Soviet Presswatch/Spy Magazine

...We have no intention of representing our cofounders as innocent lambs...

...All the same, our new, image-conscious, pinstripe-clad Komitet is careful to emphasize that it is on the side of civilization...

...That is about as subtle as this film gets...

...After explaining that the paper merely wants the general public to have access, at long last, to the wealth of information and analysis possessed by intelligence services, the editors add a coy disclaimer: "Over 90 percent of our editorial staff do not work for the KGB, and the proofs are not submitted [to that agency] for approval...

...Readers taken in by the image of a user-friendly, Milton Friedman-reading KGB are advised to turn to the April 1 double issue of the weekly Stolitsa ("The Capital"), published by the Moscow City Council...

...She never tries very hard to destroy his romance with an undertaker's daughter (Ally Sheedy), and in the end she relents and lets the boy (age 38) go to his lovely mortician, who is supposed to be plain and shy but is neither...

...Now there's a creative idea: voting ballots for the dead (it worked in Chicago, didn't it...

...Chesterton did speak of tradition as the democracy of the dead, though I doubt he meant anything quite so literal...

...KGB major Andrei Oligov explains that reports about the KGB performing services for Soviet businesspeoCathy Young is the author of Growing Up in Moscow (Ticknor & Fields...

...Of course, that has not stopped a search for it by wiser men than Lance Morrow—to wit, a bunch of movie screenwriters and directors...

...The wartime defenders of Leningrad, Seleznev exclaims, fought for the city of Lenin, not for St...

...An unexpected contribution to the Leningrad-vs.-St...

...And, on mother's side, the wickedly selfish and manipulative behavior is really only skin-deep...

...There is more: a sympathetic piece on Seventh-Day Adventists, advice to investors, an excerpt from the memoirs of the head of the Czarist secret police in 1905-17 (the KGB in search of its roots...

...Moreover, this would look abnormal in the context of worldwide legal practices...

...In it, Lt...

...What the KGB is trying to accomplish by branching out into publishing can be gleaned from the magazine's economic and political commentary, which suggests that the transition to a market economy can proceed painlessly if guided by a firm hand (invisible, perhaps, but not in the sense meant by Adam Smith...

...Vladimir Aladkin of the Altai regional section of the KGB demands a full investigation of the organization in which he has been serving for fourteen years, and the resignation of its chief Vladimir ICryuchkov...

...All right, 0 cruel Lensoviet, says Seleznev, if you are still planning to go ahead with your unholy referendum, issue not just one ballot per person but one for each man or woman who died in the siege and defense of Leningrad...

...Near the beginning of Chris Columbus's Only the Lonely, for example, John Candy and James Belushi are transporting in the back of their police van a villain who has strangled some old ladies for their Social Security money...

...His question arrests the attention, even though, as some philosopher or other has observed, its answer is never to be found in Time...

...I think...

...There is a complex irony here, for Candy himself lives a life dominated by an old lady: his mother (played in the comeback performance of the year by Maureen O'Hara), whose moral and psychological strangling of him with the bonds of guilt includes encouraging him to eat unhealthily so that he will be unattractive to women...

...This is the source of our strength and the token of the inevitable, full victory of Communism...

...if, as was the Czar's original intention, it is to be named after St...

...Ah, Hollywood...

...The same ones, perhaps, who clamored in 1982 that the town of Naberezhnye Chelny be renamed Brezhnev, then had secondthoughts six years later and demanded the town's original name back...

...Nothing Sacred Stolitsa doesn't stop with the KGB...

...In fact, that is notably more sub-tle than this film gets...

...But that, it turns out, was not the final stage in the evolution of the relationship between the KGB and the press...

...Petersburg debate came from Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who submitted an appeal to "residents of the City on the Neva river" to the TASS bureau in New York (TASS, May 29...

...Gladkov (who also suggests "flexible, non-exorbitant taxes" as a way to extirpate the underground economy) laments that involving the KGB in such "campaigning" may "turn talented young people away from the KGB and lead the best operative agents to resign...

...The mind boggles—before it registers the fact that there is no mention of how the survey was conducted or by whom...

