Leonid Ruzov. Berlin

Berlin - Moscow. Ex profundis
Leonid Ruzov

Publication date: March 9, 2004

My life, cinema, black and white cinema!
Yuri Levitansky

The NTV channel celebrated the fifth of March - the day of the death of the "father of nations" - by showing Regis Warnier's film "East - West" . The film is about the tragedy of an emigrant family who believed Bolshevik propaganda and repatriated in the post-war years.

Arriving in the USSR on a smart ship, a successful doctor Alexei Golovin (Oleg Menshikov), his wife Marie (Sandrine Bonner) and their son immediately find themselves in a terrible late-Stalinist reality. Arrests, interrogations and executions “when trying to escape” - right at the port. Kiev communal apartment - fragile life, fear and mutual surveillance. Immediately after the “former” neighbor Nina Fedorovna told them all about local life in French, she was arrested and died in a dungeon. Marie rescues her grandson Sasha (Sergei Bodrov Jr.), also a Francophone, from Soviet hell, preparing his escape abroad. Marie is arrested and her husband disowns her. After Stalin's death, she is released, and then it turns out that the seemingly traitorous Alexey had been planning for them - Marie and their son - to escape to the West all this time. The escape is successful, but he himself only got out to them during perestroika.

A strong script (Rustam Ibragimbekov, Louis Gardel, Sergei Bodrov Sr.), good acting and directing provided the film with Cesar and Oscar nominations, released in 1999.

The film is based on real stories of real people. “Birch boletuses” - that’s what they were called in Mordovia, in Dubravlaga : I heard a lot about “native birches”, became emotional, and now...

* * *

But the film "East - West" was shot primarily for the French viewer; one feels that Soviet Russia here is a distant country, which should be told simply and clearly, and accuracy is not required. However, most of the domestic films tell about Russia-USSR-Russia in a similar way...

There are two main simplifications. Firstly, the West is ideal, as opposed to the devilish East. In the West they know nothing and are not involved in anything. As if in those years there were no “victims of Yalta”, forced repatriation, executions of Cossacks, etc. As if there wasn't enough evidence about the Gulag. It’s as if they didn’t hand over fugitives, like, for example, the Lithuanian sailor Simas Kudirka .

Secondly, in Soviet Russia “everyone understood everything.” Or almost everything... But there was no faith, illusions, self-deception.

Despite the fact that the film is tightly put together - by our standards - it still “does not reach” either the Oscar level (the supporting characters are one-dimensional, without any “Dostoevshchina”), or the Russian classics (Menshikov really wants to play Stirlitz, a man with secret, but he was already played by Tikhonov).

But, let us note, Bodrov is not playing Danila Bagrov , so there is no need to reduce the artist to his image (just as one should not reduce the writer to a character; this has been known since the time of the trial of Daniel and Sinyavsky).

It's probably good that they showed "East - West". There is even a hint of a challenge in this: not a mothball-nostalgic “scoop”, where, despite the accuracy of the details and surroundings, there are complete lies in the main thing. Not a cliched series about cops and special forces, where everything is the same. Finally, not a surefire Hollywood action movie.

But it seems that the real story, the real tragedy of such repatriates is difficult to “translate into French.”

I'll try to present it in Russian... but it still won't be suitable for cinema.

* * *

He was born in the Caucasus, in the city of Khasavyurt, in 1888. As befits a highlander, his father stole his future wife. Something Chegemian appears in our story - remember Uncle Sandro, who kidnapped his endurish bride? But in this story, even Iskander’s epic is cramped, the characters are mixed: the father of our hero turns out to be an “Endurian”... or, rather, Samuel - a wandering Jew. Vera Voskoboynikova was kidnapped by Lev Davidovich Faerman, who rode up on horseback, and sped off somewhere far away - they say, shooting back in pursuit. After which they got married - against the will of her parents.

By the way, life since then has not become less amazing: in the nineties, the ataman of the Kizlyar department of the Terek Cossack army was Alexander Semenovich Elzon, his son Vladislav was taken hostage by the Chechens even before the first war...

But let's go back a century. Khasavyurt was just a point on the life path of Lev Faerman, who wandered throughout the Russian Empire from the Pale of Settlement to Turkestan. The young people lived in Yevpatoria and Baku - there Lev, who apparently did not shy away from any kind of work, was a port loader. Then they settled for a long time in Bukhara, where Faerman worked as a cotton weigher in a trading company for a German owner. At the same time, Lev and Vera did not forget to expand their family every year.

