Anniversary of the Operation Y and Other Shurik's Adventures

On July 23, 1965, Leonid Gayday's film "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures" was released on the cinema screens of the Soviet Union.

Only in the first year after the release of the picture on the screens in the USSR, almost 70 million moviegoers, or 31% of the country's population, watched it! This made the picture the leader of the Soviet film distribution in 1965. And in the entire history of Soviet film distribution, "Operation 'Y' ..." is among the top ten, occupying 7th place in it. Naturally, many publications are devoted to the history of the creation of such a champion film, which can be easily found on the net. There is no point in retelling them.

However, Leonid Gayday's film did not obtain any festival achievements. Perhaps the Silver Dragon award, which was awarded to the ыegment "Deja vu" at the not-so-famous Krakow International Film Festival, which specializes in short films. And this award has its own explanation: the plot of the short story "Delusion" was taken by Leonid Gayday from the Polish magazine "Szpilki". But at home, the film did not receive any official awards. Moreover, the fact that the film was awarded at the Krakow Film Festival was not reflected either in the Russian Wikipedia or on the Kinopoisk website.

And the path of the picture to the domestic audience was quite thorny. The well-known historian of Soviet cinema Fyodor Razzakov cites the following facts from the history of the film:

“On April 23, the film was screened by the artistic council, at which Ivan Pyryev, in particular, demanded “to stop filming Morgunov and Pugovkin". The authority-the scenario-editing collegium-demanded that Gaidai cut out a number of episodes, in particular, when the Negro Fedya the Boor was chasing Shurik and when the students pass the exams. But Gayday left everything as it is. A little later he was remembered when they assigned the second category to the film. In July, the group's determination commission classified "Operation" Y "to the 2nd category. For example, we note that in the same year, the films "We, the Russian people" were included in the 1st category (for six months the film gathered 4 million viewers) , “I see the sun” (5.1 million in six months), “Who will saddle a horse” (6.6 million in six months), which few people remember today."

But, in fairness, we must admit that after long squabbles, the film was nevertheless assigned the 1st category, and it was released in a very large circulation - 1197 copies. And as a result, brought a huge income to the state budget.

Therefore, it is not worth being surprised that the film, which became popular with tens of millions of viewers at home, but ignored by the official circles of its country, remained practically unknown outside the USSR. Although those who watched this comedy by Gayday, and there were such people in Europe, spoke about the film in the most flattering way. For example, the German film critic Thorsten Reitz writes: "So what is important about this breakthrough film? A movie like Operation ‘Y’ would not have been possible in the Soviet Union only a decade earlier. Stalin’s death in 1953 affected the culture of the Workers’ State from top to bottom. In the aftermath, Khrushchev proclaimed the destalinization of the country and a less rigorous censorship. The policies, known as ‘Thaw’, allowed artists to express themselves more freely, beyond the rigid socialist realism of the Stalin era. The successes of the era were enough positive propaganda for the Soviet Union. Books and films were finally allowed to serve different purposes." (http://www.cinema-v.com/children-of-the-revolution.../)

Russian film critic Yevgeny Nefyodov wrote about this film in 2014:

"The reasons for the triumph of "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures" at the box office do not need to be explained to anyone who has lived long enough in the USSR (or at least received adequate ideas about glorious period of national history), but the movie remains evergreen, without losing its relevance, easily conquering new generations of viewers. Among recent eloquent examples is the nomination in 2009 by the music channel MTV Russia for a film award in the nomination "Best Soviet Film""

(The matter was limited only to the nomination. The picture of Vladimir Menshov "Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears" was recognized as the best Soviet film. But getting into the top five also means a lot.)

The relevance, or, according to Yevgeny Nefyodov, "evergreenness" of Gaidai's picture is evidenced by its ratings on the IMDB and Kinopoisk websites. 84% of users of these sites gave the film "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures" ratings from 8 to 10. And 43% of users rated the film with the highest score - "ten". With that said, Leonid Gayday's film "Operation 'Y' & Other Shurik's Adventures" was rated 8,701 by FilmGourmand, making it #246 in the Golden Thousand.