Game of distrust – Weekend – Kommersant

When you watch Soviet film detectives decades after their release, it is clear that this genre carried some kind of insoluble problem. The abundance of his samples is a series of failures. Sometimes genuinely talented, sometimes ludicrously attractive, but almost always extremely ridiculous. The point here is not the inability of Soviet directors to genre art as such (a counterexample is the history of Soviet science fiction with its masterpieces). The point is the applicability of the detective story to Soviet reality itself. Late Soviet authors enjoyed film adaptations of Western classics (Maslennikov’s series about Sherlock Holmes, Govorukhin’s “Ten Little Indians”), but when trying to transfer its structures to their native soil, something did not stick.

Text: Igor Gulin

The detective describes the divergence and repair of the social fabric, the exposure of the flaw and the restoration of the norm. In Soviet cinema, this mechanic was problematic, because it needed carriers of a flaw – figures of evil. The Soviet film reality of the times of developed socialism was inhabited by good people. Sometimes they stumbled, sometimes it entailed the worst consequences, but real evil was not very possible here. This “struggle between the good and the best” is often laughed at, but it was precisely this that in many ways gave Soviet cinematography a special, sometimes involuntary subtlety, forcing them to play in semitones. A detective story that requires a clear scheme of action is difficult to build on subtle shades. Although some of the best Soviet detectives are guided by the instrumentalization of this semitone logic in the justice system. First of all, these are the films of Leonid Agranovich, especially “A Case from Investigative Practice”. Their idea: guilt is always a simplification, there are mistakes, but they can be fatal.

The real flaw could only come from outside, from the outside world. Its bearer must be involved in a different order. This otherness of evil is embedded in the genealogy of the Soviet detective. He is born at the dawn of the thaw, emancipating himself from the spy film of the Stalin era, but not daring to break this connection. It is interesting to compare two hits of the mid-1950s: Case No. 306 by Anatoly Rybakov, in which a detective intrigue is resolved by exposing a former concentration camp guard hiding under the guise of a pharmacist, and now a spy for an unnamed Western country, and the innovative Case of Rumyantsev by Iosif Kheifits based on the script by Yuri Herman. Despite the fact that it is Kheifits and Herman who invent the Soviet non-political detective story, Rybakov’s absurd film turns out to be closer to the canon that will develop in the next three decades. The noir structure of The Rumyantsev Case – a good person gets into trouble and tries to avert suspicions on his own (albeit under the supervision of the authorities) – was, despite all the reliability of the film, too bold. Further, the opportunity to act was entrusted to the representatives of the police.

Emancipation is not entirely successful, and the Soviet detective remembers his spy genealogy to the very end. She is perfectly visible in the cult “Confrontation” by Semyon Aranovich according to the script by Yulian Semenov. There is a strange rift in this series. A team of investigators led by the hero Oleg Basilashvili behaves as if they are catching an ordinary criminal, but the object of their persecution – the Gestapo officer Krotov, buried in the late Soviet world – is an absolute, transcendent evil. Therefore, a virtuoso film cannot fully take place – it breaks up into a social detective story and a metaphysical horror. In this, perhaps, involuntary duality, in many respects there is the charm of “Confrontation” – the hidden doubt of the genre in its own foundations.

***

The unfinished Nazis could not completely occupy the genre, and ordinary people also became criminals. How to explain the readiness of a Soviet person to break the law? Only a temptation that causes something fundamentally alien to the Soviet order, but present in it – market relations, private property, luxury. Almost all Soviet detectives deal with money and property. There are no crimes of passion here (or they occupy a position subordinate to financial matters). There seems to be no revenge at all.

Economic crimes are almost entirely devoted to the most popular Soviet TV series “The investigation is conducted by ZnatoKi.” Five and a half hours of another classic series, The Profession of the Investigator, is built around shenanigans with a shipment of garlic. The hero of the most stylish Soviet detective cycle, Herbert Rappaport’s trilogy (“Two tickets for a daytime session”, “Circle”, “This does not concern me …”), and an employee of the OBKhSS at all: the only truly attractive Soviet detective played by Alexander Zbruev investigates the shortage yarn and activities of clandestine sewing workshops.

Who was the culprit in this case? There were two options here: either a person who was already on the other side, absorbed in the logic of gain and, as it were, no longer fully belonging to Soviet society, or a person who hesitated, stumbled, but did not disappear. Often there were two of them – the seducer and the seduced. Often this is respectively a man and a woman. A curious example is the film with the telling title “Walk the Line” by Yuliy Koltun, where such a couple is represented by eccentric figures – an underground collector and a restless hypnotist. The same can be seen in Yevgeny Tatarsky’s more clumsy “Golden Mine”, whose popularity was associated with the unusual sex appeal of a criminal couple (Oleg Dal and Lyubov Polishchuk). If the character of the first kind is subject to withdrawal, liquidation, then the second kind is more likely to be educated.

