I was 8 or 9 years old, one of the youngest in the mix. disbanded, the kids in my neighborhood became fascinated with American movies-or, at least, the idea of American movies. I grew up in Baku, the capital of what was then the Soviet Socialist Republic of Azerbaijan. This was just one of many unauthorized things people did back then-like passing around illegal samizdat copies of Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago on thick piles of newsprint or surreptitiously listening to Voice of America news on AM radio in communal kitchens. As a middle schooler, I remember my mother talking about these and other contraband inventions. Under remaindered pictures of rib cages, bone LPs played the Beatles and other banned Western music. They came up with things like “bone LPs,” bootleg records crafted using makeshift recording lathes that cut tracks into used X-ray slides. That generation was known for a peculiar and creative resourcefulness. My parents’ generation was born after World War II, which we on the Eastern Front all knew as the Great Patriotic War. Instead of movie theaters or drive-ins, Soviet youth got their Hollywood fix through bootleg video salons hosted in grungy minibuses. Even in the ’80s, when I got to see it myself, the American jazz girls of the ’20s, portrayed through the lens of 1950s Hollywood, seemed utterly wild.īut this is not how my peers and I were introduced to our first “real” American movies. were allowed to fall in love with Girls Only in Jazz, a black-and-white masterpiece known to most English speakers as Some Like It Hot (Soviet censors found the original title too, well, hot). This trend began in the 1960s, under Khrushchev’s “thaw,” the era during which the good people of the U.S.S.R. An occasional 1960s or ’70s classic-such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather-would even make its way to one of the two central, state-run television stations broadcasting to all 15 republics. It wasn’t unusual for a few government-approved (and heavily sanitized) Hollywood movies to show up in local theaters in Mother Russia and her 14 children-states. of the 1980s, as Brezhnev’s stagnation mutated into Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet people started peering out from behind the Iron Curtain at the tantalizing opulence of Western popular culture.
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