Letter to Brezhnev: do we know anything?
To mark the fall of the Berlin Wall EU culture institutes in Kyiv, including the British Council, organise a "Good-Bye USSR!" film festival. The UK contribution is 1985's charming Letter to Brezhnev. Seen in a cool student kino in Kyiv, the film's a reminder of the almost hermetic isolation of the Soviet Union before 1989. It's not just the film's Liverpudlian characters who are equipped only with the crudest stereotypes about goings-on behind the iron curtain. The film-makers themselves had no idea either: the one scene set in Moscow, preceded by a vaguely Russian skyline, could itself be stock footage from a 1960s James Bond movie.
Not that any of us should be too sure we know anything. Throughout the 1950s and '60s, and in some cases even longer, people in the West were concerned that the Soviet Union was busy overtaking the rest of the world in key economic indicators. That's not altogether surprising - who can forget the "Sputnik crisis" of 1957, when the Soviet Union put the first satellite into orbit, or the first flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961? But when it came to the efficiency of the economy, fears of being overtaken were somewhat exaggerated. We didn't know, at the risk of paraphrasing a well-know US politician, how little we knew.
Talking of stereotypes, I liked Nigel Sheinwald's blog on the, er, stranglehold of British actors on villain and vampire roles in Hollywood. Letter to Brezhnev features another classic: the smooth, two-faced Foreign Office type, salving his conscience from a crystal decanter on his splendid desk as he tries to deter the heroine from her lovelorn mission to Moscow. I've never seen a crystal decanter on a desk in the Foreign Office. But I did once work in a fine FCO directorate with some prickly-pear cactus spirit in a filing cabinet.
Posted at 10:58 19 November 2009 by Leigh Turner | Comments[0]
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