Vorkuta in our time is a real living museum of the era of socialism in the open air. The city, due to its economic decline, seemed to be frozen in Soviet times, and in spirit it remains a Soviet industrial city with, firstly, beautiful Stalinist architecture, and secondly, with an unusually high concentration of Soviet signs and other artifacts that have already become integral part of the image of the city. Soviet artifacts in Vorkuta are carefully preserved and renovated, and sometimes modern signs are made in the Soviet style.
2. So, let's start with Peace Square - one of the main squares of the city. On two "gate" houses framing Mira Street, one can see the coat of arms of Vorkuta and the Order of the Red Banner of Labor.
3. Somewhere there are Soviet slogans. For example, the Vorkutaugol administration building, built in 1980. It seems that until recently these letters glowed in the dark, but when I walked here in the evening, they did not burn.
4. On the other hand:
5. And this is the main facade. Pay attention to the word "Severstal" on the left. The old photographs show that "Unification" was written there, and the inclusion of "Vorkutaugol" in the composition of "Severstal" took place in 2003, but they tried to keep the new letters in the already established style.
6. And such a slogan adorns the building of the Research Institute "Polarnouralgeology" in the neighborhood. In the foreground is a monument to the geologist Alexander Chernov, who theoretically predicted the existence of the Pechora coal basin, which was then discovered in 1930 by his son Georgy, who did not receive a monument because he died only in 2009 (at the age of 102!).
7. Authentic plaque on the pedestal of the obelisk in the center of Jubilee Square:
8. And with the slogan "Wealth of the subsoil - to the Motherland" such an inscription echoes. By the way, pay attention to the store on the right: the preserved Soviet letters indicate its name "Syktyvkar". It was decided to honor the capital of the then Komi ASSR in the Capital of the World.
9. However, there is another example of a grocery store named after one of the northern cities. Here, Vorkuta is already sending greetings to its polar brother from Taimyr. Which, by the way, is two degrees north.
10. But this store was named, most likely, in honor of the drink. But I jokingly came up with an association with another polar city located near Murmansk, which gave the name to the Kola Peninsula.
11. Soviet signs in Vorkuta are almost literally at every step. And it is very likely that they are specially protected here, trying to preserve the appearance of the city. Which, in my opinion, is very cool.
17. And here is one of the most impressive examples for me. There is no longer a sign, but an inscription painted on the wall of the house. And it is clearly visible that it is regularly updated, despite the lack of political relevance. You can treat the CPSU and the Soviet era as you like, but, in my opinion, this is not the main thing here. After all, this inscription is now a historical artifact, which even looks organic in a city like Vorkuta.
18. But such an inscription was preserved on the house opposite:
19. Another such slogan can be found on one of the houses in the village of Severny on the Vorkuta ring:
20. And these are the coats of arms of the republics of the USSR at the city post office. Of course, all 15 are represented there, but here only the RSFSR, the Lithuanian and Azerbaijan SSR got into the frame.
21. Some of the Vorkuta "exhibits of the living museum of the USSR" are reminiscent of the geographical location of the city. This stele, standing on the way from the railway station to the city center, has become one of the symbols of Vorkuta. And its external resemblance to the planet seems to be intended to emphasize the status of the Capital of the World.
22. Drawing on one of the houses:
23. Sometimes "geographical" names can also be found on signs. However, this particular institution is no longer working, and the house is abandoned.
24. The word "Ural" is usually associated with Yekaterinburg, Perm, Chelyabinsk and other Tagil, but the Ural Range stretches far north into the Arctic itself. And Vorkuta is located exactly near the Polar Urals.
26. What can not be said about the house in which "Youth" is located. So it pulls a caustic joke about an institution called "Old Age".
27. These signs can be seen on Lenin Street - the main one in the city (these lemon-orange five-story buildings are very recognizable). As already mentioned, even in the very center it sometimes seems that it is not the second decade of the 21st century, but still the nineties. And the abundance of Soviet artifacts only reinforces this impression.
29. Soviet signs have become such an important detail of the Vorkuta flavor that even in post-Soviet times, many signs in newly opened stores continue to be made in the Soviet style. For example, only in the comments I was told that this sign appeared, in fact, in the 2000s. However, usually it can still be distinguished by the state of the letters.
30. This, it seems, is also a modern sign. But quite sustained in the Soviet style. In what other Russian city do such signs continue to be made in our time? In addition to Vorkuta, if I have seen this somewhere, then certainly not on such a scale.
31. Maybe this one is also already post-Soviet:
32. And, it seems, this one too:
33. And this one is probably still Soviet:
34. And here you can see the Soviet store "Ugolyok" - this sign is visible even in photographs of the 1980s. What is funny, on the store that is still operating now, its name is duplicated in the Komi language: "Vuzasyanin" Shomtor "". Too bad I didn't take a photo.
35. And in some places of the city you can find such authentic stands:
36. Here you can also see:
37. The inscriptions are probably also Soviet. Moreover, the cinema "Rodina" is no longer operating.
38. Most of all I was pleased with this stand, which even looks like some kind of toy. It's a shame he's in such a state.
39. But I found such a sign on a settled five-story dormitory building in the Shakhtyorsky microdistrict on the northern outskirts of the city.
40. This panel on the end wall of one of the houses, dedicated to the friendship between Bulgaria and the Komi ASSR, seemed to me to be the most interesting artifact. Komi's cooperation with the "16th Republic of the Union" was indeed quite close, but it did not concern Vorkuta, but the taiga Udora region in the west of Komi, where the Bulgarians cut wood for their own needs.
41. And here is the board installed near the first panel house in Vorkuta. Of course, the house-building plant in Vorkuta has long been gone.
42. The drawing on the wall of the school in the village of Vorgashor - it seems that it is also still Soviet.
43. Often, Soviet letters in Vorkuta are found on public buildings.
46. Half abandoned department store in the village of Severny:
47. A mechanical plant operates. And manufactures equipment for mines.
48. A sign in the abandoned Rudnik area:
50. When I saw this sign, I was even puzzled: what kind of Count Vorkuta lives in this house? :) But the pictures of previous years from other authors showed that only the letters in the word "Photography" fell off.
