Soviet Presswatch/On the Eve

...To add to the confusion, the French were unduly prompt in sending the remains to Moscow: they arrived in December, while the welcoming ceremonies were being planned for May...

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...Other committee members threatened to take the coffin to Khabarovsk, the seat of the Count's governorship, or to his birthplace (at this writing still known as Leningrad), if the proposed burial sitewas not approved by the city government...

...Nicholas church...

...This program saved my neck when faced with teaching two new courses and only two months to prepare...

...Entitled "Worse Than Any Lies," the article charged that one of Baburin's democratic opponents was a pimp, a free-lance KGB agent, and a masturbator (I kid you not) who had infected his own daughter with a venereal disease and had been so slack in performing his marital duties in the bedroom that his wife had insisted on a written pledge to satisfy her desires at least twice a week...

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...A tomb, even one with a former governor-general in it, seemed a rather odd addition to the complex...

...One possibility that does not seem to have occurred to local law enforcement officials is that the obscene description of Lemon Creek's menu might cause riots among the free population of the territory...

...Four years were taken up by correspondence between the authorities in the Primorsk territory and the authorities in Moscow...

...It is also a story of hardship, but a hardship that even death gives no exemption from...

...The usually gentle Sakharov slapped the author's face...

...After consulting his fellow inmates, he wrote a letter to the Vladivostok city paper explaining that he and his buddies would like to acquire pen pals in Soviet prisons and labor camps (there are plenty in the Primorsk territory, of which Vladivostok is the major urban center...

...Zimelev complains that despite their image as high-living sexual profligates, low- and mid-ranking members of the Soviet diplomatic corps have been kept not only on a tight budget—barely enough to scrape by abroad—but on a tight leash: "immorality" or divorce could be grounds for a freeze on promotions, a transfer to a ghettoized job, or a ban on foreign travel...

...You've got to love a God with such a sense of humor...

...Cathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...This past July, reports the irrepressible Kommersant (July 15), things really got rough in the Siberian city of Omsk, whose democratic representatives in the Russian parliament had launched a drive to recall their fellow deputy Sergei Baburin after he attacked Yeltsin...

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...While this initiative was eventually dropped, Baburin, a leader of the nationalist, pro-empire "Russia" faction in parliament, was successfully blocked from being elected chairman of the Russian legislature in a July 13 vote...

...This is the second introduction I have written since then...

...Lemon Creek warden Walter Shishkin, a Russian-American, volunteered his services as a translator...

...The Miracle, by Neil Jordan, is about two Irish teenagers, Jimmy and Rose, who make up stories about people theysee along the seafront...

...Later that day, they called to announce that they were in South Africa, doing fine...

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...The moral of which, perhaps, is: if this is what happens to dead Russian expatriates who go home, shouldn't the live ones who harbor any such plans think twice about it...

...As reporters Anatoly Lyliakin and Vladislav Dorofeyev write in the July 15 Kommersant, authorities in Primorsk are less than enthusiastic...

...Soon, the Soviets may be able to boast of having the world's dirtiest politics...

...Meanwhile, priests from the church of St...

...In seconds, you can select out certain notes, order them in fourdifferentways...

...Barton Fink's highly wrought symbolism takes on an expressionist, almost surrealist quality that I find occasionally gets in the way of its powerful meditation on the connection between life and art...

...In April 1990, the project got the green light, and—first things first—a committee to oversee the reburial was organized in Vladivostok...

...To complicate things even further, the regional theater had made a contract with a Japanese firm for an entertainment center—summer stage, bowling alley, video salon, etc.—to be built on the very hillside chosen for the Count's final resting place...

...Both these films are marredby a little too much artistic self-consciousness...

...Maybe the shopping was better over there...

...Despite these objections, the Vladivostok city paper, which is read by many of the 10,000 to 15,000 zeks of the Primorsk territory, plans to carry Norman's letter in the near future...

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...According to a report in Izvestia (May 28), the women, who had access to classified materials, were apparently forbidden to leave embassy grounds without escort...

...Committee members, who were all set to travel to Paris to pick up the Count, were no doubt disappointed that they wouldn'tbe going any farther than Moscow...

...Mary's Court, Brookline, MA 02146 Telephone 617-277-9222 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 35...

...ut both these pictures are superb Lill examples of movie-making that does all art can do to remind us of how much more miraculous and terrifyingthe world is than our most compelling imaginative re-creations of it...

