"Soft drinks commercials" and "gentle" Russification: How the USSR was creating an alternative reality

Compared to this “perfect” landscape, the Western world seemed unstable, unjust, and dangerous: Western filmmakers were not afraid to talk about poverty, organized crime, drug addiction, corrupt and/or inefficient police, intrigues in the secret services and among political leaders, etc.

Soviet films were somewhat similar to commercials where everyone was happy. In addition to Soviet ideology, they promoted everything Russian, often at the expense of other peoples, languages, and cultures of the Soviet empire.

A soft drink commercial

The most important mission of most Soviet films was to promote the Soviet regime both within the empire itself and abroad. Just as a commercial "promotes" a certain brand of car or a soft drink — even when this "message" is somewhere in the background — officially approved Soviet art almost always promoted ideological messages.

In the commercials, the viewer is transported to some kind of alternative world where everything is perfect—or almost perfect. People are beautiful and happy, everyone is smiling, everything is comfortable, and life is beautiful. Problems, if there are any, are always easily solved. To become part of this perfect world, one only needs to drink a particular soft drink, or mortgage a house with a particular company, or buy a specific new car, or try a certain brand of chocolate—depending on which product is advertised.

Soviet culture did the same. Even in a detective movie or in a romantic comedy, the "background" deliberately represented some fictional ideal society that was very far from real life in the USSR.

Here is what this society looked like:

1) Perfect government

The Soviet authorities in Soviet movies were impeccably honest. Well, some lowranking local officials could occasionally happen to be "bureaucrats", "autocrats", formalists and even (!) petty schemers. In the movies, they were mostly displayed as comic and weak, and their ability to do dirty tricks was limited. Comrade Saakhov, the amiable and cunning local official from "Kidnapping, Caucasian Style", plots to kidnap a girl he loves to convince her to marry him. He bribes her uncle, hires three petty crooks, and successfully misleads almost everyone else. Despite being the most influent man in town, he is terrified that the police or the prosecutor might find out about his machinations. In Soviet movies, any collusion with these “incorruptible” authorities is impossible by default.

In real Soviet life, an influential local boss often had some kind of mutual understanding with the law enforcement authorities (but you would never see it in any Soviet movie released before the Gorbachev’s reform of the second half of the 1980s).

2) Perfect law enforcement

In the fictional alternative society of Soviet cinema, law enforcement officers never beat up detainees. Nor did they take any bribes. They were generally polite, or at least not very rude. Any hint of rough "cop" methods was usually censured: they were presented as “common practices” of the Western police but were considered “unthinkable” for their Soviet counterparts.

IN THE FICTIONAL ALTERNATIVE SOCIETY OF SOVIET CINEMA, LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS NEVER BEAT UP DETAINEES. NOR DID THEY TAKE ANY BRIBES. AND THEY WERE NEVER RUDE

"The meeting place cannot be changed" TV series (1970s) were exceptionally “realistic” by Soviet standards. for example, it showed how Soviet policeman Captain Zheglov pressured a distinguished physician to sign a "confession" to a murder he did not commit (the captain sincerely believed that the arrested man was guilty). But even there, the policeman could never hit the suspect; he could only shout at him. And even that ‘minor’ misbehaviour of a Soviet policemen was considered "a very brave thing” to show in a Soviet film.

But that was an exception. The canonical cinema image of the militia (as the police was called the USSR) was embodied by the trio of well-mannered Colonel Znamensky, Major Tomin and their forensic expert Zinochka, i.e. ‘little Zina’ (note that in “official gender equal” Soviet society, men were addressed by their last name and the woman by her first name). They were nice, polite, funny, noble, fearless, and devoted to their duty. Their main an only mission was to protect their fellow citizens from “some” “rare” individuals who, for some obscure reasons, “did not want to live honestly” in the Soviet paradise.

The reality, of course, was very different. Most Soviet people knew that the militia (Soviet police) could beat up a detainee at their own discretion, prosecute an innocent person, fabricate evidence as needed, demand bribes, and sometimes even collaborate with the crime. It also happened that the militia were simply powerless against local gangs. But the cinema featured a completely different world, where none of this was possible.

