Wild, wild east
Lucy Ash
Published 29 November 2007

When I first moved to Moscow in the early 1990s, my friend Dasha gave me a gift-wrapped video. "Watch this," she said. "It was made years ago but it will help you understand our country." I assumed it was a melancholy epic by Andrei Tarkovsky, with lingering shots through rain-splattered windows, or perhaps a revolutionary classic such as Battleship Potemkin.

When I unwrapped the paper and looked at the cover, I found a man in a grubby white uniform surrounded by sand dunes. "White Sun of the Desert," said Dasha. "It's a Soviet-style cowboy film. The best one ever made."
While Pravda editorials attacked decadent Hollywood, Soviet leaders couldn't resist a good western. Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, accor ding to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him. Leonid Brezhnev, meanwhile, had a crush on Chuck Connors, a B-movie actor who starred in a 1960s TV series, The Rifleman.

At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series to be shown on Soviet TV.
What Brezhnev and the rest of the Politburo really wanted, however, was a home-grown product. So the Committee of Cinematography ordered screenwriters to create Soviet supermen who would gallop faster and pull the trigger quicker than the hero of any western. White Sun (1969) was the first big hit, paving the way for a genre of "easterns". In some films, the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons.
James Meek, whose novel The People's Act of Love begins with the arrival of an escaped prisoner in a small Siberian village, was partly inspired by watching dozens of "easterns" on television in hotel rooms when he was a foreign correspondent in the former Soviet Union.

"The whole idea of the stranger riding in to town is central to the western, but it is also central to this Siberian world of scattered, remote communities," he says. "Siberia becomes what the old West was in the American western: a place of harsh elements, where Europeans come into contact with the Russian equivalent of Indians, the native people of Siberia. A hard man is alone against the wilderness or alone against criminals and bandits. It is a place where you really make your own law, or there is no law at all."

White Sun, like many later gun-slinging action movies from the Brezhnev era, is set in Russian central Asia during the civil war. The hero, Fyodor Sukhov, is a Red Army soldier who has just been demobbed and is desperate to go home, but gets caught up in a showdown between a Bolshevik cavalry unit and some Basmachis (the Russian name for armed counter-revolutionaries) in the deep south of the USSR.

more at: http://www.newstatesman.com/200711290033

John Wayne is still way cooler. I love old westerns, The Good, The bad, and The Ugly is still one of my favorites.

__________________
2006 CL500
2009 C300 4matic
1969 280SE
2023 Ram 1500
2007 Tiara 3200

Yeah, I just saw him and Kim Darby in "True Grit" yesterday, the 1969 movie that got him his Oscar. It was actually a good movie.

__________________
1991 560 SEC AMG, 199k <---- 300 hp 10:1 ECE euro HV ...

1995 E 420, 170k "The Red Plum" (sold)

2015 BMW 535i xdrive awd Stage 1 DINAN, 6k, <----364 hp

1967 Mercury Cougar, 49k

2013 Jaguar XF, 20k <----340 hp Supercharged, All Wheel Drive (sold)

Ain't that Wayne doing Louis Lamour's story, "Hondo"? Somebody told me the original opening scene was shot in 3-d. Anybody know for sure?

B