Film Soviet-American Olympics '72

FILM REVIEW OF 'GOING VERTICAL'

A BLOCKBUSTER BREAKS RECORDS

By Stephen Wilson

 

MOSCOW -- A recent Russian film, 'Going Vertical', launched

from Last December, about the Soviet Basketball

victory against the Americans in the Olympic

games of 1972, has proven an unprecedented

box office hit . In just less than a month it has

made an almost staggering 2 billion rubles.

Unfortunately the film has provoked embittered

controversy over its dubious depiction of

the major players' characters not to mention the

misleading performance of the players. Two

widows of the former team are even taking the

producer of the film to court.

Why has the film provoked so much controversy?

Perhaps because the film starts with the usual

absurd claim that ; 'The Film is based on real

events 'then goes on to show numerous invented

stories within stories with no relation to what

actually happened.

So what events is the film claiming to be based

on? The actual events of how the Soviet basketball team won against the United States at Munich is bizarre in itself ! It is such a great story that one wonders why on earth it needs either embellishing or over the top distortion in the first

place. At first, the American basketball team

presumed the match was over after they won by

one point ; 50 to 49. They even started jubilantly

celebrating. However, an indignant assistant

coach complained to the referee and judges that

the game was not finished as they had been

not granted : 'The Time out' they deserved.

Someone had made a poor job of the time

-keeping . So the judge ordered the game to

continue and during the last three seconds , to

the amazement and awe of all spectators the

Soviet team scored the winning points . They

won 51 to 50 ! The American coach and players

began angrily protesting that the Soviets should

not have been granted 'Time out' . While all this

arguing was going on the Soviet team retired

to their changing room and tensely waited for

the judges to make a final decision . The judge

decided to accept the Soviet team had won. But

the American basketball team have never

acknowledged they were defeated. They still

have not collected their silver medal!

The awarding game winning-points were scored by Ivan

Edeshkov passing the ball to Alexander Belov

who threw into net! it was all so sweepingly

sudden!

The film is directed by Anton Megerdichev

and the coach played by Vladimir Mashkov. As a

film ,which stretches over two hours, it never

has a dull moment. This in itself it quite a rare

achievement. There are a lot of moving and

amusing scenes which captivate an audience.

The basic plot is that the Soviet coach

proclaims that the Soviet team can beat the

American basketball team . "We have to instill

in all our players that they can do the impossible

even if you don't believe in the impossible' he

retorts to the defeatist assistant coach who

always 'puts him down' by accusing him of

being reckless , mad and too ambitious . The

coach Vladimir Garanzhin states he will only

agree to direct the team if, "We use a new

American methodology to beat the Americans."

But Garanzhin is facing many huge problems.

He needs to save enough money to pay for

an operation to help his disabled son who is

on a wheelchair. Not only this . Most of the Soviet

officials conspire to sabotage Garanzhin's efforts

to win the games by threatening to withdraw from

the games under a false pretext. The players

are even threatened with potential legal action

for smuggling illicit items into the country such as

a Bible and an enormous amount of clothes.

The American Basketball coach is depicted as

a ruthless man who directs his players to beat

up and injure the Soviet players. Not all the

American players agree and retort: "I'm not

a wrestler but a basketball player " and "I have

done enough boxing for today." When the Russian

players protest against foul play, the judge

answers : "You have to understand that yes, they

are playing dirty but they are not breaking the

rules." This is the same Judge who at an earlier

game sending off a Russian player with a tut tut

tut scolding : "basketball is a gentlemen's game."

Yet at the end of the film, this same judge

allows Russia 'Time out' allowing them to win the

match at the Olympics!

The film has a great cast, witty dialogue and

a lot of tense moments. It is a moving film.

A young student of mine called Roman, told me

"It was a great film . After the Soviet team won

during the last three seconds everyone in the

cinema applauded."

So why has the film provoked such controversy?

The poet Pushkin once stated: 'The tale is a lie'.

in this case, the film is a lie as it claims to be

based on real events. The widow of Alexander

Belov,{ He died of a rare heart disease in 1978,}

stated: "The only thing true about this film is

the last three seconds . All the rest of the film

is just false." 

