 5 roubles each. But today they are so small, pretty small, but sell for only 3 roubles. Should I have bought yesterday? Should I buy today? I have a frog..."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkL54oQgf6I
One of the really good humoral references to Soviet cliches is "Lord of the Rings", translated by Goblin (e.g. here - https://oper.ru/trans/view.php?t=1039986472 ). Imagine Tolkien's heroes played by a sort of lumpen, with snippets of classical Soviet tunes, including patriotic ones, quotes from blockbuster Soviet movies, political jokes etc. - same video, but very different sound. It's a treasure trove of references, but pretty hard to appreciate to someone not familiar with culture. Every significant nation has their own stories of old which everybody knows, which helps people get together. And it's hard to enjoy to outsiders.
Last one is something you'd see every new years eve. (spoiler here) It uncovers a stupidity of cities in the USSR, when those were identical up to a street name.
My mom and dad would probably come up with a slightly different list of their favorites, nonetheless they would agree these can be called "true" classics.
The important bit to remember here is that all of that production was going through "checks" to make sure there are no anti-communist ideas in the movies. Creators had to either be very careful to disguise some of the sentiment or not to have it.
At the end of the day people were not idiots and understood the role of the government. We all had someone close who was a survivor from gulag or a returning labor camp prisoner or a displaced individual with no right to get back to his village. So our lives were kind of similar to everybody elses in the west, provided you eliminate those awful bits. And maybe because those terrible parts were absent in these movies, we were able to have a good laugh.
Honestly watch those and have a laugh. If it seems not funny then try learning some russian and watch them again :D I know it is a terrible dad joke.
i was hooked and watch them many times. i started to learn russian from duolingo.
years later, i laughed when i heard the dialogue. i am also happy that those movies got me to learn another language.
compare: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-aFimeu-4DM
(also, the song "5 minutes", a kind of soviet "it's time to start the music, it's time to light the lights", from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnival_Night gets plenty of contemporary reprises. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5viIzp4rxC0 )
I had a similar feeling watching the 1969 hungarian movie "A tanú" ("The Witness")[0].
While the movie is about communist Hungary, it is interesting how some of the themes are common to satire of any disfunctional organization (incompetents that get promoted because of politicking, clueless people in power, nepotism, unjust punishment etc).
It's a pretty funny movie, and there's a recently restored version so it should be possible to find it if you try a bit.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Witness_(1969_Hungarian_fi...
(Russian cinema is legitimately great, though; why not watch the traditional pre-launch Soyuz quarantine film, "White Sun of Desert"; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066565/ It's rather like a more cynical, more Russian "Dollars Trilogy" film)
What makes you say that? I did a word search on your link and don't see "political correctness" in there anywhere.
Being politically correct these days can be an exercise in sanity. That’s why all the big corps are hiring expensive professional firms to do progressive campaigns (even the cigarette companies here in Canada have “diversity and inclusiveness” on the lighters they sell hwith their cigarettes). There’s good money in helping the megacorps, academia, and gov agencies fit in with the young university crowd.
It’s like a race to include more and more things so it’s best to go hard as possible early to not be left behind. Especially when you don’t have to actually do anything real to help the groups IRL... just change your language and run the right ad and social campaigns. And not say the “wrong” things today, even if it was decades ago.
Apparent the “real” help and change (you know, things besides performative acts) will come as a product of these megacorps becoming politically correct in the modern sense.
Political correctness has always been about strengthening your hold on power.
I'm sure that Soviets seventy years ago were just as convinced they were right(eous) as you are.
> Nor could [Office Romance] be much less politically correct. One can only imagine what a modern HR-manager would make of Office Romance, of its “power-imbalances”, “problematic” attitudes and “inappropriate” behaviour. That said, the same HR-manager should at least pause to wonder what, in doing all we can to make such relationships shameful and unfeasible, we’re also doing to ourselves.
The correct answer of course is that any professional, HR or otherwise, prioritizes facts over nice stories in movies. And the facts are that many supervisor-subordinate relationships are exploitative, often start from illegal harassment, and in any event are bad for business. Putting concepts like power imbalances and inappropriate behavior in scare quotes is just creepy and indicates sexist contempt for victims of workplace sexual harassment.
Markowski is clearly working in his politics here (which are largely centered around hyperventilating about “cancel culture”), but even by the standards of the genre it is particularly gross to suggest that the only people concerned about bosses who sleep with their employees are the PC Prudes who run HR.
It's also a fact that many happy marriages began as a relationship between superior and subordinate.
