在莫斯科教卡萨布兰卡

I first visited the Soviet Union in the summer of 1964 at age 19, when Nikita Khrushchev was in power and ardent banners proclaimed the superiority and ultimate victory of communism.

The Russia I came to know in 2010, when I taught a History of Hollywood class in Moscow’s Center for American Studies on a Senior Fulbright Award, differed profoundly from the country I had visited in the past. 然而，大部分都没有改变.

Ads for high-end consumer goods were ubiquitous, 而且好餐馆比比皆是, though colleagues admitted the appearance of prosperity was a sham and the country remained bleak and backward outside of Moscow and St. 彼得堡.

Enmity now occasionally tempered the mixture of awe and jealousy that had once characterized Russian attitudes toward Americans. I gave up Russian television news in the first week, the anti-Americanism so predictable.

My students seemed to harbor little if any of that hostility. 他们住在首都, 就读于名校, and had been educated in English marked them among the privileged.

All had been born after the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991. They considered themselves “Russian,“永不”苏维埃,” and the results of that distinction continually surprised me.

没有人听说过格拉夫利特, 苏联审查当局, without whose approval a manuscript could not appear in print. In America, while we pride ourselves on free speech, the movies are the exception, I explained. Some seemed relieved to hear that we too bore the stain of oppression.

I showed them clips from two 泰山 films. In 泰山和他的伴侣, Maureen O’Sullivan dives into a pond with Johnny Weissmuller waiting below. 在水下她是赤裸的. In 泰山找到了一个儿子, with movie censorship firmly in place, 简, 泰山, and Boy pursue a perfectly middle-class existence in their well-appointed tree house. 我说，这就是审查制度.

Ninotchka proved the most controversial film we discussed. The students argued furiously over whether Hollywood had portrayed Stalin’s Russia accurately. 是刚性的吗, militaristic surveillance state to which Garbo returns after the light and romance of Paris? Certainly not, some angrily insisted, as ignorant of Stalin as of Soviet censorship. 唉，是的，其他人辩称. The Russian émigrés in Hollywood had got it right, and so had Garbo.

Neither my Russian colleagues nor my students had ever heard of 卡萨布兰卡. I explained that the film contained references to isolationism vs. intervention in American politics on the eve of war but gave no further introduction.

我的听众被迷住了. The cleaning ladies came and sat to watch, crowding in among the students. The next week every class in the American Studies Center found a reason to show it. “I know; we love it too,” I told my colleagues—and gave them my copy of the film.

Some of my students wanted to meet me outside of class and show me Moscow. 在普京, the city now suggested a theme park in homage to Catherine the Great, 克里米亚的征服者. I wondered if Putin intended to emulate her. He had resurrected Catherine’s Tsaritsyno Palace from a pathetic ruin into a showplace of 18th-century imperial style and regularly wore the black and gold ribbon of the Order of St. 殉道者乔治, established by Catherine to award commanders fighting in Crimea or elsewhere in the south.

Some of my students did not buy into this image of their country. Their parents insisted, they confided, that if they could not live in Moscow or St. 彼得堡, they had to leave Russia.

One of them showed me a saltshaker in the form of a bust of Putin. 他眼中涌出了泪水. 这是, 毕竟, only four years since the murder of the renowned journalist Anna Politkovskaya on the doorstep of her apartment building.  暗杀审查.

I had been in Moscow two months when I awoke to the sound of ambulances with blaring sirens screeching toward the Institute of Emergency Medicine. Two bombs had gone off in the Moscow metro at rush hour. 在几天内, ominous notices went up all over the city warning the populace to report suspicious activity to the FSB (successor to the KGB), 不是警察.

I have not heard from Russian friends since December 2021. The Russia I knew only 11 years earlier, both paradoxical and filled with possibilities, now seems like a collection of archaeological sites.

亚历克西斯·波戈尔斯金，66年, who chaired the history department at the University of Minnesota Duluth for 19 years, has just completed a book titled America’s Mortal Storm: Filmmaking as Political Struggle on the Eve of War. She is co-editor of a collection of essays on the Tenth Party Congress.