Vyacheslav Tikhonov

Seventeen Moments of Spring aka Semnadtsat Mgnoveniy Vesny

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Stirlitz driving a car

Watercooler TV from a land without watercoolers, Seventeen Moments of Spring lays claim to being the most successful Soviet TV show ever made. It was commissioned at the command of KGB boss Yuri Andropov. USSR leader Leonid Brezhnev loved it. But the public did too – streets emptied when it was first aired, stripped over 12 nights in 1973. It seems that no matter what Soviet citizens thought of the regime, everyone agreed that the war against the Nazis had been a just one. Sticking it to the Americans was no bad thing either. It also happened to be compelling TV. And it still is if you turn off the bit of your brain … Read more

War and Peace Part I

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A lone horse and rider on a hill

So here’s the most expensive film ever made in the USSR, or a quarter of it. War and Peace Part I finally arrived in 1966 after years in the making, a rebuke to the massive 1956 US version starring Audrey Hepburn and Henry Fonda. Here’s how you do Tolstoy, the Soviets are saying, at five and half hours long, with a cast of thousands, no expense spared, big sets, huge battle scenes, and so on. It was released in four big chunks originally, too, and it’s best watched that way, in instalments. It’s impressive, certainly, shot on 70mm film for that widescreen epic look – though on muddy Soviet film stock – but … Read more