...23) of the weekly Stolitsa ("The Capital") in an interview with Alexander Zimelev, who achieved the distinction of spending seventeen years (1973-90) in the Soviet foreign service without being a party member (though mostly working, for that very reason, in the ghetto of the publishing department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs...

...This committee, stacked with bigshots from the local government, the military, cultural institutions, and even the church, got so carried away with preparations for the welcoming ceremony—the float to carry the coffin, the orchestra, the parade of ships, and everything else—that they forgot one small detail: a gravesite...

...He is Count Nikolai N. Muravyov, once governor-general of Siberia and founder of the port of Vladivostok...

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...In the pre-Gorbachev "years of stagnation," says Zimelev, assignments to certain lands "with soft climates and hard currencies" were handed out as rewards to nomenklatura dons about to retire...

...To make their escape, they had to extricate their passports from the clutches of the embassy's consular division and slip past Soviet counterintelligence officers...

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...Otherwise, why would episodes that clearly smack of deviltry . . . be happening here with amazing regularity...

...And the committee would not hear of burying their charge without proper pomp and circumstance...

...Here is the Hollywood ethos pressing its nose against the dingy glass of its shop window in an attempt to see what lies outside...

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...In the May 31 issue of Rossiya, the publication of the presidium of the Russian parliament, Natalya Barabash writes, "The devil must be fond of our country after all...

...SOVIET PRESSWATCH ON THE EVE by Cathy Young This column was completed before the stunning roller-coaster events set off on August 19...

...Jerry Norman, a denizen of the Lemon Creek Correctional Center in Alaska, which houses 158 men and six women, thought up something more adventurous...

...But it is a lot more exciting than mere myth-making...

...The dispute turned into a veritable schism when another priest, a committee member, stated that the church would sanctify no other burial site but the one behind the theater...

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...Don't Look Homeward, Angel And now for a completely different sort of Vladivostok story...

...The dead person involved has been dead for quite some time: 110 years, to be precise...

...To begin with, a prison administration official explained to the reporters, certain categories of Soviet convicts are allowed to write only two to three letters a month...

...All are highly to be recommended, but our films of the month (there are two), like others of the cinematic culture's self-referential syndrome, get into the mirror world of fiction about fiction...

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...The reluctant diplomats, Zimelev goes on to say, took out their injured feelings on the embassy staff and sometimes on the local friendly leadership: One, brooking no objections, would force the politburo of the fraternal party to master the difficult science of the game of "billygoat" [a Soviet variety of dominoes], while another, from Central Asia, would raise a flock of sheep at the embassy and entrust their care to the staff as a top priority...

...But that was only the beginning...

...The joke is on them, however, since none of the lurid stories they invent is anywhere near as fantastic as the truth about one of their fantasy subjects—that she is in fact Jimmy's mother, whom he had supposed was dead...

...In the climax at the very louche Hotel Earle, the descent into Hell suggests Bill and Ted's Bogus Journey more than it does The Seventh Seal...

...Next month: the Russian Revolution of 1991...

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...But whether this meeting of minds will take place is still in doubt...

...Nicholas, where the Count in his coffin was awaiting the resolution of this conflict, declared that to bury him on the hillside—formerly the city dump and currently a favorite spot for neighborhood dog owners to walk their pets —would be disrespectful, and that they would not surrender the remains for such sacrilege...

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...The summer season has produced some excellent based-on-fact movies, including My Father's Glory and My Mother's Castle by Yves Robert, based on the memoirs of Marcel Pagnol, and Europa, Europa by Agnieszka Holland, based on the true story of Solomon Perel, a Polish Jew who unexpectedly found himself enrolled in the Hitler Youth...

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...In the infamous 1983 book by "historian" Nikolai Yakovlev, CIA Target—USSR, excerpted in two mass-circulation magazines, Sakharov was described as putty in the hands of his wife, and Elena Bonner as a "sexual brigand" who, "since her dissolute youth, had developed an almost professional knack for seducing and subsequently sponging off older men...

...But then, even in older and more puritanical times, the Soviet propaganda machine was not above using sexual innuendo against political foes...

...In July 1983, Yakovlev had the temerity to show up at Sakharov's Gorky apartment for an "interview" and actually offer to autograph copies of his books for the exiled dissident...

