One of my favorite movies of all time is Kin Dza Dza. It's a low budget comedy sci-fi movie with amazing ideas and a surreal aesthetic, and is quite funny and gets better with each watch. It's a subtle criticism of the soviet union in the era before its fall. You'll be saying "Kuuuu" for days after watching it.
One of my favorite films too! I saw it first on soviet TV, and found it amazing that all characters seems so human, naturalistic; and the world building is so organic. There are no flaws in this movie, everything just hangs together so well and effortlessly.
I second this recommendation. Kin-dza-dza! is a brilliant Soviet-era film of surreal social criticism and satire. I believe it must have had quite an influence on western film makers over the years.
i second this. i was looking for a well translated version to be able to share it with my english speaking friends, but the official translations do not seem to convey the idiosyncratic language that is used in the movie.
If the translations are losing a lot of meaning, then that just shows how great the movie is, because my native English speaking friends and I love it.
Among the Russian films with a strong political innuendo I've seen, "Welcome, no trespassing" was the sharpest and one of the most enjoyable. It's about a scout camp where the the director oppresses the children with stupid formal procedures, patriotic ceremonies, and abuses of power. I could not understand why this film was allowed, since the camp is an obvious metaphor of the USSR.
I'm also surprised one of the most famous Russian comedies, Sauna Blues, was not in this article. Even more since its main actor died this year. Sauna blues is a funny romance, yet it depicts Russian cities were buildings and furniture are similar and spiritless, so much that people can't recognize their apartment or their street.
Production started during an era that was a slight relaxing of censorship in general in the USSR. Obviously any criticism of the Soviet system, law, government, policy, leaders, etc. was absolutely right out, but you do start to see hints of social criticism in that era. There are a rash of novels in the late 50s and 60s in that style.
In fact, just the year before, Krushchev had personally ordered the publication of One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich, which is also quite hard to believe got published in Soviet times, even with redactions. The leash was pulled short again not long after that!
Anyway, legend has it that Krushchev also got a preview of "Welcome, or No Trespassing" and liked it. So he ordered it immediately released. I don't know if that's true, but it certainly could be.
Khrushchev may have intended for the people to view this as life under his predecessors. He did believe Stalin's reign had been problematic and probably saw himself as ushering in something new. From Wikipedia[0]:
> Khrushchev believed that once the stain of Stalinism was removed, the Party would inspire loyalty among the people.[129] Beginning in October 1955, Khrushchev fought to tell the delegates to the upcoming 20th Party Congress about Stalin's crimes. Some of his colleagues, including Molotov and Malenkov, opposed the disclosure and managed to persuade him to make his remarks in a closed session.
> […]
> Khrushchev told the delegates:
> "It is here that Stalin showed in a whole series of cases his intolerance, his brutality, and his abuse of power ... he often chose the path of repression and physical annihilation, not only against actual enemies but also against individuals who had not committed any crimes against the party or the Soviet Government."
Sounds to me like someone who expected to be seen as ushering in a brighter future. I don't expect he would have allowed the film's release if he expected people to equate it with his own leadership. But that's just a guess.
>Khrushchev may have intended for the people to view this as life under his predecessors. He did believe Stalin's reign had been problematic and probably saw himself as ushering in something new
I don't think it was just his self-image, I think I recall reading about the Cultural Revolution in China, and how some people there (Mao?) saw Khrushchev as kind of having betrayed the true path or whatever.
Allegories were pretty safe in the USSR. The problem with censoring an allegory is that to recognize it as an anti-soviet one is also to confirm the existance of the subject it's exposing. When the official stance is "there is no such thing" you'd be risking an "anti-soviet propaganda" charge yourself.
Edit:
The most clear example I can recall is the "Alexander Nevskiy" film (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0029850/). It's a historical drama about the early Russia's struggle against foreign invasions. The titular character makes a Bible reference at one point ("Who will come at us with the sword will die by the sword" referencing Mat 26:52) but since it's not a direct quote, somebody censoring this would have to admit reading the Bible and would be in danger oneself. So the quote remained in the film and most people recognize the reference.
