Legendary bard subject of biopic
The legendary singer, actor and bard of the late Soviet era, Vladimir Vysotsky, has been eerily resurrected in a new film written by his son Nikita and directed by Pyotr Buslov (most recently of the criminal thrillers Bummer and Bummer 2).
The movie, Vysotsky. Thank You for Being Alive (Высоцкий. Спасибо, что живой) chronicles a period in Vysotsky’s life, in the summer of 1979, about a year before he died, when he traveled to Uzbekistan on an “unofficial” and therefore illegal tour and had a near-death experience due to an overdose on morphine.
Despite unprecedented publicity, Afisha magazine called the film “stranger than strange,” with a touch of the “demonic.” This may be evoked by the actor playing Vysotsky, who looks exactly like the real bard, thanks to special effects. Vysotsky is even listed in the credits.
Channel One, which produced the film (along with Disney Studios), has stoked intrigue about the film by keeping the name of the actor wearing the layers of makeup secret, though some reports have said it is Sergei Bezrukov, who also plays the role of Vysotsky’s friend Yura, sans the heavy makeup.
While the film is clearly deeply personal for many of its creators, first and foremost for Nikita Vysotsky, critics on openspace.ru said viewers may experience discomfort when they see Vysotsky raised from the dead “not unlike when the Banionis character in Solaris repeatedly meets (his wife) Natalia Bondarchuk.”
The film’s website is at:
visotsky-film.ru
Cash-strapped prize rights wrong
In December, Alexander Chudakov won the Russian Booker of the Decade for his novel, A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps (Ложится мгла на старые ступени...). The novel was short-listed for the 2001 Russian Booker Prize but did not win. Chudakov died in 2003 and the prize was awarded posthumously (by way of a R600,000 award to Chudakov’s widow, pictured), something only made possible by a recent change in Booker rules.
The Booker of the Decade prize competition was held this year in lieu of the normal annual prize, due to lack of funds for running the normal review procedure. The prize will resume its annual schedule next year under the sponsorship of Russian Telecom Equipment Company.
Chudakov was known around the world as a prolific expert on nineteenth century literature and in particular on Anton Chekhov. A Gloom is Cast Upon the Ancient Steps was his only novel. Set in Stalinist Russia, in a town of political exiles in Northern Kazakhstan, it celebrates the human spirit under difficult circumstances. The book has not been translated into English.
Celluloid non grata
A documentary about Russia’s most famous prisoner, former Yukos oil company chief Mikhail Khodorkovsky, appears to have suffered the same fate as its protagonist: it will not be released. Only in this case, it is a question of theaters, not prison.
Khodorkovsky, a two-hour documentary by German director Cyril Tuschi, was released in November. It begins with Khodorkovsky’s youth in the Komsomol and ends, as expected, with the convicted oligarch in jail, including an interview that the director managed to get when the former oil tycoon appeared in a cage at his second trial in Moscow in 2010. Interviews with various figures in the rise and fall of Yukos are interspersed with animated graphics of Khodorkovsky’s arrest and several other real and imagined episodes.
One week before the film’s release date, the film’s producers said that most Russian theaters had refused to show the movie, despite earlier agreements. The movie did, however, open in one privately-owned theater, Eldar, located far from the center of Moscow.
Tuschi also had problems during the movie’s production. In February 2011, his office in Berlin was burgled and some footage was stolen, though the master was untouched.
The documentary received mostly good reviews outside of Russia, opening in late November in New York, though some critics criticized the director for a lack of objectivity, as there are no officials representing the government’s point of view in the film.
khodorkovsky-movie.com
Country now internet leader
This fall Russia became Europe’s largest internet user, according to comScore, which measures international digital activity. Some 50.8 million people are counted as internet users in Russia, though most don’t spend much time online.
On average, Russians spend 22.4 hours per month online, while the European average is 26.4 hours. What is more, Russia’s population is 142 million, while Germany’s is 82 million, so the density of internet usage is not as high.
Young Russians have turned to the internet for entertainment in increasingly larger numbers as both the quality of television programming and the cost of online access have declined. Some political analysts have speculated that this trend may spur political change, yet polls suggest that few Russians are using the internet to read news, and some named Putin as their favorite blogger (Putin does not blog).
Do you use the internet, and if yes for what purpose?
