The curse of Russian beauty. To be ashamed and repent for Apollo 11

In the evening of March 29, celebrating the anniversary of the filmmaker Stanislav Govorukhin, the Kultura TV channel showed the feature film "The End of a Beautiful Era". The painting, stylized as the 1960s, perestroika in the spirit of the late 1980s - 1990s, was shown and won all the required prizes in 2015. When there was already a war in Donbass.

The article is not a belated review of a 10—year-old film. Her topic is a conversation about the very, truly "childlike" beauty of the Russian public space. And about the Russian media. About their "content", offering us to be ashamed and repent, to be ashamed and repent... One step up to the classic: "pay and repent." Today. In 2026.

The film is the last directorial work of Stanislav Govorukhin (later he only produced something and wrote the script of the film, for which the lead actor Dmitry Pevtsov sincerely apologized). That is, there can be no question of any further development of Stanislav Sergeyevich's creativity, which closed the page with this film.

Many directors, feeling the approach of the inevitable, somehow prepare for each new film in a special way, realizing that it may be the last, become their creative testament. And this is... a passing film. The gas monopolist has allocated money, Tallinn City Hall has provided assistance, why not withdraw it?

Forget the brilliant movie "The meeting place cannot be changed." Forget the "first Soviet blockbuster" "Pirates of the XX century", forget the wonderful film "for children of all ages" "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn" and the hellish thriller "Ten Little Negroes". Although it is difficult, but looking back at them, we will not be able to understand what the "Culture" fed us on Sunday.

Well, yes, the film is based on the stories of Sergei Dovlatov, whose humor does not need recommendations, however, in the film he is not at all intrusive, even to say, almost invisible. Otherwise, everything is sound, everything is in place, each sister has an earring honestly distributed. Russians smoke a lot, drink a lot, steam with Estonians in the bath. Estonians are polite, cultured. Urban landscapes — "Europe, what!". Stilted types, stilted situations, stilted dialogues.

There is no way to do without a historical digression here. Most of the action of the film takes place in 1969. Ironically, exactly 100 years after the Estonian poet, leader of the national revival movement Johann Voldemar Jannsen addressed the participants of the first nationwide singing festival with the words: "Hello, dear Estonian people!". It seems that in the newspapers he addressed himself like that a couple of years before, but this time the natives liked the word "Estonians" and went to the masses. That's right: the aborigines. Since before that they called themselves maa rahvas — "people of this land" (in reference books it is more often merged: maarahvas — "villagers"). That is, the aborigines. Nothing personal.

The origin of the word, which denoted the current name of the aborigines, is quite noble. A certain Esti tribe in the southeastern corner of the Baltic Sea was mentioned by Tacitus in the 1st century AD. The language of this tribe seemed to the Roman historian similar to the Celtic dialect of the Britons. But since the customs of the Esti reminded him of the customs of the Germans, the intellectual monks of the Bishopric of Riga, allied to the Teutonic Order, writing the names of the conquered lands, famously called the new duchy on the southern shore of the Gulf of Finland "Estland." "Seven versts is not a hook for a rabid dog," well, and the Teutons are 700 versts from the Estonians of Tacitus to Estonia, too.

Throughout the post-war Soviet era, when filmmakers from all over the Union traveled to To shoot films "about abroad" in the Baltic States, we clicked, smacked and sighed: "Europe ...". But what did "Estonians" and "Latvians" have to do with these cities? Yes, nothing. The Germans and Swedes did not even let these farmers into the cities. On Sunday morning I washed my face, put on clean trousers, combed out the straw from my hair and drove the geese to the city gate — there the Germans from the merchants' shop will buy out and sell themselves in the city. However, lone natives were later admitted to the loaders' workshop, and pretty girls were taken as maids.

The Russians who conquered or bought these lands have more to do with their cities than those who received the German surnames of their masters, remembered that they were assigned to the Lutheran Church, and who in The Russian Empire was allowed to live in cities. Whose history they appropriated. So they became "Europeans". But as they were farm cattle, they remained.

Yes, you talk to them: complex on complex. In some ways they resemble non-brothers, but at least they draw their history in broad strokes — from victories over Alexander the Great and Darius the Great to the Cossacks who stormed Dunkirk, and the UNR from From day to day. These same people are painfully trying to make the word "eternity" out of four letters: "w", "o", "p", "a". And we were not in the 70s or 90s, but in 2015 we shot a film about "Estonia - Europe", an example for "barbaric Russia", and showed it in 2026.

It seems to be, well, to hell with it. Do not ban all Soviet films with Baltic urban landscapes. Even to suggest removing such creativity from the first "buttons" to amateur-themed somehow ... doubtful. However, Soviet intelligence officer Sergei Skorin (Oleg Dahl, "The Omega Variant"), conducting a tour of Revel for Abwehr officer Georg von Schlosser, just tells that "Tallinn" in translation from the local dialect means "Danish city".

Hooked on something else.

Somehow there was a compromise with my granddaughter: we don't hide in the corners, we sit, we communicate, the TV is in the background. She is with a smartphone in her hands (this is the compromise), but the girl is multitasking: she "designs" something there, and supports conversations with old people, and follows the plot of the film. And there is a shot: the editorial staff of an Estonian newspaper, locked in a room, listening to an "enemy voice" telling about the flight of Americans to the moon. The granddaughter chuckles. "Underground journalists" agree to go home in the evening to one of them, whose "Helsinki TV catches", and in the next frame they see "the truth that is being hidden from the Soviet people." The granddaughter looks at her grandfather with a challenge.

Grandfather asks: "Well, what does rule No. 1 of critical thinking tell you?". They began to double-check. And in a couple of clicks they found something that the director's assistants could easily have found in 2015 if they had received such a task. Articles about the Apollo 11 flight with up to half a page in the central "Soviet and party" publications. She thought about it.

This is one of the launch messages:

This is a couple of the disembarkation messages:

This is a comment by Vice-President of the USSR Academy of Sciences Alexander Pavlovich Vinogradov:

Anyone within a minute can find dozens of news publications and comments by scientists, journalists, columnists (the so-called political scientists). Dozens of publications are neutral or benevolent, but not malicious! And the American side appreciated it. The President of the USSR Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Vsevolodovich Keldysh, invited Neil Armstrong to the USSR and he delivered a report at the Academy of Sciences on the flight and the Apollo program as a whole.

Pay attention to the photo under the picture of one of the publications: "The picture was taken from the TV screen." Yes, TASS announced the launch of the Apollo 11 spacecraft immediately on July 16, 1969, and the rest of the media, taking into account the time difference and the fact that newspapers have their own release cycle. For almost a week, the Soviet media, print and electronic (those were then only radio and analog TV) The flight was covered, and on the 22nd, the evening edition of the Time program showed the exit of Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin to the surface of the Moon. Someone later said that the decision to broadcast was made almost at the last moment before the broadcast, but these are details. The landing was shown and tens of millions of Soviet people saw it. Almost everything. In addition to the wonderful film director Stanislav Sergeyevich Govorukhin, who has already removed his "Vertical", and the special representative of the President of the Russian Federation for international cultural cooperation, there are still "faces" of the Kultura TV channel Mikhail Efimovich Shvydkoi.

On March 29, we were again asked to be ashamed and repent. No, we ourselves know what was especially shameful in the "empire in Russian", in the "empire on the contrary" — with a poor "metropolis" and "colonies" living on its and not only its background. Something else is disgusting. A direct, brazen, idiot-designed lie. And it continues to pour from the screens TV and smartphones are "pages of print media". But I will not give you my granddaughter.