3) Almost no crime

Soviet cinema (and Soviet media) admitted the existence of crime in the USSR. There were even detective movies and TV series. But crime was presented as a rather marginal phenomenon. It happened “rarely”; and when it did, the police knew how to deal with it. Youth street gangs—a reality of many Soviet cities and towns—never really appeared on screen. At best, a marginalized small group of hooligans could be mentioned, which was easily neutralized by positive characters (as it was in the second part of “Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears”, a love story from 1979).

Until the late 1980s (Gorbachev’s reforms), no Soviet movie could show a situation where bandits controlled a whole district or town, without fear of the authorities. The closest analogue of the "mafia" — the "Black Cat" gang in the TV series "The meeting place cannot be changed" — was depicted as a phenomenon inherent in the immediate aftermath of World War II, as a direct consequence of the difficult wartime. In general, the Soviet government attributed almost all social and economic issues to the consequences of the past wars, or better yet, to the "heavy legacy of capitalism and the Tsarist regime before 1917."

4) The absence of (serious) social problems

Just as with crime, Soviet cinema acknowledged that there were multiple shortages of goods, and that Soviet people had to spend a lot of time in lines at stateowned stores (there were no private ones). But that was presented as a minor irritant, which was actually quite funny on occasions. In 1979, when Eldar Ryazanov released the film Garage (1979) featuring scientists of a research institute who squabbled over the permission to build garages with their own money, the movie was considered a "bold", almost dissident work of art. The film contained no politics or criticism of the government; it only showed the extent of the system’s inefficiency. The "outrageous" film was banned for many years, until Gorbachev’s reforms in the late 1980s.

THERE WAS NO POVERTY OR DRUG ADDICTION IN THE SOVIET MOVIES

There was no poverty or destitution in Soviet films, because poverty could not exist in the “ideal” Soviet society. In most other societies, both democracies or dictatorships, there was no taboo on talking about the hardships that the poor faced. The old Russian Empire before 1917, notorious for its widespread censorship, did not prohibit writing about poverty, underemployment, or homelessness (unless these publications challenged the government and its institutions). The same was true in most 20th -century countries (except for the Communist ones), be they in the West, the East, or the South. There, one could make a film about poverty and other social problems.

There – but not in the USSR! A Soviet film could never feature old people barely surviving on a small pension. Or a single mother with a small child who had no money for decent food (there were no food banks in the USSR, because “nobody was poor”). Or a young family with three children, huddled in a one-room dorm, sharing a kitchen and toilet with numerous neighbours, with no hope of a separate apartment. Or cruel treatment of patients in a psychiatric hospital. All these situations were quite common in the real USSR, but not in its fictional cinematic version. There, these topics were simply taboo.

Needless to say, in the film version of the USSR, there were no drug addicts or prostitution, although both existed in real life.

Serious social problems could only exist in the past, before the advent of the Soviet power. And those that still existed in the Soviet times were explained as consequence of the "old tsarist times" or World War II. The USSR claimed to have solved them by the 1950s (if not earlier). But they certainly existed abroad—in the West and in the Third World—as shown by both Soviet propaganda and real foreign movies and literature.

Who wouldn’t dream, now and then, of a perfect utopian society where everyone is happy and where no serious problems exist? Who wouldn’t want to spend a couple of hours in the ideal world of a soft drink commercial (should it exist in real life)? Well, that was exactly the world created by Soviet arts and presented as “the real everyday life of the USSR.”

Real Soviet life, of course, was very different from these "commercials," and the filmmakers were well aware of that. In the late 1980s, when censorship was eased, they suddenly produced an incredible number of movies featuring Soviet street gangs, drug addiction, prostitution, organized crime, urban slums, corrupted police and dishonest officials. It was as if, in a couple of years, they tried to compensate for decades of imposed silence.

Ban "Pepsi ads"?

Both Soviet propaganda and soft drink commercials proposed a kind of ideal imaginary world. There was, however, a fundamental difference between them: the Soviet “publicity” was total. No alternatives were tolerated. A soft drink commercial never pretends to be the Absolute Truth, and advertising companies do not deny that they create some kind of idealized "alternative world".

