Soviet Baby Boomers – Soviet Patriotism and Anti-Americanism

One important topic of Raleigh’s book is Soviet patriotism and anti-Americanism of the Soviet baby boomers. This topic with an emphasis on Soviet patriotism and rejection of negative aspects of capitalism prevailed in all student diaries from the early stage of the Soviet middle school (5-7 grades) through the years in the high school (8-10 grades) and the first college years through the 1960s and the 1980s. For the authors of those diaries a Soviet child was a patriot of his socialist “motherland.” Despite the fact of the growing influence of western cultural products, which became available during the détente in the 1970s, and beginning of cultural fixation over such products like movies, popular music and fashion in the last years in high school and the first years in college, the mental construction of the young man in the diaries is still based on the dichotomy of “Soviet patriot vs. western capitalism.”[1]

The most popular Soviet movie for children during the late 1960s and early 1970s was Yevgenii Sherstobitov’s film Aqualangi na dne, which was released in 1965. The story of a brave Soviet boy, who tried to help the Soviet border guards to catch a foreign spy in a small Soviet resort town on the Black Sea coast, inspired millions of the Soviet children. As one of them noted in his diary after watching this film the second time, in July of 1971, “I want to be like Sashka Kharitonov to help to arrest a spy who was an enemy of my country.”[2] Many years after the author of that diary still recalled how influential these patriotic Soviet images were for a mental construction of his own self. At the same time the images of the films from the “capitalist West” (which were made mostly by the leftist, anti-capitalist inclined, film directors like Stanley Kramer or Sydney Pollack) helped the authors of “summer diaries” to justify their construction of the Soviet self.

The first the most popular American comedy film that opened the Brezhnev era in Soviet Ukraine and became the new movie sensation was a Stanley Kramer’s film of 1963, It’s Mad, Mad, Mad World. It was released in the Soviet Union in late 1965, and was shown in eastern Ukraine for the first time in full theaters with all tickets sold out during January-February of 1966.[3] According to the Soviet film magazine statistics, this film became one of the most popular foreign films that were shown in the Soviet Union in 1966.[4]

Stanley Kramer’s hilarious comedy tells the story of a search for buried treasure by at least a dozen people, all played by well-known entertainers of their day. After a car accident, a group of complete strangers (including Milton Berle, Jonathan Winters, Sid Caesar, Phil Silvers, and others) witness how a dying driver (Jimmy Durante) identified the location of hidden money. This story of buried treasure triggered a conflict-ridden hunt, watched over carefully by a suspicious cop (Spencer Tracy). This treasure hunt involves more and more people and creates various humorous situations. As an eleven-year-old Aleksandr Gusar summarized in his summer diary on May 31, 1970, “my Mom and I watched a very funny, two-parts (dvukh-seriinyi) American film in color about a search for money which was buried under the trees, a combination of which looked like the English letter ‘W.’ The main characters were chasing each other for more than two hours; then they found money and lost everything at the end.”[5]

Another young moviegoer, fourteen-year-old Vladimir Solodovnik, during the first show of the American comedy in March of 1966 also noted that this film was funny and dynamic. However, at the same time he felt very uncomfortable about the main story of the film, a search for money. “It looks like everybody (in the film) was driven crazy by this search,” Solodovnik wrote, “the capitalist West is mad about money.” He concluded this entry with a remarkable phrase: “So our propaganda was correct, in America a human greed and lust for money is the most important driving force. Even the American film makers such as Stanley Kramer demonstrated this in their movies.”[6] Such ambiguous feelings about themes in Kramer’s film were present in another twelve-year-old boy’s writing. Andrei Vadimov noted, “It is funny to watch this hunt for money, but it’s good to know that we live in the normal country, safe and comfortable, without this American madness about money.”[7] Many Soviet filmgoers were shocked by realistic portrayal of human greed in a Kramer’s film. In Kramer’s comedy America looked “like an abnormal dysfunctional country” comparing to the normality and stability of the Soviet Union.[8] The American comedy about “a mad hunt for money” played the role of the “negative other” from the West in the imagining of “normal” Soviet identity by young filmgoers during the beginning of the Brezhnev era.

During the late 1970s and early 1980s Soviet college student watched the new American films like The Sandpit Generals, They Shoot Horses Don’t They, The New Centurions, Bless the Beasts and Children, The Domino Principle, Oklahoma Crude, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and 3 Days of Condor which presented mainly the leftist criticism of the American realities, contributing to the mental construction of positive identity of Soviet self. One college student, who loved American rock and roll and western movies, noted after watching in one week of August of 1982 such different American movies as The Domino Principle, Oklahoma Crude, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and 3 Days of Condor, “we perhaps have not enough products in our food stores and fewer cars on our roads, but our youth has much brighter future than those Americans.”[9] As Aleksandr Gusar commented in his diary after watching the American film, a police drama New Centurions, “it is good to live in the West when you have money and power, but it is very dangerous to live there if you are just an ordinary poor man. I would rather stay in my own country.”[10] Two anti-CIA thrillers – 3 Days of Condor by Sydney Pollack (1975) and The Domino Principle by Stanley Kramer (1977) – especially influenced the negative perception of America and of “Western imperialism” among Soviet college students. As some college students from eastern Ukraine explained in their writing, “The military industrial complex and the intelligence agencies rule the West. After watching Pollack’s and Kramer’s films, we understand that the capitalist West has no future.”[11] And another young author who watched these two American films after an Anderson’s O Lucky Man! movie in 1979, and who was the most enthusiastic rock music fan, noted “the capitalist society has some potential for modern development, but it suppressed by CIA and the military machine. That is why rock music was born to challenge and criticize the politics of the West!!! And all these films, like rock music, criticize the politics of the capitalists.”[12] As some of these authors later acknowledged, during the détente “Westernization” of the imagination for young Soviet consumers had certain ideological limits, and overall, it had an obvious very strong anti-capitalist bias.[13]