>I could not understand why this film was allowed, since the camp is an obvious metaphor of the USSR.
there are couple of aspects here:
- the movie was allowed by Khruschev who had [to a significant degree] dismantled the "Gulag regime" of Stalin, so one could make a case at the time that the movie was a metaphor of that dismantled regime
- there is a kind of political poker with censorship - who the first would associate the satire work with a sensitive political metaphor. If the artist doesn't do it directly themselves, then it is the censors who should declare that they see say a USSR in such a grotesque work, and that would expose the censors' own disrespect of the USSR. It is better described by the joke from the time:
Stalin (who had a prominent mustache) orders to the great [in USSR WWII history view] Marshal (4-star general) Zhukov an impossible task : "Take the city by tomorrow morning!". Marshal Zhukov leaving the meeting mutters in frustration: "F-king ass with a mustache!" The KGB chief Beria overhears it and reports about it to Stalin. Stalin calls Zhukov back and asks whom Zhukov had in mind when saying that. Zhukov answers : "I had Hitler in mind of course!". Stalin turns to Beria and asks "And whom did you have in mind?"
Soviets != Russia, yes the USSR was sort of a new iteration of The Russian Empire, but you can't call armenians, ukrainians, georgians and so on russians this simply wrong
There are infinitely less difference between Russians, Ukrainians and Belorussians than, for example, between those Americans who live in California and Texas.
Californian and Texan accents might be mutually incomprehensible, but they' re not completely different languages like Ukrainian, Russian, and Belorussian.
If you grew up in Ukraine you grew up around speakers of both Russian and Ukrainian and so learned both languages. You’re now confusing your knowing of two languages for innate properties of those languages.
This is not the case at all. Russian speakers can understand stock Ukrainian phrases used in jokes and the Ukrainian-Russian mixed language known as surzhyk, but when Russians are presented with samples of purer Ukrainian, like Shevchenko's poetry, intelligibility drops significantly.
These languages have similar grammar, because they all have evolved from Old Church Slavonic, but Russian had different path of evolution, where it has gained a lot of Turkic vocabulary among others.
I know Russian on native level and have visited friends in Lviv. Sure it is possible for me with Russian language to understand some things and with what I know it would be very easy to LEARN Ukrainian, but I don't live among Ukrainians, so I can't understand 90% of anything when I am watching something on yt when Urainians start to talk in moiva. I think, that there is a bigger chance for Polish people to understand Ukrainians, that for speakers of Russian.
It looks like your observation applies to Russians, who are already living in Ukraine and have some grasp of Ukrainian.
They didn't evolve from Old Church Slavonic. OCS was an artificial South Slavic literary standard based on the language from around Thessaloniki, as spoken by Cyrill and Methodius's mission. Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian are East Slavic languages, a different branch of the family. Indeed, they all have a common ancestor in Proto-Slavic, but the relationship of Russian etc. and OCS is one of cousins, not parent-child.
1. Russians do not have common ancestry in Proto-Slavic, because ancestors of Rus people in majority did not even speak Slavic languages, but Baltic, and Finnic languages - Rus themselves initially spoke Scandinavian. Poland and NW area of Ukraine is place where Proto-Slavioc originated. Do your math.
Бере-менна can not even be explained by Slavic language, or Proto... Baltic, but it can be explained by Swedish language, where bear-men was clear purpose of Rus women.
2. All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic - very similar to Russian(and possibly others that were known as Ruthenian, but I have no knowledge of Ukrainian, Belorussian or Rusyn to judge that).
3. You and me are not going to decide the classification of languages, that are based purely on geographic distribution or in case of Rus languages(or as they are known to others - East Slavic) - common history being part of one nation and not based on similar ancestry.
Please pick up a basic introductory textbook to the history of the Slavic languages. Your understanding of the relationship between them is very mistaken. If you want to read in Russian, I can recommend К. А. Войлова’s Старославянский язык, which describes not only what Old Church Slavonic is, but also the family tree of the Slavic languages in general and how Russian, Belarusian and Ukrainian are not a direct descendant of Old Church Slavonic. If you want to read in English, Alexander Schenker’s The Dawn of Slavic covers much of the same ground in an accessible fashion.
