Boris Bare: The End of a Stereotype
Will the real Boris stand up? This glasnost business is getting perplexing.
For years we knew exactly who the Soviets were. We saw them in movies and on television, saw them in commercials, saw them depicted as shapeless women in boots and babushkas or as thick-necked brutes with bald heads. They were at once objects of our fear and the butts of our jokes.
Inaccurately calling all of them Russians instead of Soviets, we viewed them as a monolith with a single identity, not as a culturally and ethnically complex hybrid consisting of various republics, of which Russia was merely the largest and most influential.
The Soviet stereotype was habit-forming as well as easy and comfortable. For many, blindness was bliss.
But look what has happened. With the relative openness of Gorbachev’s glasnost have come infinite fresh images of a Soviet Union in transformation, and with them confusion, because some of these images not only clash with the old images but also with each other.
--On KCET, Huell Howser’s inexpensive camcorder captures a broad cross section of Moscow citizens who are so warm and friendly that you want to reach right through the screen and embrace them.
--There are continuing stories of Soviet anti-Semitism. Plus newscast after newscast bring pictures of Soviet armor ominously rumbling through Vilnius in a show of might intended to bully once-autonomous Lithuania into backing away from its pronouncement of independence from the Soviet Union. CBS News predicts: “The stranglehold of Soviet power will soon be felt.”
--A “Frontline” program on PBS goes behind the scenes of a Miss U.S.S.R. beauty pageant, finding controversy and pretty contestants.
--On CBS, “60 Minutes” follows a group of Australian and American tourists having less than a wonderful time visiting Yalta, a Soviet seaside resort in the Ukraine. The many Soviet male and female sunbathers showed on camera have bodies that can be described, charitably, as gargantuan mounds of blubber.
--The Academy Awards come to the Soviet Union. Among foreign cities connected by satellite to ABC’s Oscar telecast is Moscow, where visible in the hall among celebrities in the background is Yakov Smirnoff, a stand-up comic in the United States whose jokes ridicule his homeland’s communism.
The perspectives grow in diversity and number.
And “Voices of Leningrad”--airing at 8 tonight on Channels 28, 50 and 15--is yet another perspective, a “National Geographic” special merging the powerful currents of Russian and Soviet history into a single golden hour that monitors changes in the city that narrator Theodore Bikel calls “a majesty of space and sky, water and stone.”
Written and produced by Miriam Birch, “Voices of Leningrad” is majesty in documentary filmmaking.
Leningrad was first St. Petersburg, an elegant, European-style city of graceful buildings, palaces, parks and canals that Czar Peter the Great founded in 1703 as old Russia’s door to the West. It was renamed for Lenin following the 1917 Russian revolution that toppled the monarchy and ultimately elevated the Bolsheviks to power.
During World War II, Leningrad somehow managed to endure a 900-day German siege that killed 25% of its population. One of those who didn’t perish is now on the screen. He’s the director of the splendorous State Hermitage Museum, and he shows off the museum’s bomb shelter that was his home and office during the siege.
As this program so eloquently demonstrates, the city’s great physical beauty survives even today in sharp contrast to the futility and grim shabbiness of the revolution that began there and dramatically altered history.
We see a Soviet couple and their son shop for groceries. The store they shop in is a handsome relic from earlier times. The problem is that it contains few goods. Just the same, the lines for those few goods are enormous.
Meanwhile, evangelical Christians sell their faith on the steps of an ancient church, a TV reporter is regarded as heroic for reporting candidly about the city’s homeless, a rock singer wails about the miseries of the Afghanistan war and, in the most stunningly luminous segment of all, the camera records a 12-year-old ballerina and her classmates dancing in the footsteps of Pavlova, Nijinsky and Baryshnikov at what is now the Vaganova State Choreographic Academy.
There is awe and wonder on her small face, in contrast to the worry and skepticism of many of her adult countrymen as they face the sacrifices and uncertainties of perestroika.
What gleaming work this program is, and how long it has taken Americans to hear and comprehend the diversity of voices that sound here and elsewhere in the Soviet Union.
Will the real Boris stand up? He’s doing it--all of them are doing it--now.