However, the Soviet authorities were serious and resolute in presenting their "fiction" as an "objective reality." In the USSR, no one could dare to doubt the veracity of this utopian world—at least publicly.

In the modern world, Coca-Cola advertising is everywhere. But the same goes for advertising for Pepsi and other competitors. One can criticize or even sue the manufacturers of any soft drink or, for that matter, any other product. Studies on the harm of sugary carbonated drinks are regularly published and can be read by everyone.

In contrast, the Soviet regime was a system that advertised its “brand” non-stop, and any criticism was forbidden. Trying other "drinks", let alone advertising them, was explicitly unwanted, and could cost you a career or freedom (and in Stalin’s times even life).

Today, new generations — children and grandchildren of the Soviet citizens— are watching those “old commercials”, perceiving them as a "true description of the good old life" and feel nostalgic for an "ideal world" that never existed.

Problems could only exist abroad

Unlike the USSR, Western culture did not present its society as ideal. In Western films, the mafia bosses wielded enormous power, and there were many rogue cops and equally scoundrel politicians. In Western movies, there were unemployed and homeless people; there were those who could barely pay their rent; there were drug addicts...

Some of these movies were bought by the USSR and shown in cinemas in Russian translation. The authorities never bothered to translate them into Ukrainian, Lithuanian, Armenian, Uzbek or any other language of peoples of the USSR peoples — everyone was supposed to know Russian. Such movies showed a big contrast between the “perfect” and “safe” Soviet live compared to the "dangerous, corrupt and hypocritical" West.

As a child, I enjoyed French comedies, but they caused me mixed feelings. It is true that they were exciting and funny, but life in France seemed notoriously insecure. It was hard to find a job, and even when you were hired, you could be fired at the whim of the boss without any reason (“Toy”, 1976). Young people on motorbikes could mock and insult an honest citizen right in a fast-food restaurant, and no one would protect him (“ComDads”, 1983). A high-ranking officer of the French secret services could casually kill one of his employees, without any fault of the latter, simply to cover up his intrigues against his own superior (“The Tall Old Man with One Black Shoe”, 1972). Police secretly watched criminals at work and then extorted bribes from them in exchange for cover (“My New Partner”, French: “Les Ripoux”, 1984). France was beautiful indeed, but who would risk living there? How different it was from the quiet confidence of the Soviet life, as I had seen it in the movies!

The US was certainly no better. When young musicians who witnessed a murder were threatened by mafia (“Some Like It Hot”), they wouldn’t go to police, because the US police was powerless to protect them. Meanwhile, Soviet citizens (in the movies) could always count on the protection of the government.

In another American movie I watched as a child, a man with his 12-year-old son went to a local diner, was insulted by some local bad guys, and had to punch them — yet another proof that the US was “violent” and that a father could only count on his fists to protect himself and the child.

I didn’t care that in the real USSR people fought a lot and the police were unreliable. This really did not make it into Soviet movies.

In the West, artists often criticize the government, the system, the establishment and the elites. Such criticism helps society improve, because the alternative is North Korea with its " wise leader." Or the "ideal" USSR.

And that’s the main difference. A Soviet film director could not even dream of making a comedy about treacherous KGB agents — the very idea could cost them freedom. Nor could they make a thriller about a disillusioned army veteran who takes up arms to confront local authorities.

As for the Soviet analogy of “The Godfather” — the "Thieves in Law" (1988) — it could only have appeared during Gorbachev’s reforms. And even there, the Godfather doesn’t live in Moscow or even Rostov: he only controls a small tourist town somewhere in the Caucasus. But even then, the 1988 film shocked part of the Soviet audience, because just a couple of years earlier such a plot would have been unthinkable.

Before 1987, the worst disaster in the USSR that Soviet writers or filmmakers were allowed to “describe” was a train fire caused by someone's carelessness (the movie “Express on Fire” a.k.a. "Express Train 34", 1981).

UNLIKE THE USSR, WESTERN CULTURE DID NOT PRESENT ITS SOCIETY AS PERFECT

Soviet science fiction was no exception: even in a hypothetical imaginary world, the USSR had to be perfect. In the West, Michael Crichton could imagine a situation when an American space satellite accidentally brings back a dangerous disease which kills a small American town within a few hours ("The Andromeda Strain", 1969).