Here's the first picture - private life in Russia at the turn of the century.

A hero was born. Change of frame.

* * *

Meanwhile, our main character, the son of Vera and Lev, young Borukh Faerman, in turn served in the army and became concerned with education. In 1912 he went to Germany, to a commercial school. Needless to say, the place and time were chosen extremely well...

In 1914, with the outbreak of World War II, Faerman found himself in the Goltsminden concentration camp “for civilian prisoners” - by the way, the writer Konstantin Fedin and the Pushkin scholar Boris Tomashevsky were also imprisoned there .

After the end of the war and liberation from the camp in 1918, at first he went hungry - but, having found a job as a worker at a film studio, he bought a camera with his first salary.

Since the state from which Borukh came to Germany no longer existed (as, indeed, the German state where he came to study!), Borukh accepted Soviet citizenship. Like, probably, many of the hundreds of thousands of former subjects of the Russian Empire, brought to Germany by the revolution and wars, imperialist and civil. The Russian community in Germany in the twenties lived very turbulently. Read Viktor Shklovsky or Ilya Ehrenburg. Remember Alexei Tolstoy, who edited a magazine from Berlin and left for Russia in the early twenties, or Nikolai Timofeev-Resovsky, who went to work in Germany in 1925.

In 1922, Faerman was hired for a permanent job at the Soviet trade mission, and he apparently considered his position quite stable and himself quite wealthy. He got married - unlike his father, without any kidnappings. The bride's name was Martha Henny Maria Lisbeth Bütof, and she was from a poor East German peasant family. The bride's parents were pleased - marrying a Jew, by all accounts, was considered a good match. And this - in the twenties, for us - on the eve of Hitler's rise to power!

Here I will allow myself a second digression. Can you imagine a movie based on this plot? We, the viewers, are explained what and how: about the brown shadow creeping over the Weimar Republic. They do this in a form that is accessible to us. Most likely, through the lips of the heroes themselves. They - ordinary people - turn out to be almost prophets. As in the film “East - West”, a neighbor in a Kyiv communal apartment openly asked: “You are in shit.” But few people understood, few tried to understand what world they lived in, both because it was difficult and because it was scary. After all, in our country in the summer of 1937, it was easier and more pleasant to hear not the rustling of tires and steps on the steps at night, but a brass band in the park during the day. By the way, what's on TV today - "Full House"?

But let's return to our hero. In 1923, his daughter Hannah-Laura was born, who became almost the center of the world for him. So that the baby would not have sweat rashes, he bought some special pillow for crazy billions of marks - there was prohibitive inflation in Germany. Faerman never felt like an emigrant, but a purely private person. Was a hobby - amateur radio operator, amateur photographer. In the latter capacity he even became famous - prizes, exhibitions. His work was included in the book of the best photographs of the season - but in the picture there was still the same five-year-old daughter with a balloon.

Here is the second picture - private life in Germany, the twenties. The hero has a child.

Staff change.

* * *

In March 1930, Borukh (or, probably, Boris Lvovich - he was already over forty) returned to Russia, now Soviet, with his wife and daughter.

Just like in the movie, he received an offer from the consulate to return to his homeland with the promise of a heavenly life. Or rather, minimal comfort, a tolerable existence: apartment, furniture, arrangement. But this could not but have an effect - after all, the Great Crisis reigned in the world of capital. In general, the offer was one of those “impossible to refuse.” Fireman thought for a long time or for a short time - and he made up his mind. And some refused - for example, Timofeev-Resovsky...

And so he and his family - his wife and daughter - find themselves in Moscow. And he gets - again, like in the film - a room in a communal apartment. They moved between such departmental rooms eight times, until 1939, when they settled on Sretenka. After a settled life in Germany, they were naturally shocked - poverty, monstrous life and morals, the language barrier. Lisbeth never truly learned Russian. She sang in chorus - and cried, not understanding what kind of fruit “kiri” was, and why they peeled it: the song was “recthy epic tales”... Boris Lvovich works at Stankoimport and suffers very much - after all, it is his fault that the family “got into trouble” to shit." True, very soon, when Nazism in Germany moved from the “near future” to the “present”, it turned out that he rather saved the family...

