Introduction: Carnival versus lashing laughter in Soviet cinema

Summary

I adhere to the tradition of laughing while the lash swishes. Mine is a laughter of destruction.

Sergei Eisenstein

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.

Jonathan Swift

Headed for the promised sky

We never had a good civilization, but we always had a good culture.

Viktor Yerofeyev (Shapiro, “Ablest Soviets Flee for Better Lives”)

It's a dark, snowy, cold Russian night, and a large group of the Moscow homeless have been surrounded by police and soldiers and commanded to leave their shantytown so that an American—Soviet joint venture hotel and condom factory can be built on the spot where the poor have been living. “This is our land and we are not going to leave it,” calls out the president, the leader of the homeless who acts like a not-so-distorted copy of Gorbachev and looks remarkably like Albert Einstein. But the official forces will not listen. They move in with tanks and riot troops, crushing all in their path. The poor gather on an old steam locomotive, which looks a lot like the old “revolutionary” trains of seventy years ago, and to everyone's surprise, the locomotive starts up and heads on down the track with the military in hot pursuit.