> Russians do not have common ancestry in Proto-Slavic, because ancestors of Rus people in majority did not even speak Slavic languages
When historical-comparative linguists say "common ancestry", they mean common linguistic ancestry, not the genetic ancestry of the Slavic languages' speakers.
> All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic
This is not the case. The Novgorod birchbark letters that were excavated over the 20th century attest some early East Slavic, noticeably different from the Old Church Slavonic language that was borrowed into Russia/Belarus/Ukraine around the same time as a literary standard after the christianization of the region.
> You and me are not going to decide the classification of languages, that are based purely on geographic distribution
The distinctions "West Slavic", "East Slavic" and "South Slavic" aren't actually based on the geographic distribution. Rather, they are based on the isoglosses that set the Slavic languages apart from one another. The terms "East/West/South" for the basic post-Proto-Slavic isoglosses are used only because those isoglosses map roughly with those cardinal directions. Again, this is something covered in any basic textbook.
> Бере-менна can not even be explained by Slavic language, or Proto... Baltic, but it can be explained by Swedish language, where bear-men was clear purpose of Rus women.
No, беременна is a native Slavic word and not a Swedish borrowing; it goes back to the same root as беру. If it looks similar to a Swedish word, this is only because the Slavic languages and the Germanic languages both inherited the same Proto-Indo-European word. A detailed etymology for the Russian word can be found in Vasmer under the headword *беремя*.
After taking a quick glance on the book of К. А. Войлова "Старославянский язык" nothing really contradicts what I posted before about Old Church Slavonic place in creation of Russian. Also, if you are presenting your source it is up to you to quote where Russian is not descendant from Old Church Slavonic, to disprove me - I have no obligation whatsoever to comb whole book and make something up that proves your point.
I had a different - more recent source that I read from Russian linguist(my memory is bad on names), where he discussed Old Church Slavonic and how it replaced most of local languages as a base to Russian and other modern East Slavic languages.
Also I think you are confused about these terms in English, where
Old Church Slavonic == Старославянский язык
Church Slavonic == Церковнославя́нский язы́к
>The Novgorod birchbark letters that were excavated over the 20th century attest some early East Slavic, noticeably different from the Old Church Slavonic language
That is correct, however what I wrote was completelly different: "All the survived early written texts of Rus are in Old Church Slavonic."
Besides, they were neither early East Slavonic or even classified as modern East Slavic and they are not directly related to Russian as well. Many of those Slavic can be classified as early Western Slavic at best.
>No, беременна is a native Slavic word and not a Swedish borrowing
It seems, that I was wrong in this one(as pregnancy in most of Slavic languages use different word, but I did not search further, where Bulgarians use similar word for pregnancy). Sadly, that also means that Old Church Slavonic replaced everything else.
"Democracy" in which the president has closed 3 popular TV channels with a single executive order, applies sanctions against leader of the second largest political party, and has tried to pass a clearly unconstitutional law to disband the сonstitutional сourt. "Democracy" in which the main security agency uses far-right nationalist forces to terrorize opponents [0] and fabricates a moronic political case [1] against a blogger who dares to harshly criticize the president and who is a leader of a rising political party.
"War with Russia" in which Ukrainian citizens fight against Ukrainian citizens. If you don't trust my word, just look at the lists of the latest prisoner swaps, not a single Russian citizen there. The war which has started with clearly unconstitutional use of military forces against its own citizens and in which the freshly installed government has targeted administrative buildings in the center of Lugansk with no armed rebels in it using a military plane (they have tried to launch a stupid fake about an exploded AC, but recently they have officially confirmed that it was indeed a warplane target).
Note that I do not deny Russian involvement in the Ukrainian civil war, but you do not call the Syrian civil war a "Syria-American war", do you? Foreign involvement in civil wars is more of a rule, not an exception.