To find information I need: 27%
To communicate: 18%
To listen to music: 13%
To watch movies: 13%
For entertainment: 13%
To read the news: 11%
I don’t use the internet: 62%
Name three internet bloggers whose opinion on social and political issues you trust?
Dmitry Medvedev: 2%
Vladimir Putin: 2%
Artem Lebedev*: 1%
Don’t know: 95%
{Levada poll from March 2011}
* Russian designer and provocateur, tema.livejournal.com President Putin does not blog, and popular blogger Alexei Navalny registered no votes in this poll.
Alexei Navalny goes global
While most Russians pay little attention to Alexei Navalny, the anti-corruption crusader and blogger, the western media has been treating him as a key opposition figures. Recently, Foreign Policy magazine [bit.ly/tVd2l9] named him as 24th (tied with a former WikiLeaks deputy Daniel Domscheit-Berg and Tunisian blogger Sami Ben Gharbia) in their list of 100 Top Global Thinkers.
Navalny is a lawyer and one of most popular writers on Russia’s LiveJournal blogging platform. He uses his digital soapbox [navalny.livejournal.com] to write biting and sarcastic critiques of corrupt officials and their policies.
...on film
One of the world’s rarest mammals, the snow leopard, was caught on camera for the first time in Russia’s Altai mountains, WWF announced.
Infrared, motion-activated cameras installed by WWF along the Chichacheva Ridge in Russia and Mongolia were used to capture images [bit.ly/sylfYD] of the animal in its natural habitat, without a human presence.
Previously, researchers were limited to monitoring the elusive and rare snow leopards – there are only 100 in Russia – by looking for traces they have left behind, including footprints in the snow, claw marks on trees, and scat. There are only an estimated 10 to 15 animals in this mountain range.
On November 30 in London, Bonhams Russian Art sale in the gallery on New Bond Street sold two long lost masterpieces by Vasily Polenov for the record-breaking prices of £4.07 million (“He That Is Without Sin”) and £2.8 million (“Guilty of Death,” 1906, pictured, left).
America’s 40th president, Ronald Reagan, came to power by defeating an incumbent president from the U.S. State of Georgia. In November, a statue to Reagan was unveiled in the other Georgia – heralded by that state’s virulently anti-Russian leader as a symbol of the differences between the ideologies of Georgia and its northern neighbor.
The statue is in Tbilisi’s Rike Park and the unveiling was attended by three U.S. congressmen: Republican David Dreier; Republican Ed Whitfield and Democrat Donald Payne.
Two days earlier, a statue of Reagan (standing at a podium) was unveiled in Warsaw, Poland, by Lech Walesa.
On November 18, Prime Minister Vladimir Putin skated onto the ice to join the Russian national hockey team in a practice. In the end-of-practice penalty-shot session, the shakily skating premier clumsily dribbled the puck, then, as he approached the goal, the goalie readily spread his legs. Score!
More important than this silly display, a few days priors to the practice Putin “persuaded” Rosneft to underwrite the CSKA hockey squad. Putin said CSKA President Viktor Tikhonov, an International Hall of Famer, had recently asked him to help the club, which was founded and is owned by the Defense Ministry. Despite the club’s dominance of Russian hockey over the past half-century (32 championships in the 46-year history of the Soviet ice hockey league) the Defense Ministry said it can no longer subsidize the team (which costs about $70 million per year).
“We started looking around, brought in our energy firms, agreed with Rosneft that they must, no, may support the ice hockey club,” Putin said. “Otherwise they will not be competitive compared with the NHL and all the leading players will flee. We should be realistic, we cannot close the border and keep people on a leash.”
Rosneft is not alone in sponsoring Russian hockey; Gazprom owns St. Petersburg’s SCA hockey club.
In 2016, Russia will host the World Ice Hockey Championship, with Moscow and St. Petersburg acting as host cities.
Vice Premier Alexander Zhukov, head of the Russian Olympic Committee, said Russia expects to win 25 gold medals in the approaching London Summer Games and place third in the overall medal count. Zhukov said he is most optimistic about Russian gymnastics, boxing, wrestling and weightlifting. In 2008, Russia finished third in the Olympic medal count, gleaning 23 golds, trailing host country China (51) and the US (36).
“In the end, I suffered more than anyone else in this situation, morally, financially, and physically.”