51. Also a very interesting sign:
52. The entrance sign of the village of Vorgashor, apparently imitating deer antlers (the name Vorgashor in translation from the Komi language means "stream near the deer path"):
53. But such an inscription adorns a residential building near the railway station:
In fact, I am far from the first person who comes up with the idea of creating a "museum city", that is, a museum space based on a real-life city. However, such projects are more often voiced in relation to the ancient cities of Central Russia. While I was thinking about Vorkuta, this is really a living museum of the era of socialism! And it is clear that they understand this here, otherwise they would not have kept so many Soviet signboards and would not have updated the slogans on the walls of houses. And these Soviet artifacts suit Vorkuta very well, which retains the atmosphere of a young Soviet city of northern romance.
Accepted as a gift. Literally, such a beauty. She was born on July 31, 1963, practically unused. Brand new, as from the assembly line ... Moreover, in a rare, export configuration.
By the name of Sakta, beauty - if anyone did not know. Moreover - it works!
1. At first she caught only the VHF band, now she catches everything, including many foreign radio stations. How it works - I'll show you. at the same time I will show you up to the company of little animals which I have not yet shown to everyone ...
something like this.
2.
3. Open... Everything shines and sparkles... Unfortunately, the bearings don't make much noise, but we'll fix it.
4. The decoration that gave the name...
5. A relative of the electrophone "Youth" - "Youth". Alas, it is non-working - there is no head and one roller ... plus the bearings are dirty as always ...
6. Good old Youth ... Well-worn and vyvalaytso - but tolerable.
it seemed to flash, but maybe someone woke up from the New Year and recognizes the music on Youth ...
7. A long time ago I found such an animal in the Kostroma region. Who is it? Don't say anymore. One of the three is either Voronezh 54 or 58 or Strela.
8. You also have such a wonderful artifact - a trip plan for Czechoslovakia.
9.
10. The following is a description of the sights in the form of museums of Gottwald and Lenin, we will not get hung up on this ...
11. Stamped portrait of Lenin...
12. Santa Claus...
13. Posters...
14.
15
16. A strange phone with a Latin alphabet ... It seems like an Amer of the 70s, then exiled to us.
17. old glass holder with enamel...
18. Vympelki Intourist...
19. Ax and iron...
20. Razor "Agidel"
21. Killed player "Accord" and clockwork cockerel...
22. Soviet toy bear...
23. "Ukraine". Behind her ZIL-Moscow ii ... what would you think? Refrigerator SVARZ!
24. Vacuum cleaner "Whirlwind", born in 1966.
25. Brother Whirlwind - Buran. He is born in 1968.
26. Refurbished cast lamp, 50s found in a garbage dump on the street. People's Militia...
27. Kerosene lamp from Kostroma region.
28. Samovar of the 50s...
29. A brand new vacuum cleaner found in a Leningrad dump...
35. Radio dot, filthy with unknown paint, and in the old days - glamorous pink. They gave her as a gift the uniform of a major general of the artillery of the Soviet Army, with award straps, striped pants ...
36. Radio station "Ryazan". It seems to be very late - almost after the collapse of the USSR already, although - for those times - too beautiful or something ... without a switch.
Until you have had enough ... Continuation of my collections follows.
Anticipating questions - yes, I keep almost everything at home. And new - just throw it away and get rid of it. I keep something in a secluded place, about which I do not expand.
film by Nikita Mikhalkov
The creator of the book about the adventures of the yellow suitcase, who brought up the best part of the generation of children of the 70s with the fairy tale “I won’t ask for forgiveness”, Sofya Prokofieva wrote only one “adult” play (still not published as a separate book), - “Conversation without a Witness” , about the price of betrayal, the unbearable burden of human morality and the irreversibility of the past. After reading it in a magazine, Nikita Mikhalkov, who was at that time on the verge of a midlife crisis, was so inspired that at first he even decided on a theatrical debut, trying to stage “Without Witnesses” in Vakhtangov. And then, having quarreled with the chief director of the theatre, he shot a scorchingly poignant chamber drama based on the play, which would have done credit to Bergman - for the sake of this he abandoned Merezhko's tempting script about flying in a dream and in reality. Perhaps never before on the Soviet screen did the heroes look into such bottomless existential abysses as the character of Mikhail Ulyanov in his demonic monologues, and nowhere was the maxim about good that will cut its way anyway, illustrated with such grandiose literalness. There is some kind of sad paradox in that the only painting by Mikhalkov, to which the classic set of current invectives against its creator is by no means applicable, turned out to be the least known, as if forever hanging in Andropov's timelessness, exactly between two trilogies - about the drama of the Russian nobility and about the tragedy of the Soviet nobility. Georgy Mkheidze
novel by Vladimir Tendryakov
“Once I asked Tendryakov,” art critic Kamil Ikramov recalled, “who does he serve, the muse or the truth? He said that, of course, the truth. The gloomy Vologda resident Vladimir Tendryakov is sometimes unknowingly attributed to the villagers, which is not true: his pen was driven not by hatred for urbanism and not by pain for Russia, but, first of all, by the desire to find out everything on his own. Metaphysical questions were no exception: Tendryakov (according to Yuri Nagibin, “a heavy man, with colossal conceit and conviction in his messianism”) remains the creator of the only “atheistic cycle” in Soviet literature - the Pentateuch, which, having begun during the years of Khrushchev’s struggle against sectarians with bright, but popular popular novels "Miracle" and "Apostolic business trip", ended in the 83rd defiant and confessional "Gospel from the computer." "Eclipse" is undoubtedly the top of this array. The family drama of the reflexive agricultural chemist Pavel Krokhalev, from whom his beloved beautiful wife Maya leaves for the sectarian preacher Gosha Chugunov, in a short 170 pages turns into a psychopathological quest about a desperate search for the meaning of life - a "tiny, hairy gap" among the endless galactic emptiness. Fifteen years before the official revival of Orthodoxy, Tendryakov, perhaps the first among his generation, convincingly showed that religion and everyday materialism are equally incapable of answering the question “Where are we from and why?”, Or at least simply teaching people to understand each other without paying for it with "blood and pieces of life." Georgy Mkheidze
1923-2001