In Moscow, private life continued, but now without friends and communication. The hobbies of photography, and even more so radio, have been forgotten. Boris Lvovich communicated only with one of his relatives and his friend Ivan. They were friends with the Don Cossack Ivan Shustov from the very concentration camp, where they ended up together in 1914. Shustov organized a choir and drama club there. Together they accepted Soviet citizenship - however, Ivan seemed to dissuade Borukh... Then at the same time they got married, and they had daughters the same age. They repatriated together. True, Faerman took his German wife from Germany, and Shustov took a Polish Jewish wife. He seems to have saved her from the Holocaust too. But in 1937, Ivan’s wife was arrested, not as a Jew, but during the “Polish operation” of the NKVD .

The third picture is private life in the Soviet Republic, the thirties.

Staff change.

* * *

Summer of forty-one. Hitler's Germany attacked the Soviet Union. And in the center of Moscow, on Sretenka, a German family lives. What this meant, Boris Lvovich understood too well. But what could a middle-aged man, fifty-two years old, do about this inevitability? He found a solution, and in July he joined the people's militia.

Together with Faerman, his only friend Ivan Shustov went to the militia. He also had a daughter who needed to go to school, but his wife was already in the camp. Because of them, the already middle-aged Ivan joined the militia. He and Borukh perfectly understood the hostage system in force in the country, and both needed to “correct their biography.” Shustov and Faerman defended Moscow - and at the same time their families. Both went missing in the “cauldron” near Vyazma in October 1941. But the family is alive and knows about their father. Where?

On the evening of January 31, 1942, at about eight o’clock, there was a knock on the door of a communal apartment on Sretenka. The soldier standing outside the door asked: “Isn’t Yusup Akhmetovich Aliev living here?” They tried to drive him away, bickering began, the soldier insisted: “His wife should live here!” And then Laura remembered how, as a child, her father played with her, portraying the merchant Yusup from the eastern bazaar: “I’m selling apricots!”

They let the soldier in, he took out a case: “Here are his glasses, he also had a knife and a razor: good ones, foreign ones, the guys took them for themselves...” The glasses in the case were his father’s. The daughter exclaimed: “But he is Boris Lvovich Faerman!”

The soldier said that in October 1941 he found himself between Vyazma and Smolensk, in a Soviet military hospital, first in a “cauldron”, then in territory occupied by the Germans. The Wehrmacht was rushing to Moscow. They were not interested in the wounded. On the next bed lay an elderly man who called himself Yusup from the Caucasus. He was wounded; but his shattered shoulder was already healing after the operation when he died on October 29: his heart could not stand it. And soon this soldier planned to escape, having first collected information about his comrades in misfortune: “And the address was in the cartridge [suicide medallion], I wrote it down for myself just in case,” he said, and hurried: “I need another family tell me, don’t explain where..." - he gave the address, asked how to get there, and disappeared into the night. He did not reach the next apartment - there was a curfew in Moscow, a state of siege. No one ever found out what happened to him.

The Germans were not interested in the wounded - unlike the “Jews and commissars”... Having called himself Aliyev, Faerman could not save himself - but he saved at least the memory of himself. True, this knowledge did not have any formal consequences - in order to attest to the death of a Red Army soldier, the testimony of two people was necessary, without them he was considered “missing in action.”

But the German family continued to live in the center of Moscow - although there were denunciations and calls to state security. By volunteering for the militia, Boris Faerman paid for their freedom. Even though he was not listed as dead, but as missing. The state dealt with him fairly.

The ending is the death of the hero. A curtain.

* * *

This, you see, is not suitable for cinematography - it should show “a typical person in typical circumstances.” The whole problem is that everyone is a person! - somewhat atypical. A colleague of filmmakers, a great expert in the field of the “human dimension” - his name was Procrustes - could tell a lot about this...

But let's return to the family of Boris Lvovich. A few years later, at the end of the forties, the “fight against cosmopolitanism” began. They now turned out to be not Germans at all, but Jews. And already in this capacity, Hannah-Laura was kicked out of her job - “on a general basis”...

* * *

It would seem, what does this have in common with the film? There the hero betrays his wife, here he dies so that she will be alive and free. But it is difficult for the French to explain that sometimes even a person who fled and renounced his family saved that family. There they only demand of him to renounce - and what other choice did the government actually confront the people with? Just remember Sophie's Choice ...

Sometimes it’s worth looking into this abyss... so as not to return there again. And to once again remember the people who lived and died so that others could live. People like Boris Faerman - the “unknown soldier” who defended Moscow.