USSR (Former Soviet Union)

Subterms

    Latest story

    100 Shares99 Views

    ‘A Compassionate Spy’ Review: Back to the U.S.S.R.

    by

    The scientist and spy Theodore Hall is profiled in this warm, low-key documentary.The subject of the absorbing documentary “A Compassionate Spy” might be the brilliant atomic physicist Theodore Alvin Hall, but its star is his nonagenarian widow, Joan. Funny, candid and eager to share, this delightful woman — and her unwavering support for her husband’s espionage during World War II — sets the tone for a film that leaves no doubt as to the location of its sympathies.These will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the work of the film’s writer and director, Steve James, whose empathy for his subjects has always been evident. And by placing Hall’s leaking of nuclear secrets to the Soviets within the context of the couple’s romantic and robust marriage, James gently wraps the viewer in the warmth of Joan’s memories. The effect is sneakily disarming.“I felt so proud of him,” she confesses to James during one of several interviews. “Ted was trying to prevent a holocaust.” Recruited by the Manhattan Project in 1944 at the age of 18, Hall was the youngest scientist working on the development of an atomic bomb and eager to win a race against the Nazis. Later, fearing the consequences of a single country’s monopoly on such a terrible weapon, he decided (with the help and encouragement of his best friend, the poet Saville Sax) to pass classified nuclear details to the Soviet Union. Despite being subjected to F.B.I. interrogations and decades of surveillance, Hall was never prosecuted, his spying concealed from the public until a few years before his death in 1999.Ensconced in her cozy home outside Cambridge, England, Joan (who died last month) is an entertaining booster of her husband’s legacy. Recalling her close postwar friendship with Hall and Sax at the University of Chicago (in nostalgic re-enactments, we see the threesome gamboling on the grass like well-fed puppies), she cheekily hints at a youthful love triangle and reveals that Hall confessed his spying before their marriage. She was unfazed.Hall’s own feelings about the espionage — expressed in clips from various interviews, including the 1998 docuseries “Cold War” and excerpts from a VHS tape belonging to Joan — would grow more nuanced. (The film’s title comes from his citing of compassion as a “major factor” in his decision to leak.) Strangely, he admits no fear for his own safety, and even had to be dissuaded from trying to prevent the 1953 executions of the spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.Noting America’s political about-face from pro-Russian propaganda (like Michael Curtiz’s 1943 movie “Mission to Moscow”) to Red-scare paranoia, James keeps his camera calm and the talking heads to a minimum. The dramatizations are nicely filmed, if a little hokey, and the overall velvety tone is peppered with piquant details, like Hall communicating with the Russians in a code derived from Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass.”Wry, shy and fragile-looking, Hall gets off lightly here, with little interrogation of his patriotism, personal ethics or fears of a nuclear world’s potential for catastrophic error. (He candidly describes working on the bomb as “exhilarating.”) The general impression given by this warm, low-key film is that the spying was a simple act of pacifism. Countervailing voices are faint and few; anyone seeking more vigorous pushback will have to look elsewhere.A Compassionate SpyNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 41 minutes. In theaters. More

    More stories

    • 63 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      Why Tetris Consumed Your Brain

      by

      Rotating a colorful shape before slotting it into the perfect position is such a satisfying experience that Tetris has joined chess in the pantheon of universally recognizable games.Less familiar is the true story of how a prototype created in 1984 by a software engineer for the Soviet Union’s Academy of Sciences ended up reaching millions of players across the world. The movie “Tetris,” which stars Taron Egerton and was released on Apple TV+ on Friday, explores those humble beginnings.The addictively simple puzzle game features seven uniquely shaped pieces, each composed of four square blocks. Players move, rotate and position the pieces to form solid lines, which are then cleared away, allowing for potentially endless play. The game’s name — derived from the words “tetra” (Greek for “four”) and “tennis” (the sport enjoyed by the game’s creator, Alexey Pajitnov) — has even pervaded culture as a verb, like when you “Tetris” your luggage into the overhead bin on a plane.In an interview with The New York Times, Pajitnov described Tetris as “the game which appeals to everyone” and said he hoped that its future included e-sports and the integration of artificial intelligence. He is also working on making “a very good” two-player version of the game but said “we are not there yet.”Before Tetris was able to cement itself as a household name with releases on consoles like the Nintendo Game Boy, Henk Rogers, the character played by Egerton, had to journey to the Soviet Union and fend off competitors to secure the game’s rights. As the film shows, that was an arduous task that paid off immensely.Here are more details about the game’s creation and why it has resonated with so many for so long:The Nintendo Game BoyIn the nearly four decades since Pajitnov created Tetris using the Pascal programming language on the Electronika 60, a Soviet-made computer, more than 215 officially recognized versions of Tetris have been released.Perhaps the most notable variant is the one that was packaged with each copy of the Nintendo Game Boy when the hand-held gaming console was released in 1989. But that incredibly successful pairing — the Game Boy and the Game Boy Color have combined for about 120 million unit sales — almost didn’t happen.The president of Nintendo of America, Minoru Arakawa, initially wanted to bundle Super Mario Land with the Game Boy, following the company’s success packaging Super Mario Bros. with the Nintendo Entertainment System. Rogers, however, was able to convince Arakawa that Tetris should be included instead, in part because it would appeal to a broader group of demographics.Pajitnov described the partnership as “two creatures created for each other: Game Boy for Tetris and Tetris for the Game Boy.”“Tetris” shows an early example of the video game featuring seven unique shapes.AppleThe Tetris EffectAs anybody who has spent hours playing Tetris knows, it is an incredibly addictive game. Many people who play for extended periods of time have reported seeing Tetris pieces outside of the game, such as in their mind when they close their eyes, or in their dreams. It’s a phenomenon known as the Tetris Effect.You may have experienced the Tetris Effect yourself if you’ve ever seen tetrominoes, officially known as Tetriminos, when you’re trying to bag your groceries.In professional studies, the psychologist Richard Haier found that regularly playing Tetris resulted in an increased thickness of the cerebral cortex. Haier’s studies also demonstrated how Tetris can affect the plasticity of cortical gray matter, potentially enhancing a person’s memory capacity and promoting motor and cognitive development.A study in 2017 by researchers at Oxford University and the Karolinska Institutet showed that Tetris had the potential to provide relief for people with post-traumatic stress disorder, if they played the game after an incident while recalling a stressful memory.The Quest for PerfectionDecades after it was invented, Tetris continues to have staying power. Newer versions of the game include Tetris Effect, which builds a Zen experience via music, and Tetris 99, in which players try to outlast opponents who are meddling with their boards.In competitive play, new methods of moving the pieces are still being discovered. The standard way to play the Nintendo Entertainment System version of Tetris — yes, the game first released in 1989 is still used at the Classic Tetris World Championships — is by holding the gray rectangular controller so that the left hand controls the movement of the pieces, and the right hand manages the rotation. But that method, known as “delayed auto shift” in the competitive community, has been usurped in recent years by “hypertapping” and “rolling.”Hypertapping involves rapidly pressing the buttons, countering the traditional sensation that pieces are slowly being dragged into position. Rolling lets pieces be moved even more quickly, by flicking the fingers of one hand along the back of the controller.The power of hypertapping became clear in 2018, when a 16-year-old named Joseph Saelee used the method to defeat Jonas Neubauer, a seven-time world champion. But in the years since, the rolling method has dominated the competitive scene. Not only is it incredibly effective, but it seems to be less strenuous on fingers and hands. More

