Word: simochka
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...prisoners, who are mostly men of science, are all supposed to be working on a project ordered personally by Stalin: a tap-proof phone. But one of their number, Gleb Nerzhin (Gunther Malzacher), keeps finding the time to steal off to a supply closet with one of the warders, Simochka (Elzbieta Czyzewska). "I'd like to leave you with my child," he breathes, lunging for her tunic. "Monday," she shudders, dying to surrender herself but trying also to cope with a pesky short-wave radio that crackles away on a nearby table, summoning her to report. Such sequences evoke...
...central figure in a series of events which would seem like fantasy were not each episode matched by a solemn quotation from Soviet pronouncements. By Soviet standards, T.T. is highly fortunate-he has a television set, a Pobeda automobile, a plump stomach and a talented teen-age daughter named Simochka. Yet there comes the dreadful day when it is reported from Simochka's university that she has been overheard making anti-party statements. This is serious business-only last year, two students had to be shot for forming a secret society. At this moment Novelist Grinioff's comic...
...sacred Marx-Lenin-Stalin writings may prove fatal. The action dissolves in a mirage of Marxist motivation: whom to bribe with what is the problem. Thus, to buy silence, the television set goes to a despised subordinate, a piano to someone else, a raccoon coat to a third. Simochka is saved, at the price of most of Daddy's worldly goods-only to be trapped again by a girl MVD agent who wins the simple Communist debutante's confidence with a copy of a magazine resembling Vogue...
Barchester in Russia. Then comes the switch. Stalin is posthumously purged by Khrushchev & Co., and the spiral of official truth spins into reverse. Simochka, it appears, was right all along. T.T. is back in the center of his absurd universe, and the bribes fly back from the terrified recipients. Thus Novelist Grinioff extracts ribald comedy from his central theme: under tyrannous government, humanity exists in the corruption of its officials. It is human crookedness that can best the inhuman game...
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