A native of the Jewish town of Gaisin, Gorovets began as a soloist at the Jewish Theater of Mikhoels and switched from Yiddish to Russian at a fairly mature age. Perhaps that is why the melody has always been much more important to him than the text: cover versions of The Beatles, Sinatra, Celentano, Adamo, Aznavour and so on have become his calling card (the State Concert specially for Gorovets bought the rights to the most fashionable songs). A strong lyrical tenor, outwardly reminiscent of the singing Danny DeVito, Gorovets became the perfect embodiment of the Soviet 60s - a short cosmopolitan era, when Gelena Velikanova sang "Someone dreams of captivating Nice", and Gorovets himself - "People sometimes dream of their hometowns, to whom Moscow to whom Paris. In 1972, he emigrated to Israel, then to the United States, and for almost thirty years he tried to interest the public in songs in Yiddish - rather unsuccessfully. Gorovets will obviously go down in history with the song “I Love Pasta”, but his radiant recordings, which perfectly combine comedy and absolutely blissful romance, are clearly worthy of more. Alexey Munipov
vocal and instrumental ensemble
Georgian stage is never bad, but sometimes it is just amazing. This fully applies to the VIA "Orera" - the pride of the Georgian SSR, where the young Vakhtang Kikabidze sparkled with a smile behind the drums, and the thin Nani Bregvadze froze at the microphone. The early recordings of Orera, especially the first two giant albums released on Melodiya in 1967, still leave a feeling of completely unrestrained, boundless, unrestrained happiness. In part, this effect is created by Georgian polyphony, laid on a strong beat-based foundation, and freedom of improvisation, unprecedented for the Soviet stage (for some time, the young jazzman-nugget Vagif Mustafazade, discharged from Baku, was the artistic director and arranger of "Orera"), in part - the very energy of the former graduates of the Tbilisi foreign language . In the Union, Poplars performed by them were most valued, but now the hit “Lalebi” is best listened to - about the fact that if the girls became stars, they would have to get on dates on spaceships. "Orera" exists and still performs, but it's worth listening to their recordings of 1967-1975. Alexey Munipov
novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov
Anatoly Kuznetsov was an extremely unusual Soviet writer and later an equally unusual dissident. Exiled from the capital to Tula after his novel The Legend Continued was unauthorized published in France, the thick-lensed eccentric shocked the provinces by throwing bohemian nude parties and erotic photo shoots in an apartment on Mira Street, and when the house caught fire , did not make repairs so that guests could leave autographs on the black ceiling. After his most famous book, the autobiographical novel Babi Yar, was first torn apart and then published against the will of the author in a castrated version, he began to prepare for his escape - but three months before the trip to London, where the 40-year-old Kuznetsov asked for political asylum, "Youth" managed to print his new novel "Fire". In form, this is a production drama about a journalist’s trip to blow out a new blast furnace in the Ural village of Kosoluchye, where he once spent his childhood, in fact, it is an amazingly powerful thing, literally oozing some kind of howling hopelessness, impotence to change anything in a cracking at the seams and crumbling everywhere, wherever you look, the world. This book, which begins with the funeral of a hero who committed suicide, in which they speak with the dead and express the version that the book of the prophet Ezekiel describes the first contact with aliens, seems to go infinitely far beyond everything that is in principle permissible and possible in Soviet literature. Perhaps the most tragic of the leitmotifs of "Fire" is the complete inability of a person to predict the future: on the way to the blast furnace, the hero estimates how the fate of his classmates has turned out, and then, throughout the entire novel, he is stunned to discover to what tragicomic extent his forecasts do not coincide with theirs. real destinies, each new meeting is like another nail in the coffin of youthful illusions. Georgy Mkheidze
film by Teodor Vulfovich
Director Vulfovich's debut was a stunning screen adaptation of Aldridge's "The Last Inch", a story about an 11-year-old boy who has to sit at the helm of an airplane in order to save the life of his father injured by a shark. Nine years later, Vulfovich proved that even in the light genre he was able to create things of a congenial level. A romantic movie joke about the hero-cavalryman Ivan the Terrible (Vitaly Solomin), whom the doctors, after being wounded, “exiled” to command a women’s airship (!) platoon, where he has to repel attacks by no means from the Fritz, but the sharp-tongued Raechka Oreshkina (Nadezhda Rumyantseva), literally requires 20 minutes to turn into a head-spinning eccentric burlesque - with the occasional overflight, travesty disguises, ladle brawls, and the takeover of a Nazi van stuffed with a secret x-z brutaline powder that infuriates soldiers. Immediately after the release, "Nutlet" was subjected to criticism, accusing him of an unacceptable mockery of the sacred blood of the fighters, and was put on the shelf for a long time. Shooting the war as a comic book in Russia will start again only after more than forty years - but, unfortunately, much less talented. Georgy Mkheidze
1945-1995
He had the vocal abilities of a teenage idol - he could very well be our Lou Christie or Gene Pitney. In the USSR, he won not teenage, but rather childish love by singing "I'll get off at a distant station" in the film adaptation of the Dragoon's "In Secret to the Whole World." The heyday of Gennady Belov's career came in the mid-seventies, and no one's voice then exuded such a strange, almost vicious bliss. In the glorious paganism with which he sang of herbs, fallen stars, and "bread to the left," a vague anxiety showed through. Galich called these “poor tenor”, and it is no coincidence that Belovsky’s hits left with the singer: when the era of old songs about the main thing began, no one tried to cover either “Grass”, or “Star Song of the Sky”, or the great “Thrushes”. The last thing is mysterious; try to explain - what is it about? A strange inertia makes one think that it is about the war (as if a couple of “Nightingales”), although, in essence, there is not a word about the war in the text. In 1973, performing “Drozdov” on “Song of the Year”, Belov, after the first verse, casts an amazing look somewhere over his right shoulder - seemingly at the conductor Yuri Silantiev, but in fact - into the abyss: this is how Peter Lorre looked in “ M" Fritz Lang. The recording of that concert is periodically played on the Nostalgia channel. But this view has already been cut out by someone. Maxim Semelyak
singer and artist
1918-2009