The funny thing is that I'm from Luhansk and you are just parroting russian propaganda, Russia lost control over Ukraine when Yanukovich had run away, and at first annexed Crimea and then started a war in eastern Ukraine, Girkin (Strelkov) himself takes responsibility of starting the war who is russian, but his just a Kremlin's puppet. Anyway, please, stop spreading russian propaganda
It's funny that two people has claimed that I spread Russian propaganda, but none of you have even tried to deny the facts presented in my comment. If you are indeed from Luhansk, then you should know that everything I've said is factually true and you simply can not argue against it.
>Girkin (Strelkov) himself takes responsibility of starting the war who is russian
While he indeed played a big role in the uprising (though I think he tends to oversell his role), the cause was strongly supported by simple folk. (Don't forget about the last line in my previous comment.) The videos from the early stages with simple people blocking unconstitutionally deployed military forces is a good supporting evidence for this statement. You can call them "brainwashed by Russian propaganda" all you want, but it does not change the fact.
> It's funny that two people has claimed that I spread Russian propaganda, but none of you have even tried to deny the facts presented in my comment.
I see the following reasons: political discussions can be extremely long, and in any case are frowned upon here, and the chance of finding irrational stubbornness for this subject even here is high. So... we're agreeing to disagree then.
>But you can't overcome the truth no matter how loud you scream.
Then argue what exactly is not true in my previous comment, not simply yell loudly about me spreading "Russian propaganda". Everything I wrote can be easily verified and fact checked. If you can not do that, then it's you, not me who got blinded by a propaganda machine.
Actually, someone from San Francisco would have no trouble in moving to Austin. That same Californian moving to, say, Salinas (that’s in California) would be more of a culture shock
Growing up in the USSR I always been fascinated by how only a few of soviet writers/comedians/directors were allowed some level of freedom while the rest had to stay true to the party propaganda lines. Obviously, these few were most appreciated.
It was just easier to do some kind of a propaganda film. No risk, no reshoots, no script rewrites, just stamp it out and make a little bit of money and a trip to Yugoslavia and a black sea vacation.
My theory is that the elites needed entertainment too. I am judging by the flood of previously unknown art during perestroika. Those books, movies, and the rest took years of work to develop. They didn’t just appear out of thin air after Gorbachev declared glasnost
I wish some soviet era standup comedian material was translatable to English. The jokes were layered in the way that made them funny, even to people who only grasped the surface layer.
"Yesterday those lobsters were so big, really big, but sold for 5 roubles each. But today they are so small, pretty small, but sell for only 3 roubles. Should I have bought yesterday? Should I buy today? I have a frog..."
One of the really good humoral references to Soviet cliches is "Lord of the Rings", translated by Goblin (e.g. here - https://oper.ru/trans/view.php?t=1039986472 ). Imagine Tolkien's heroes played by a sort of lumpen, with snippets of classical Soviet tunes, including patriotic ones, quotes from blockbuster Soviet movies, political jokes etc. - same video, but very different sound. It's a treasure trove of references, but pretty hard to appreciate to someone not familiar with culture. Every significant nation has their own stories of old which everybody knows, which helps people get together. And it's hard to enjoy to outsiders.
Last one is something you'd see every new years eve. (spoiler here) It uncovers a stupidity of cities in the USSR, when those were identical up to a street name.
My mom and dad would probably come up with a slightly different list of their favorites, nonetheless they would agree these can be called "true" classics.
The important bit to remember here is that all of that production was going through "checks" to make sure there are no anti-communist ideas in the movies. Creators had to either be very careful to disguise some of the sentiment or not to have it.
At the end of the day people were not idiots and understood the role of the government. We all had someone close who was a survivor from gulag or a returning labor camp prisoner or a displaced individual with no right to get back to his village. So our lives were kind of similar to everybody elses in the west, provided you eliminate those awful bits. And maybe because those terrible parts were absent in these movies, we were able to have a good laugh.
Honestly watch those and have a laugh. If it seems not funny then try learning some russian and watch them again :D I know it is a terrible dad joke.
> What’s interesting about Afonya is its picture of Soviet life at a time when we were told all was grey, unsmiling misery there. Instead it’s a world with palpable similarities to the West: pop music, glamour photos, consumerism and (undeniably) a class-system.