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...Norman's references to theathletic and computer facilities at Lemon Creek, and to the inmates' diet—including fresh fruit and vegetables, chicken, milk, and veal—were deemed particularly subversive...

...In The Miracle, Jimmy's adolescent attempt to blame God for that which he cannot blame on anyone else leads to an epiphany, engineered by Rose, in which escaped circus animals stand for both the absurdity and the pathos of the human condition...

...A feeble attempt to present the construction of the chapel as "public works" got nowhere...

...Perhaps it was some such ordeal that recently prompted two staffers of the Soviet embassy in Mozambique and a typist from the Soviet trade mission to take the unusual step of fleeing to South Africa...

...At home in Omsk, there were rallies for and against Baburin, culminating in an article in the Omsk Pravda by 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR OCTOBER 1991 Mikhail Mashkarin, secretary of the party cell of the Omsk Polytechnic Institute...

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...But the Russo-Japanese war intervened, and the issue of the posthumous repatriation of Count Muravyov was not raised again until 1986...

...CY Edifying thoughts on Soviet global policies, diplomacy in the new age, and such are coming our way this October, when the Free Press brings out the memoirs of former CPSU attack dog in Georgia, ex-Soviet minister of foreign affairs, and democrat extraordinaire Eduard Shevardnadze...

...The Miracle's use of stage imagery—a second-rate production of Destry Rides Again and a traveling circus—pushes to the limits the idea of life as a series of grotesque and demeaning public performances...

...For others, problems might be caused by the excessive volume of Alaska-bound mail...

...Conversely, assignments to friend-ly socialist states in the Third World were used as punishment for provincial party bosses who had, for example, made an especially egregious mess of the fall harvest drive—Cuba being a popular place of banishment...

...So the saga goes on, and the mortal remains of Count Muravyov are still in the St...

...How they managed to do the former is unknown, butthe latter was easy: the ladies just said they were going out to do some shopping...

...In the same way, Joel and Ethan Coen's new film, Barton Fink, which won the Palme d'Or in Cannes this year, is about a writer (John Thrturro in the latest in a series of splendid performances) who goes to Hollywood full of big ideas about a theater of the common man, which he preaches sanctimoniously even at the common man in the next-door hotel room—who turns out to be a multiple murderer...

...While certain Vladivostok citizens insisted that the remains be buried in one of the city's cemeteries, the committee had picked a special site on a hillside behind the regional theater, where the chapel to be built by an architect (also on the committee) would be visible far and wide...

...Giving Dirty Politics a Bad Name Before glasnost made breast-beating an approved national sport, there were many clandestine jokes that made fun of official propaganda's tendency to proclaim the superiority of all things Soviet by twisting these slogans into such lines as, "We have the world's smallest dwarfs...

...Meanwhile, the seamy side of Soviet diplomacy is explored in a June issue (No...

...he merely gave orders, from the deck of his ship, to build a port in that location...

...He also laments the amateurism of the Soviet foreign service, overwhelmed as it is by semiliterate party honchos whose language skills in Russian, let alone other tongues, leave a great deal to be desired...

...It was then that another small detail overlooked by the Count's fans came up: the money for the burial, the chapel, and the festivities...

...As always, the art that makes you forget its own artistry is the rarest and toughest to create...

...Still, in 1903, when the citizens of Vladivostok realized that Muravyov had made the mistake of dying in Paris and getting himself buried in the Montmartre cemetery, they petitioned the czarist government to authorize shipping the Count's remains to their city for a new burial...

...Their opponents at last relented and the burial site was deemed acceptable...

...One might add that the Count never set foot in Vladivostok...

...Well, not that different...

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...Jailbirds of the World, Unite Men in prison, as anyone who has read the personals will know, are wont to seek correspondence with eligible bachelorettes...

...Mashkarin asserted that a copy of said pledge was in his possession...

...But the official frankly admitted that the biggest problem lay elsewhere: Soviet wardens are worried that "American inmates might describe their living conditions to their Soviet counterparts," possibly leading to riots...

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...At the time of the first I wondered if the ending of this column might prove prnphetk and if there would be a next column or a Soviet press to watch...

...In Barton Fink, as in the Coens' last picture, Miller's Crossing, the admittedly improbable combination of rich visual imagery, snappy dialogue, and bizarre incidents works together to create a filmic world that at times seems more frighteningly real than we could have imagined from the real world itself...