Nothing like that could be published in the USSR. That a Soviet satellite could bring back a germ that would kill the population of a Soviet town was, if not unimaginable, then at least unpublishable. In Soviet science fiction, even a foreign or alien attack could not cause much damage inside the USSR. When in 1931 the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov wrote the play "Adam and Eve", in which the Soviet city of Leningrad perishes from a ‘capitalist’ chemical attack, the authorities refused to stage or publish it. In Soviet science fiction, catastrophes could only happen abroad. Thus, when in 1964 the Soviet author Sever Gansovsky in his story "Day of Wrath" imagined a situation in which a scientific experiment got out of control and intelligent bears created in a laboratory began to kill and eat people, he had to move the action to an unspecified “capitalist” country, giving his characters “foreign” names. When another science fiction writers, the brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, wanted to write about, say, aliens accidentally leaving some dangerous but scientifically valuable waste on Earth (“Roadside Picnic”, 1972) or aliens disguised as humans hiding from the mafia at a ski resort (“The Dead Mountaineer's Hotel”, 1970), they also had to place the event “somewhere abroad”. Like most Soviet citizens, they had relatively sketchy knowledge about everyday life in this magical “abroad”, and so their “foreign countries” where a mixture of disguised Soviet realities and elements of some Western reality as they knew it from films and literature. When the censorship almost disappeared in the late 1980s, it became clear that the plots of their books had to be “foreign” involuntarily: suddenly, their new (or newly published) novels “moved” to the fictional Soviet town of Tashlinsk, where both the setting and the characters reflected their own knowledge and culture. Neither Michael Crichton nor Stephen King were forced by censors to set their plots in, say, the USSR or India, nor to replace their American characters by foreign ones.

Covering up mass murders, ethnic cleansings, and the wide- spread state terror: The smile of a "sadistic doctor"?

Captured by Pain" (Ukrainian: U Poloni Bolyu, У полоні болю ) is a Ukrainian novel by Alevtina Shavlach, in which a sadistic doctor locks a young woman in his apartment, constantly beating and torturing her. When the victim tries to tell other people about her ordeal, they refuse to believe her, because everyone sees the doctor as a ‘nice guy’. In public, he is always friendly and caring, sociable and funny.

How can anyone believe that such a friendly person could intentionally hurt someone? Apparently, this poor girl is exaggerating. Surely, it was she who accidentally broke her own arm and jaw while the doctor was simply trying to help. Besides, she is so lucky that our nice, kind doctor takes such good care of her!

Over time, the victim begins to wonder if she herself is to blame. Did she provoke the beatings and abuse? Or was she exaggerating her own suffering? Like the fictional sadistic doctor in Shavlach's novel, the Soviet regime was guilty of a number of heinous crimes against its own population. Millions of Soviet citizens were murdered, tortured, deliberately starved to death or sent to concentration camps for decades by their own government.

During multiple waves of organized campaigns of ethnic cleansings, the whole peoples and ethnic groups (Chechens, Crimean Tatars, Kalmyks, Black Sea Greeks, and many others) were deported to Siberia or Central Asia. Many of the deportees, especially small children, died on the way or later.

At the same time, the Soviet Union presented itself, both at home and abroad, as a kind of utopian society where “everyone lives a good and happy life” and where the government cared about happiness and well-being of “ordinary people.” Which again was pretty close to the image of a nice, friendly caregiver that the “sadistic doctor” pretended to be. In this context, Soviet popular culture played much the same role as the friendly smile of the fictional doctor: it helped to disguise Soviet crimes against its own population — along widespread social and economic problems— while promoting the regime as “humane.”

Thousands of talented people—actors, producers, composers, scriptwriters, etc.—worked hard to further enhance this "smile." Many of them did so unconsciously: they simply enjoyed their art, did their job, and were rewarded for it (often quite modestly). Yet their work served to propagate the totalitarian regime under which they lived. For how could one believe that the alleged Soviet crimes where real when “these people” had such good and bright movies and such amazing ballet?