A joker by birthright, who studied at the course of Boris Babochkin, Benzion Noevich Baranchik passed, without passing any wounds or orders, the Finnish and Patriotic Wars, and then managed to play a lot on stage before finally giving his talent to the variety entertainer, becoming the best in this genre in the Union. With the unchanged Rhythm ensemble, Benzianov annually traveled half the country, stood on the same stage with Vertinsky, joked in front of Khrushchev and Brezhnev, endured the anti-Semitic attacks of the Leningrad boss Romanov and made every effort to “ridicule everything that interferes with life, but at the same time passionately affirm everything beautiful ". Bentsianov's parody songs, preserved in amateur recordings, are a real hologram of everyday culture of the 70s, a grand potpourri of fragments of the Soviet collective unconscious, the archetypes of which he handled with bewitching virtuoso ease. It seems that no one better than him managed to capture the aesthetics of the “small style” of stagnation: the exchange of waste paper for Dumas, the faces of pop stars on shopping bags, the “leather syndrome”, collective trade union committee drinking in nature, and so on and so forth. In order to hurt the materialists, loafers, gossips and slanderers more painfully, he brilliantly dissected the entire Soviet pop culture, from the Musketeers and Pugacheva to Leshchenko and the Nikitin bards. The premieres of his performances were always held in his native Leningrad, but his true patrimony was the peripheral palaces of culture, rest houses and resort halls-shell scenes. Benzianov made 8 big concert programs, but never got a record or a CD; until the last days he continued to lead the concert association - but did not have time to finish the autobiographical book "Moments", in which he would probably recall his main principle: "Once I realized that success can come if I live on stage the way I live - that is, do not lie and do not be afraid. Georgy Mkheidze
musician and composer
1940-1979
The records of the Azerbaijani virtuoso pianist are perhaps the best thing left of Soviet jazz (if we leave out the Ganelin trio). He recorded a lot, and Melodiya willingly published it. Before his death, at less than 39 years old, Mustafazade managed to release nine records - more than any Soviet jazzman. He could easily play “under Monk”, “under Jarrett” or “under Evans” (he was often called the Soviet Evans, for his lyricism), but his main invention is jazz-mugham, a fusion of jazz with very complex Azerbaijani traditional music. It is these melodious recordings that anticipated the fashion for world music, and today you can easily surprise anyone. Moreover, now they are not so difficult to access as they used to be: Mustafazade is now an important cultural icon in Azerbaijan, his anthology on six discs and a double Yollar have been released there; in our country Melodiya not so long ago re-released Jazz Variations. Who is really completely forgotten is the Sevil girl ensemble created by Mustafazade - an experimental synthesis of Azerbaijani folklore and progressive pop music of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Sevil sounds no worse than Turkish psychedelic and funk of the same time - on the label Finders Keepers they can be released with your eyes closed. Alexey Munipov
novel by Robert Stillmark
It is not clear what is more surprising: the novel itself or the story of its creation. In the first edition, two authors are indicated - R. Shtilmark and V. Vasilevsky; in the second - only Shtilmark, and in the preface Vasilevsky is called "an assertive accountant" who helped the author; the author himself was allegedly a geologist and wrote the novel on a long expedition to the Arctic. What kind of expedition it really was, it turned out 30 years later. The writer Shtilmark, convicted for "anti-Soviet agitation", was discovered by the criminal Vasilevsky in the early 50s, in a camp, on the construction of the Salekhard-Igarka railway. Vasilevsky was eccentric: his fix idea was to write a novel and send it to Stalin so that he could have his sentence cut off. Shtilmark was asked to become his literary negro; in exchange, protection and exemption from logging were guaranteed. There were two conditions: not about modernity and that it was interesting. Shtilmark chose England of the 18th century and in 14 months from scratch, huddled in the attic of the barracks, working 20 hours a day, composed a huge (4 volumes in a manuscript bound in a shirt specially taken from some unfortunate prisoner) adventure novel, with pirates , Jesuits, Indians, Luddites, slave traders, impostors, sea battles and chases. Yes, similar at once to Stevenson, Jules Verne, Boussinard and Dumas, yes, replete with clichés, yes, incredibly infantile - but at the same time, it is still incredibly fascinating and amazing with its complex intrigue, the author's imagination and the breadth of geographical coverage: it is impossible to break away. The Heir is the perfect novel for the Adventure Library; however, the thing is that this is a nesting doll, a secret in a secret, a detective in a detective. It is strange: how can one, under the barking of camp sheep dogs, eating plaster pies, describe English gentlemen from “good old Bulton” and pirates of the Caribbean? Strange: it was a bestseller that could feed the entire book industry of the USSR for decades, but after it was published a couple of times at the end of the 50s on the recommendation of Ivan Efremov, it remained semi-underground. Lev Danilkin
actor and director
1923-1987
When Vladimir Basov was not yet Vladimir Basov Sr. and even Duremar and other singing evil spirits, he staged a big black-and-white movie based on the big conservative prose of the century - from Bulgakov's The White Guard and Priestley's Dangerous Turn to Bondarev's Silence and the novel the gloomy idiot Vadim Kozhevnikov "Shield and Sword", about which, it seems, Dovlatov wrote that Kozhevnikov only knows about the war that one German is called Fritz, and the other is Hans. Basov himself went through the war in Tolstoy style as an artillery captain - that's why, to know, he even managed to make a Soviet hit from this junk, which marked the beginning of a new fashion for overseas intelligence (Stirlitz, Koltsov and Ladeinikov were a little later) and introduced the first of three Sash Belovs (the second was Zhigunov in the "Midshipmen", and the third you know who). Composer Basner often wrote folk hits to his films to the words of Matusovsky, but even against the background of "Nameless Height" ("Silence") and "White Acacia" ("Days of the Turbins"), "How the Motherland Begins" from "Shield and Sword" became tragic diamond: Basov scored it with a sniper at the end of the first series, when a resident, a cameo of the director himself, dies at Lieutenant Belov, who naturalized in a foreign land, and he, by the words about good and faithful comrades, understands that on the first day of the war he was left alone in the deepest German rear alone. This loneliness of a decent person among near and far will become a landmark feature of both Myagkov - Turbine, and Vokhmintsev in "Silence", and Yakovlev - Kaplen in "Dangerous Turn". The stamp of the light minor will also fall on the bass lanky fairy ghouls. The same motive was shared with him by a veteran of the Spanish international brigades - a British subject Sir Thomas Botting, who settled in our foreign broadcast, invited to advise "on the style" of "A Dangerous Turn" - that's why the film resembles the best English samples, and not the Baltic cranberries.
Basov generally liked to make films long and detailed, therefore he often worked for television, which did not constrain in footage, and therefore the fact of his directing was somehow lost. Of the acting directors, grips are more often stuck in the people's memory - Mikhalkov, Menshov, Govorukhin - he, like Bykov, remained in the mass consciousness as a brilliant comic episodic. Thin Wolf. Kochevryazhnev. Arturka. The song "Let's bring art to people."