- Andrei Lugovoi, the Russian suspected of murdering former FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko in London, on the decision of Russian investigators to investigate whether Lugovoi is a victim of polonium poisoning himself. (LifeNews.ru)
“In 1988 I sold things in Luzhniki [market]. I exchanged all my earnings into dollars, in order to then buy merchandise abroad and haul it back to Moscow. I sometimes broke the Soviet criminal code over 100 times a day. But I was never caught – I could run fast.”
- Former Evroset owner and currently self-exiled businessman Yevgeny Chichvarkin, on how he made his first dollars. (Vlast magazine)
“We are a nation used to acting on a grand scale – that is in our character, if you will, in our blood. Let’s be blunt: Russian citizens today not only live with their day-to-day problems, they also believe in the historic mission of Russia.”
- President Dmitry Medvedev, on Russia’s historic mission during the party congress that formally nominated Vladimir Putin for the presidency (Agence France Press)
“We are not cattle and we are not slaves. We have a voice/vote and we have the strength to defend it.”
- Alexei Navalny, in his letter from detention on December 10, 2011
“We are not planning a storming of the Kremlin and an ‘orange revolution’ on December 4. When we begin planning, I will let you know. And when I let you know, trust me, it will happen.”
- Alexander Belov, nationalist politician and former head of the banned DPNI. (Lenta.ru)
Stalin’s only daughter was living in Wisconsin under the name Lana Peters when she died of colon cancer last month at the age of 85. But this was only her final identity in a life full of geographical and ideological zigzags – a life overshadowed by the dark and towering figure of her father.
Born Svetlana Stalina, she was most widely known as Svetlana Alliluyeva, the last name she took from her mother, and the name under which she penned her memoirs, Twenty Letters to a Friend, written in the 1960s and offering a rare glimpse inside the Soviet regime during Stalin’s lifetime.
Twenty Letters was published after Alliluyeva fled to the West, via the U.S. embassy in India, where she had traveled with the ashes of Brajesh Singh, an Indian Communist with whom she was in love but not allowed to formally marry. He was the third of her four husbands.
Alliluyeva eventually settled in the U.S., and could have lived out a modestly comfortable life, earning royalties and enjoying her status as the highest profile defector of the Cold War era. Yet she never found comfort, and she returned to the Soviet Union in 1984, denouncing her life in the West, dragging along her daughter, whom she plucked out of boarding school, and who barely spoke Russian.
Perestroika was still over a year away, and it was not clear what sort of life Alliluyeva envisioned for herself in the Soviet Union. Her Soviet son and daughter, whom she left in 1967, reportedly shunned her, so she briefly moved to Tbilisi before asking to return to America, then led a private life marked by additional twists and turns, including reportedly some time in a Swiss monastery. “You can’t regret your fate,” she reportedly once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”
Lana Peters is survived by two daughters, Chrese Evans in the United States, and Ekaterina Zhdanova in Russia. For an excellent obituary, see: nyti.ms/stalinsdaughter
Legendary weightlifter vasily Alexeyev, who trained himself to fame and overcame a crushing illness to set dozens of world records, died of heart problems in November as an overlooked pensioner in a coal town.
Alexeyev was brought up in a small town in Ryazan region and as a young man worked in the timber industry, using a rod from a cargo trolley as his first weightlifting bar. He set his first world record (210 kilos) at 28, and by the time he retired he was in the Guinness Book of World Records for holding the most world records in the super-heavyweight category.
Sports Illustrated called Alexeyev “the world’s strongest man” when he was at the zenith of his career, yet those who knew him always described him as modest and unpretentious, and he was known to be intolerant of doping.
In 1968, doctors pronounced him legally handicapped due to stress on his spinal disks, but he worked his way back into professional sport by inventing weightlifting equipment that allowed him to keep lifting. He retired with 80 unbeaten world records, and trained the Russian weightlifting team for two years in the early 90s, later describing in interviews his frustration over the team’s lack of success in the 2000 Olympics.
Alexeyev’s world record (645 kilos) in the triple event (clean and press, snatch, and clean and jerk) will probably never be beaten, as the event has been discontinued in international weightlifting competitions.
“I treated the weight bar with respect,” he said in one of his last interviews with Sport Express. “I never stepped over it, and God forbid never stepped on it.” Alekseyev was living in the coal-mining town of Shakhty when his heart problems worsened. He was rushed to Germany, but doctors were unsuccessful in their efforts to save him. He was just 69.
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