"How," Jean-Luc Godard once wrote, "can I hate John Wayne upholding [Barry] Goldwater and yet love him tenderly when abruptly he takes Natalie Wood into his arms in the last reel of The Searchers?" You could chalk that up to the paradox of being French, but it turns out that even a Godless Russian Communist wasn't sure how to respond to the Duke's charms. According to documentarian Lucy Ash, writing in The New Statesman, "Stalin was both fascinated and infuriated by John Wayne; the American actor's anti-communism so disturbed Uncle Joe that, according to Orson Welles, he once sent the KGB to California to assassinate him." Some of the Soviet leaders who came to power during the post-Stalin thaw were puppies by comparison, reduced to puddles of fanboy mush by far lesser lights. Leonid Brezhnev, it seems, had a jowly man-crush on Chuck Connors. "At a party hosted by President Nixon, Connors presented a delighted Brezhnev with a pair of Colt .45 revolvers. The general secretary returned the favour by allowing the American series [The Rifleman] to be shown on Soviet TV."
But as in all things, the Kremlin really sought to demonstrate their cultural superiority by showing that anything the capitalist swine could do, they could do better. Thus was the Soviet "Western," or "Eastern," born. In these films, "the backdrop is the steppes or Siberia. The Ural Mountains stand in for Monument Valley, the Volga replaces the Rio Grande and the heroes sport civil war-style budyonovka hats or fur-lined shapkas instead of Stetsons." The standard setter for the genre is the 1969 White Sun of the Desert, "set in Russian central Asia during the civil war. The hero, Fyodor Sukhov, is a Red Army soldier who has just been demobbed and is desperate to go home, but gets caught up in a showdown between a Bolshevik cavalry unit and some Basmachis (the Russian name for armed counter-revolutionaries) in the deep south of the USSR. These Islamic Turkic rebels are the bad guys, the equivalent of the Indians in an American western. The arch-villain is Abdulla, a Basmachi warlord fleeing the Reds. He kills a handful of his wives and abandons the remaining eight in the desert, and so the gallant Soviet hero is forced to come to their rescue. The film was originally called Save the Harem." As played by the blond, blue-eyed Anatoli Kuznetsov, Sukhov is "the embodiment of Russian macho cool. . . laconic and unruffled." Ash suggests that one key to the movie's enduring popularity is that it offers contemporary Russian viewers a heroic masculine image at a time when that sort of thing seems to be in short supply. In fact, Russian cosmonauts became so taken with it that they latched onto it and began to watch it as part of their ritual preparations for a space launch. When the Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi became a space tourist and contracted to spend ten days at the International Space Station, the Russians with whom he ferried out made him watch the damn thing first. His stoic verdict? "Not bad for a Soviet movie." — Phil Nugent