I had a similar feeling watching the 1969 hungarian movie "A tanú" ("The Witness")[0].
While the movie is about communist Hungary, it is interesting how some of the themes are common to satire of any disfunctional organization (incompetents that get promoted because of politicking, clueless people in power, nepotism, unjust punishment etc).
It's a pretty funny movie, and there's a recently restored version so it should be possible to find it if you try a bit.
Strange how the meaning of "political correctness" has shifted, since it was coined to cover the deployment of "political officers" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Political_commissar ) enforcing adherence to communism within the Soviet military and wider society. All of these films were made under a strict political censorship system.
(Russian cinema is legitimately great, though; why not watch the traditional pre-launch Soyuz quarantine film, "White Sun of Desert"; https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066565/ It's rather like a more cynical, more Russian "Dollars Trilogy" film)
To add a little background, the "White Sun of the Desert" belongs to the genre which is sometimes called the "eastern", in the footsteps of the American "western". It describes what was known in the Soviet historiography as "the establishment of the Soviet power in Central Asia".
They probably mean they don’t like it being used to describe things they like being made ‘incorrect’ and taboo. Or at least a certain segment of our culture has if not themselves.
Being politically correct these days can be an exercise in sanity. That’s why all the big corps are hiring expensive professional firms to do progressive campaigns (even the cigarette companies here in Canada have “diversity and inclusiveness” on the lighters they sell hwith their cigarettes). There’s good money in helping the megacorps, academia, and gov agencies fit in with the young university crowd.
It’s like a race to include more and more things so it’s best to go hard as possible early to not be left behind. Especially when you don’t have to actually do anything real to help the groups IRL... just change your language and run the right ad and social campaigns. And not say the “wrong” things today, even if it was decades ago.
Apparent the “real” help and change (you know, things besides performative acts) will come as a product of these megacorps becoming politically correct in the modern sense.
I have to disagree a bit, even when I was watching the movie on Soviet TV, when there was nothing else on for weeks or months, I was always bored to tears by 'White Sun of Desert'. To be fair, acting and characters are pretty good, but not very exciting otherwise..
Words can have multiple meanings. From a US perspective, this does seem weird, as "political correctness" is largely about not punching down on people who face adversity in our culture. The Russian definition seems to mean punching up; criticizing the government.
A Soviet would probably reply with the claim that the party was the direct representative of the working class, and therefore not any more of an acceptable target than members of the working class themselves.
Political correctness in the US is largely about people with "privilege" being offended on behalf of other people and enforcing rules that help no one.
Clearly the Revolution and the Party serve the workers, so by challenging them you are threatening the glorious future of the Worker. In exactly the same way, the modern left uses "tolerance" and disadvantaged classes as a weapon against people they don't like.
Political correctness has always been about strengthening your hold on power.
We just saw an example of how a joke about mobile game developers going out of their way to addict people was twisted into being a joke about mobile gamers, and therefore somehow directly into being racist and misogynist, and called "punching down", and used to call for boycotts and hate.
I'm sure that Soviets seventy years ago were just as convinced they were right(eous) as you are.
Well, political correctness in that context is a term deployed by people opposing greater respect for minorities and such, so the pejorative association is intended. Nobody uses that term to describe their own work.
The “political incorrectness” angle is really an unnecessary and very stupid aside that tarnishes an otherwise decent piece:
> Nor could [Office Romance] be much less politically correct. One can only imagine what a modern HR-manager would make of Office Romance, of its “power-imbalances”, “problematic” attitudes and “inappropriate” behaviour. That said, the same HR-manager should at least pause to wonder what, in doing all we can to make such relationships shameful and unfeasible, we’re also doing to ourselves.
The correct answer of course is that any professional, HR or otherwise, prioritizes facts over nice stories in movies. And the facts are that many supervisor-subordinate relationships are exploitative, often start from illegal harassment, and in any event are bad for business. Putting concepts like power imbalances and inappropriate behavior in scare quotes is just creepy and indicates sexist contempt for victims of workplace sexual harassment.
