Translated material
Icebreaker "Tarasova"
“Stars on Ice” allowed many decent people to turn on the country’s main TV channel without the usual feeling of disgust. Amazingly, this show turned out to be not only talented (and not mediocre, like the “Time” program) propaganda, and many people really wanted to send their children to figure skating. “Stars on Ice” became almost the only place for public mass manifestation of genuine emotions. A place where all participants in the spectacle on television behave like people, and not like zombies. A place where people say what they think and do it in the good Russian language that has been forgotten on TV.
Despite all the attractiveness of this idea - of course, people will be happy to watch how figure skating stars paired with theater and film stars compete with each other - the fundamental moment of the incredible success of the show was the presence in it as a key figure of the great Russian coach Tatyana Anatolyevna Tarasova.
I was still a little boy when I read about one episode from the life of her father, the best hockey coach of all time, Anatoly Vladimirovich Tarasov. In the mid-70s of the last century, it seems it was 1976, he was unexpectedly transferred to coach the football team CSKA, then for the first time in its history, it was on the verge of relegation from the major league of the Soviet championship. Tarasov ran away from the football team six months later, indignantly declaring that he could not coach the team when some generals were dictating to him who to put on the team.
True professionals always have more time in which to live and work. Of course, Anatoly Vladimirovich was not any dissident. He simply could not stand interference in his work by those who didn’t know a damn thing about it. Tatyana Tarasova in the TV show “Stars on Ice,” almost 30 years after that demarche of her father, returned to us a sense of the real scale of personality in the profession. When almost everything in the country is run by thieving, illiterate and untalented people, suddenly - even if only in an entertainment show - there is a person who judges because he has the right to judge. And he does this exclusively according to the laws of the sport that he has served all his life.
The icebreaker "Tarasova" amazingly breaks the ice of moral degradation and creative stagnation that has shackled the Russian elite. Even politicians, when they come to this show, “unfreeze” a little, thaw out, and begin to say some normal human things. Moreover, such a metamorphosis occurred with people as different in temperament and way of communication as Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov and Deputy Speaker of the State Duma Vladimir Zhirinovsky.
Therefore, the main value of “Stars on Ice” is not only the propaganda of figure skating, but also the propaganda of television without propaganda, the triumph of real creativity, real emotions, sincere thoughts and actions. Yes, and this show’s participants constantly call it the word I hate, “project.” But the implementation of this “project” does not imply stupid PR of the implementers themselves, but truly beautiful dances of beautiful and talented people, a truly warm attitude of the public towards the very subject of the show (figure skating). And even jokes, for example, about the creation of such a show with football advertising and the impossibility of doing this, since, unlike “fig-skating”, it will not be possible to find professional football players in Russia, look kind and honest.
Tatyana Tarasova, an intelligent and highly professional person, rules the roost in one particular program on one Russian TV channel. The nature of this reign leaves us with hope that the rest of our lives may be the same. Thank you, Tatyana Anatolyevna! Just don’t join United Russia, please. And don’t join A Just Russia, like Evgeni Plushenko. Because you are Russia without adjectives and quotation marks.