Being A Fan Of Western Movies In The Soviet Union Wasn’t Easy. Here Are Some Of My Memories From That Time.
Back in the late 1980s, barely anyone in the Soviet Union had a VCR, even in a city like St Petersburg (back then still Leningrad). It wouldn’t be long until that technology would become more widely available, and cinemas would be filled with boobs and bottoms from the United States, France, Italy, South America… even from the mighty Russian Empire itself. But we weren’t quite there yet.
This is where watching “Cobra” or “Caligula” would get you
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During the night, it wasn’t uncommon to see a police car patrolling the streets. Apart from any other types of crime police forces may have been on the lookout for, they would be instructed to peek into people’s windows. The thing they were looking for was blue shimmering light. Yes, the kind of light emanating from your TV set in a dark room. TV stations would cease operation at around midnight, and if somebody’s TV was still working, it could only mean one thing: Some lucky sod had a ‘vidak’ (as we always called VCRs). And while this in itself wasn’t illegal, watching almost anything with breasts and blood in it was. So, the cops reckoned: how likely was it that somebody would decide to watch a documentary on Peter the Great or the October Revolution after all lights had gone out? Whoever had that kind of light in their flat after dark must have been enjoying some forbidden fruit!
Upon spotting said light, the policemen would then enter the building, but instead of knocking on the suspect’s door straight away, they would first pop out the fuses. The intention behind this was to prevent the tape from being ejected from the device. It would get stuck and later serve as evidence in court.
The most ridiculous thing about it was – later on, the law banning violent and pornographic materials was repealed, but the folks who had been sent to prison shortly before that because of it were still ‘sitting’.
It was the best of times… but also very much the worst of times
Of course, I’m very fond of Netflix, and Amazon Video, and Disney Plus, and DVD & Blu-ray. I have a Dolby Digital/DTS surround system, a roll-out screen almost the size of the entire wall and I can also watch movies using my VR gear (feels like you’re in an actual cinema… well, almost).
But the thing is: none of the above pleasures come even close to the borderline orgasmic sensation of holding your first videocassette in your hands. That moment when it’s about to be inserted into the machine, the buzzing, the forbidden (sort of) show about to begin. That very specific mellow plastic smell, frequently mixed with a hint of tobacco if you’ve bought it from an illicit outlet. And the ‘outlets’ were always illicit. There was no other kind, and if there was, they hid them pretty well. The sticker on the cassette would contain typewritten titles, or they would have been simply scribbled by hand. Then the buzzing of the recorder, and holding the remote – in the second half of the eighties, we Soviets weren’t used to remotes, you know? There simply wasn’t anything manufactured in our country that would come with a remote. So, just that remote gave of a vibe of extreme luxury.
When it came to video, I have always been a Pavlov’s dog, just like millions of other boys and girls of my generation. To this day, when I see one of those 180- or 240-minute cassettes, I get teleported into the first half of the 1990s.
We did not have ‘licenced’ videocassettes, as they were called. Or, well, maybe there were some official state-released movies and programmes, but I don’t know of anyone who wanted to have them. There was plenty of that stuff on the telly. We wanted what we were not supposed to have.
If you know anything about the Soviet Union, you are surely aware of the Iron Curtain. Only selected members of the elite were permitted to travel abroad. A few of them were brave enough to return home carrying a certain number of videocassettes in their suitcase. How exactly they decided what films to buy, I have no clue. Maybe they’d ask the sales staff. Naturally, this kind of purchase always involved a certain risk – especially if those purchases somehow involved ‘strawberry’ (i.e. erotic elements) or brutality, as I already said. People were known to be arrested for watching ‘The Godfather’. The authorities didn’t see the arty stuff in that; they only saw the gunshots.
So, if you were afforded the extremely rare opportunity to do some shopping abroad, you would try to bring along some cinematic masterpieces. Those videos, usually in English or sometimes in French, were given to special ‘interpreters’, who would operate in the following manner: play cassette, record their simultaneous translation of the film’s dialogues on tape, then make a copy of the film using another recorder while at the same time feeding their voice recording onto the soundtrack.
