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Mikhalkov, who recently returned to the U.S.S.R. from a trip to the U.S., sees similarities between the best films of both countries. Says he: "It seems to me that the time has come to return to a type of romanticism—to Chaplin, to films that give people some hope—Breaking Away, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nashville, Paper Moon." But as a Soviet film maker, is he not asked to make cuts in his movies to satisfy the cultural bureaucrats? Mikhalkov shrugs his shoulders. "Of course, that's only natural," he replies. "Whoever pays can call the tune. Here it is from Goskino [the centralized film bureaucracy]; in America it would be the producer. But as far as I am personally concerned, if I have to be financially dependent, I would prefer that I not be dependent on one or two producers but on what is called the fatherland. I just try to do my job as honestly as possible."
The question is whether "honesty" and "fatherland" are, in the U.S.S.R., irreconcilable enemies. Soviet film makers work under many ideological restraints —some subtle, some blatant—that began with a five-year plan set down by Goskino. Like the production schedule of an oldtime Hollywood studio, the code calls for production funds to be divided among pictures in a variety of genres. But the genres in question touch on themes that only an apparatchik could love: tales of young workers and peasants heroically exceeding their quotas.
All scripts must be filtered through an editor, who claims that his desire is merely to "clarify" the writer's aims. Says Mikhail Bogin, an émigré Soviet director: "The editor wonders, 'What can be learned from this film? How does it serve the Soviet people?' He'll probably begin to think, 'I'm afraid. I'm worried.' " He should be, for he will share the blame with the film's creators if something offends someone further up the line —a cultural bureaucrat in one of the republics, or perhaps even the Central Committee in Moscow. Like Stalin before him, Brezhnev has been known to enter these debates. He once got a movie shelved simply by inquiring after a screening, "Who needs it?"
Usually, however, a film is well laundered before the party boss gets to play movie mogul. One director found himself squabbling with censors when he made a comedy about corruption in the wine industry: in one scene a bad barrel was labeled "48," which happened to be precisely the number of years that had passed since the revolution. Was he perhaps implying that the revolution had gone sour too? Another film maker got into trouble when he included a song called Bring Me a Piece of the Moon—during the time that Americans had landed there and the Russians had not. Was he belittling the Soviet space effort? Edward Topol, an émigré screenwriter, once tried to explain a picture about juvenile delinquency to a Soviet official, who said that in his travels round the Soviet Union he had never seen any youthful criminals, so how could they exist? Re-edited and reshot, a new version was permitted to go forth by KGB Boss Yuri Andropov.