Russian Documentary Filmmakers Become Victims of Their Own Success : Media: After a rush of movies that revealed painful and bitter truths about the country’s past, the public is no longer as hungry for them.

Flames flicker across the screen, then a mushroom cloud.

“No one gets to read the story of his own death,” a narrator intones in the stillness of an ornate reception room in the Russian Embassy, four blocks from the White House in Washington. “But you and I will come very close to doing that.”

For the next hour, a small group of Russian diplomats, U.S. State Department officials and journalists watch the harrowing story of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis--as told by a Russian documentary filmmaker.

Once-secret documents from Soviet archives concerning the showdown over the deployment of ballistic missiles 90 miles from Florida are displayed and discussed. Retired Soviet military and KGB secret police officers vividly recall, by their day-by-day actions, how close two countries came to incinerating each other.

“For me, John F. Kennedy is a hero and so is Nikita Khrushchev,” says filmmaker Andrey O. Stapran after the lights come up. “In Moscow, the military was ready to go to war. Kennedy and Khrushchev saved us all. We need to raise a monument to both of them.”

Stapran was in the United States recently trying to find a distributor for his production. The Russian documentary film, one of the most conspicuous expressions of the glasnost period that led to the disintegration of the Soviet Union, is a victim of its own success.

“I don’t think anybody in Russia is interested in more revelations. They’re just trying to survive all that’s happening there now,” says Russian film and cultural critic Michael Brashinsky, a native of St. Petersburg who teaches at Brooklyn College in New York. “The whole wave of excitement of the new documentary was because they opened up all the archives. It’s all past now. You can’t amaze anybody.”

Documentary films, books and memoirs by key Soviets that revised Cold War history were in vogue during the late 1980s. For some, the interest continues. Recently, principal players on both sides of the Cuban missile crisis met at Princeton University to compare notes.

In Russia, the bottom dropped out of the documentary market just as Brashinsky’s book about Russian filmmaking, “The Zero Hour: Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition,” was going to press in 1991.

“For a few years there was a wonderful rush to tell the truth on film about Russia’s past,” says co-author Andrew Horton of Loyola University. “Now people know the truth and they don’t want to hear more.”

The problem is partly economics. The Russian film industry in general is reeling from an influx of cheap foreign movies and made-for-TV soap operas, including martial arts from Asia and low-budget potboilers produced in France, Italy, Mexico and the United States. Only pornographic films are cheaper to produce domestically.

During its golden age, roughly from 1986 through 1991, the Russian documentary graphically revealed secrets of the country’s past to audiences hungry for enlightenment.

Documentaries stripped away government propaganda and told ugly truths about Chernobyl, the 1986 nuclear accident that released a plume of radiation that circled the globe, and about Afghanistan, the disastrous, decade-long occupation that became the Soviet Union’s Vietnam.

Films demolished state-propagated myths about the rule of Stalin with footage showing prison camps where political enemies were locked up in subhuman conditions. Slice-of-life films about ordinary Russians showed the casual cruelty of Soviet bureaucracy.

For the first time, filmmakers could show Soviet life as they saw it, according to Oscar-winning documentarian Vivienne Verdon-Roe. She wrote in an introduction to a Glasnost Film Festival in 1989: “The door to a forbidden room has finally been opened. And what we find there is somehow disturbingly familiar.”

Documentary films enjoyed wide popularity, and a few of their stars--historians with newly granted licenses to uncover the past--became as familiar to Russians as talk show hosts are in the United States.

“The Trial,” a 1987 film by Igor Belyayev, showed the Stalinist trials of the 1930s and how the Soviet leader had systematically eliminated rivals, many of whom had been close to Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin.

Although there had been only rough estimates of how many people Stalin had eliminated, the film showed evidence that 20 million “enemies of the people” had been murdered.

“The film had an amazing effect,” Horton said. “The night it was shown, it was like the last installment of ‘Dallas.’ Everybody was watching. There was hardly any traffic moving on the street.”

Although films shown on television received the widest audiences, those produced for theater release were the most critical of present and past regimes.

One of the most widely acclaimed feature documentaries shown in theaters was “Is Stalin With Us?” In 1989 it eerily foreshadowed the 1993 conflict between Communist hard-liners and President Boris Yeltsin.

The film profiles individuals who still idealize Stalin and yearn for a return to the old days. They include a sweet-natured retired school principal, a family patriarch, a Georgian peasant and a truck driver confident that “Stalin is alive and will be alive forever.”