This would lead to… well, mixed results. Sometimes, you could hardly hear the translation because the mixing was done so poorly. This is what ruined ‘The Omen’ for me and my family back in the day. Sometimes, the interpreter was clearly not managing and would rather ‘summarise’ what was being said. Occasionally, their voice would suggest a stomach infection or some other malaise – often, their voice would sound like they would much rather go home and stay in bed for the rest of the week. On the other hand, though, one of those guys actually laughed at one of the character’s jokes while translating.
But most of the time, the product was acceptable. It probably wouldn’t have bee acceptable to anyone who grew up enjoying fully dubbed programmes, but to us, the mere fact of watching a topless Sylvester Stallone bazooka-ing Vietcong soldiers or two American cops on a stakeout doing silly American things with other American cops in a setting that couldn’t possibly be more American – that was what actually counted.
In fact, there are still plenty of Russians who actually prefer that kind of translation to full dubbing that uses different voices where you can no longer hear the original track. It was being able to hear English and then a few moments later the translation that made it possible for me to learn to speak some passable English by the time I was in my mid-teens.
Terminator invasion
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If I had to pick one film that defined my childhood, I would without hesitation go for ‘The Terminator’… And ‘Terminator 2’, obviously, and please don’t force me to choose one – that would be like asking me which of my ears I would rather have cut off.
Not that I don’t have a favourite – ‘T2’ was the first one from the franchise that I saw, and there was never the slightest doubt in my heart that it was, very subjectively, superior. Most people will probably say the same. Back in the early 1990s, this particular Arnie vehicle was very much a cinematic orgasm for almost anyone who enjoys this sort of destruction orgy. It’s just that, in the West, the audiences would have already seen something similar, something that would have prepared them for it – be it the first ‘Terminator’, ‘Star Wars’, ‘RoboCop’, ‘Total Recall’, ‘Aliens’, ‘Abyss’, or at least ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘Ghostbusters’… or ‘Dune’… anyone?… No? OK.
I went in entirely unprepared. My dad had a weekend free. We would normally go to the cinema without a specific idea what to see and then decide on the spot. Now, imagine what this must have been like for a 10-year-old kid from the Union. A kid whose only sci-fi experience was a Soviet zero-budget TV mini-series about a girl who travels back to then-present-day Moscow to retrieve some miraculous device stolen by two mildly obnoxious, but never dangerous, middle-aged men.
And then ‘T2’ was unleashed upon us, audiences largely comprised of people with a similar lack of experience when it came to 100-million-dollar blockbusters.
Wwwwwwwooooww!!! That… that… that was… like… No, but seriously… WOW!!! How did they… how did they do that thing???… That thing with… with the liquid metal?? And… and… the nuclear explosion?? They didn’t really have any nuclear explosions on set, did they?? And… and the skulls!! Where did they find so many skulls??…
Hasta la vista, baby!
Yes, hahahahah!!! ‘Hasta la vista!’ (Those were both my first Spanish words and the time I learned the word ‘baby’.)
And Arnie learning to give the high-five, that was the most hilarious thing! And Robert Patrick walking right through bars, being made of liquid metal and all that, but his gun gets stuck. Everyone laughed.
Ever since that night, the thing that I would long for most was to see it again. Cinema had been pricey, so there was no way I would be taken to see it twice, so I had to wait for it to be shown on TV. And they did show it about three years later. And every week during those three years, I would longingly scan the TV guide, hoping to see the word and the number I was so madly in love with: ‘Терминатор 2’.
That is not to say that I, in any way, disliked the first instalment. The only thing wrong with it was that it wasn’t ‘T2’. And while the latter was only shown in selected cinemas and that pretty sporadically, T1 was actually given an official release and, for quite a long time, was everywhere. I still hear the voice from the TV spot: For the first time on our screens… THE TERMINATOR! The last image in the spot, when the letters appeared on the TV screen, was that of Arnie leaving the gun shop and looking around. It’s that image that I’ve always associated with the radical change in the cinematic landscape that our country had recently begun to experience.
My mum took me to see it. One of the few perfect days in my entire life. Smashing. Absolutely brilliant. Except for one thing. Linda and Michael making love. In front of everyone. In front of Mum and me. Boobs. Kissing. Doing… stuff. Of course, I had no real notion of the mechanics. I was vaguely familiar with the notion that adults would do things like that when they liked each other. But that was it. Nowhere was I ever able to find any specifics, not even in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia (and I did try, believe you me).
