The Bootleg Video Vans of the Soviet Union

In the U.S.S.R. of the 1980s, as Brezhnev’s stagnation mutated into Gorbachev’s perestroika, the Soviet people started peering out from behind the Iron Curtain at the tantalizing opulence of Western popular culture. It wasn’t unusual for a few government-approved (and heavily sanitized) Hollywood movies to show up in local theaters in Mother Russia and her 14 children-states. An occasional 1960s or ’70s classic—such as Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather—would even make its way to one of the two central, state-run television stations broadcasting to all 15 republics.

This trend began in the 1960s, under Khrushchev’s “thaw,” the era during which the good people of the U.S.S.R. were allowed to fall in love with , a black-and-white masterpiece known to most English speakers as (Soviet censors found the original title too, well, hot). Even in the ’80s, when I got to see it myself, the American