...Her eventual acceptance of a half-Sicilian, half-Polish daughter-in-law proceeds pari passu with her increasing tolerance for the romantic attentions towards herself of a Greek (Anthony Quinn, doing another of his Zorba impressions...

...1 mandate for Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin (see TAS, November 1990...

...Specifically, the Moscow section of the KGB...

...They resolve to take a vitamin supplement...

...the last page, consequently, is devoted to film news and reviews...

...SOVIET PRESSWATCH SPY MAGAZINE by Cathy Young It used to be that whenever the KGB wanted something to appear in the press—say, a denunciation of the subversive doings of human rights groups—a newspaper chosen for the purpose, whether Pravda, Izvestia, or one more obscure, would simply run an article signed by "V...

...Petersburg referendum...

...and, for some unfathomable reason, a "poetry corner," with selections from classical Chinese poetry next to an article charmingly titled "The KGB in a Changing World...

...Petersburg (and certainly not for anything as puny as their lives...

...The front page carries, in large type, an address to the reader which opens thus: One of the co-founders of our newspaper is an intelligence service...

...Petersburg...

...It is a battle with no chance of victors because it should be waged by economists and producers, not by detectives and operatives...

...But at least now it gives investment tips...

...The terror of the gentle giant Candy that his mother will have some gruesome accident because he has been insufficiently attentive to her is illustrated in tedious fantasy sequences that, I think, are supposed to be funny...

...Mother Muldoon is given to offending the non-Irish by calling them dagoes or polacks and has to be severely scolded by a (Polish) priest by James Bowman with a reminder that this is the nineteen nineties...

...An article on the dangers the "brain drain" poses to the Soviet economy ends by noting that the flow cannot be stopped by "prohibitive methods": "After all, our people have become real experts at getting around various governmental bans...

...Morrow himself suffers from moral illiteracy, and his piece is a credit to God's mercy towards the afflicted...

...T he progressive belief that morality 1 is a function of chronology is one way to make immorality easier to account for...

...On the same page appear the results of a survey measuring "negative attitudes of the population of the Russian Federation" toward various institutions...

...In the same way, in City Slickers, Billy Crystal confronts a couple of thugs who are sexually harassing a young woman by saying, "C'mon guys, this is not nineties behavior, I gotta be honest with you...

...In fact, it seems to be little more than a subspecies of insensitivity...

...The dead, after all, tend to be reliable fellows who vote exactly the way the party wants them to vote, something that can no longer be expected from the fickle living...

...The strip matches photographs of a near-perfect Lenin lookalike with quotations from the great leader's voluminous works...

...In one of them, he shows the reader a kukish, a fist with the thumb sticking out between the index and middle fingers—a classic Russian "up yours" gestureTHE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991 33 with the caption reading, "This is the essence...

...Before me is the first (March 1991) issue of a new Soviet monthly, the Analytic Press...

...vitamin deficiency...

...A "Viewpoint" article by one Gennady Seleznev (May 14), "Let Us Defend Leningrad," argued that the namechange would be an insult to "war and labor veterans and siege survivors," who are having a rough time as it is: "They are no longer honored, deprived of basic privileges and aid, ignored and constantly humiliated . . . by heart attack-threatening revelations about the uselessness of their heroism in the defense of Leningrad and the senselessness of the October Revolution itself...

...Presumably that is the full extent to which a gentleman is now permitted to assist a lady in distress, even in the Wild West...

...More than one is too many...

...Even more remarkable is an article entitled "KGB in the Back-Rooms of Shops," signed by one Andrei Gladkov, who takes Vremya to task for its reports about the KGB hunting down dishonest shop personnel and reclaiming so many million rubles' worth of hidden goods—a mere drop in the bucket of the Soviet consumer famine: Drug dealers, organized crime leaders [and the like] can rejoice: KGB experts have been taken off their case and sent into battle with socialist shortages...

...Shouldn't Peter the Great get a ballot, too...

...Only the Lonely has some lovely moments, but it dissipates its emotional energies in too many breakups and reconciliations...

...corporations...

...The results are broken down regionally: the KGB is rated less negatively in Moscow (31 percent) and Leningrad (33 percent) than in the republic as a whole, beating the courts, prosecutors, and the Supreme Soviet of the USSR...