So, I was sitting there at the cinema, next to Mum, and wasn’t really sure how to behave. What was I supposed to do with my gaze? Was I expected to look away? I guess I was… because otherwise, she would have told me to do it, and that would have been even more embarrassing… Nah, she probably wouldn’t have. But what if she had? But then, if I did look away, it would appear like I’m being needlessly obedient and also not watching the film that my mum had paid for… so…
In the end, I must have found some middle ground, sort of looking away and maybe turning my head around a little. I don’t know exactly. But luckily, that scene wasn’t too lengthy.
I had the novelisations, as well, and would re-read them regularly – in fact, I would devour them again and again and again, until I knew with relative certainty what would come in each following paragraph. It was Dad who bought me the T2 one, as we were casually scanning bookstalls outside our underground station. The first novelisation I ever had. Until then, I didn’t even realise it was a thing. I had no idea that something like that actually existed.
Until today, these two books by Randall Frakes are among my most prized possessions, and if I had to get rid of all the books in my library and was only allowed to keep two, I wouldn’t need a moment of time to think about which ones I would save.
Many years later, Mum got me a limited steelbook DVD edition of T2 for my birthday. This is probably the only item in my film collection I’ll never lend to anyone, especially considering how ‘good’ people are at returning the films they borrow.
A New Hope
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By late 1992, I still hadn’t seen any of the ‘Star Wars’ films. Dad would keep promising to take me, but on those rare occasions when he and I would go around town looking for a cinema or a videosaloon, there was never one in the vicinity showing it. There was almost invariably a place showing ‘The Godfather’ though, which wasn’t of much interest to me at that point.
By that time, most Russian movie buffs had already seen at least one of the episodes. Like almost all US blockbusters, this one didn’t just come to our country and become an instant success. We may have got to watch it sooner, had most Russian officials not found it to be a phantasmagorical and mentally deranged allegory on the fight of the two superpowers. CIA vs. KGB, really. Naturally, Lucas’ primary goal must have been to damage the USSR’s reputation in the eyes of the world even further – which, however you look at it, couldn’t have been an easy task, considering how great a job we did ourselves in that respect.
So, just like most other Hollywood productions, the only way of seeing this one on the territory of the evil empire was via video piracy. Though, let’s not call it piracy… I mean, sure, piracy it was, but as I already said in the beginning, there was nothing else. No alternatives.
The first ‘alternative’ was offered by a kid’s show called Zebra, which ran on one of Leningrad’s regional TV channels. It ran from 1989 to 1991, and for two years, they would show three minutes of ‘The Empire Strikes Back’ – with Lucas’ permission, one needs to add. They actually wanted to show ten at a time, but that was too much for the copyright owners.
Finally, it was announced that Ostankino, the 1st state channel, was to show ‘A New Hope’ on 4 October 1992. My mum was the first to see it in the TV guide in a newspaper. ‘No, you’re messing with me!!!’ I shouted and tore out the paper from her hands.
It was true. It actually said it there. Black on yellowy white. ‘Zvezdniye Voyny’.
I was looking forward to that day as I’d hardly looked forward to anything in my life, as pathetic as this may sound. Star bloody Wars was coming!!! To our living room! For free!! It was almost too much to handle. If you’ve ever been a kid, you must remember how the time slows down when you’re waiting for something. In my case, it crept like a turtle who had lost all its legs in a speedboat accident.
Time. The worst but sometimes also sweetest kind of torture.
At last, Sunday came.
‘Star Wars’ didn’t.
Ostankino had failed to secure the rights. The film was cancelled three hours before it was scheduled to air.
Just think of it as a huge chunk of morphine a patient had been looking forward to after a day of arduous physiotherapy, just to return to his ward and find a piece of unwashed cabbage on his pillow instead.
Ostankino did try to compensate movie fans for their pain. ‘A New Hope’ was off the air, but ‘Supergirl’ took its place. Everyone was hungry, so they took the bloody cabbage because what else was there to be had?
Bestsellery Gollywooda
‘RoboCop 3’. Not the film though. The book. Don’t laugh. The novel offered numerous facets and background details, giving the reader deeper insights into the characters’ actions and motivations that you simply couldn’t have in a film.