***

Here is a key feature of the Soviet detective. His protagonist, the investigator, is always a bit of an educator. He instructs, reads morality, takes care and punishes like a father. Good people want to confess to him the first time they meet. The softness of a kind teacher and the KGB hardness are present in these characters in different proportions, and sometimes unpredictably replace each other – like the same hero Basilashvili in “Confrontation”. An exaggerated parody incarnation of this type of detective-educator is Aniskin from a series of films about the “village detective” based on the books by Vilya Lipatov.

In one of the best articles about the Soviet film detective story, the pedagogical nature of the genre is analyzed by the historian Ilya Budraitskis. He connects the didactics of these films with the role that the Ministry of Internal Affairs tried to assume in the late Soviet world, the role of the last guardians of moral purity in a society that was increasingly retreating from socialist ideals. The embodiment of this still contained catastrophe – the structures of the “second economy”, in which almost the entire population is involved in one way or another, is the very market relations that invisibly permeate the Soviet world, constituting its inside out. In the view of the ideologues of the police, which was broadcast by the authors of detective stories, the desire for enrichment, the pursuit of private property was something like an original sin that nestled in the minds of every individual, undermining the ability to real socialist relations. The task of the investigators in this case was not only to solve a specific crime, but also to point out this flaw that corrupts and destroys every person, to propose a project for the moral salvation of society from itself.

***

The detective of the classic detective is always an ambivalent figure. He restores the social fabric, but he himself is to some extent turned off from it, he looks at the order from the outside. Even when he is a police officer, he usually has an element of eccentricity, like Lieutenant Columbo.

The Soviet investigator is the embodiment of order. He does not change masks. He must be flawless. The fact that he is often inconspicuous or unsightly in appearance (Georgy Burkov played such characters ideally), maintains this purity, does not give way to temptations. The heroes of Soviet detective stories usually do not even have a personal life, or it is radically curtailed, reduced to the attributes of a worthy citizen (here – in contrast to the bosses who also represent the state in production films, for whom something always goes wrong).

The most important exception, of course, is “The meeting place cannot be changed.” Gleb Zheglov was the only famous Soviet anti-hero detective who embodied the transgression of the law serving the law. But he could only exist in tandem with positive Sharapov. This violation of the code (and at the same time following the rules of the genre) becomes possible due to the transfer of action to the mythological past. Stalin’s time turned out to be a kind of Wild West, an era of not yet established morality and, therefore, an era of adventure.

In modern times, there was no place for adventure. The heroes of most detectives do their job – they talk in offices, walk around the apartments of witnesses, talk on the phone, and all this takes a very long time. In this sense, Soviet examples of the genre are closer not to detective stories proper, but to what is called in English “procedural”. The work does not imply much intrigue, and it often seemed superfluous to the screenwriters. We usually know who the culprit is from the start and watch as the truth is established and justice is done. From a genre based on suspicion, intrigue is being eliminated as an element that is too suspicious and subversive.

***

It seems that the failure of the Soviet detective is connected with his slightly paradoxical origin. This genre belongs to Soviet pop culture – a component of a peculiar consumer society that arises during the thaw and finally takes shape in the Brezhnev era (which also became the era of the heyday of cinema and television detectives). Its purpose is to satisfy demand, to entertain and distract, to bring easy pleasure. At the same time, it is more connected with the state than any other genre. From their very birth, detectives have been part of the propaganda campaign of law enforcement agencies – the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the KGB, the traffic police and the OBKhSS. It is impossible to say who used whom here: the organs are a massive demand for action-packed entertainment, directors and screenwriters are the patronage of the organs. In any case, what was born from this meeting did not quite correspond to any of the tasks.

The Soviet detective is permeated by a strange neurosis. These films break their own logic and try to build action from the rubble, yell at themselves when they become too exciting, tread lightly, fall into rhetorical didacticism at the wrong time. They seem to be themselves under suspicion and convey this uncertainty to the viewer.

In classic examples of the genre, we enjoy identification with the detective – his intelligence, strength, resourcefulness. This pleasure is possible due to the fact that truth is separated from power – as a detective is separated from a policeman. Where there is no such separation, there is a certain measure of unrest that always pervades the relationship between man and the rule of law. In the Soviet detective, this anxiety becomes obsessive. We cannot take the position of an investigator, a bearer of power, because we find ourselves objects of its suspicion and care. At the same time, this government does not inspire much confidence: people acting on instructions, reading tedious lectures and just about ready to blame the problems on Nazis who have not existed for a long time.

That slightly unsettling pleasure that you get from Soviet detectives, in many ways, comes down to a game of distrust. Denying the viewer identification with the forces of order, they push him into the position of a suspect, a violator and allow him to feel an illegal alienation from a dull system.

---

Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram