Lots of moments of people looking into the camera and going "how could communism do this?" which is cringe, but otherwise it's a fantastic story of human drama and how bad shit can get. Funny, I read this morning that Gorby is now dead, weird timing.
was talking about this with folks on discord last night when I was telling them how good The Americans is and someone said the exact same thing verbatim lol
Lots of shows about The USSR in The 80s, typically written decades later, when we need to tell ourselves that the collapse was coming because the wheels were coming off. I think that plays a big roll in the "How could communism have failed?!" narrative.
You see comparatively little about Russians from the 60s or 70s, when they were a globe-spanning Superpower dunking on us at every turn while we flailed about in Vietnam and sagged under hyperinflation.
I would love to travel back in time to 1981 and ask a Russian filmmaker to do a movie about the Kennedy Assassination or an American slice-of-life about the OPEC shock. Or maybe a modern day Chinese director could go ham and do a movie about the rise-and-fall of Japan or South Korea from the end of outright military dictatorship in the late-70s to the financial and cultural collapse of the modern era.
Someone find me the Communist Bloc Richard Linklater.
I think at the very least The Americans is a bit better about this in that it's shown quite clearly what the US and CIA were doing to try to sabotage the USSR while the Soviet spies are basically just trying to do counterintelligence and stay ahead of US aggression.
I never made it to the end, so I don't know if it every mellows out. But the first few seasons had plenty of "The central agency is asking you to do something obviously immoral in the name of state security" / "Back in Soviet Russia, we were so poor and they dehumanized us so brutally in order to prepare us for this mission" scenes. I think there's one about them kidnapping and deporting a Refusenik physicist.
There's plenty of dunking on Reagan-Era machismo and other Americana bullshit. But the underlying conceit is that smol bean Russians are struggling to keep up with the American juggernaut and failing. You're waiting with baited breath to see how the Jennings Family endures the End of Empire as foreign spies operating overseas.
Bated breath. As in, you abate breathing.
Bingo.
Even as late as 1985-86, while there were certain foundational problems in the USSR daily life was pretty OK. All the stuff about shortages and breadlines were mostly concurrent with the market reforms instituted by our dearly departed Gorby. But the propaganda did it's job, every single American is 100% convinced the USSR collapsed because communism is some inherently unstable system that is destined to collapse; and they will not be convinced otherwise because they obviously know more about it than you, you tankie.
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