    • 125 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      The Facts and Fictions of Shostakovich’s ‘Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk’

      by

      The 1934 opera, revived this season at the Metropolitan Opera, stoked the ire of the Soviet state, or so the story goes. But archives tell a more interesting tale.Dmitri Shostakovich’s career is the most deeply politicized in Russian music history, perhaps in all music history. Arguably his most politicized composition is his alluring, macabre opera “Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk.”“Lady Macbeth,” which is being revived at the Metropolitan Opera through Oct. 21, was condemned in the Soviet press in 1936, two years after its successful premiere in Leningrad. The opera was performed in that city, now called St. Petersburg, some 50 times in 1934, and it had been presented in Cleveland, New York and Philadelphia, along with Buenos Aires, London, Prague, Stockholm and Zurich. But the hammer came down. Shostakovich was censured by the Stalinist regime and feared for his career, as well as his safety.Or at least that’s how the story goes. But the archives of Moscow’s theaters tell a more interesting tale, I learned, as do fortuitously published documents from Russia’s federal archives and private holdings.“Lady Macbeth” is based on an 1865 story by Nikolai Leskov, as adapted by Shostakovich and Alexander Preys. The title character, a childless merchant’s wife, Katerina Izmailova, lives grimly in a grim burg. (Mtsensk is an actual place near the city of Oryol, known in the 19th century for its crafts. It’s not far from Moscow by Russian standards, less than four hours by train.) To escape her surroundings, and to enact vengeance on her besotted, cheating husband, Katerina takes Sergey, a laborer at a flour mill, as her lover after he sexually assaults her.When the relationship is discovered by her father-in-law, she feeds him poisoned mushrooms. And when her husband discovers his dead father, Katerina and Sergey strangle him. Katerina and Sergey are condemned to a remote penal colony. On the long trek to Siberia, Sergey takes up with another woman, Sonyetka. Katerina subsequently drowns Sonyetka and herself in the Volga River. Things could have been worse: Leskov’s story, unlike Shostakovich’s opera, includes infanticide.Svetlana Sozdateleva, left, and Brandon Jovanovich in the work’s current revival at the Metropolitan Opera in New York.Evan Zimmerman/Metropolitan OperaShostakovich takes Katerina’s side in this ghastliness, pushing his opera beyond the bounds of theatrical convention to make a point about amoral responses to amorality. Lowbrow, “popular” genres represent the opera’s execrable characters. Shostakovich flagrantly abuses these genres to allegorize how most of the men in his opera treat most of the women. Katerina is assigned poignant salon arias and pensive recitatives that bear the contours of folk song. Even she, however, does not escape grotesque caricature. At the end of the first act, she describes her loneliness in a fashion that bears, at the start, elements of the Letter Scene in Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin.” But Katerina can’t read or write, so the point of reference is skewed.Her singing increases in power, morphing from a Romantic mode to unbalanced expressionism undercut by the horrible cancan accompanying her rape. The brass section explodes, the drums attack, the strings squeal, then everything falls apart in postcoital detumescence. The “pornophony,” to quote a critic for The New York Sun who heard the music in 1935, highlights the body’s plumbing: Toilet plungers serve as trombone mutes.Opera is replete with suffering heroines, and one could argue that Katerina avenges not only what she has had to put with, but also what the heroines of the past have had to put up with, setting to rights the bad treatment of her soprano sisters. Whereas, for example, the protagonists of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” and Puccini’s “Tosca” achieve a state of grace through martyrdom, Katerina achieves payback. Spiritual emancipation, Shostakovich insists like a good Soviet, is a bourgeois decadent concept.That message was lost between 1934, when the opera premiered, and 1936, when it was denounced. The trouble for Shostakovich began on Dec. 26, 1935, with a production on the Bolshoi Theater’s second stage. The action unfolded in front of Katerina’s rickety wooden house, with the sloped floors and exterior staircase collapsed into a platform for the final scene. The rape was not shown, only heard. Afterward, Sergey climbed down from the window to find Boris, who beat him senseless. The music was earsplitting, the brass supplemented to fill the 2,100-seat hall.In a special, concrete-reinforced box sat Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the Communist Party and self-declared opera lover. He attended a performance on Jan. 26, 1926, with Vyacheslav Molotov, the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, and two other aides. The din was too much for them. They left before the end.At the same time, another production of “Lady Macbeth” had long been running up the street from the Bolshoi at the Nemirovich-Danchenko Theater. This production took the name of the heroine: “Katerina Izmailova.” The staging was tightly choreographed and highly claustrophobic, defined by low ceilings, heavy furniture, handmade wallpaper, dark rugs, bricks, mortar and grime. The final scene bunched up a group of convicts in bedraggled derangement, some looking menacing, others injured and hopeless. According to the theater’s lore, Stalin was supposed to have taken in this more