Red Penguins. A Stellar Documentary That Explores The Clash of Cultures and Attitudes.

Another day I watched this excellent documentary film, Red Penguins. By the same director who’s made another superb documentary, Red Army. The director of these documentaries is smart enough to approach the plight of Russian hockey and its extraordinary Red Army Team, as some sort of vantage point, from which to explore larger cultural, political, and economic issues.

While Red Army focused mostly on hockey and traced several memorable hockey lives, the focus of this film is different and seems to be more historical, yet very current.

Red Penguins tells the story of all sorts of culture and ideological clashes: Russian vs. American, capitalist vs. socialist, law-abiding vs. mafia and lawlessness, despair of collapse vs. hopes and disillusionment of transformation.

A couple of American entrepreneurs, among whom the owner of Pittsburgh Penguins, and a marketing wonder boy, Steve Warshaw, decided to turn a former mighty Red Army Juggernaut into a Russian version of NHL team: Russian Penguins. Soviet team, along with the rest of the country, has fallen into total disrepair in early nineties. Players drunk and poor, stadium torn apart and neglected except a tiny strip club placed in former locker room, and the whole scene reminding of a sinking ship with a couple of pirates looting it.

Using their American know-how, Americans have turned things around. Team attracts sponsors and audience, stadium is fixed. So what if former strippers dance before the game, or free beer is distributed to teenagers and bears. Some old timers are scandalized, but things were improving, and began to function again.

Steve Warshaw was a charming visionary kid, whose total ignorance of Russian situation, of its corruption and despair, has clearly helped him, as he would not be deterred. Until…

That being early nineties, mafia inevitably moves in. Why should Americans make money on some Russian property, when Russians can steal better? That seems to be their logic. So through violence, intimidation, lies, and suspicions, mafiosos muscle Americans out. Red Army Leadership, which was supposed to protect the team, washed its hands of it. A coach, a player, even a photographer who took a picture of a wrong person got killed. The end result? The whole thing collapsed. The thugs, like parasites, drank all the blood out of this budding venture, and went on destroying other businesses and ventures.

It is strange to watch this film, a documentary to boot, where Americans are good guys, dreamers and visionaries, and Russians are thuggish, lying, drunkard losers. But that was 90s, and even though some facts of the film might be challenged by some purists, many of its details actually confirm my own understanding of Soviet collapse. Even though I missed the 91-93 period of utter disarray – I returned to Russia for the first time in 1994 after fifteen year hiatus -- what I saw during my visits of the late 1990s, surely confirms the picture of cynical greed, of zero-sum game approach to issues, of stupid desire to destroy the goose that might bring golden eggs. The time when crime, fears, aggression, and paranoia were the dominant emotions. We had one kid from Brown, who went to Moscow to perfect his Russian, and who was thrown from his dorm window at Moscow University to his death, only because some Mafioso guy thought that the kid might have witnesses something. And yes, the dorms of Moscow University were freely rented to thugs from Chechnya who felt it is their duty to rob and kill everything that moved.

The most relevant part of the film is its conclusion. Americans went home, team fell apart, Russian hockey players are abandoning the ship and moving to America, and Yeltsin’s lawlessness continues. And then we are moved to the year of 2000, the New Year TV show, during which Yeltsin announces his retirement and names his heir: Vladimir Putin.

I don’t really know what the director wanted to convey with this ending. But for me, from the perspective of 2020, it looks like the announcement of a savior, of a final sigh of relief. When you see the gruesome and grizzly details of the 1990s, and then recall a spectacular transformation of Russian society during the last twenty years, what other conclusions can you draw?

Americans in the film were guests from the future. They knew where the society was going, and wanted to transform parts of the old system into XXI century. They encountered tremendous resistance. New Mafia and Old Soviets didn’t believe or trust or wanted to utilize American know-how. The body politics could not digest the radical new practices in the 90s, only to fully embrace them in later years. It was under Putin, that all the methods and approaches that Pittsburgh visionaries wanted to bring in, flourished in one way or another.

One can argue whether today’s Russia is a advance on old Soviet System. For me, it is, for many, it is not. But clearly, very few Russians outside mafiosos and Yeltsin liberal supporters, want to go back to the 90s. What an awful, destructive and self-destructive time it must have been! The country that survived this period, will survive everything.

Here is the link to a fascinating interview with film director and Steve Warshaw ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwvBEG9NTrg). And below are several shots from the film, the shots of drunken bears and of the young American kid who was not afraid to deal with Russian wolves and bears.