"O? A plot," his polisher would say, and millions would immediately agree: indeed, a plot. Denis Gorelov
television series by Semyon Aranovich
The five-part series based on Yulian Semenov, shown on the Central Television in 1985 about how the boring Colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs Kostenko catches a serial killer and a werewolf Krotov, as is customary to write in such cases, was a little ahead of its time. Made by the former documentary filmmaker Aranovich, the author of "Torpedo Bombers", an important figure in the "Leningrad school", a comrade and main rival of Herman, he was successfully ignored by both Soviet film criticism and the audience (the streets during the broadcast did not empty, as was the case with Semenov's "Seventeen Moments" and “TASS is authorized to announce”). Of those who saw him in childhood, few people remember Aranovich’s film, and who remembers, remembers strangely: “Confrontation” had the property of being recorded in the head not according to the category of cultural impressions, but in that segment of the brain where early childhood nightmares and memories of an attack of scarlet fever are stored. The stronger the culture shock that you experience watching it now. Five years before the revolutionary Lynchian dreams in American prime time, ten years before Trier's "Kingdom" and "Dogma-95", twenty years before the start of mass experiments in crossing documentary films with fiction, Aranovich fused all these techniques that had not yet been invented at that time together. Filmed halfway in b/w, wandering in space and time (from the swooning Soviet 80s to Germany at the end of the war and back), not so much mixed with newsreel footage as growing out of them, "Confrontation" is one of the grandest demonstrations of hypnotic possibilities. TV. Two great acting works - the tired interrogating angel Basilashvili and the Germanic Lapshin - Andrey Boltnev in the role of a petty demon running from him (years later, naturalized Leningrader Balabanov respectfully steals his specific smile for the most spectacular moment of "Cargo 200"). Soviet Twin Peaks, Soviet Angel Heart, Soviet Sleepy Hollow. The question that still haunts is - where did Krotov put the severed heads? Roman Volobuev
film by Vytautas Žalakyavičius
The format of an action-packed Baltic production from foreign life, a favorite window for the unconscious part of the audience into the world of beautiful vices, defiant dresses and marksmanship - Lithuanian detectives about corruption in Germany, Latvian adaptations of Chase, vicious music, vicious conversations, vicious Mirdza Martinsone in a vicious swimsuit - with the opening of borders (even earlier - with the advent of video) turned into one big curiosity. All this (especially Mirdza Martinsone) was terribly exciting at the age of 12, but unlike Polish detective stories and Yugoslav films about the Wild West, the genre was originally an ersatz, both for those who watched, and, it seems, for those who filmed - to return to these once favorite films are now possible only for nostalgic reasons. Released in 1979, “Centaurs” by the Lithuanian classic Zalakiavičius stands apart, although formally they belong to the same category – the director of the great partisan western “Nobody Wanted to Die” was once repatriated from Mosfilm home to the Lithuanian Film Studio with the verdict of the artistic council “author talented, but works better on national and international topics”, so for half his life he filmed something about Latin American freedom fighters and Dürrenmatt’s comic adaptations. But Zhalakyavichyus, firstly, was a genius, secondly, of all human states, he was mainly interested in death, and thirdly, work on a Soviet-Czech-Hungarian blockbuster about a coup in Chile (filmed in Colombia, which was friendly at that time) coincided he has a passion for Bergman and at the same time Costa-Gavras. The result is a fantastic mixture of a political thriller and a film about the end of the world with Banionis as a distraught Allende, the devilishly handsome Adomaitis going to his death in a freshly ironed shirt, shootouts filmed through misted glass, and a crazy finale, where the director’s message to humanity in general and the Soviet government in In particular, he effectively summed up a sudden kick to the causal place. The hint was understood, more expensive joint productions were not entrusted to Zhalakyavichyus. Roman Volobuev
film by Gennady Shpalikov
1966
A geologist (Kirill Lavrov), returning from an expedition, meets a girl (Inna Gulaya), goes with her to her small town, spends chaste evenings and nights with her, but disturbed by dreams, has a picture breakfast with vodka in the morning to the song “Learn to play the harmonica and leaves without saying goodbye. In the only film by Gennady Shpalikov, one can see the formal techniques of the French “new wave” or the branded Italian “alienation” (Antonioni appreciated “DSZH”), but it seems that “A Long Happy Life” is more about overcoming Chekhov (it’s not for nothing that the characters watch the production "The Cherry Orchard"). Chekhov's main message was formulated by him as follows: "People are having lunch on the stage, drinking tea, and at this time their destinies are crumbling." Shpalikov is more ingenuous than Chekhov - he removes the heavy slump of the last phrase. At Shpalikov's, people dine, drink tea, and that's it. And this makes it completely unbearable. The guns hang but do not fire. The conductor in vain seduces with a long ticket tape. Floats in anguish inexplicable girl with an accordion to nowhere. And Luspekaev wants to shoot himself. Shpalikov managed to achieve that divine one-sidedness of pictures and words, which turned out to be higher than irony, higher than metaphor, higher than aesthetics. As the hero of the film says: “I always have simple, understandable intentions.” Maxim Semelyak
film by Larisa Shepitko
The second (and last) color film by Larisa Shepitko about two fellow doctors who once, under different circumstances, gave up their talent for peace of mind, and then suddenly discovered that neither one nor the other was left, turned out to be one of the most depressing - and at the same time shockingly unusual in pictorial a number of dramas in Soviet cinema. As Yuri Vizbor admitted (whose hero in one of the scenes, to the music of Schnittke, flies under the dome of the circus on a safety lounge), “the internal springs of the film were not propped up by importunate explanatory; its road signs were supposed to be read at high speeds of thought.” At first, this tape is either wild or creepy to watch; towards the end, both emotions merge into a deafening pavane about human impotence. As Maxim Semelyak wrote about this film: “All the characters are either already hysterical or froze in anticipation; there are simply no other conditions for people here. The ringing of a telephone that no one approaches, Shirvindt's ridiculous cameo, Yefremov's strange role, Natalya Bondarchuk's suicide, which is treated by mimicking Korney Chukovsky, the Bond theme - all this together rushes into the abyss of such hopelessness that there are no analogues to pick up. “Should I hang myself, or should I go to dinner? - one of the heroines formulates the main conflict of the film. “I don’t want to live, but I want to eat.” Shepitko was taken away from the filming of the scene in the circus by an ambulance - the next few scenes had to be filmed by her husband Elem Klimov. Screenwriter Gennady Shpalikov hanged himself on his own scarf three years later in the House of Creativity in Peredelkino. The audience, however, considered the picture too elitist: "You and I" simultaneously received silver in the Venetian youth competition - and the last line in terms of attendance at home. Georgy Mkheidze
* In the printed version of the material, a quote from Maxim Semelyak was not indicated for reasons beyond the control of the author of the text. The editors apologize.