Markowski is clearly working in his politics here (which are largely centered around hyperventilating about “cancel culture”), but even by the standards of the genre it is particularly gross to suggest that the only people concerned about bosses who sleep with their employees are the PC Prudes who run HR.
> It's also a fact that many happy marriages began as a relationship between superior and subordinate.
I'm curious about what fraction of superior-subordinate relationships you think culminate in happy marriages, and how low that fraction has to go before you decide that forbidding superior-subordinate relationships is a lot easier than negotiating the messy world of allowing it? My guess is that the fraction is pretty low, and the world of HR standards in the west has already been through this calculus.
> the world of HR standards in the west has already been through this calculus
HR's calculus is dominated by considerations of risk to the business, something about which I care not one jot. The standards of American corporate HR departments certainly should not be society's standard for what constitutes acceptable behavior.
As for what fraction of such relationships are "happy marriages," I don't know. I do know that my parents met that way, as did several couples of my acquaintance.
An already dead veteran of pair counseling here in Czechia once wrote that of 400 randomly chosen cases of marital infidelity that ended up in his office, 397 started in the workplace.
People spend a lot of time together in the workplace, more than with their family. It is likely that sex will continue to happen there. No doubt some of it is really exploitative; but nowhere nearly all of it.
That however says nothing about how many of those that went on between boss ans employe were exploitative, coerced or massive nepotism where boss is giving goods to those that will couple.
Yeah you are correct and as usual on HN when it comes to these things, you got downvoted. These kinda coercions by people in power are rampant. Just as an example, here is something from Silicon Valley's crown jewel Google.
I forget the source of this, but I read that it was by design. It was understood that inconsistent censorship and oppression was actually more effective than the consistent type.
Knowing exactly what you are not allowed to say can be comforting: You trust in the rules and there is no reason to be afraid.
Add in inconsistencies and suddenly this comfort is removed. It adds an extra layer of uncertainty and fear to everything. Two people can say the same thing and only one disappears. No one knows where the line lies. It's a nasty psychological game and quite sick and twisted actually.
Lol, a simple explanation is always far more likely than an intricately complex one: that censorship is subjective and was enacted by different people with varying tastes and preferences, guided by vague and contradictory directions from above that would shift depending on changes in political direction, membership of the Politburo, etc etc.
you couldn't openly and clearly critique/satirize the whole System nor the Party nor the Leader (with all 3 being basically equivalent). You were allowed (and to some degree and in some shape encouraged) to critique and have a laugh at supposedly small and separate defects/impurities on the shining body of the System, the defects which were still present as supposedly exceptions and not the rule ("otdelnye nedostatki") thus your work would supposedly be improving the System instead of weakening it. The great talent of some of those writers, directors, actors, etc. was to show those supposedly small separate defects in the formally allowed way while really making it a deep and profound satire of the whole System.
The approach of course isn't unique to USSR, it has been the forced choice of artists through the history of ideological oppression in human civilization, and giving the rise of ideological intolerance everywhere today i expect to see again that approach more and more.
The books are very pro-Soviet. The satire is directed toward people who are considered to be "behind the times": a priest depicted to be not much priesty, the former "head of local nobility", and so on. But the main protagonist somehow came out so lively that we totally sympathize with him :)
> What’s interesting about Afonya is its picture of Soviet life at a time when we were told all was grey, unsmiling misery there. Instead it’s a world with palpable similarities to the West: pop music, glamour photos, consumerism and (undeniably) a class-system.
Facebook/Instagram effect in old cinema. You don't post grey misery unless you can make it meaningful. The same applies to movies. Nobody would watch their own life either. There's a lot of grey misery available in a sarcastic take though. Polish cinema of the time has lots of that as well.
I find it curious how the phrase “politically correct” entered western political language as as self-critical satire by the left (presumably in reference to Soviet political officers), before being transformed into criticism by right-wing commentators, to the situation of being surprised that the Soviets didn’t care about power imbalances and what we would now regard as inappropriate behaviour.
