But Movies Undermine Kremlin Control : Illicit Videos Entertain Moscow Masses

It could be a soft-porn movie like “Emmanuelle,” a futuristic fantasy like “A Clockwork Orange,” or a serious study of an Eastern European Communist society such as the Polish “Man of Iron.”

For Soviet cultural watchdogs, it does not really matter.

What is important is that the movies are all termed “ideologically hostile” and are all being watched on pirated videotapes by Soviet people, thus challenging the Kremlin’s control over the Soviet Union’s entry into the video age.

The early reaction of Soviet authorities to video cassette recorders mixed suspicion with indignation at what seemed yet another subversive Western invention, undermining official control over information and opinion.

That attitude died out in the early 1980s, and the aim now is to supply a range of ideologically acceptable videos of Soviet movies, classical music concerts, plays and circus shows that people can watch on their own Soviet-made machines.

“Whether you like it or not, the video machine is an integral part of the scientific and technological progress entering our life,” the Literary Gazette told its readers recently.

As the weekly observed, and as any Muscovite with enough money to buy or rent a Western movie will tell you, the technological leap represented by videos is also a leap into forbidden areas of foreign culture.

“A black market has appeared and videos are passing from hand to hand,” the Literary Gazette said. “Often they are things that are hostile to our ideology. Already people are selling tickets for home screenings.”

For Soviet people hungry for a glimpse of the Western world, the problem is that the newly created state video clubs and rental centers just do not offer attractive enough fare.

Two months ago authorities opened a “video salon” in Moscow, next door to the house where the poet Alexander Pushkin lived in 1831. The 10th such outlet in the country, it stages evening movie shows and rents out movies overnight.

But as the Literary Gazzete reported, a search inside the store for the movies of Federico Fellini, the animated films of Walt Disney, or the filmed songs of the late but still popular maverick poet Vladimir Vysotsky, is a search in vain.

“They have Soviet films from the 1930s and about the war, but we have been looking at those on television for as long as I can remember,” one middle-aged Muscovite said. “They have nothing I particularly want to see.”

Another said some people were reluctant to rent videos from Moscow’s two outlets for fear the sales clerks would ask thorny questions about where they had acquired their machines or, if they had none, where they would watch the films.

Japanese and Western European recorders sell on the black market for up to $3,750--no great outlay for underworld entrepreneurs from the freewheeling southern republics of Georgia and Azerbaijan, but beyond the budget of the average person. The Soviet Union’s own model costs $1,500.

In theory, the Soviet-built equipment is incompatible with Western cassettes. In practice, it can be converted, and Western films can be rented on the black market for about $60, Muscovites say.

To buy a Western film costs about $190 or, if it is one you have specially ordered on the black market, more than $250.

Smuggled pornographic films command some of the highest prices, Muscovites say. The official press has reported cases of police breaking rings of criminals who had lucrative careers importing pornographic and other films from abroad.

Films which have filtered into Moscow recently include Sylvester Stallone’s “Rambo: First Blood, Part II”, which President Reagan seemed to like but which was denounced by a deputy Soviet culture minister as typifying a new anti-Communist hysteria in the American movie industry.

Still popular are films made in the 1970s starring Clint Eastwood, Steve McQueen, Marlon Brando and Robert de Niro.

Professional Soviet actors and actresses have done some of the Russian-language voice overs for the latest films to arrive in the capital.

Aware that many Western movies showing on private Soviet video players entered the country through visiting tourists and businessmen, customs officers now conduct even more rigorous searches of foreigners’ baggage at Moscow airport.

Like critical Western studies of the Soviet political system or the works of exiled writer Alexander I. Solzhenitsyn, cassettes can be confiscated which are deemed “harmful to the moral health of the nation.”