film by Mikhail Ulyanov
Junior police lieutenant Semyon Mitrofanovich Kovalev, having served a full quarter of a century, submits a resignation report, almost waiting for a new police uniform. He spends his last day in the service, like all the previous ones, on his four-block site. He manages to shame the anonymous Byzin, and remind the dissolute widow-gulena Agnessa Pavlovna that with each lonely night she will become more and more uncomfortable and scary from her own zabubenny life, and promise Verka Kukushkina tomorrow to take her and the boy with her to the village away from the alcoholic -husband - everything before the desire to help the sparrow girl, who is about to be blamed for the robbery of the Vetkin pensioners, does not lead him to a dark park behind the final bus stop, where he will find himself face to face with a flock of predators in human form, armed with one just a toy pistol in a holster. Boris Vasiliev, the author of this story, which opened the 70s, slowly leading the reader to catharsis, managed to write a hero of amazing strength and integrity: a wise police samurai in uniform with one star on the strip, ready to listen to everything and accept everything in this life - everything, other than evil. The book was appreciated, a performance was staged at the Maly Theater with Zharov in the title role - but it was Mikhail Ulyanov, for whom "The Very Last Day" became a directorial debut (in addition, he played the 65-year-old protagonist at 45), managed to turn the sad story a good man into one of the main Soviet sagas about nobility, honor and conscience. Georgy Mkheidze
film by Sergei Tarasov
The border guard Bakhteev, performed by Andrei Rostotsky, notices a fair-haired man with a military bearing on the subordinate coast and, unarmed, rushes after him across half the country - from one resort to another (the chase begins in the Baltic, ends in the Black Sea). The favorite movie of all schoolchildren in 1987, "Interception" is notable not so much for its general dashing, hand-to-hand and uncompromising use of KamAZ - and not even for the fact that film director Vladimir Menshov, who plays an American saboteur, looks like two drops of water here on Steve McQueen. Director Tarasov, previously famous mainly for films about knights (“Ivanhoe”, “Quentin Dorward”, “Black Arrow” - that's all of him), chivalrously broke the arrogant canon of the Soviet spy film, turning it - almost for the first time into a domestic practice - in a duel of equals and equally worthy. One is an enemy, the other is ours, one is a border guard, the other is a marine, but at the same time both are serious people, honestly and, most importantly, professionally fulfilling their duty. At the end, when the heroes finally meet face to face on a strategically important dam, and the unthinkable happens - the bad karateka Menshov respectfully turns the good sambo wrestler Rostotsky into a cutlet in a fair fight, the capture team arrives in time just when he decides whether to finish off the enemy or not. The finale, where a crippled Soviet midshipman and a shackled but unbroken U.S. Marine exchange a long, respectful look in a helicopter carrying one home and the other to the Lubyanka, turns Intercept from just a good B-movie to a grand one. Today's "Personal Numbers" and "D-Days" never dreamed of such nobility. Roman Volobuev
film by Konstantin Ershov
A “penny” with three bandits rushes along the night roads of the Russian south, a restaurant VIA sings “Fly away, cloud!”, Leonid Filatov, buying a watermelon at the market, for some reason runs into a fight - the watermelon itself, of course, will be cut with a large knife, from which Of course, at some point there will be blood dripping. There are three bandits - two brothers and an uncle, the uncle was killed during the arrest, and the older brother persuades the younger one to say that this uncle is the only killer in the gang. The younger brother, who also killed, is about to break down, but the astute judge (Aleksey Petrenko) has already understood what the matter is here. The debut work of director Konstantin Ershov, Viy, is considered the first Soviet horror film. Shot by Yershov 15 years after "Viya", "Rooks" is perhaps even too Hollywood for the USSR of the early 80s, a court drama (and even with elements of a Hollywood road movie). There was no caption “Based on real events” in the film, but for some reason everyone watched it as a film adaptation of the real capture of a gang operating in the south (although it is not known exactly which case formed the basis of the plot - whether Ershov had in mind the brothers Tolstopyatov, or the Bilykov brothers, who robbed cars in the Rostov region). For the first time in Soviet cinema, the bandit killer is presented in Rooks not as an indisputable enemy of society, but as a victim of circumstances - a weak will, plus an uncle who served time and an authoritarian brother. In November 1982, the new General Secretary Yuri Andropov will say that we do not know the country in which we live. Konstantin Ershov in Rooks said, in general, the same thing - and very beautifully. Oleg Kashin
a film by Grigory Pozhenyan
1944 - Yalta is already Soviet, Sevastopol is still occupied. You can already drink pink nutmeg, flirt (young Angelina Vovk is one of the passions) and listen to songs performed by Strizhenov about the country of Tra-la-la-la. But you still need to make deadly sorties in torpedo boats. Pink Muscat is not remembered by chance, it is in a sense the engine of the plot: the main character (Viktor Avdyushko) took a drunken swim, caught a cold, was not allowed to complete the task, as a result of which a colleague died. There are films that, in principle, could be finished immediately after the passage of the initial credits - “Farewell” by Grigory Pozhenyan is just one of those. Torpedo boats cut through the sea, and fragments of phrases sound to the accompaniment of the piano: “And health is not eternal, but good luck will come later.” In this maritime story there is something from the romantic prose of the beginning of the last century, it is no coincidence that Avdyushko at some point drops the phrase: “Everything is like Grin’s.” People are not so much between war and peace as between sea and land. And the magnificent Tariverdiev, singing his songs to Pozhenyan's verses (by the way, it is from here that "I made a decision" sung by Letov at Starfall) sounds like a god from the engine room. Maxim Semelyak
writer
1914-1997
Yuriy Sotnik's school comedies (“Kuprum Esa's Elixir”, “Mashka Sambo and Splinter”, “Clairvoyant”) are a permanently sparkling world where children enter into amazing interactions with adults. A chemistry teacher invents an elixir, after using which a person can demand anything from other people; the schoolgirl promptly forces the inventor to crawl under the table. A 12-year-old girl snatches a bottle of vermouth from the hands of a policeman who arrested a company of minors for drinking alcohol and swallows the forbidden liquid with pleasure: “Sorry, my mouth is dry!” Terribly implausible assumptions and quasi-detective plots lived very well in the late Soviet literary world - because any wound inflicted on common sense, conservative ethics and generally good healed instantly; the world returned to normal—calm—with surprising ease, no matter what happened. In fact, the Centurion is just the tip of a huge iceberg. Golyavkin, Veltistov, Moshkovsky, Dragunsky, Bulychev, Krapivin - there were as many good children's writers in the 1970s and 1980s as there were bad science fiction writers in the 1990s and 2000s; but as soon as life changed, children trying to imitate adults began to look not so much funny as scary; This is where the genre collapsed. Since then, he has been gone - but you can see him in these stories. Like a fly in amber. Lev Danilkin