...For a central premise of the film is that such yuppie-talk is superficial...

...Petrograd, he goes on to say, is the right name if the city is to be named after Peter the Great...

...Peter City...

...Lenin in the Land of the Bolsheviks" (a spoof on the title of an old propaganda piece about a fat American capitalist's trip to the Soviet Union...

...The double issue, not only timed to coincide with April Fool's Day but also published close to the 121st anniversary of Lenin's birth, features a "photo comic strip" entitled "The New Adventures of Mr...

...What does the KGB have to say for itself...

...I have heard," writes Solzhenitsyn, "that your city is preparing for a referendum on restoring the name of St...

...Above all, it doesn't allow us to take the mother seriously...

...I, too, would like to cast my vote and persuade you that this name should not be restored...

...Beneath the patina of sophistication imparted by post-industrial urban life there still exists a more authentic, elemental world in the context of which the very 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1991...

...The question should have been: Can ace scribbler Lance Morrow essay some 3,500 elegant and not too hollowly reverberant words on the subject without ever distinguishing between evil and suffering...

...Which, in itself, will put you on guard...

...Peter, the proper Russian name is "Sviato-Petrograd," Russian for St...

...Weirder still, the other co-founder of Analytic Press is the independent film studio Contact-Film...

...Meanwhile, on June 12—the same day that citizens of the Russian republic elected their own president—residents of Leningrad voted to change the name of their city back to St...

...ple (see TAS, March 1991) are greatly exaggerated but not completely untrue ("We could help Soviet enterprises become more competitive in the international market"), and asserts that such things are common all over the world (CIA director William Webster is quoted as saying that the Agency is beginning to monitor the economic activities of other countries in order to boost the competitiveness of U.S...

...At least Crystal realizes that this is a joke...

...Petersburg (which it was called prior to 1914, when Germany became an adversary and the German-sounding name of the then-capital of Russia was Russified to Petrograd...

...Then glasnost arrived, and the KGB came out of the closet...

...Candy says he has read somewhere that people do such things because of a "chemical imbalance," which Belushi likens to a James Bowman, TAS's movie critic is American editor of the Times Literary Supplement...

...How about the presidential elections, too...

...Two weeks later, Pravda explained to its readers that the adoption of the name "Leningrad" after Lenin's death in 1924 was not, as certain slanderers claim, a dictatorial imposition by the Bolsheviks but a perfectly legitimate response to the will of "workers, peasants, Red Army men, and young people...

...And this is sponsored by the same MossovietMoscow City Council—that, out of sheer habit, retains its No...

...The name change, pushed by the city council's current radical leadership, had already ruffled some feathers, particularly at the editorial offices of Pravda...

...Here, if evil is not caused by vitamin deficiency it is a no less temporary infirmity and as easily remedied...

...Here it is the stranglee who has the vitamin deficiency...

...The current KGB leadership, writes the brave officer, is guilty of numerous violations of law and human rights and continues to serve the Communist party, not the people...

...THE TALKIES THE BANALITY OF '90s EVIL R ecently, Time magazine asked its readers "Does Evil Exist...

...According to the survey, the KGB is not as unpopular as some other Soviet institutions: republic-wide, it gets a negative rating of 40 percent, coming out ahead of Communist party structures (62 percent), the Komsomol (58 percent), local councils of people's deputies (45 percent), official trade unions (45 percent), and the Soviet Council of Ministers (44 percent...

...Ivanov" or some other Russian equivalent of Joe Smith...

...But why restrict the application of this great principle to the Leningrad/St...

...It is as if it were due to vitamin deficiency...

...Soviet dailies and weeklies began to carry "KGB Briefing" or "News from the KGB" columns, which usually stressed that, though the state security police may have lapsed into "violations of socialist legality" in the past, its present activities were strictly confined to protecting the Soviet people from espionage, terrorism, and organized crime...

...A referendum on renaming the city is unspeakably cruel to "the people whose hearts break from the sheer thought of such a sacrilege to the memory of the fallen...

...It was imposed in the eighteenth century in violation of the Russian language and Russian consciousness...

...Cui bono...