Birthday of Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha

On August 21, 1967, Vladimir Motyl's film "Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha" was released on the screens of Soviet cinemas in a fairly limited edition of 730 copies.

It was no coincidence that I mentioned the number of copies, since the circulation of the film in those years was a delightful indicator of the government's favor for the film in general, and the cinematic authorities in particular. So, for comparison, the circulation of films released on screens around the same 1967-1968 years was characterized by the following data: "Kidnapping Caucassian Style, or Shurik's New Adventures" by Leonid Gaidai - 1474 copies, "We Will Live Until Monday" by Stanislav Rostotsky - 1671 copies, "The Diamond Hand" again by Leonid Gaidai - 2,079 copies. As the saying goes, the naked eye can see, to put it mildly, the authorities' aversion to the film of Vladimir Motyl. But why?

Let's start with the fact that the script of the film is based on Bulat Okudzhava's story "Be healthy, schoolboy!" This story has largely an autobiographical character, since it is based on the memoirs of a poet, bard and writer about the war days, when he, who went to war as a volunteer, fought first as a mortar in the cavalry regiment of the 5th Guards Don Cavalry Cossack Corps, and then, after injured, as a radio operator in the 126th howitzer artillery brigade of high power of the Transcaucasian Front.

The first publication of this story took place in 1961 in the anthology "Tarusa Pages". The initiator and ideological inspirer of this almanac was Konstantin Paustovsky. The main feature of this almanac was that the then secretary of the Kaluga regional committee for ideology, Alexei Surgakov, believing in the "Khrushchev thaw", took the liberty of allowing the publication of materials that were not censored in Moscow. It was planned to publish the almanac with a circulation of 75 thousand copies.

It all ended with the release of the first part of a circulation of 31 thousand copies. Okudzhava's story caught the eye of someone from the ideological bosses, further publication was prohibited, the unrealized part of the circulation was destroyed, the editor-in-chief of the publishing house was fired, the director received a severe reprimand, and Surgakov has got a warning on dismissal. And this, I repeat, at the very, one might say, the height of the Thaw. The point is that the depiction of military events in the story of Okudzhava, who finished military service as an ordinary Red Army soldier, was even more truthful and reliable than in the works of the so-called "lieutenant's prose". And it literally infuriated the ideological leadership. (In passing, we note that in 1987, during the years of perestroika, this story by Bulat Okudzhava was published in a separate edition.)

By some miracle, one of the surviving copies of the almanac fell into the hands of Vladimir Motyl, who naturally caught fire with the idea of ??a film adaptation of Okudzhava's story. But at the same time, Motyl perfectly understood that it would be very difficult to implement this idea. And, as they say, there would be happiness, but misfortune helped. In the mid-60s, Vladimir Motyl began working on a film about the Decembrists. But, as it turned out, despite the fact that Lenin's phrase about "the Decembrists woke Herzen" was present in every school history textbook, the very idea of ??praising people who dared to challenge - it's scary to think! - to the supreme ruler of the country, in the eyes of many ideological officials, it looked like a terrible sedition. And they gently, but persistently, recommended Motyl to change the theme of the future film. For example, on the theme of the Great Patriotic War. And Motyl took advantage of this. Of course, not without some trickery and manipulation.

We will not tell the story of this movie. All the vicissitudes and misadventures that befell the film literally from the very beginning of work on the script, the fight against the hard drinking of Oleg Dal, all the "butting with an oak tree", that is, with the party and ideological structures for the release of the film on screens, the role of Bulat Okudzhava in making the film, the role of A N. Kosygin in the release of the picture on the screens of Soviet cinemas is described in sufficient detail by the director of the film Vladimir Motyl himself, and by other eyewitnesses, for example, here and here.

We will only note that, despite the rather modest circulation of the picture, in the USSR almost 25 million people watched it in the first year. In our opinion, one of the indicators of a film's popularity can be the number of viewers per copy. After all, it's one thing when a film is shown in every cinema, including the one that is a stone's throw from your home. It is quite another matter when the film is shown only in 3-5 cinemas on the opposite end of the city, or even in another city. So, according to films - "peers" of Motyl's film, the picture is as follows: "The Diamond Hand" - 36.8 thousand per copy, "We'll Live Till Monday" - 18.5 thousand viewers per copy, "Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha" - 33,7 thousand per copy.

The famous Russian film critic Sergei Kudryavtsev described the popularity of this film and its reasons as follows: “The film of Motyl and Okudzhava did not accidentally turn into a cult among the intelligentsia, which immediately felt not only the challenge of the authors against the false heroization of the war, but also their almost dissident aspiration for those times to defend the right of every little person in the big battle of nations to have and keep intact his own special, sometimes strange and funny individuality. "

And one more observation. There is an opinion that the Western film distribution, on the whole, very negatively disposed towards Soviet films, favorably treated those of them, the authors of which were "caught" to one degree or another of "dissidence". Maybe they are right. But this rule did not apply to war films. Films showing at least the slightest degree of the role of the Soviet army in defeating fascism, whether their authors were at least three times dissidents, were not allowed on the screens of American, and in general, Western cinemas. Perhaps the only happy exception to this rule is Andrei Tarkovsky's "Ivan's Childhood". But our conversation about this film is still ahead. And the film "Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha" was not allowed on the screens of American and most European countries. Except for Hungary and Czechoslovakia, according to IMDB.

The modern moviegoer appreciated this film by Motyl and Okudzhava no less highly than the audience of the 60s. 70% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users gave this film an 8 or higher rating. Based on this indicator and the above, the rating of Vladimir Motyl's film "Zhenya, Zhenechka and Katyusha" according to FilmGourmand's version was 8.024, which allowed it to take 677th Rank in the Golden Thousand.