Cola Belda album
Fatherless and stuttering (the speech defect went away when he started to sing), Nikolai Ivanovich Beldy, before becoming an official delegate of the small northern peoples on the Soviet stage, managed to serve in the Pacific Fleet and take part in the liberation of Korea from the Japanese invaders. Now he is remembered mainly for the curious hymns of the taiga and tundra and is often confused with Polad Bul-Bul-oglu, which is unfair - Belda's non-opportunistic repertoire of the 60s and 70s is interesting if only because of the way he sings: as if awkwardly trampling in these frivolous twists and lofty hymns, mastering a foreign language. Even more important is Belda's latest work, the album "White Island", released when no one cared about the Soviet stage, and had nothing to do with this stage. For ten years Beldy collected the original songs of the peoples of the Far North - from the Dolgans to the Ulchi, translated them into Russian, and then recorded them in an utter sound. Jaw's harp, shamanic percussion and a minimalist synthesizer add up to clumsy songs about hunters, fishermen and seagulls, similar either to Einsturzende Neubauten in Siberia or Animal Collective in Chukotka. "White Island" - as the voices of the outskirts of the collapsing empire, where they did not seem to be very aware that this empire existed. A year after the release of this record, Peter Gabriel will create the Real World label in London - Cola Beldy brought his ideas to life even more righteously and accurately, but in the midst of perestroika, no one paid attention to this. Alexander Gorbachev
« Owner of the forest»
1945-1976
According to the biography of Matveeva, you can study the concept of "Soviet people": she lived a very poor and very rich life. She worked at casual and non-profit jobs - a proofreader, a laboratory assistant. She was fond of sciences - physics, cybernetics. Traveled a lot around the country. I read a lot. At some point, she began to compose songs and sing them with a guitar. The circle of reading is also noticeable in the songs - Cinderella, Solveig, Peer Gynt. She died at the age of 31 from brain sarcoma. Most of the songs were written during the years of illness and with a clear awareness of the inevitability of the end. According to formal signs, it is customary for Matveeva to be ranked among the bards; If you let a critic who is unfamiliar with the aesthetics of the Grushinsky Festival listen to her recordings, he would probably recognize in her songs "Gothic folk" - something like Marissa Nadler, but in Russian. In fact, her music is above all genre divisions: slender, ringing, uncompromising, calmly desperate songs, sung in a strong and at the same time defenseless voice. Brodsky said about Tsvetaeva that, they say, a woman can afford to be ethically uncompromising. Matveeva could afford it doubly. Standing on the edge of the abyss, she does not induce a mystical fog, soberly and clearly calls a spade a spade, and at the same time incredibly keenly experiences all the beauty - and transience - of life: troubles do not melt away, and days fly away, but somewhere hope waves its hand. Yuri Saprykin
"I so want"
film by Mikhail Kalik
In a room with white walls and a portrait of Mayakovsky, couples are dancing to a tape recorder. A man in a long double-breasted raincoat and a woman in something black ride in a taxi, walk through the forest for a long time, saying almost nothing, then he escorts her to the station, and she leaves. A prominent guy is carrying hay on a cart, a black-eyed beauty on the side of the road asks for a ride, they soon play a wedding. A girl in a white beret with a pom-pom smokes nervously in a street cafe. The priest talks about what love is. In the film by Mikhail Kalik, which consists of four unrelated short stories, as well as interviews filmed on the street, a monologue by Alexander Men and an insert musical number with a song by Tariverdiev with lyrics by Yevtushenko, almost nothing happens and too much happens at the same time. This is an amazing black-and-white movie, where even in the most insignificant episodes actors of amazing beauty with the thinnest and smartest faces are engaged - from Valentin Nikulin to Andrei Mironov, from Alisa Freindlich to Svetlana Svetlichnaya, where their every movement, look, turn of the head speaks as many as cannot be written in any of the most verbose scripts. This is an almost wordless, nuanced meditation on the properties of love, possible only in the late 60s: never will the black-and-white air in the cinema be so transparent, the people so effortlessly natural, the rain so July. The film was ready just in time for the entry of troops into Czechoslovakia, it was cut without the knowledge of the director, and then put on the shelf, a criminal case was opened against Kalik himself and he was forced into exile, when he returned in the late 80s, the author's copy of the film no longer existed : what we see today is a semblance of a forever lost picture, composed of accidentally surviving fragments. Yuri Saprykin
1942-1997
A self-taught Odessa citizen, who cleaned his pockets on the beach as a child, turned out to be almost the only unconditionally original pop star in the Union. Valery Obodzinsky consciously focused on the manner of the "Westerners", but in the end he found his own style: it was the most non-Soviet voice, in no way similar to any Western analogue. Copying non-existent samples, in a good way, cost Obodzinsky a career: newspaper feuilletonists rinsed him for cringing, the chairman of the State Television and Radio Broadcasting Company Lapin cut him out of Blue Lights, he was excommunicated from concerts in Moscow for years, and even in the cinema they were allowed to sing exclusively behind the scenes. However, the lack of recordings and broadcasts did not affect his fame in any way: the first disc sold quite a Michael Jackson circulation of 13 million, large metropolitan halls calmly charged his concerts for a month on a daily basis - if the concerts were not canceled by order of the Ministry of Culture. Few people imagined what he looked like (maybe for the better), but everyone knew the voice, and this voice revealed other dimensions that were not familiar to Soviet culture - in any of its versions. Obodzinsky's vocals are like a person whispering something tempting into the ear of a slow dance partner and at the same time falling into an abyss; it is omniscience and forgiveness, multiplied by a clear confidence in the inevitability of a tragic outcome; happen and, in principle, apparently never happened at all. This is especially audible in his later works - at least listen to “White Wings”, Yevgeny Martynov’s mannered tango, sung by Obodzinsky not only on his last breath, but almost on the verge of cardiac arrest. In the mid-80s, he, forgotten by everyone, will end up in the watchman's closet at the tie factory alone with a glass and sit there until an old admirer accidentally discovers him, brings him to his senses and brings him to the stage of the Rossiya hall, where he will have time to sing for the last time - already after the disappearance of his native country, so rich in talents and so unkind to them. Yuri Saprykin
