Eugene Yelchin’s I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This

Eugene (formerly Yevgeny) Yelchin won a Newbery Honor for his children’s novel, Breaking Stalin’s Nose and helped storyboard everybody’s favorite commercial: Coca-Cola’s Christmas polar bears. Frankly, it makes sense he would have an affinity for the big white bears from his time in Siberia. He first went there voluntarily to work for a theater company (and avoid service in Afghanistan), but stayed against his will in a state “mental hospital.” Getting from there to America was quite a story, which he tells and illustrates in I Wish I Didn’t Have to Tell You This: A Graphic Memoir, which goes on-sale today.

While still a theatrical design student, Yelchin loved his city of Leningrad, but he was drawn to the underground art scene. He was also vaguely conscious his Jewish heritage could be considered a liability, but he and his stern mother and cranky grandmother were absolutely not Refuseniks. Indeed, their attitude towards such dissidents were quite Soviet, until Yelchin meets Libby, a visiting American student through his friend Mark. Much to his surprise and confusion, she is on a mission to help the Refusenik community.

It is awkward between them, because of the language barrier and their conflicting loyalties and values, but the chemistry just keeps pulling them closer. Yelchin also starts to question the Soviet system when he notices all the KGB surveillance focused on them. However, he truly loses faith when the KGB (or perhaps just the regular militia) kill Mark after he too declares his Refusenik intention to immigrate.

At this point, Yelchin can sufficiently read between the lines of Party propaganda to know he wants no part of the war in Afghanistan, so he accepts a job with a Siberian theater company, whose director has KGB connections. Yet, life on the outskirts of a plutonium enrichment facility entails its own dangers. The state also completely censored mail between him and Libby, so Yelchin grows increasingly isolated.

Yes, the tragically late actor Anton was Yelchin’s nephew, but the events of this graphic novel memoir predate him. Instead, they capture the turmoil and austerity of the late Brezhnev and early Andropov years (of course, he hardly had time to enjoy any “late years” as General Secretary). Consequently, Yelchin provides a revealing Soviet-era perspective on the Afghanistan War and its “Cargo 200” stigma, the Refusenik experience, anti-Semitic prejudice in general, and the horrors of Soviet sanatoriums.

Yet, his graphic memoir is also a highly appealing love story, especially since it is entirely free of cheap sentimentality. Despite the initial language differences, Yelchin and Libby are always brutality honest with each other. Indeed, that seems to be part of their unique chemistry.

Golden Voices: Refusenik Cineastes

Some call it an artform, even though most cineastes can’t stand the practice. Nevertheless, Victor and Raya Frenkel enjoyed a small sliver of prestige as the top film dubbers in the bad old Soviet Union. They were also Jewish, so their positions were always a little complicated. When the Soviets finally allowed the Refuseniks to immigrate to Israel, they decided to get out while the getting was good. However, adjusting to a new country and a new way of life will be more difficult than they expected in Evgeny Ruman’s Golden Voices, which opens tomorrow in New York.

For many Soviets, the Frenkels were the voices of international films in Russia. However, Russian dubbing is not an obviously marketable skill in 1990 Israel. Yet, due to the large influx of Russian immigrants, Raya manages to find a job requiring Russian fluency. She tells her husband she is tele-marketing. Her boss considers it phone sex, but they way she practices it, she is more like a voice in a chatroom for lonely men like Gera.

Meanwhile, her husband finally thinks he has found an outlet for his talents with a couple of low-rent Russian film pirates, but they just don’t have his commitment to quality cinema. As they try to go about their new lives, Israeli society keeps on rolling, while preparing for potential chemical weapons attacks from Saddam Hussein.

That part was no joke. If you lived through the lead-up to the first Gulf War, you should recall how George H.W. Bush insisted Israel not retaliate against any potential Iraqi attacks, so as not to jeopardize his international coalition. One can only imagine how intense the atmosphere was in Israel, but Ruman and co-screenwriter Zev Berkovich do a pretty good conveying the vibe.