restrained, cerebral production, but his chauffeur took him to the Bolshoi instead, since that’s where Stalin typically heard opera.A calculated takedown of the opera in the press centered on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” via Nemirovich-Danchenko TheaterStalin relied on culture, along with the secret police and prison camps, to enforce his rule. Music let him down, however. It had become too discordant, experimental and inaccessible. At the end of 1935, Stalin authorized the establishment of an organization called the Committee on Arts Affairs. It was led by Platon Kerzhentsev, a 54-year-old career propagandist, censor and Lenin hagiographer. Kerzhentsev’s task was to correct culture, which meant correcting the top composer in the land of the Soviets: Shostakovich.On Jan. 28 and Feb. 6, 1936, Shostakovich was the subject of a pair of unsigned reviews — not editorials, as is often claimed — published in Pravda, the Communist Party newspaper. One concerned “Lady Macbeth,” the other “The Bright Stream,” a ballet that Stalin had seen just before the opera. (The famous title of the first of the reviews, “Muddle Instead of Music,” was a Pravda meme, followed by a blasting of a children’s artist called “Scribbles Instead of Drawings.”)Their author was an opportunistic journalist named David Zaslavsky, a former bundist (Jewish socialist political movement member) eager to demonstrate fealty to the Party and to Stalin. Shostakovich knew him and probably found out that he had written the reviews. Zaslavsky used what he was paid for them to settle his Communist Party membership dues.When Stalin exited the Bolshoi performance of the opera in disgust, Kerzhentsev launched an arrow at his rival Alexander Shcherbakov, the first secretary of the Union of Soviet Writers. Shcherbakov had praised the original Leningrad production of “Lady Macbeth” in a letter to Stalin. Stalin redirected that letter to Kerzhentsev, whose arrow struck Shostakovich.Zaslavsky’s takedown of “Lady Macbeth” is vulgarly imaginative, centering on Shostakovich’s desire to “tickle the perverted tastes of bourgeois audiences with its twitching, screeching, neurasthenic music.” It “quacks, hoots, pants and gasps for breath in order to present the love scenes as naturalistically as possible.” And “‘love,’” Zaslavsky added, “is smeared throughout the opera in its most vulgar form.”There are no love scenes, and the circuslike music of the Act I sexual assault is musically linked to the score’s other episodes of brutality, something Zaslavsky neglected to mention in his condemnation. Nor did he mention that “bourgeois audiences” in the United States did not hear all of the panting. It was censored, and, to accommodate conservative critics like Ruth Knowles of the Clean Amusement Association of America, the boudoir scene was concealed behind a curtain.For Stalin, Zaslavsky served his intended purpose. “Yes, I remember the article in Pravda,” he told a cultural official. “It gave the correct policy.” The journal of the Union of Soviet Composers scrambled to reprint Zaslavsky’s articles and devoted several issues to shaming Shostakovich for his “leftism.”There are conflicting accounts of Shostakovich’s reaction to the scandal. Before, Bolshoi dancers remembered him playing through the score of “The Bright Stream,” laughing like a child. After, he turned up at the theater looking for his score in a panic saying he’d do “everything they want me to.” He was frightened, but he also seemed to be offended, for himself and for Russia, hurt that his art had now to be somehow like Pravda itself — that opera, ballet and the other arts had to read in black and white.Levon Atovmyan, a Composers’ Union functionary, once recalled Shostakovich leaving Moscow on the day the scandal broke to perform a concert in Arkhangelsk. The composer received a standing ovation, then headed back to Moscow, getting drunk and playing blackjack on the train. Atovmyan’s account dispels a couple of myths, one being that the opera was banned. It wasn’t. The performance Stalin saw, the fourth in the Bolshoi run, was followed by three more on Jan. 31, Feb. 4, and Feb. 10, 1936. Then the run ended.Another myth is that Shostakovich disavowed opera. “Lady Macbeth” had indeed been conceived as the first of four operas about heroic Russian women. He went back to that plan but put it aside to begin an opera based on Leo Tolstoy’s final novel, “Resurrection.” By that time, in 1940, he had composed himself out of trouble with his Fifth Symphony, which the Soviet musical establishment praised on command. Shostakovich was too valuable to the regime to be silenced.He loved “Lady Macbeth” more than anything he composed before or after it. He dedicated it to his first wife, and it was one of only two compositions that he took with him when he was evacuated out of Leningrad at the start of World War II. He revised it in 1962 under the name “Katerina Izmailova,” excising some of the ghastliness, and it returned to the Soviet stage. Not all of the changes were a response to political demands; some reflected his matured personal attitude toward the drama.“Lady Macbeth” survived a period in which culture became the very thing that its heroine so shockingly resisted: mind-numbing, repressive parochialism. In the final scene of the revised version, after Katerina hurls herself and her rival Sonyetka into the dark waters of the Volga, a convict mutters: “Oh, why is our life so dark, terrible? Are people really born for such a life?” It’s a question for the ages.Simon Morrison teaches at Princeton University. He writes about Russian music, ballet and Stevie Nicks. More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Music

