--- Sujeet Bhatt <sujeet.bhatt at gmail.com> wrote: This incident from the early eighties may be relevant here - I was living in Germany then. A young Bulgarian woman buttonholed me at a party and insisted I hear her sing a very popular song from a Raj Kapoor film. She had a beautiful voice and, except for entirely understable lapses in pronunciation, rendered it quite well. Unfortunately, I could not return the compliment with a Bulgarian - or even a Russian - song. Having said which, I must add that I knew more about Dostoyevski, Tolstoy and Turgenev than she did about Ghalib, Mir and Zauq (roughly the same period)!
---
Putin is a Raj Kapoor han, supposedly.
For the life of me I can't figure put why the Soviets didn't promote their entertainment industry more aggressively overseas. It would have really improved the image of the country abroad. They had great war movies and comedies. Outside of Tarkovsky and Eisenstein's work, pretty much the only Soviet film anybody's ever heard of abroad is Moscow Does't Believe in Tears. Bummer.
Disco Dancer's cult status is part of the role it played in the USSR's disco period, back when ABBA was supplanting Deep Purple as the cool young Soviet person's foreign band of choice. Rumor has it that ABBA had some kind of special merchandising deal with the Soviet government.
Nu, zayats, pogodi!
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