Being a bad Russian, I don’t watch Soviet movies and therefore have little idea of how the censorship works in general, but since I’ve watched Soviet adaptations, I can explain things that all of us will get, because here the free world behind the iron curtain versus the Soviet rules. Today I’m going to explain as much as I know about the Soviet Sherlock Holmes series and its relationship with the censors. Even though some things I was keeping for later, because duh I still have a lot of posting coming up, but uh.
First of all, the Soviet censorship wasn’t something horrific as you may think. It’s not like the comity got angry because Maslennikov filmed a movie about that capitalist country and the main characters are not Ivan Ivanov and Sasha Smirnov that praise Communism, and everyone was sent to Gulag and happy end, no, film anything you want as long as it’s appropriate.
You need to remember that any character that shows up in a movie is going to be a role model for someone, unless shitty behavior of that character is justified or blurred enough that its present and absent at the same time. USSR was not a free country. No matter what it was still trying to promote good qualities in people - kindness, smartness, dignity, love, friendship, humor, loyalty. How about promoting a cold drug addict and his strange behavior? Children are going to watch that. They will like that. They will go out in the yard and play boredom and drug taking. They will mimic the habits and the shitty character.
Basically, you were surprised why Soviet Holmes wasn’t taking any drugs and was so kind in general. This is the answer why - just remember anything that is bad for kids and never expect that to show up in a Soviet movie. If there are different cases, praise the genius of the director, he teared his ass apart to sneak that in his movie.
I can say for sure that Sherlock’s drug addiction was deleted because of the censorship. His character, though, was changed because the director wanted it. We usually forget about any shit canon Holmes does, we only remember how he treasures Watson and all the kind stuff he does. So Maslennikov threw everything bad about Holmes out and created a movie about friendship. It was his own will and it passed through the censorship comity, they have little to do with that change, if at all.
So everything you find strange and maybe too idealistic about the series - it’s both because of the censorship and the director’s will to show the Britain he never saw as he imagined - a dignified country full of dignified and good people. Remember that many things the directors and screenwriters take out themselves because the censorship comity will order to throw it out anyway.
So going straight to the things that were actually ordered to be deleted: it was one fucking word.
Remember the scene when Watson just met Holmes? Holmes told Watson that he just came from the East. You know, “the East”. Not Afghanistan, but the East. He DID say Afghanistan. The word you will HEAR - “vostoka”. The word he SAYS - “Afghanistana”. Look
Too long for “vostoka”, isn’t it?
It was 1979 outside and the USSR had just started this nice Afghan war, suddenly a wild Watson appears and says he just came from a war in Afghanistan. You know, it was coming from Conan Doyle, there was nothing wrong with it, but when the comity heard it, as the lady in this one minute long video says, they just fell off their chairs because of horror. The director was asked to replace Afghanistan wih something. Watch that vid though, you can skip straight to 0:33 or something, the narrator tries to voice over Livanov here and it’s funny
If you watch every scene that mentions the East in that episode, you will see that everyone says “Afghanistan”. It was changed just before the premiere.
Well, that was the only ordered change. Firstly because Sherlock Holmes didn’t touch anything that intersected with the USSR’s business anymore, and secondly:
I know cosmoglaut likes this part: these two episodes were originally planned to be the only ones. It was the common people of the Soviet Union that liked these episodes so much they were sending TONS of letters to the filming studio, and if people asked, that very evil filming organisation that censors movies then had to order the director to film more. Awesome, right? So the filming team was careful, knowing that “yeah these episodes will be the last ones, so let’s work hard on them” and remembering that weird thing with Afghanistan. Overall there were five sets of episodes and every each of them was filmed only because the people asked for it. I shit you not everyone including the actors were so done with this
If you’re still surprised about that tiny amount of problems the series had: of course they were heavily censored movies. The directors of these movies wanted to either laugh at the reality or just show the reality; Maslennikov wanted to film a movie about friendship.
Another aspect of censorship comes not from the filming organisation, but from the USSR in general. As you know, it was forbidden to leave the country. Want to film England? - sucks to be you, bro. Here you have the whole of this big Soviet Union, do as you please with that. Literally, you can’t leave the country, fuck you and your movies. So the filming team had to search for something that would look at least not like Russia. They had to search for European looking surroundings, thanks to Stalin we had the whole of Latvia and other countries/cities with similar architecture. So yes, the Soviet England doesn’t look like England, that’s right, it looks like Riga, St.-Petersburg, Georgia, Estonia, and other. The brightness and the poverty of the Soviet cinematography. So don’t blame the guys, they worked real hard to find these places. Even the new series were still filmed in Russia, in St.- Petersburg in particular. I live there I still have no idea how I managed to miss all the shooting
So one interesting thing that comes out of this problem was in the second episode of The Treasures of Agra. The boat chasing scene had to be filmed. St.- Petersburg’s Neva was always playing Thames on that matter, but just at the time of the shooting one lucky Russian reporter was going to London to film some shit for his channel. The director was pleading him to film some Thames views while he will be there. So that reporter did. These random views you see while the chase is the true™ London and true™ Thames that reporter filmed when he was on a tourist boat
True™
The last presence, or rather absence of the Soviet censorship happens in the last two episodes of the series.
If you are a stranger to Soviet movies, you might not feel any difference between the XX Century Approaches and the previous episodes. But something tells me you felt that at least something was different about it.
These episodes came out in 1986 - at the time when Perestroika began. During that time, the censorship became so weak you had no problems sneaking horrible stuff into your movies. In 1987 Ten Little Negroes came out, only because the filming organisation didn’t give any fucks anymore. It wasn’t possible to film something like that before, it was too dark and bloody. The movie was starring Kaidanovsky, by the way, the guy who was almost Holmes before Livanov
You might have noticed that in the last two episodes of the Soviet series the humor became more…understandable for you maybe, more like the thing we got used to after all the Western movies. These two episodes were similar to Western movies in general. As Livanov says, it happened because Maslennikov wrote the script himself instead of usual screenwriters, and because everyone was tired of Sherlock Holmes in general…
These two episodes are considered to be the worst ones in Russia.
I don’t believe they were “the worst” only because Perestroika kicked in, like the team was all the same, but some magical power made them forget how to film good movies overnight. Of course there were several reasons why these two episodes came out to be…different from the rest, but most of us think this change pretty much symbolizes how the times have changed in Russia. Don’t believe how it was before? - watch the first nine episodes. Want to see what we mean by saying after the fall of the USSR all movies became shit? - watch the last two episodes. Look at the change. You can literally see how the country changes by watching Soviet Sherlock Holmes.
While Russia had tight censorship and was under that evil Communist regime - it had its golden movie era. Not Russia, every country in the Soviet Union. Any ex-Soviet country will tell you that its best movies were produced under the regime. Everybody thought that when the USSR will be gone, we could film better movies, because we will have freedom, but instead of better movies this freedom had created disaster only. The Soviet censorship was ridiculous, it created separate fact pages about movies, it has created lots of questions amongst foreigners, but it wasn’t as terrific as you thought. I mean, no matter what, the Soviet series was still great, wasn’t it?
