Russia Off the Record

Being momentarily in a career lull, I find myself stuck in the house a lot of the time. The weekends do not provide as much opportunity to get out as I would like, but I tend to feel better about taking the car and getting out of the house on Sundays, when nothing in particular urgently needs to be done and my father is usually parked in front of the living room TV set, watching some sporting event or other.

Today, I decided to get out of the house by visiting the local library. This was not strictly necessary; I had been earlier in the week. But I decided to go anyway, in pursuit of a Philippa Gregory novel I was keen to read.

While I was there, I also took the opportunity to look for Russian-themed videos. I was not expecting to find Solaris or Ivan the Terrible, just some sort of travelogue I could watch in order to look at pretty sites around Russia. I ended up picking up two videos, neither a travelogue. The first was a mediocre CNN production about the abortive 1991 putsch that ultimately brought Boris Yeltsin into power. But the other was a much more interesting production from the mid-1980s, called Russia Off the Record.

The stated aim of Russia Off the Record's producers was to dismantle American stereotypes of Russia (then the Soviet Union) and its citizens. For the most part, it did a pretty good job of it, showing that Russians do not lead a joyless existence under an ever-watchful KGB. But I felt as though its treatment of a lot of issues of Russian life were superficial at best.

For instance, the film treated the wastefulness of the command economy in only a cursory way. A few Russians were interviewed who said, essentially, that in earlier years, the priority of the state had been just to produce enough for everyone to have shoes, that issues of quality could not be addressed then but were starting to be now. A Russian journalist who had worked in the United States noted that, at the time, 20 percent of Russian families were still forced to share apartments with other families. But no real analysis was done of why this was so. I suspect the crew had its reasons for avoiding any clear discussion of how communism had utterly failed to produce enough shoes or apartments to meet Russia's needs.

The program also paraded a seemingly endless number of Russians before the camera to express their best wishes for the American people and for President Reagan, and their hopes for peace and friendship between the United States and the Soviet Union. Now, of course, this seems intensely dated. But again, I felt analysis was lacking. Were these really the sentiments of the people who expressed them, or were these people merely saying what they thought Soviet officialdom would want American viewers to see and hear?