      When Ukrainian Music Wasn’t Under Threat, It Thrived

      by

      For a brief period in the early 20th century, Ukrainian composers put a national twist on modernism, free from Russian or Soviet regulation.In late March, a month after his invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, decried what he called “the West’s Russophobia.”Laying the blame on an encroachment of so-called cancel culture and sanctions imposed in response to the war, he claimed that Western countries were “attempting to erase a thousand years of culture” in Russia. To support his dubious claims, Putin pointed to instances of Western European and American orchestras dropping performances of works by Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich and Rachmaninoff — even though many of these composers are hardly wanting for attention on the world’s biggest stages.Since the invasion began, the question of whether to perform music by Russian composers in the shadow of Putin’s war has been debated, with arguments both in favor of and against cancellations. Yet for some Ukrainians, these discussions miss the point.As one Ukrainian online petition argued, the history of composers like Shostakovich, who was censured by the Soviet musical apparatus, has long overshadowed parallel — and often more violent — repressions against Ukrainian composers. Under the Czar, and then later the Soviet regime, Ukraine’s robust and diverse musical traditions — including Cossack songs and Romani music — were heavily regulated (and, at times, censored entirely) by the authorities. More recently, Putin has outright denied the existence of a unique Ukrainian culture.For a brief period of time in the early 20th century, however, Ukrainian composers enjoyed a dearth of regulatory oversight from Russian or Soviet powers. Between the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the Stalinist repressions of the 1930s, the city of Kyiv was a hotbed for modernist music and experimentation — often, with a particularly Ukrainian twist.Mykola LysenkoAlamyUkrainian composers at the turn of the century, many of them rooted in the Russian Orthodox choral tradition, wrote more for choir than any other ensemble. Mykola Lysenko (1842-1912), who earned the title of “father of Ukrainian music,” spent the first several decades of his professional life collecting and arranging Ukrainian folk songs, many of which he later incorporated into his original compositions. His choral works helped to forge a distinctly Ukrainian sound. Some — such as “Prayer for Ukraine,” which the Ukrainian Chorus Dumka of New York performed on “Saturday Night Live” shortly after the start of the Russian invasion — gained prominence in both religious and civic spheres. And his output provided the foundation for Ukrainian musical education in the years to come.Church vocal traditions, said Liuba Morozova, a music critic and the artistic director of the Kyiv Symphony Orchestra, helped in uniting Ukrainian composition under a national banner in the early 20th century. “Choral culture,” she explained, “was given an important place by both the Ukrainian People’s Republic” — an independent country that existed from 1917-20 — “and the Soviet government in the 1920s.”It was a student of Lysenko’s, however, who made the biggest impression in Kyiv’s choral scene. Mykola Leontovych, born in Vinnytsia in 1877, picked up where his teacher left off by setting a cappella folk songs and drawing from national forms of poetry and prose. Through imitation, counterpoint and attentive orchestration, Leontovych brought the sounds of the Ukrainian nation to a broader public. His most popular arrangement, “Shchedryk” (1912), is better known to Anglophone audiences as the “Carol of the Bells,” but his settings of 19th-century poems by Taras Shevchenko show a deep understanding for vocal timbre and color.Leontovych’s more dramatic works emulated the tradition of the Kobzars, the Ukrainian bards and history bearers who accompanied themselves on the bandura, a multistringed plucked instrument similar to a zither. Kobzars, the ethnomusicologist Maria Sonevytsky said in a phone interview, constituted some of the earliest experiments in Ukrainian musical sovereignty. Their poetry brought Ukraine’s past into dialogue with its present, and as such posed an ideological challenge to Russian colonial power.Their national identity was lost on neither the Czar nor the Soviets, both of whom regulated the genre extensively. By the 1930s, the Stalinist regime had carried out mass executions of bandura players throughout the country. At the end of the preceding decade, Sonevytsky said, there were at least 300 bandurists registered in Ukraine. After 1936, there were four.KobzarsDenys Savchenko/AlamyLeontovych also paid the ultimate price for his patriotism. In January 1921, he was shot in his sleep by the Soviet secret police.His death, however, did little to scare others in Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, into submission. In the wake of his murder, the city’s musical community gathered to form a society in his honor. The Leontovych Musical Society, organized less than two weeks after his murder, brought together composers, musicians, critics and folklorists to explore a specifically Ukrainian style of the modernism in vogue across Western Europe at the time. Led by the composer Borys Lyatoshynsky, the society sponsored hundreds of ensembles, pedagogical initiatives and discussions dedicated to Ukrainian music. It provided many of the city’s young composers with an opportunity for aesthetic and ideological experimentation.The music that came out of the Leontovych Society during its seven-year existence was inventive and provocative. With intense orchestration and complex harmonies, Lyatoshynsky’s music drew on the modernism of composers like Bartok and Berg while incorporating national idioms. His Second String Quartet, composed in 1922, is a 25-minute work that draws on atonal harmonies, extended techniques and miniature leitmotifs to trace a dramatic trajectory from a wall of sound to a crooked folk dance. Levko Revutsky, another composer with the society, fused traditional melodies with innovations in craft — such as in his Second Symphony, from 1927, which sets folk songs into dialogue with sweeping, impressionistic harmonies. It won first place that year in the society’s competition to honor the 10th anniversary of the October Revolution.Mykola LeontovychAlamyIn collaborating with visual artists, writers, academics and directors, the Leontovych Society joined a robust experimental scene in Kyiv. Among those who worked with the composers was Les Kurbas, a film and stage director whose Berezil Theater, founded in 1922, staged ambitious plays from around the world in abstract multimedia productions. For Kurbas, music was the linchpin for his synthetic art, which used rhythm and melody as a sort of pace-keeper for the action onstage. Berezil drew hundreds of partners and admirers from across the Soviet Union.How the Ukraine War Is Affecting the Cultural WorldCard 1 of 6Gavriel Heine. More

