Hear The One About The Cold War Leader Who Fell In Love With The Queen?

Sydney Morning Herald

Saturday February 18, 2006

Helen Womack in Moscow

RUSSIANS flocked on St Valentine's Day to see a quirky new film about Leonid Brezhnev dreaming of freedom and wishing he could marry the love of his life, the Queen of England. Viewers were divided as to whether the movie was a harmless fantasy, showing the late Soviet leader to have been not such a bad old bean after all, or a piece of gross political self-deception.

Directed by Tigran Keosayan, Hare over the Abyss is set in colourful gypsy country in the 1970s. The film opens with local Communist Party functionaries preparing for a visit by the dear leader, Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev.

"Leonid Ilyich loves circuses and balloons as well as good food and drink," says one grey suit. So another grey suit goes one better and arranges for a hot-air balloon display to greet the general secretary.

Crowds waving portraits line the roads when Brezhnev arrives. But in the back of his Zil limousine the old buffer, he of the bushy eyebrows, is saying to himself: "I hate the sight of my own face." He is already dreaming of defecting from the country he rules. A group of gypsies surrounds the Zil and they lure him out to dance. A gypsy lad steals the limo to impress his future father-in-law and Brezhnev does not seem to mind at all.

On the contrary, he goes on to escape from the party functionaries in a hot-air balloon.

Like the hare in the fairy tale, which leaps into the abyss and laughs because it is free, Brezhnev goes sailing out over the river. When he lands, the gypsies arrange for the Queen to join him and they hold a wedding in the summer fields.

Judging from the laughter in the auditorium, the film went down well. "It's inoffensive and it shows our leaders are human too," said one young woman.

Among Russians too young to remember the Cold War and the privations of Brezhnev's rule from 1964 to 1982 there seems to be a yearning for what they imagine was a less pressurised way of life.

Noting that there had also been a TV series depicting an avuncular Brezhnev, Angelina Davydova wrote in the St Petersburg Times: "Russians are showing an appetite for cosy depictions of a man once roundly despised as the personification of stagnation and decline. It follows that there is an audience for this nostalgia."

Some older Russians were aghast. "I lived through the Brezhnev years and remember how we used to have to take the train to Moscow to buy sausage," said one middle-aged man.

A Muscovite couple recalled: "We suffered endless humiliations. We could not travel freely or read what we wanted and we had to watch our dear leader falling down the stairs when he was drunk."

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Nikita Khrushchev's secret speech to the Communist Party in which the atrocities of the Stalin era were revealed in full.

A brief thaw followed, before Brezhnev took power and political winter returned to the Soviet Union. The next thaw came under Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but now a degree of iciness has returned with the authoritarian Vladimir Putin.

"No doubt in 20 years' time, we shall see a film portraying Putin as a dog lover," the middle-aged man said, referring to the fact that the present Kremlin leader tries to show his softer side by playing publicly with his Labrador, Koni.

© 2006 Sydney Morning Herald

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