Russia's silenced voice of the people

By C.G. | BERLIN

“IF YOU want to understand Russia, you must listen to Vladimir Visotsky,” my Moscow friends told me. That was in 1980 as I began a Russian course at university. Visotsky, a poet and songwriter with a deep, hoarse voice, has often been called the “Bob Dylan of the Soviet Union”.

As an East Berliner I soon began to see that the idealised image of “our great and glorious communist brothers” did not quite match real life in Moscow. Just as at home brave people such as artists, who dared to criticise the society around them, were monitored and often arrested by the Stasi, so they were here by the KGB.

Whenever I visited my Moscow friends Eleg and Elita they played Visotzky songs and explained his lyrics to me. Of course they had the few records released by the state label “Melodia”. But most of the songs they played were secret recordings from live concerts which came on bootleg cassettes.

I remember relatively opulent dinners at their flat, with lots of vodka, sovietskoje shampanskoje and endless discussions about bureaucracy, corruption, anti-Semitism, alcoholism, crime and the daily tribulations of Soviet life—subjects that Visotzky addressed in his songs. As Red Army veterans who had fought for a better world, Eleg and his brother-in-law Viktor (who shared the modest flat along with his wife) were clearly embarrassed by the status quo.

I never saw Visotzky in the flesh. A month before I came to Moscow the man who was loved and worshipped as a voice of the people—and hated by the authorities for the same reason—died of a heart attack, aged 42.

Thanks to “Visotsky, thank you for my life!”, a new film which launched the Russian Film Week in Berlin recently, I can see more clearly how inspiring he must have been. It's no biopic, said Michael Schlicht, chairman of Monumental Pictures, a Columbia Pictures/Patton Media joint venture and one of the producers. It features just five momentous days in the life of Vladimir Visotzky. To understand the plot one needs to know that Visotzky was also an actor at Moscow's legendary Taganka Theatre, which occasionally performed in the West. Those foreign trips and his marriage to Marina Vlady, a famous French actress, made him privileged, which explains why he drives a big Mercedes through the streets of Moscow, wears blue jeans and behaves like a Western rock star.

The film not only shows us the Bohemian hero, it also reveals the complexity of his personality and the bizarre culture of the time. “He enjoyed the very privileges which he condemned in his songs; he complained about alcoholism and drug addiction but was an addict himself; he attacked corruption, but without bribery his life would have been much harder,” Mr Schlicht explained to me.

Nikita Visotzky, the film's script-writer and the singer's son from his first marriage, told the audience that the film “is of course a work of art and not a documentary. But sometimes art is more truthful than facts.”

Against the advice of his Moscow doctor, Visotzky, already seriously ill from alcohol abuse and drug addiction, is seen flying to Uzbekistan in July 1979 to give a concert in the city of Bukhara. He is accompanied by two friends from the Taganka Theatre, a friend and physician and later also by his young lover Tatiana, who provides him with the “medicine” he had accidentally left in Moscow. The concert was a trap to ensnare him for performing illegally (something Nikita Visotzky learned eight years ago from a former Uzbek KGB man). His use of drugs gave the KGB another reason to monitor him. This breathtaking Hollywood-style thriller is much more than the story of a vox populus under threat of being silenced forever. It is a pageant of intriguing characters, odd dependencies, latent racism, obedient state servants, dodgy KGB officers and a corrupt society.

Asked if the timing of the film's wide release in Russia on December 1st was deliberate—just days before the Russian parliamentary elections—both Mr Schlicht and Mr Visotzky said it was not. “When we began to work on this film five years ago, nobody thought that the circumstances in the country would become similar to those of 30 years ago,” Mr Schlicht told me. “The time has come to talk about Russia's most famous singer and poet of the 20th century, especially with young people who were born after his death,” Nikita Visotzky told the Berlin audience. The disturbing news from Moscow about election manipulation, corrupt state servants and the growing opposition to a new “unity party” suggest that Visotzky's songs remain topical and his voice is likely to resonate afresh across the country.

Read more: "A Russian awakening" (Dec 11th)