    • 138 Shares99 Views

      in Television

      Mikhail Vasenkov Dies at 79; His Spy Ring Inspired ‘The Americans’

      by

      He and his wife were among 10 Soviet sleeper agents who blended into American society before being exposed and deported in 2010. The TV series sprung from the episode.Mikhail Vasenkov, the most senior of 10 Soviet sleeper agents who posed as ordinary citizens in the United States as they scouted potential recruits, and whose mass arrest and deportation in 2010 inspired the TV series “The Americans,” died on April 6. He was 79.His death was announced by the Foreign Intelligence Service of the Russian Federation. The agency did not specify how or where he died, but he was interviewed as recently as December 2020 in Moscow.When they were arrested, Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, a journalist, had been living undercover in a Soviet-owned two-story brick and stucco house in suburban Yonkers, N.Y., since immigrating from her native Peru in 1985.The house in Yonkers, N.Y., where Mr. Vasenkov and his wife, Vicky Pelaez, lived undercover.Daniel Barry for The New York TimesThey and eight others, part of a network of so-called illegals, were rounded up in a multiyear F.B.I. investigation, called Operation Ghost Stories, and pleaded guilty to failing to register as agents of a foreign government. They were then deported, flown to Europe on July 9, 2010, and swapped for four Russians who had been imprisoned in Moscow on charges of spying for the United States and Britain.The arrests of the sleeper agents, including several couples with children and a self-styled New York socialite, Anna Chapman, generated the concept for “The Americans,” which was broadcast on FX beginning in 2013.“That was absolutely the inspiration for the series,” Joe Weisberg, who developed the series with Joel Fields, told Time magazine in 2010.Over six seasons, the drama, set in the 1980s, followed two Soviet undercover agents masquerading as a suburban Washington couple, Elizabeth and Philip Jennings (played by Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys), in a Cold War cat-and-mouse contest with federal agents.A scene from the sixth season of the FX television show “The Americans,” which was inspired by the arrest of Mr. Vasenkov and nine others as spies. From left, Lev Gorn with Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys, who played married Soviet agents at the center of the show. Patrick Harbron/ FXMr. Vasenkov, operating as Juan Lazaro Sr., conducted what sounded more like a cat-and-slouch competition with federal counterintelligence agents. He and Ms. Pelaez didn’t shade their anti-American views, and they apparently neither collected nor delivered any secrets to Moscow.When the spies were rounded up, the F.B.I. said that while “their intent from the start was serious, well-funded by the S.V.R.” — the Soviet intelligence service — “and far-ranging,” they “never got their hands on any classified documents.”Whether for the benefit of eavesdroppers or because he was getting paid regardless, Mr. Vasenkov was recorded by federal agents telling his wife matter-of-factly that his Soviet handlers “say my information is of no value,” adding, “If they don’t like what I tell them, too bad.”He was apparently the first of the Soviet agents to have been compromised, captured on tape as early as 2003 blithely instructing his wife on how to communicate with Moscow.“When you go to Peru, I am going to write in invisible,” he said, according to a transcript, “and you’re going to pass them all of that in a book.” To which Ms. Pelaez replied, “Oh, O.K.”When he was arrested, he told investigators that he “would not violate his loyalty” to the S.V.R. — “even for his son,” a teenager whom he would leave behind when he and his wife were deported.When the 10 agents arrived in Moscow, Vladimir V. Putin, a former K.G.B. agent who was prime minister at the time, greeted them by lustily leading them in patriotic anthems and offering them a “bright life” in Mother Russia with a pension and a monthly stipend.But Mr. Vasenkov, the senior spy among them, said no, thank you. He had not been looking forward to his return. He had not lived in his native Russia for decades (by then he spoke Russian with a Spanish accent), and his wife had never visited the country. And so within weeks of landing in Moscow he decided instead to resume his false identity and return with his wife to Peru.They did, in 2013.In “Deception: Spies, Lies and How Russia Dupes the West” (2012), Edward Lucas wrote that while the infiltration by sleeper agents posed a serious threat to U.S. national security, “it is easy to mock the pointlessness of these people, apparently the least serious of the illegals, sent at vast trouble and expense of a foreign country in order to carry out tasks that most people manage with a mouse click.”Nonetheless, in announcing Mr. Vasenkov’s death, the Russian security agency praised him in an obituary.“At work in special conditions since 1975,” the obituary said, “he created and headed an illegal residency, which obtained valuable political information, which was highly appreciated.”The agency openly identified him as a “former Russian spy and sleeper agent” — a covert infiltrator assigned to scout potential spies, assess vulnerable targets and stand ready to be activated in a crisis even decades later.The S.V.R. said that Mr. Vasenkov had reached mandatory military retirement with the rank of colonel in 2004, without elaborating on why he had remained in New York for six more years before he was betrayed, the agency said, by a Soviet defector.The agency’s announcement listed the medals and other commendations that Mr. Vasenkov had been awarded and characterized him as “a hardworking, honest and modest employee” who had been “prone to work associated with risk” and had shown “will, courage and resourcefulness.”The couple’s son, Juan Lazaro Jr., who was 17 at the time of their arrest and already an accomplished pianist, declined to accompany them back to Russia. He was finishing his studies at Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and Art and Performing Arts in Manhattan at the time. According to a résumé, he later graduated from the Juilliard School and studied at the Mannes School of Music in Manhattan, part of the New School, and still lives in New York.Ms. Pelaez’s stepson from a previous relationship, Waldo Mariscal, an architect who was 38 at the time, also remained in the United States. He now lives in Peru with his mother, according to her lawyer, Carlos Moreno. She and her sons are among Mr. Vasenkov’s survivors, Mr. Moreno said.Mikhail Anatolyevich Vasenkov was born on Oct. 9, 1942, into what his obituary described as a family of workers in Kuntsevo, a town outside Moscow. (Stalin had a dacha there.) The family moved to Siberia some time after the German invasion during World War II.Mikhail graduated from the Moscow Higher Combined Arms Command School. Trained in English and Spanish, he flew from Madrid to Lima in 1976 on a Uruguayan passport under the name of Juan Jose Lazaro Fuentes, an identity he had stolen from a Uruguayan who had died of respiratory failure in 1947 at the age of 3.Described as a freelance news photographer with a black belt in karate, he was granted Peruvian citizenship in 1979. In 1983, “with the sanction” of the spy service, according to the Russian security service, he married Ms. Pelaez, a television reporter.Two years later, they emigrated to the United States, where she went to work as a journalist for the Spanish-language daily newspaper El Diario/La Prensa.Mr. Vasenkov earned a doctorate in political science at the New School, wrote approvingly of the leftist Shining Path guerrilla movement in Peru and, in 2008, taught Latin American and Caribbean politics for a semester as an adjunct professor at Baruch College in Manhattan, part of the City University of New York.Despite the recording of Mr. Vasenkov’s instructions about invisible ink, Ms. Pelaez insisted that she had not known that her husband was a Soviet agent until the arrests. And in interviews, her stepson — who remained loyal to the couple, saying, “We believe in the integrity of our parents”— vouched for her.“My mother barely speaks English,” he said. “She’s going to speak Russian? The only Russian thing my mother likes is vodka.” More

