Русские здесь: Фильм, помогающий Андропову - [22]

And you would be right. But why did the creators of “The Russians Are Here” invite only Russian writers, journalists, and poets of the same ilk to participate: either the unsuccesful who are on welfare while deriding American democracy, or the envious and malicious, for whom public spectacle has become a second profession, or the habitual cynics?

I am not saying that such people ought not to participate in the film. But why not, for the sake of objectivity, show all strata of the Russian emigration and not just, I repeat, the spiteful failures? There are Russian emigres living and working in New York, journalists, writers, poets, philosophers, ballet performers, and artists, for whom the words “honor” and “conscience” have not become hollow sounds, as they have for the majority of the representatives of the artistic intelligensia who appeared in the film, “The Russians Are Here”. To some writers, poets, and artists, just as to some engineers, the first days of emigration are difficult: they work, some in bookstores, some as security guards, some as taxidrivers, and pursue their own callings in their spare time.

Just like the unofficial artists and writers in the USSR, they operate elevatores and work as mailmen; they find in themselves the strength for their creativity. There are many such people in the present emigration to the USA. Why were not notable Russian artists, poets, ballet performers, writters, chess players, and former Soviet engineers who have found themselves, who have achieved praise and recognition in the USA, not invited along with Dovlatov, Khalif, and Kuzminsky? Who found it necessary to make an offensive film about Russian emigres in general and about its artistic community in particular? Who found it necessary to repeat, for millions of Americans viewers, what the Soviet papers now write, today: emigrants in the capitalistic West go wanting? This is a lie! It is not for nothing, to be sure, that at the end of the film the host closes with the comment that if these people do not need freedom and democracy, then why did they come to America?

Ms. Ronner! I have many friends among the Russian emigrants-artists, writers, journalists, and engineers. For many of them it is not easy, but this is natural — emigration is not an easy thing, but freedom and democracy are necessary to all of them, and they say this forthrightly and unambiguously in their public appearances and intreviews, and in private. But, alas, the creators of “Russians Are Here” for some reason invited only those for whom democracy and freedom are hardships. And because of three or four similar people a distorted impression has been created about the entire present-day emigration from the USSR and about the Russian people in general.

Respectfully yours, Alexander Glezer, General Director CASE Museum of Russian Contemporary Art in Exile and Chief Editor of the Publishing House “Third Wave”

(New York Tribune) July 2, 1983

PBS -TV drops racist bomb on emigres

On June 13 and for the first time in New York, the Public Broadcasting Service showed, on “Frontline” with Jessica Savitch, an alleged “documentary” breezily entitled “The Russians Are Here.” The title, a stale joke repeated before in a similar context, indicates that the film is about recent arrivals from Russia in the United States.

Most of these 100,000 “Russians” are Jews, and those who are not are usually heroic fighters against the Soviet regime. Tb associate them with the “Russians” in the sense of Soviet invaders is not only a stale joke, but a bad one.

But is the title of the PBS “documentary” just a joke? Not at all.

The ‘enemy’

“We think of them as an enemy,” Jessica Savitch begins her narration. And flashed on the screen are the “Russians” — in the totalitarian regime of Russia. The recurrent theme is that the “Russians” who are “here” — that is, Jews who fled from anti-Semitic tyranny or heroic fighters against it — are mentally and psychologically the same as the Soviet KGB and the military.

Scenes of the goose-stepping Soviet military are flashed on the screen — and the narrator says about the “Russians” who are “here” that they are “children of another [that is, the goose-stepping Soviet KGB-military] system ... which made them what they are.”

Naturally, the “children” of this “system” are not fit for the West and turn into drunks, public charges, derelicts and embittered cranks.

This does not mean that the producer of the “documentary” regards the Soviet regime as evil.

Quite the contrary, its many advantages — like “free medicine”—are extolled even in the narrator’s text.

Thue, at the beginning, the narrator says: “We know very little about them [the Russians in the regime and outside].” So one may ask. “Ladies and gentlemen of PBS, if you know very little about them, how the hell do you presume to know about their free medicine in Russia?”But such questions are impertinent. Those in charge “know very little” about the “Russians” and yet know everything. Here, then, is the omniscient message of the "documentary" ;