Русские здесь: Фильм, помогающий Андропову

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PROGRAM DIRECTOR OF CHANNEL 13, WNET NY

Dear Ms. Konner:

The film “The Russians Are Here”, aired twice on Channel 13, disturbed many Russian emigres, and also many Americans who are thoroughly familiar with the third wave of emigration from the USSR. This film suggests that almost all Russian emigres are either kooks, or citizens who have been so drugged by Soviet education that they are incapable of evaluating the merits of freedom and democracy.

Of course, you can say: “But what can we do if the Russian poet Lev Khalif says that in the USSR he felt like an individual, because they watched him, that is, at least the police organs paid attention to him, but that here no one needs him or his books, and he does not feel like an individual?”.

Of course you can say that it is not an American, but the Russian writer Sergey Dovlatov who testifies that here it is difficult to be a journalist because one has to think, to search, to ponder over what to write and how to write it, while in the USSR everything is already formulated, everything one has to write is directed from above. Or, of course, you can note ironically that it is our own Russian poet, Konstantin Kuzminsky, who is sprawled half-drunk on a couch in embrace with a sober dog and a drunken friend, haughtily spouting nonsense, and not an American connoisseur of marijuana. You could, of course, go on and say that these are Russian Journalists — Vail and Genis — who are affirming that there is not political activism in Russia, and that only a vodka unities friends, forgetting about those things which all thinking American know, that is, the human rights movement, the struggle of the faithful for the right to belieive in God, and the nationalist movements in the Baltic States, Russia, the Ukraine, Georgia, and Armenia.

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