Such linguistic shifts happen a lot (title of this forum included), but nonetheless tickles my mind whenever I see it.
12 Chairs + Golden Calf by Ilf and Petroff; A dog's heart and Master and Margarita by Boulgakoff. I've heard Zosh'enko was also considered very funny at the time, but I'm not sure how well his stuff has aged..
Also, it is "Romanian" not "Soviet". While Romania was a part of the Warsaw pact they were more open to western countries than the rest of the soviet block.
I realised it wasn't your ordinary comedy when one of the early jokes involved landing an Aeroflot flight on a highway. There's a splendidly bizarre explosion/dream sequence bit in the middle. And a lion chase.
The Soviet mini-series that adapted Jules Verne's "The Children of Captain Grant" [1] is really nice, it's from the mid-'80s, a time that supposedly was bleak because of Chernobyl and the post-Andropov and post-Chernenko years, but nevertheless to kid me the TV series seemed full of optimism and of endless opportunities and marvels. That's from where I got the nickname I use on this website, too.
The article talks mostly about lighter-hearted movies, but I'd still want to recommend my favorite examples of "burdensome beauty" (as they put it) by Tarkovsky:
And, if you're into Slavic cinema in general, I'd also recommend "Life is a Miracle" by Emir Kusturica: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0322420/ -- he's not a Russian director, but he is fantastic.
There’s an abundance of serious, existential, often heavy Russian films. I just saw Beanpole and felt excited about a light, genuinely funny Russian comedy.
Anything by Gaidai [1]. "Kidnapping, Caucasian Style" [2] is probably the most popular or try "Operation 'Y'" [3], a movie that consist from three short novels with the same protagonist. Or, may be a good fit, his rendering of three O'Henry novels [4]: the first is the more serious one, the second is funnier but mostly conversational, and the third is burlesque action.
An example of a modern Russian comedy would be the "Yolki" series with [5] as the first installment.
I've just read an interview with a Russian book editor that mentioned Lev Ovalov [1], which is I think the closest thing to what you wanted (in terms of books, anyway):
> Soviet writer, author of detective stories about the Chekist-counterintelligence officer Major Pronin .
(...)
> It was for this magazine that the story "Blue Swords" was written - the first in a cycle about Major Pronin, after which six stories about the hero were published in 1939-1940 in the magazines " Vokrug Sveta " and "Znamya" , then came out as a separate publication in the series " Library of the Red Army ", and in 1941 were included in the collection" The Adventures of Major Pronin ".
(...)
> On July 5, 1941, Lev Ovalov was arrested on charges of divulging classified information and convicted, after which he spent 15 years in labor camps and exile. There, the writer worked in his main specialty - a doctor, and met the nurse Valentina Klyukina, with whom they began to live together in the late 1940s .
Thanks, I wasn't really asking for the actual bond but speaking Russian; I was asking "how did the Soviets address the same kinds of issue in popular culture" (if they did at all -- a parallel commenter suggests that it wasn't really a topic safe for anyone to touch).
It doesn't seem to have been a big genre, probably because of the difficulty of talking about secret agents in a country where secrecy was brutally enforced and the KGB were deeply feared.
Soviet spy movies are like James Bond written by Checkhov :) For example, there's "The fate of the secret agent" (1970) [1] and while it depicts a spy, it's very much not a James Bond type of guy. E.g. he only gets a single woman in the movie and he actually loves her.
Thanks, I'll give that a try! The very differences are the point; if it were nothing but a reshoot of an existing trope that wouldn't be so interesting. So your "like James Bond written by Checkhov" is the kind of approach that would be interesting.
Well, if you're into 'politically incorrect' movies, virtually anything before 1980 will fit the bill. You could start with Birth of Nation which celebrates the KKK. Then move on to the Jazz Singer which prominently features black face. Breakfast at Tiffany's is famous for Mickey Rooney's 'ching chong' routine. There's really no shortage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kin-dza-dza!
Edit: just noticed a critic quoted on wikipedia called it "Mad Max meets Monty Python by way of Tarkovsky", which is a very accurate description.