    • 138 Shares199 Views

      in Movies

      ‘The Village Detective: A Song Cycle’ Review: Soviet Film Hero Emerges

      by

      Bill Morrison, the poet laureate of lost films, turns the story of footage found near Iceland into a history of a slice of Soviet cinema.The main title of this movie could be referring to two different people. The first would be Fyodor Ivanovich Aniskin, the avuncular hero of a banal 1969 Soviet film, played by the frequently avuncular actor Mikhail Zharov. Consulting on a case in which a musician, new to his hamlet, complains of a purloined accordion, Aniskin notes that the man does not yet understand the values of their small town.The other “village detective” might be Bill Morrison himself. For Morrison, who is the producer, director and editor of this strangely intoxicating film, is a cinematic investigator of the first stripe. The values of his own corner of film revival place as much emphasis on ruin as on restoration. His astonishing 2017 feature, “Dawson City: Frozen Time,” unearthed an uncanny swatch of buried film history from the end of the line of the Klondike Gold Rush. Other films, like “Decasia” (2002), are audiovisual tone poems reveling in the beautiful rot of old reels in varying states of disrepair.Like “Frozen Time,” “The Village Detective” tells the story of a find. After a preface in which two films featuring Zharov, one from the 1930s and another from the early 1970s, conduct a kind of dialogue with each other, Morrison tells, in onscreen titles, of a 2016 email from a friend, the Icelandic musician and composer Johann Johannsson.On a trip home, Johannsson heard of an Icelandic lobster trawler catching a forgotten film canister in its net. We learn that the canister was picked up on the border of the tectonic plates that hold North America and Europe — the West abutting the East, so to speak. Underneath these plates is molten lava; the hydrogen sulfide emanating from that lava is a very high-quality preservative. Film preservationists in Iceland were practically salivating over the possibilities.What was found, and what we see, in mesmeric images transferred from celluloid that was steeped in mud, was the Soviet movie from 1969, “Derevensky Detektiv,” savaged by critics but a huge popular hit — so much so that Zharov continued to play Aniskin in sequels for the last decade of his career. He died in 1981 at the age of 82.As Morrison demonstrates through exhaustively selected clips, the actor’s story is also a, if not the, story of Soviet cinema. His film debut, as an extra, was in 1915, in a pre-Soviet film about Ivan the Terrible. He appeared in movies by important Soviet directors such as Boris Barnet and V.I. Pudovkin — and by many less important filmmakers. As he grew a bit stout in his thirties, he began to resemble the players of friendly-but-hapless supporting roles in American studio films. He’s got a touch of Alan Hale Sr., you could say.He did some of his best work in Sergei Eisenstein’s “Ivan the Terrible, Part II,” which got its director in hot water with Stalin. And when Zharov’s in-laws were imprisoned as part of the so-called “doctors’ plot” to assassinate Stalin (no such plot existed; the whole affair was an antisemitic fraud), Zharov was ostracized for not denouncing them.Morrison weaves this history into a treatment of Zharov’s 1969 star turn that renders its stodgy corniness poetic. (The accordion-centered score, by David Lang, is essential to this near-alchemical process.) The movie ends on a droll semi-cosmic joke that one expects its dedicatee, Johannsson, who died in 2018, might have appreciated.The Village Detective: A Song CycleNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 21 minutes. In English, with some Russian and Icelandic, subtitled. In theaters. More