Alright, that is obviously not true. But we did have them, those novelisations. In fact, we had more of them than you guys did, wherever you are in the civilised world. We didn’t only have the official ones (and of the ‘Robocop’ series, only the first two films were officially novelised), but many ‘kinoromany’ (‘movie novels’) were written by people living in the former Soviet Union. The most productive one was, without any doubt, a guy called Ivan Serbin, a writer from Moscow who didn’t begin to publish his own stories under his own name until 1996.
During six years prior to that, he penned an astonishing amount of novelisations under such pseudonyms as Arthur Quarry, Edgar Francis, or Arch Stranton. Hardly anything is known about him, and he doesn’t even have a website or a Facebook account.
One day, as Mum and I were passing some bookstalls, she asked if I perhaps fancied one. A long time ago, I had laid my eyes on books from the ‘Hollywood Bestsellers’ series but was too shy to say I wanted some of those (better still, all of them). I was sure we were too short of money to afford any of them. Turned out, we really were short of money, but books were books, and if anything was respected in my family, it was them. Even those that were evidently rubbish, I guess.
We approached one of the stalls, and I picked the volume containing ‘RoboCop 3’ and ‘Bullitt’. I had never heard of the latter, or even Steve McQueen, and I still haven’t read it and don’t actually think I ever will, to be honest… Oh, but reading all about Robo flying with that wondrous jetpack on his shoulders and fighting the cyborg ninja… I wanted that! Now, I do know no one actually likes the third instalment. But look, I was in my very early teens. I was hungry for anything that was Western and sci-fi and had ninjas in it, especially if those ninjas were of robotic descent. So, give me a break.
‘Is there any other movie novel you’d like to have?’ Mum asked me after the vendor had handed us the book. She was feeling generous. She did have those moments.
‘Yeah, ‘Universal Soldier’!’ I said. I knew for a fact it existed, having seen it before. Never held it in my hands but quickly saw it from afar.
Mum asked the vendor whether they had it, but they did not.
‘We do get some copies every now and again, though,’ he added. ‘Do come back again. We may have it again soon.’
From that day on, whenever we were in the neighbourhood, we would visit the station and scan all the bookstalls opposite the entrance. Occasionally, Mum would buy me more books from the same series, but ‘Universal Soldier’, the third book released in the Hollywood Bestsellers series, was curiously elusive, and I was beginning to fear it was out of print.
It took us almost two more years to get our hands on a copy. It shared the volume with ‘Alien 3’, both by the same author – Arch Stranton. Strangely enough, although there was an official novelisation by Robert Tine, Mr Stranton aka Mr Ivan Serbin penned his own version of it. I guess they just weren’t able to get hold of the original.
Super Action!
In 1995, we finally got ourselves a VCR. A phrase tantamount to: ‘We got ourselves a small villa in Brighton’ by today’s standards. The comparison sounds far-fetched, I know. Sure, you’d think it’s far-fetched. But do remember how that friend of my dad’s declined swapping his VCR for a yacht.
Shivaki. It was relatively affordable. Mum called a few shops to ask whether they had it. Sounds Japanese, right? Well, google it, and you’ll get plenty of matches in Russian. Apparently, it’s manufactured especially for the Russian and Indian markets. And yet, whatever big-brand device I happened to purchase in the years after that, our beloved Shivaki outlived them all. And it’s been used way more than any of them. It’s been in retirement for many years now, so who knows what it would behave like now, but the last time I turned it on, it was working splendidly.
‘Do you want to go rent something?’ Mum asked.
I wanted the ‘Terminator’, though. Not to rent, but my own copy. Both of them, naturally. Wanted them badly. To own. To re-watch every week. Even now that I’m writing these lines, I feel like I want to put in that tape right now and watch it again.
The first place to try was the kiosk at our underground station. My luck seemed to have turned, and they did have a copy. A 240-minute SKC cassette with both films. I’ve got it right here, standing in a cabinet barely one meter away from me, here in London. Alas, it no longer has the smell that it did 23 years ago and for a long time after that, and the ink on the label is showing signs of age. But no matter. I’ll cherish it more than any disc that I’ll ever buy or have bought.
‘Arnold Schwarzenegger in the Sci-Fi Super Action Film TERMINATOR /1 and 2/’, it says on it. ‘super action film’ was a term used in those times meaning not so much the quality of the film but rather the copious amount of action sequences. Any action film with more than 10 shots or two explosions was labelled ‘super action’. If a film was simply marketed as ‘action’, it probably had no action at all but was rather a drama or an adventure film where one of the characters had to use a gun on one occasion or was involved in a car crash.