Although it is billed as a comedy, Golden Voices is thoroughly bittersweet in tone and generally much more serious than whimsical. Mariya Belkina gives an extraordinarily accomplished performance as Raya, especially in her acutely sad and sensitive scenes with Alexander Senderovich, who is also a standout as the nebbish Gera. Vladimir Friedman is achingly dignified as Victor Frenkel, but there is also more than a little sentimentality in his ardent movie love.

Kew Gardens ’18: Operation Wedding

It is rather unfair to call Eduard Kuznetsov, his then wife Sylvia Zalmanson, and their fourteen fellow Refuseniks hijackers. They would have been perfectly willing to buy tickets to the West, if the Soviets had granted them exit visas. Nor were they holding guns on frightened flight attendants. They just intended to “borrow” a small 12-seat, wing-and-a-prayer Antonov An-2 commuter plane. The escape attempt did not go according to plan, but neither did the resulting show trial. Anat Zalmanson-Kuznetsov documents her parents’ remarkable true story in Operation Wedding (trailer here), which screens during the 2018 Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema.

The idea was relatively simple, but not simple enough. Posing as a wedding party, Kuznetsov and company bought all the tickets on a puddle-jumping flight originating in “Leningrad.” They would just tie up the flight crew—leaving them tucked into sleeping bags so they wouldn’t get cold, mind you—and then just fly themselves to the West. Unfortunately, the KGB was onto them from the start, so they never even set foot on the plane.

Of course, the mighty Socialist system had to make an example of the Refuseniks the state media quickly dubbed “terrorists,” so they convened a show trial that would duly sentence Kuznetsov and their pilot Mark Dymshits to death, which it most certainly did. However, the accused did not act like the broken old revolutionaries of the original Moscow Show Trials. They stuck to their guns, denouncing the injustice of the Soviet system, particularly its restrictive immigration laws (just for the record, these applied to people trying to get out, which is a much different proposition than trying to control who comes in). Zalmanson was particularly eloquent, so she became an international symbol of Soviet oppression.

Obviously, Kuznetsov’s scheduled execution was not carried out, since he discusses the dramatic chain of events in great depth with his documentarian daughter. It is a pretty incredible chronicle, in which perhaps history’s greatest odd couple, Golda Meir and Generalissimo Francisco Franco (who was not dead yet) worked in tandem to embarrass the Soviets.

Zalmanson was such a bipartisan cause célèbre throughout the West, it is frankly a bit scary how quickly and completely she has receded from the pubic consciousness. That is why Operation Wedding is such a necessary film right now. In fact, Russian filmmakers are still trying to rewrite the history of this incident through the lens of Soviet revisionism.

Fortunately, Zalmanson-Kuznetsov has plenty of documentation to back up the accounts of her parents. She also has KGB defector Oleg Kalugin on-camera, happily confirming all the dirty conducted by his former agency. It definitely sets the record straight, but there are also moments of real drama, as when Zalmanson revisits the KGB prison where she spent years as a prisoner of conscience, including several months in solitary confinement—all in a quite economical sixty-two minutes. As a filmmaker, Zalmanson-Kuznetsov’s approach is understandably straight forward, but she shows a bit of  style nonetheless, including some subtly clever transitions.

History really does repeat itself. If the Dymshits-Kuznetsov escape attempt sounds familiar, it is because a group of Georgia dissidents tried something similar in 1983, but it was more like a conventional hijacking, which gave Eduard Schevardnadze and his Kremlin masters license to crush them mercilessly (as dramatized in the recent film Hostages).

Clearly, the experience of Refuseniks like Zalmanson and Kuznetsov has timely implications for the neo-Soviet era of Putin. It is also a reminder of how different our politics looked in the early 1970s. Yet, it is also just amazing story. Very highly recommended, Operation Wedding screens this Wednesday (8/8), as part of Queens Museum Block 5, during the Kew Gardens Festival of Cinema.