Truly popular! To the 100th anniversary of Leonid Gaidai

January 30, 2023 marked the 100th anniversary of the birth of Leonid Gaidai, a film director whose films, without exaggeration, were known and loved by the whole vast country. Russian publicist and political scientist Dmitry Travin responded to this date:

"The full significance of Leonid Gaidai's films became clear much later than the moment when we saw "Operation Y", "The Caucasian Prisoner" or "The Diamond Hand". We watched them, revised them, pulled them apart for quotes and melodies that began to live independently of the films. "The Island of Bad Luck" or "The Song about Hares" went well in a cheerful company after libations, but few people took them seriously. Gaidai's films seemed like cute dummies that filled the time between real cases. In serious conversations, they discussed "Andrei Rublev", and not his "coeval" "Diamond Hand", "Mirror", and not "Ivan Vasilyevich".

But when you look at Gaidai from this day, you find that his films have become truly popular at a time when "apupei" about the revolution and the war should have been considered popular. The Coward, the Idiot and the Seasoned won the competition for the attention of the proletariat from Lenin, Stalin and Zhukov. I'm not even talking about the intelligentsia right now. This "layer", invariably paying tribute to the enchanting "Diamond Hand", was always drawn to some "Stalker". I am talking specifically about the "deep people", who had to listen to the official ideology of the "Kremlin Chimes" type, and listened to Gaidai's "entertainment".

Of course, Gaidai did not undermine the foundations. If anyone in the party areopagus believed that bullying a manager (a friend of a person) was dangerous for communist construction, the "Diamond Hand" would be put on the "shelf" where the banned cinema languished. But they looked at the "Diamond Hand" as a normal rest after working days. And only over time it became clear that in the 1960s - 1970s, after working days, a simple Soviet person had a mental emptiness that could no longer be filled with any dreams of a bright future and no communist ideology. Gaidai's films perfectly filled this void, which in fact meant a person's desire for idle rest, entertainment, consumerism instead of increasing political literacy and going on a clean-up day. When we all – from the professor to the janitor – began to watch Gaidai, it became clear that the Soviet system was not based on a great idea, but only on brute force.

Today, the great director Leonid Gaidai would have turned a hundred years old..."