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Dramatizing the Chernobyl Disaster, for Its Survivors

      by

      Unlike the recent HBO series, the Russian-language feature film “Chernobyl 1986,” now on Netflix, explores the human toll of the power plant explosion.CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — In April 1986, Alexander Rodnyansky was a young documentary filmmaker living in Kyiv. When the fourth reactor of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Station exploded 60 miles north of the Ukrainian capital, most citizens of the Soviet Union were not informed. It took the government 18 days to share exactly what had happened, but Rodnyansky had been filming the disaster zone from the day after the catastrophe.What he witnessed in Chernobyl after the explosion — and the Soviet government’s bungled response to it — has obsessed him ever since.“It was probably one of the most important events of Soviet history and my own personal history,” Rodnyansky said in a telephone interview.Rodnyansky went on to become an award-winning director, producer and television executive. His career-long ambition to make a feature film about Chernobyl came to pass this year with the release of “Chernobyl 1986,” a historical drama that he was adamant should focus on the lives of the people, known as “liquidators,” who prevented the fire from spreading to the other reactors and thus avoided an even bigger disaster.An aerial view of the Chernobyl plant on April 26, 1986, showing damage from the explosion and fire.Volodymyr Repik/Associated Press“Chernobyl 1986” emphasizes the role of the individual, people’s personal heroism and dedication to a higher cause.Non-Stop ProductionThe film, which recently arrived on Netflix in the U.S., comes on the heels of the 2019 critically acclaimed HBO mini-series “Chernobyl,” which critics praised for its focus on the failures of the Soviet system.“Chernobyl 1986,” which was partly funded by the Russian state, has received some criticism within Russia and Ukraine for not emphasizing the government missteps to the same extent. But Rodnyansky said that doing so was never his intention. When he watched the HBO series — twice — his film was already in production, and he wanted it to focus on the people directly affected by the disaster.“For years people spoke about what really happened there, especially after the Soviet Union broke up and the media were absolutely free,” Rodnyansky said, adding that most people understand that what had happened at Chernobyl was a failure of the Soviet system. Everyone involved in the disaster was a victim, he said — “they were hostages of that system.”Whereas the HBO approach was to dissect systemic flaws in the Soviet system that led to the disaster, the Russian film does something familiar to the country’s cultural tradition: emphasizing the role of the individual, people’s personal heroism and dedication to a higher cause.Before the disaster, Rodnyansky had been “living quite a stable life, and then something happened that made me think about the system which doesn’t allow people to know about the disaster that can kill hundreds of thousands — that is not a fair system,” he said, referring to the government’s silence immediately after the explosion.Thirty-five years later, Rodnyansky said it was clear that the Chernobyl explosion was one of the major events that led to the breakup of the Soviet Union. It “changed the perception of life, the system and the country,” he said, making “many Ukrainians, if not the majority, think about the responsibility of Moscow and the need for Ukraine to be independent.”Today, the power plant site has fewer than 2,000 workers who maintain a giant sarcophagus placed over the site to ensure that no nuclear waste is released. This month, Ukraine will celebrate the 30th anniversary of its independence from the Soviet Union. The anniversary comes as the country tries to protect itself against Russia after Moscow’s 2014 annexation of Crimea and its support for separatist militants in Ukraine’s east.Although making this film had special resonance for Rodnyansky, he has taken on epic historical films before: He produced the 2013 movie “Stalingrad,” a love story set in the World War II battle of the same name, as well as “Leviathan,” which won best screenplay in Cannes in 2014.In 2015, he got the script for “Chernobyl 1986” and sent it to Danila Kozlovsky, a prominent director and actor who was then on the set of the film “Vikings.”The film’s Danila Kozlovsky, center, said that “it was important not to make just another pseudo-documentary feature film.” Non-Stop ProductionOlga (Oksana Akinshina) and Aleksei (Danila Kozlovsky) in “Chernobyl 1986.”Non-Stop ProductionKozlovsky, who was born the year before the nuclear disaster, was initially dismissive. But he said in a telephone interview that the more he read the script, “the more I understood that this was an incredible event that influenced the history of our country, which is still a rather complex topic.”In the film, he plays the protagonist, Aleksei, a firefighter and bon vivant. Upon encountering a former girlfriend in Pripyat, where most people working in the Chernobyl plant lived, Aleksei finds out that he has a 10-year-old son. Though he is interested in his son and ex-partner, he makes promises he doesn’t keep until he and his fellow firefighters are thrust into the horror and devastation of the explosion.“For me it was important not to make just another pseudo-documentary feature film,” the actor said, but to tell the story of “how this catastrophe burst into the life of an ordinary family.”Kozlovsky said he had spent a year meeting former liquidators and people displaced from the Chernobyl region to prepare for the role. In a sign of the political change in the former Soviet state since the disaster, Kozlovsky was unable to visit the protected 1,000-square-mile Chernobyl exclusion zone, where the reactors and the abandoned city of Pripyat are, he said, because Russian men of military age are restricted from entering Ukraine amid the countries’ ongoing conflict.The movie, which is dedicated to the liquidators, has struck a chord for some people who survived the efforts to prevent further explosions and then to clean up the radiation-affected area. An estimated 240,000 people were involved in the cleanup in 1986 and 1987, according to the World Health Organization.Oleg Ivanovich Genrikh was one of those people. He was working in the fourth reactor when it exploded, and today he regularly appears in documentaries and speaks to student groups to ensure that younger people understand the gravity of what happened.Now 62, he said he was pleased that the new Russian-made drama explored the disaster through the lens of the experience of one of the people to arrive at the catastrophe.Oleg Ivanovic Genrikh, who was working on the fourth reactor when it exploded, in front of the monument to “liquidators” in Chernobyl.“What is important is that the film shows the fate of a person who showed his love for and his dedication to his profession,” he said in a telephone interview, remembering the way he fought to contain the fires not only because of the environmental crisis that could result, but also because his wife and two young daughters were living nearby.“I know for sure that that night we did everything so that our city, which was three kilometers from our station, would be protected,” he said. “And we understood that our families, our loved ones, our children, were at risk.”Ivan Nechepurenko More