The only thing I found slightly confusing and a tiny bit annoying was T2’s widescreen presentation. Nobody had ever explained to me what those black bars in the upper and lower parts of the screen were. Normally, films would take up all of your 4:3 screen. No-one had ever explained to me the difference between the full screen and the widescreen formats, and I genuinely believed that somebody had just gone and covered half of the image for no apparent reason.
One day, Mum and I were queueing at a kiosk where I had spotted a cassette with a Dolph Lundgren double feature – ‘The Punisher’ and ‘Masters of the Universe’. When Mum went over to some other kiosk for a moment and left me alone in the queue, a guy approached me.
‘Hey, you need some porn?’ he asked, trying not to talk too loudly but not really trying too hard.
‘What?’
‘You know, porn. Sex.’
I was 14, and I was aware of porn, but although I had already begun to appreciate tasteful erotica (or, in fact, any kind of erotica, or even the slightest hint of it), I didn’t know exactly what the difference between those two terms was. Someone said that erotica is when you don’t have enough energy left for pornography. But I could honestly say that porn, as a separate genre, was something I had never given any thought to.
‘Er, no, thanks…’ I muttered, and the bloke left me alone without saying another word.
What if, one day, a parent heard the offers he was making? It was bound to happen sooner or later. I suppose the worst that could happen to him was an attempted beating by some enraged father, though even that was unlikely. Most guys my age were out without any parental guardians. It was only anxious Jewish boys who still hadn’t begun to experience the puberty-related voice change and whose mums insisted on accompanying them. Not that I’d never left the house without Mum… It’s just that she would always frown at this perspective and would end up accompanying me in the majority of cases.
Would anyone try to call the police on that bloke? Not bloody likely. Especially not in the time when hardly anyone had a mobile phone and in a country where hardly anyone gave a rat’s ass about law or order.
From the big to the small screen… in a manner of speaking
‘Broken Arrow’ was the first ‘screen copy’ I ever got to see or, as they were called in the People’s Republic of VHS, ‘ekranka’.
What is a screen copy? If you’re a ‘Seinfeld’ buff, you may remember the episode where Jerry is forced to tape a film off the screen by a boorish video pirate? Well, this is what we used to call those. Screen copies.
Well, now that I think about it, it was the second one I saw – I had watched ‘Batman Forever’ quite a few times and never realised why the colours, the contrast, and the sound seemed a little off. But while the quality of the former was still very much acceptable, the copy of John Woo’s second US production after ‘Hard Target’ that we got to ‘enjoy’ was pretty abysmal.
I didn’t immediately figure out that there was something wrong with it. I only became aware of the illicitness of the recording when I first heard the audience’s laughter at something John Travolta must have said (could have been Christian Slater, too, but I can’t remember Christian ever saying anything funny – in any film – to save my life. Maybe he got depressed when making ‘The Name of the Rose’ and stayed that way for good). At some point, I saw silhouettes of people in the audience getting up and leaving to go to the bathroom or maybe just leaving (I guess those were not the ones that were laughing).
I guess, no matter what country you’re based in, you’ll always have ways of getting hold of pirated copies a day or two after the movie’s release. The difference between Russia and more law-abiding countries was this, though, we didn’t need to ‘get hold’ of them. There was no searching involved whatsoever. They were readily available. Anywhere and everywhere, wherever videos were being sold. Nobody would even dream of trying to hide them. Nobody gave a hoot.
Oh, sure, there must have been some copyright laws, in theory, with the state raising its index finger to threaten some hypothetical wrongdoer. The thing was, though, while in this menacing stance, the state wasn’t looking at anyone in particular. The state had polio and was hungry. The state had bigger problems. Virtually all of its problems were bigger, in fact. Not a soul in those years would imagine they could get busted for copyright violation. Copies were made of copies made of other copies, and there was not a bloody thing anyone could do or wanted to do.
In the year or two that we still had in Russia, Mum, Grandma, and I would see quite a few of those. I don’t think there was a single moment when any of us actively became aware that we were breaking the law. The whole country was breaking the law. By that time, the law had not only been broken, but crumbled, crushed into powder, and scattered across the remains of the Soviet Empire.
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