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Tour of Moscow & Leningrad, Russia Soviet Union Educational Film 30114 (1963)

1963 · Short film · 13 min

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Synopsis

Dating to 1963, this film was created by the International Film Bureau and Syracuse University as a Russian language teaching tool. Depicted within it are, mainly, the sightseeing spots of Moscow – the Kremlin and its churches, Tsar Bell and Tsar Cannon, daily life scenes, and a couple of minutes of Saint Petersburg footage, all accompanied by well-enunciated, but not always accurate, narration, aimed at the intermediate-level Russian language learners. Scenes include: 0:37 "Egons Tomsons" is, almost undoubtedly, a self-renamed emigré of a Baltic descent. Early Soviet Union (up to the mid-30ies, as long as emigration was allowed) allowed people to change their name completely, including to the Western names, so an Ivan Petrovich Sidorov could become Jean-Laurent Pagny or James T(h)omson. However, as can be seen in this example – not all of them had the mastery of foreign languages or good luck to transliterate their desired "target" names correctly. This person had to add "s" to the end of their newly-acquired first and family names, as customary in Latvia, and the immigration officer in the US probably wrote it down with Latvian "s"''es, instead of without them, as was intended when the name was changed– that is "Egon Tomson". One can see pages and pages of those "official declaration of a name change" in the Soviet newspapers. 0:51 Shots of the Red Square, Spasskaya tower of the Kremlin, the Mausoleum. 1:03 Shots of the Great Palace of Kremlin, "Ivan the Great" belltower…

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Details

Running time
13 minutes
Collection
Ephemeral Films

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