    • 100 Shares99 Views

      in Movies

      ‘What We Left Unfinished’ Review: Spectres of History

      by

      For her first feature documentary, Mariam Ghani dug up five unfinished movies from the Communist era in Afghanistan.In “What We Left Unfinished,” five movies started and then abandoned during Afghanistan’s Communist era, between 1978 and 1992, form a dazzling time capsule of the nation’s political and cultural history. The director Mariam Ghani — the daughter of Afghanistan’s current president, Ashraf Ghani — digs into the archives of Afghan Film, a state-run company that endured the whims and demands of various regimes before the Taliban destroyed most of its holdings in the 1990s.Culled from the remnants of the company’s collections, the films Ghani remixes in “What We Left Unfinished” bear the traces of successive political upheavals. “The April Revolution” (1978), for instance, was commissioned by Hafizullah Amin, who became Afghanistan’s president in a 1979 coup. When the Soviets assassinated him months later in a takeover, the film had to be shut down.
      In interviews, the filmmakers and actors involved in these movies recall their struggles with strict ideological dictates and censorship, but also the generous resources that propaganda-hungry governments lavished on them. The snippets we see are beautifully lit and produced — some feature big explosions and shootouts involving real soldiers wielding real Kalashnikovs.“What We Left Unfinished” doesn’t dwell too much on the nuts and bolts of the making of these films, which is a pity, because they offer tantalizing glimpses into a cinematic culture whose formal ambitions seem to have been unstinted — and perhaps even encouraged — by political pressures. But Ghani’s mode is less interrogative than associative. Her montage of film fragments illustrates and sometimes poetically belies the interviewees’ recollections, evoking the ambiguous and unresolved contours of collective memory.What We Left UnfinishedNot rated. In English and Dari, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 11 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

    • 88 Shares129 Views

      in Movies

      ‘State Funeral’ Review: Saying Goodbye to Stalin

      by

      Sergei Loznitsa’s new found-footage documentary illuminates Soviet life in the immediate aftermath of the dictator’s death.Joseph Stalin died on March 5, 1953. “State Funeral,” the Ukrainian director Sergei Loznitsa’s fascinating and elusive new documentary, shows what happened in the next few days, as Stalin’s body lay in state at the Hall of Unions in Moscow before being transferred to the Lenin mausoleum. (It was removed eight years later, but that’s another story).Composed entirely of footage shot at the time in various parts of the Soviet Union, the film is a haunting amalgam of official pomp and everyday experience, the double image of a totalitarian government and the people in whose name it ruled.At the beginning, crowds gather to hear news of the dictator’s death, read out in stately, somber tones over loudspeakers. Those broadcasts, which continue as the masses shuffle past Stalin’s wreath-laden coffin, supply an abstract, rose-colored interpretation of his life amid frequent invocations of his immortality. His subjects — his comrades, in the idiom of the time — are reminded of his undying love for them, as well as of his “selflessness,” his courage and his monumental intelligence. He was, among other accomplishments, “the greatest genius in human history.”This kind of rhetoric is evidence of the cult of personality that would be disavowed a few years later when Nikita Khrushchev came to power and undertook a program of de-Stalinization. “State Funeral” captures the official manifestations of that cult, including the gigantic portraits of Stalin hanging from public buildings and the arrival of delegations from other communist countries. Fulsome elegies are delivered by the distinctly uncharismatic men who — briefly, as it turned out — took Stalin’s place: Georgy Malenkov, Vyacheslav Molotov and Lavrenti Beria. (Khrushchev, who would shortly kick them out, serves as master of ceremonies).But Stalin’s famous visage, with its bushy mustache and sweptback hair, is upstaged by the throngs of ordinary citizens who gather to bear witness and pay tribute. The anonymous camera operators, shooting in color and in black and white in far-flung shipyards, factories, oil fields and collective farms, are Loznitsa’s vital collaborators. Intentionally or not, they gathered images that complicate and to some extent subvert the somber, emptied-out language of the regime, disclosing a complicated human reality beneath the ideological boilerplate.It’s the parade of ordinary Soviets that makes “State Funeral” both moving and unnerving. It is hard not to be touched by the tears shed by grandmothers, soldiers, old men in fur hats and bareheaded young women, even though they are mourning a monster. Other responses are harder to read. Does that steady, unsmiling gaze signify stoicism or defiance? Is that faint smile an expression of relief? Of gratitude? Of terror? When someone looks directly into the camera, do the eyes register suspicion or solidarity?A brief note at the end of the film reminds the viewer of Stalin’s crimes against his own people — the tens of millions purged, imprisoned, starved and slaughtered. That knowledge sits uncomfortably with what has come before, not because the leaden language of the scripted obsequies is persuasive, but because the grieving citizens are so real. In their variety and particularity, these people don’t seem to belong to a distant place and time. They seem entirely modern and familiar.Which can be taken as a warning: Any population can be swayed and subjugated by tyranny. They could be us. But the tone of “State Funeral” is more meditative than admonitory. It contemplates the Soviet state at almost the exact midpoint of its existence, illuminating the faces of those who lived there and at the same time reckoning with the dead weight of history.State FuneralNot rated. In Russian, with subtitles. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes. At Film Forum. Please consult the guidelines outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention before watching movies inside theaters. More