Spinning Boris
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Movie Reviews of Spinning Boris
Movie Review: What do Boris Yeltsin and Bill Clinton have in common?
Summary: 4 Stars
They both won presidential elections with the help of Dick Morris and his team. If you are a political wonk, you will enjoy this movie. Great cast, great portrayal of a true story.Movie Review: a must for political junkies
Summary: 4 Stars
Since this is based on a true story it is a must have for political junkies in your DVD collection.Movie Review: Interesting
Summary: 3 Stars
An interesting movie about an interesting political topic. The American spin in Moscow. Good actors for a premium cable movie and a movie that doesnt drag on.Movie Review: The Best President of Russia America Ever Had
Summary: 2 Stars
This is the purported chronicle of the US consultants that "sold" Boris Yeltsin to the Russian public in the 1996 elections in said country. And is also a prime warning to those inclined to take their political and historical cues from slick film productions. The movie's basic premises - that these US consultants "saved" Russian democracy, that Yeltsin was the only alternative considering his opposition, etc., - are nonsense to anyone knowing the inside story of this process.
First, it was *not* the first free election in Russian history. That was in November 1917, to the Russian Constituent Assembly, which was in fact allowed by the Bolsheviks. The Assembly was shut down because it returned a non-Bolshevik majority but that is another story, and a precedent (read on.)
Second, only those candidates vetted by the Russian government - ie, Yeltsin - ever made it to the candidate stage in 1996. The broad and serious opposition to Yeltsin had already been neutralized by his anti-parliamentiary coup of October '93 and the months of personal dictatorship that followed. (This was also trumpeted as a "triumph for democratic reform," if one chooses to remember.) The two allowed opposition candidates of '96, Zhyuganov of the KPRF, and Zhirinovsky of the "Liberal Democrats", were not only permitted to run because they made Boris look good. Their parties were also on the take from the government in the State Duma. The relationship between Yeltsin and his rivals was symbiotic, not truly oppositional. So much for the groundwork of establishing the democratic playing field.
The film is correct in its depiction of fear-mongering as the final key ingredient that put Yeltsin over, and American ideological manipulation and dirty tricks did indeed help. But the real threat here came from Yeltsin's public statement that if the Communists won he would not honor the results. The threat of civil war was genuine, but it came not from Zyuganov and the KPRF (no Russians believed it could have) but rather from Yeltsin and his oligarch supporters. Russians could believe at least that much about their government. It was a "free and fair election" with a gun pointed at the electorate's head: Yeltsin's real secret of victory. With so much gun-toting in the film, it's strange that its writers never connected these dots - but maybe not, considering this film is an ideologival whitewash anyway.
This movie does communicate a good sense of Moscow of the period, still half-Soviet in feel and look before Mayor Luzhkov's "mass bombing" urban renewal. That these cynical US yuppies, so far from home, would turn down the offer of free sex so self-righteously as shown here is an unintended hoot, to anyone familiar with real American behavior in Moscow. The film does have a few good moments interspersed amid the nonsense, and the acting is more than adequate for its task. That these consultants were chosen as randomly as depicted is quite unlikely, given the strings of connections in Washington and Moscow so evident even in the film. And after '96? Yeltsin turned right around and absorbed much of the program and personnel of his "hard-line" rivals, paving the way for the Era of Putin. Again, so much for happy Hollywood endings, eh?
In short, this film rated is "EPO" - for entertainment purposes only. If you're _seriously_ interested in delving into the reality of Russia and its "reform process," try Reddaway and Glinski's "The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms."
Movie Review: It is not a fun
Summary: 2 Stars
A trio of CIA-linked Americans saved Russia from a civil war by orchestrated Boris Eltsyn election campaign.
If something positive in this work was, it is deploying the USSR-grown talented migrants to create this film itself being as much true and clever as Tatiana Dyachenko-Eltsyn's daughter similarity not existing to Tatiana Dyachenko original.
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