"Oriental Song"
film by Valentin Selivanov
In the mid-1970s, for reasons known only to the USSR Goskino, several films about children in space appeared on the screens at once: according to unconfirmed reports, they were even filmed in the same scenery and with the same silver suits. For all the similarity, it was the "Great Space Journey" that turned out to be the most naive, fragile and precious among these teenage intergalactic raids. What is the reason for this? Or the music of Alexei Rybnikov, played since then until he was blue in the face, but still has not lost some kind of April freshness. Either a touching retrofuturistic entourage - the heroes walk around the orbital station in high silver boots, control it with the help of, naturally, a car steering wheel, repair the on-board computer with a screwdriver and now and then talk in the language of crazy robots: “Alpha Dog! Limbo 240 degrees! Sector 30!” Or flashbacks to Soviet childhood - a radio in the kitchen, go-kart racing, walking barefoot on the grass in the rain; suddenly become for them (as well as for us) an unattainable past. Is it the sweet whisper with which Mila Berlinskaya, the future famous pianist, pronounces the phrase “Do you believe me or not?”. But most likely - a completely Pelevin story, in which space flight turns out to be just a simulation, an experiment, a grandiose high-tech initiation rite, the only visible meaning of which is that children can survive the horror of death, cosmic longing and galactic proportions of disappointment when the finale turns out to be that they did not leave the Earth anywhere. Before the final credits, pilot-cosmonaut Leonov appears on the screen against the background of an unfinished picture - and says that, they say, there will be space travel in your lifetime; At the same time, the picture shows - one more detail in the spirit of Pelevin - the docking of the Soyuz and Apollo, which in reality will happen only a year after filming. Yuri Saprykin
12928
A triangular package of milk, a hunchbacked Zaporozhets, a Zil refrigerator, a can of condensed milk, triple cologne and a school uniform with white aprons - many of us have known all this since childhood. And how will the person who saw them for the first time react to these things. Designer Umberto Giraudo is a lecturer at the British Higher School of Design. I propose to look at Soviet artifacts through the eyes of a native of Italy.
1. Avoska
“One of the best examples in the field of Soviet design. If you care about the problems of ecology and pollution, excessive consumption - know that this bag became a viable solution to a number of problems many years ago. The shopping bag seems to me to be part of a reasonable system, a kind of systematic design in which products are bought exactly in the quantity in which they are needed, and not “in reserve”. They are not packed several times, and the bag can be used repeatedly and constantly carried with you - the bag is compact and does not take up space. I am sure that modern designers should pay the closest attention to this subject.”
2. Tear-off calendar
“Such calendars were popular in Western countries as well. Moreover, they are still relevant today. Despite the fact that a lot of paper is spent on them, these calendars seem cute to me, as they provide the opportunity, by tearing off the sheets, to physically feel the passage of time.
3. Kettle
“The kettle is like a kettle, nothing special. My grandmother had a similar one.
4. Coffee
"Lovely packaging. Simple, economical to produce, only two colors, and still looks very modern. I would love to buy coffee in such a package - it looks much more authentic than all this plastic garbage that coffee is packaged in today.
“The guy on the label looks pretty scary! Jokes aside, I find the contrast between the carefully crafted graphic design of the label and the shape of the container to be amusing. From the neck and cap, you can understand that such bottles could be used not only for toilet water, but for anything. Storage of household chemicals or cheap alcohol, for example. The bottle is very practical. On the other hand, it is unclear why, in the absence of a competitive market, one should invest in specific and aggressive packaging layouts. Unfortunately, many of today's "young entrepreneurs" also do not understand the value of design in commerce and invest in the wrong things to invest in."
6. Condensed milk
“A real Russian masterpiece. I know that so many people love this product, also because it can be boiled right in the jar.”
7. Condoms
“Honestly, I'm surprised. I was sure that children in Soviet Russia appeared from cabbage! So was there sex in the USSR or not? It looks like it was after all... As for the packaging of the condom, I can say that it is very functional. At the same time, it is not “emotional” at all, but I don’t think that in certain circumstances someone paid attention to it. I like".
8. Toy
“As a child, I had a similar toy, I don’t see almost any difference. Unless the contrast of the American Mickey Mouse and the inscription in Cyrillic is interesting - it's nice.
9. Faceted glass
“Simple and elegant, an ordinary glass that symbolizes stability. I hope they don't fill it to the brim with vodka."
10. Triangular milk carton
“Recently I saw a ceramic remake of the first tetra-pack packaging. I know that this is a canonical package, a symbol of the era - and I am glad that today designers are playing with this symbol.”
11. School uniform
“Quite elegant and perfectly reflects the formal hierarchical status. I also wore a uniform when I went to school. However, I cannot help but note that today such a uniform would look rather on waitresses or students, but not on students at school.
12. TV
“Such a TV could well have been in the living room of my grandparents. I remember when I first saw the glass for enlarging the image on the screen, I was very surprised.
13. "Zaporozhets"
“A real masterpiece of Soviet design – despite the fact that it was based on the design of FIAT. The Zaporozhets has unique features, such as a grille on the hood, which gives the car a certain aggressiveness. I have never seen "Zaporozhets" in my life, but I have heard many stories about these machines. In particular, about how they were repaired and decorated.
14. Refrigerator
“Amazing design and I absolutely don’t understand why Russians are buying Chinese refrigerators and rebranding them instead of breathing new life into old forms.”