Leto

2 comments on Hacker News

1. PositivestrlenDec 25, 2021

   Thank you for the revised link! Good that you mention Leto (which was a beautiful movie, despite many historical inaccuracies): Leto is set in the early, pre-perestroika 80s. The first link I posted - Elektrichka - is also from that era: it is about a man who on an electric commuter train (think Caltrain, but electrified: People’s Democratic Republic of California is behind USSR in that respected) that is taking him to a wrong destination. It is a metaphor for the state: as a result, the song was banned.

   Contrast the song with Перемен (Changes): the unofficial anthem of my birth country‘s democracy movement. While the song is explicitly non-political (it is about making internal changes), it is able to convey the sentiment in USSR in the late 80s and early 90s (the song was written in 1985. prior to Perestroika.) To put another way, a song about the “gentle Nietzschean”/Schopenhauerian thesis of artists changing the world through their work, highlights the elective affinities between the agents of cultural change and the agents of political change.

   An important thing to note: Kino’s front man, Victor Tsoi is of Korean descent. h Soviet Koreans, aka Koryo-Saram (there is roughly 1mm of them today in former USSR) came to Russian Empire during the Koryo dynasty (mostly from mid 19th to early 20th century.) They played an important role in the early days of USSR, but we’re deported to Central Asia as Stalin as he suspected them of harboring pro-Japanese sympathies (this would be equivalent to suspecting Jews of harboring pro-Nazi sympathies, which he also did in the case of my paternal grandfather the minister of transportation for Soviet Belarus.) Over 10% of their population died during the deportation.

   Their plight was largely unknown until glasnost. The Kazakh film maker Rashid Nugmanov of Игла (Needle) fame - movie about drug addiction, a topic rarely discussed for most of USSR’s existence - which starred Tsoi and featured his music - portrayed their story in his critically acclaimed historical fiction film Месть (Revenge.)

   In a tangential note relevant to HN’s usually discussed topics, Russia’s richest woman - she created e-commerce site wildberries while on maternity leave - is also of Korean descent: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatyana_Bakalchuk

2. PositivepaganelMay 8, 2019

   It's true that no Western "sovietologist" had predicted the sudden fall of the Eastern Block, but that doesn't mean that the West and the countries that were under Soviet influence weren't enemies. Source: me, a guy that grew up in an Eastern European country and who was imbued with my country's propaganda during my childhood.

   And to make it even more OT: the "war" between West and East was won by the West the moment when people in the East started almost revering physical objects coming from the West, such as blue jeans. I remember that growing up in the '80s my mother's only jeans dress had an almost mythical status, it was THE one piece of clothing from our family's wardrobe that had that extra thing. I remembered of that feeling this past weekend while watching a Russian movie describing the '80s as lived on the Eastern side of the Wall (the movie is called "Leto" [1], I highly recommend it), during which movie one of the female characters highly wishes to purchase a pair of jeans for herself, if only she would have had the money.

   It is my intuition that the Western sovietologists from back in the day didn't have access to this type of information on the real feelings of the people living in Eastern Europe and in the former USSR, they were looking mostly at translated articles from Pravda and at satellite photos of rocket-launch sites in order to predict the health of the system. Turns out they were looking at the wrong stuff.

   [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7342838/