Letter to Brezhnev (Yeardream, Palace Pictures, Channel Four Films, 1984)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Bodyguard Seduction my husband Charles ran me a movie on YouTube that he’d heard about when it was new (1984) but hadn’t actually seen: Letter to Brezhnev, a quirky British film about two young women in the Kirkby district of Liverpool, Elaine Spencer (a woman with the very unfortunate name Alexandra Pigg) and Teresa King (Margi Clarke). When the film begins they’re two women on the prowl in LIverpool’s night life, going to a number of dreary clubs with recorded music (one wonders why the Liverpool live-music scene had apparently disappeared in the over two decades since the Beatles broke out of it into international stardom). In one of the clubs Teresa attracts the attention of an old, creepy-looking guy and offers to dance with him – only she’s really interested in picking his pocket, which she does. Then he notices her and responds to the loss by chasing her through the Liverpool streets, making subhuman grunts and growls that suggest he’s going to turn into the Incredible Hulk at any moment. Nineteen minutes into the movie, we finally get a connection with Russia when we meet two Russian sailors, Peter (Peter Firth, Pigg’s real-life husband since 2017) and Sergei (Alfred Molina). We can tell they’re Russian because Peter’s sailor’s cap has a single red star affixed to it. Actually, Charles pointed out that the Russian connection had been established earlier on when the two sailors cried out, “Liverpool!,” and said how excited they were to be in the city that gave the world The Beatles. But I had been thrown by the name of their ship, “Brazil,” into thinking the movie was actually set there.

Anyway, the two women hook up with the hot Soviet sailors – remember this was when the Soviet Union was still a going concern and Leonid Brezhnev was still alive (albeit barely) and its leader – and while Teresa, a good-time girl who reminded me of the heroine of Dorothy Parker’s marvelous short story “Big Blonde,” instantly “shags,” as the British would say, Sergei, Elaine and Peter spend a more starry-eyed (literally, since Peter points out a star in the sky to Elaine and says it’s “their” star) night in bed, cuddling but never doing the down-’n’-dirty. Elaine falls hopelessly in love with Peter and becomes determined to go to Russia herself and join him. The fact that this is ludicrously impossible – the Russian ship was spending only one day in Liverpool and another day in Scotland before heading home (which made me think director Chris Bernard and writer Frank Clarke were going to give us a Liverpudlian version of On the Town, also a film about sailors in a big city with only one day’s leave th hook up with female companionship) – only fuels Elaine’s determination. She attracts the attention of a British tabloid reporter who dies a front-page story on her quixotic quest for her Russian sailor lover-boy. Her parents (Joey Kaye and Eileen Walsh) flatly tell her they won’t let her go to Russia. She seeks out the British foreign office but they’re no help, either. She gets a lot of lecturing from her friends about how terrible the Soviet Union is, how repressive and inhuman its government is and that even if she goes to Russia, if she doesn’t like it she won’t be allowed to leave.

Finally she hits on the idea of writing Leonid Brezhnev himself and asking him to help her reunite with her Russian boyfriend – and, in a fantastic happenstance writer Clarke doesn’t even attempt to explain, he writes back, dictating a response to his secretary. (Iggy Navarro is credited as playing “President of Russia” in this scene.) The reply includes a one-way plane ticket to Moscow and Elaine is determined to use it, despite the attempts of all her friends to talk her out of it. When she hears everyone she knows tell her how repressive and awful Russia is, she fires back, ”Have you ever been there?” Naturally, none of them have – they’re just repeating what the Western media have had to say about it. Finally Elaine is summoned to a meeting with a British diplomat who actually has been to Russia – he was one stationed at the British embassy in Moscow – and he even rattles off a few sentences in Russian to prove to Elaine that he can speak the language, or at least some of it. (Maybe I’m wrong, but I assumed foreign diplomats assigned to a particular country are picked in part because they are already fluent in its language. I once read a book about the experience of the American hostages held in Iran from 1979 to 1981 and how the diplomatic staff didn’t want their captors to find out they knew Farsi, Iran’s language, because then the Iranians wouldn’t use Farsi around them. Some of them figured it out and started speaking to each other in Turkish, not knowing that the Americans they were holding knew Turkish, too.)

He shows Elaine a picture of Peter and asks her if this is indeed the man she wants to go to Russia to be with, and when she says it is, the next photo he shows is of Peter with a woman whom the consular official says is his wife. Needless to say, this flummoxes Our Heroine and discourages her from going, until Teresa talks her back into it, saying that maybe Peter is married and maybe he isn’t, but the only way she’ll find out for certain is if she goes to Russia and tracks him down. The film ends with her confidently striding through the airport on her way to board the plane, and the closing credits appear over a background of a cut-glass rendition of the Moscow skyline. Letter to Brezhnev is the sort of quirky film that got made quite often in the 1980’s, and though Charles had never seen it before and wasn’t sure what to expect, we were both charmed by it. Charles said that one of the major publicity points about the film was it was made on a budget of 50,000 pounds (though imdb.com lists a budget at £400,000) and still attracted major distribution and a worldwide audience. It holds up despite one major plot point that didn’t mean much in 1984 but means a great deal today; it’s established that Peter and Sergei are from the Black Sea region, which would make them not Russian but Ukrainian. In 1984 most people both in and out of Russia assumed that Ukraine was and always would be part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union that replaced it; the fact that within just six years the Soviet Union and the entire Eastern Bloc would collapse, Ukraine would become an independent country for three decades, and Russia would launch a full-scale war, a so-called “special military operation,” to reconquer it would have been inconceivable.