I'm curious about what fraction of superior-subordinate relationships you think culminate in happy marriages, and how low that fraction has to go before you decide that forbidding superior-subordinate relationships is a lot easier than negotiating the messy world of allowing it? My guess is that the fraction is pretty low, and the world of HR standards in the west has already been through this calculus.
HR's calculus is dominated by considerations of risk to the business, something about which I care not one jot. The standards of American corporate HR departments certainly should not be society's standard for what constitutes acceptable behavior.
As for what fraction of such relationships are "happy marriages," I don't know. I do know that my parents met that way, as did several couples of my acquaintance.
People spend a lot of time together in the workplace, more than with their family. It is likely that sex will continue to happen there. No doubt some of it is really exploitative; but nowhere nearly all of it.
It is orthogonal thing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/25/technology/google-sexual-...
https://qz.com/work/1326942/sergey-brin-started-google-with-...
It's the victims that suffer because they report.
[0] https://scocal.stanford.edu/opinion/miller-v-dept-correction...
Knowing exactly what you are not allowed to say can be comforting: You trust in the rules and there is no reason to be afraid.
Add in inconsistencies and suddenly this comfort is removed. It adds an extra layer of uncertainty and fear to everything. Two people can say the same thing and only one disappears. No one knows where the line lies. It's a nasty psychological game and quite sick and twisted actually.
The approach of course isn't unique to USSR, it has been the forced choice of artists through the history of ideological oppression in human civilization, and giving the rise of ideological intolerance everywhere today i expect to see again that approach more and more.
Facebook/Instagram effect in old cinema. You don't post grey misery unless you can make it meaningful. The same applies to movies. Nobody would watch their own life either. There's a lot of grey misery available in a sarcastic take though. Polish cinema of the time has lots of that as well.
Such linguistic shifts happen a lot (title of this forum included), but nonetheless tickles my mind whenever I see it.
Edited to add the following:
Thanks for the recommendations!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonid_Gaidai https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldar_Ryazanov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgiy_Daneliya
Edit: probably not so short, just regular stories... so maybe not what you're looking for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_How_Ivan_Ivanovich...
and the story that influenced me to move to Russia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Government_Inspector
Whatever you do, don't miss The Nose, there's even a brilliant pinscreen animation adaptation: https://www.openculture.com/2014/09/animation-of-nikolai-gog...
I realised it wasn't your ordinary comedy when one of the early jokes involved landing an Aeroflot flight on a highway. There's a splendidly bizarre explosion/dream sequence bit in the middle. And a lion chase.
https://russianfilmhub.com/movies/unbelievable-adventures-of...
Anyway, much of Mosfilm is on Youtube.
"Зеркало" (The Mirror): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CYZhXm02kN0
"Сталкер" (Stalker): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TGRDYpCmMcM
"Андрей Рублев" (Andrei Rublev): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6kqlveBhVY
And, if you're into Slavic cinema in general, I'd also recommend "Life is a Miracle" by Emir Kusturica: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322420/ -- he's not a Russian director, but he is fantastic.
“The irony of fate” 1975
“Winter cherry” 1985
There’s an abundance of serious, existential, often heavy Russian films. I just saw Beanpole and felt excited about a light, genuinely funny Russian comedy.
Any recommendations?
An example of a modern Russian comedy would be the "Yolki" series with [5] as the first installment.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0301145/ [2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060584/ [3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0059550/ [4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0056982/ [5] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1782568/
I've just read an interview with a Russian book editor that mentioned Lev Ovalov [1], which is I think the closest thing to what you wanted (in terms of books, anyway):
> Soviet writer, author of detective stories about the Chekist-counterintelligence officer Major Pronin .
(...)
> It was for this magazine that the story "Blue Swords" was written - the first in a cycle about Major Pronin, after which six stories about the hero were published in 1939-1940 in the magazines " Vokrug Sveta " and "Znamya" , then came out as a separate publication in the series " Library of the Red Army ", and in 1941 were included in the collection" The Adventures of Major Pronin ".
(...)
> On July 5, 1941, Lev Ovalov was arrested on charges of divulging classified information and convicted, after which he spent 15 years in labor camps and exile. There, the writer worked in his main specialty - a doctor, and met the nurse Valentina Klyukina, with whom they began to live together in the late 1940s .
[1] https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9E%D0%B2%D0%B0%D0%BB%D0%BE...
Just a fair warning to the uninitiated.
I can however reccomend the Italian bond knockoff genre, including the ridiculous OK Connery: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062078/?ref_=nm_knf_t1
Starring Neil Connery. Music by Ennio Morricone.
Andy Rooney "played" a curmudgeon on 60 Minutes.