An old calendar of 1964 picturing a set of remarkable citizens of the world: a Soviet person next to its American counterpart. Sadly there is no annotation left to figure what the message was — informative, propagandist or other, so the faces below are torn out of context. But it is still nice to have a look at some Soviet artist’s work.
It would have been a brief post, so we thought we’d include the major achievements of these great men.
Movie Producers: Sergey Eisenstein & David W Grifith
My iPad has really got me reading recently. On iBooks almost all of classic literature is free, so I am reading a book by Arthur Conan Doyle — The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: The Man with the Twisted Lip. There was a passage that struck me as remarkable (or, as Conan Doyle would put it, rather singular):
One night — it was in June 1889 — there came a ring to my bell. … We heard the door open, a few hurried words, and then quick steps upon the linoleum. Our door flew open, and a lady, clad in some dark-coloured stuff, with a black veil, entered the room.
The Soviet movie illustration of this book. 1979. Vasily Livanov as Sherlock Holmes and Vitaly Solomin as Dr Watson.
Really. In June 1881, just like that, Sherlock had linoleum, which was nothing extraordinary at the time — given he was presumed to somewhat struggle financially, and thus his need to share a flat. In the USSR — and this is the point I am making now — linoleum was one of the highest sought-after products until at least early 1980. I wouldn’t believe it myself, but I remember how excited my Mum was when in 199o we managed to “secure” some of this precious material to floor the kitchen in our apartment.
What was the price of those space exploration programmes if linoleum was a scarce commodity at least for a century after it became widespread in the rotten, capitalistic West? You feel my pain?
Paris, city of love, brought them all together. A Russian movie of 1981.
The official history often misses a very important and interesting point in the course of the Russian Revolution – not everybody knows that Vladimir Lenin, a formidable mind behind the Great October Patriotic Revolution and the leader of all communists, had less than straightforward love life – apart from a wife, he had a mistress – and not only that, these two women knew each other and got on very well!
Apart from the Soviet writers’ prolific input into the children literature, a great deal of stories was translated into Russian, so the kids of the USSR grew up on the stories by Hans Andersen, Charles Pierrot and the Grimm brothers. Often the translators took the liberty of changing the plot of the storyline: this is how the famous book by A. Milne “Winnie the Pooh” in its Russian version features no Tigger yet there are some extra characters not from the original script. Arguably, it allowed the translator to become somewhat of an author and hence their name went onto the book cover (this is what happened to the Russian version of The Wizard of Oz). As cartoon making was one of the most developed (and certainly less censored ones) graphic arts, it can be of interest to see how the Russian animators saw the traditional Western fairy tales characters.
Just like anywhere else in the world, the Soviet youngsters wanted to socialize, to listen to the music and to dance. The nightclubs were unheard of – anything of that kind would have been announced as promoting debauchery or morally wrong lifestyle habits. So the best one would hope for were the discotheques – the special dance occasions, organized by the officials on a weekly basis. They always had a designated supervisor – a school principal or a city council representative in charge.
A Soviet discotheque, most likely late 1960s.
Often enough, especially in the small cities, these dance events were the only source of entertainment. Movies were scarce and arrived in towns infrequently; the circus would visit once a year; and libraries just didn’t do it.
Late 1960s. Actress Svetlana Svetlichnaja is doing a wee strip dance for a movie. This was probably the most R-rated scene of the Soviet cinematography.
Due to a series of not so fortuitous events ( the Great October Socialist Revolution of 1917, the First World War, the overall rundown of the young Soviet country) women never had their needs attended to properly. Underwear was made, first and foremost, for the working class with no preferential treatment for the females so women had no choice other than to wear those sexless garments. This is probably the saddest part of the Soviet history.
