Playboy and Soviet decline
"ripe and ready for a sexual revolution"
We’re screening Little Vera this Sunday — part of our Soviet Collapse Cinema series that’s running every Sunday night in July. The film is about the life of a typical Soviet girl, a kind of coming-of-age story. It hit the screens in the USSR in 1988 (a year before I left with my family) and was very popular and scandalous because it portrayed Soviet life in a more or less natural way: everyday alcoholism, minor domestic abuse, cramped living conditions, family strife, crumbling industrial infrastructure…stuff that didn’t comport with the usual official line that everything was great. It also featured the first sex scene and nudity in a Soviet movie. So the film was iconoclastic in that way.
LITTLE VERA — this Sunday at 7PM, Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
The film marked another historical first. Its star, Natalya Negoda, the one who played Vera, was the first Soviet woman to appear in Playboy. Little Vera was a big hit in the West, too, did well in the festival circuit, and the Playboy feature was part of its Western promotional tour.
I couldn’t help myself, so I got the May 1989 Playboy issue that featured this historic spread. The photo spread and drooling and triumphant text that accompanied it is interesting on a few different levels. First, it foreshadowed something that was just around the corner for a lot of women in the USSR: a de facto market prostitutization of the female body on a scale never before experienced by the population. This wasn’t something that was imposed purely from the outside — lots of Russians were eager to jump into this new world of market relations in everything, including in romantic relationships themselves. The feature also captured something you don’t see very much anymore: an America full of swagger and haughtiness. The America of May 1989 was an America entering peak empire mode, full of confidence and sure of its own superiority and future…a feeling that you don’t get in America any more.
From the spread:
Thanks to Gorbachev, that notoriously opaque curtain has begun to show signs of see-through seductiveness, permitting a little political peekaboo between East and West. Naturally, Playboy’s editors were delighted late last year when some quiet negotiations well below the summit offered reasonable hope that the screen sensation wowing them from Minsk to Moscow might be free to fly West for a revealing pictorial. “Twas the month before Christmas, and visions of glasnost and perestroika danced in our heads. Soon, Natalya herself arrived in Los Angeles, accompanied by interpreter Viviane Mikhalkov, to confer with West Coast Photo Editor Marilyn Grabowski, whose first impression was that a Soviet-American space walk might be easier than a joint effort in photography. “Natalya seemed dour, even grim,” Marilyn recalls, “and gave off an aura of not trusting Playboy or Americans in general. When we asked questions, the word we heard more than anything else was nyet.” Roughly two weeks later, their cold war had dissolved in a détente of girl talk and good vibes…
Some scans of the photo shoot below…