All this talk about Soviet totalitarianism must have been some kind of exaggeration or misunderstanding! The examples are numerous. Immediately after the Holodomor (the artificial famine of 1932-33, orchestrated by Kremlin in Ukraine, in which millions of Ukrainian peasants died), the regime released a funny musical comedy, "Jolly Fellows" (Veselye Rebyata), which showed the "happy and prosperous" life in the Soviet village.

At the time, Soviet peasants were treated no better than serfs: they were forced to join state- owned collective farms, where most of the work was poorly paid or unpaid. Furthermore, they did not have identity cards and were not allowed to leave their village without written permission from a local official. But in the film, funny village boys easily form an amateur jazz band, travel wherever they want, and become famous. In 1934, the film was shown at the Venice Film Festival and apparently was a success. In the US, it was distributed under the telling title, “Moscow Laughs.” The regime that has just killed millions of peasants was presented as humane, friendly, and cheerful. How is it fundamentally different from the amiable sadistic doctor from Alevtina Shavlach's story? I

MMEDIATELY AFTER THE FAMINE, WHICH KILLED MILLIONS OF UKRAINIAN PEASANTS, THE COMEDY "JOLLY FELLOWS " WAS RELEASED, SHOWING "HAPPY AND PROSPEROUS" LIFE IN THE SOVIET VILLAGE

Quite often, Soviet films were outright lying. "Circus", a funny ‘light’ comedy, was released in 1936, when any unauthorized social contact with foreigners could lead to imprisonment or worse. The plot: an American circus performs in Moscow, and a circus star meets a Soviet young man, falls in love and decides to stay with him in the “free and happy” Soviet Union, becoming a good Soviet citizen and singing a propaganda song on Red Square.

The reality, of course, was very different: foreigners who immigrated to the Stalin’s USSR were often imprisoned or even executed. And a Soviet citizen dating a foreigner in the second half of 1930s was lucky if they were not arrested. Also in 1936, the regime released another comedy, "Seekers of Happiness", which told the story of a Jewish family who traveled from abroad to Birobidzhan in the newly created Jewish Autonomous Region in the Soviet Far East (which, in fact, never became Jewish in either population or culture).

After some minor technical difficulties, the newcomers lived happy and fulfilling lives and thanked the Soviet leadership for their good fortune. The story was simply another lie: from about a thousand foreign Jews who settled down in Birobidzhan in the early 1930s, most were arrested in 1936- 1938, sent to labor camps or executed: the very fact of their previous living marked them as "spies" in the eyes of the Soviet secret services. The film had nothing to do with the gruesome reality: it was cheerful and optimistic, and thus was “proving” the “success” of the Soviet national policy.

Like many other Soviet films, it helped to create a positive image of the Soviet regime both at home and abroad. The same goes for Soviet and Russian ballet, whose remarkable artistic value served mainly as a costume for a criminal. The same was true for art exhibitions abroad. Every time a Soviet fil won an award at an international festival, a Soviet screening was held in London or Paris, or a collection of Soviet paintings was exhibited in a foreign museum, people said: “How nice and creative these Russians are! How could such spiritual people do something wrong? Maybe we just don’t understand this complex, mysterious soul...”

The fact that many of the actors, artists, and filmmakers were actually Ukrainians, Georgians, Armenians, Lithuanians, or other colonized peoples never occurred to the international public. Everything coming from the USSR was labeled as “Russian” by definition. Today, Putin’s Russia is trying to follow the same strategy. Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemics, the Red Army Choir performed in Montréal, promoting the “beautiful and mysterious soul” of Putin’s military (and thereby helping to forget or downplay their “exploits” in Ukraine, Chechnya, Syria, and elsewhere). The more talented the Soviet film, the better it helped to bolster the regime’s "humane image.” At home, the ‘soft’ “art-powered” propaganda worked in its own way.

Many Ukrainian children whose parents had survived the Holodomor happily recited poems about Stalin and mourned sincerely when the dictator died. Many western Ukrainians whose uncles, aunts or grandparents were deported by Soviets or died fighting for Ukrainian independence in the 1940s and 1950s sincerely believed Soviet propaganda until the late 1980s.

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