She stated that her late husband did not sleep around with other girls or suffer from any dizzy spells where he fainted during his time in the team. The Soviet doctors would

have disallowed him from playing as they had

very strict rules and were subject to many strict

medical tests. That the Soviet team would have

lost to a group of street youth over a bet also

appears ludicrous as "Sasha was a genius at

basketball." How the game was performed

on the film is highly misleading. The stunts

of leaping up in air and hurling the ball into the

air through the net was forbidden by the then

rules of basketball. 

"Whoever wrote this script has never watched a game of basketball or knows anything about the game ," declared

basketball player Alexander Ovchinnikov.

She also stated that there was no woman's

Olympic basketball team in 1972 as it had not

been founded.

How has the film director Anton Megerdichev

responded to those allegations ? He claims that

if they told the story as it actually happened it

would be so dull nobody would want to watch

the film. In other words 'Truth is more boring

than fiction!' He certainly would not agree with

the old cliche that 'Truth is more fascinating than

reality'. To be fair, he is not the only director to

present a film purporting to be based on true

events but blatantly false. Daniel Ogen, a

storyteller, told me that: "Hollywood has produced

more false legends about the American Indians

than the Indians themselves".

Does it matter? Do cinema goers really believe

this game was 'based on real events?' Well,

some gullible Russian school children under the

age of 12 do tend to tell me they believe the

events portrayed in wartime films are true even

when I point out some inaccuracies. Many war

veterans don't even attend war films because they

are inaccurate to the point of absurdity.

So what might be a solution to at least avoid

troubled court cases? Why not use a bit of

honesty and declare at the beginning of the film:

'This film is very loosely based on events and

is not the literary truth.' But such an honest

confession in the eyes of many producers and

film directors risks profits. But it would be better

not to make the old misleading claim that:

This film is based on real events'. More often

'The film is a lie'.

HOD Meeting

House Of Delegates Meeting

By Jim Vail

The January, 2018 Chicago Teachers Union House of Delegates met Wednesday to discuss two resolutions and endorse six candidates for office.

VP Jesse Sharkey chaired the meeting because President Karen Lewis is still home recovering from a stroke. He said she is feeling better and they had spoken for two hours.

Sharkey said good riddance to former Chicago Public Schools chief Forrest Claypool who was brought in to destroy the union. He made his name in civic office as a union buster, having helped gut the unions in the Chicago Park District and the Chicago Transit Authority.

Did Claypool fulfill his duty in the schools? He was forced to resign like his predecessor, but not go to prison this time, but he did fire union activists like former Saucedo teacher Sarah Chamber, further the privatization of school services and threaten to layoff thousands of teachers and implement furlough days. Claypool believes in vouchers, Sharkey said, (so does CTU endorsed House Speaker Mike Madigan) and hung a picture of free market wacko Ayn Rand in his office.

What about new schools chief Janice Jackson?

"There are a number of ways she'll be better than Forrest Claypool," Sharkey told the delegates last week. "You don't go up by being the enemy of the system."

The first resolution passed was to support Black Lives Matter School Week of Feb. 5th. The first two or three teachers from CORE who spoke in favor were white, to show solidarity between white and black teachers for this resolution.

The resolves (what the union pledges to do if you hold its feet to the fire) include the CTU will participate in Black Lives Matter School Week to kick off Black History Month the week of Feb. 5, 2018, CTU will host events aligned to national demands for ending the pushout of Black teachers in our schools, restorative practices in schools and ending zero tolerance discipline, teaching Black and other histories and ethnic studies curriculum (important since this country has swung so hard right to eradicate the curriculum of minorities forged in the radical 60s), and encourage teachers to wear Black Lives Matter at School shirts to school that week and teach lessons about important Black topics.

The next important resolution passed was to Reclaim the Paraprofessional and School Related Personnel (PSRP) in CTU. The discussion about this centered on how CTU lost a lot of teacher aid positions when the jobs were reclassified to SECAs, and then moved to be under the SEIU union. Some teachers demanded the CTU leadership do more to ensure the many aids who have lost their jobs because of this. Sharkey said contract enforcement is the surest way to do this.

The CTU noted that after CPS created the new category of SECA (Special Education Classroom Assistant) outside of CTU membership (just like charter teachers), the number of SECAs, like charter schools, has been growing "astronomically" while CTU PSRPs have fallen greatly - a switch of 3,200 members from CTU to SEIU, and CPS is also reclassifying PSRP positions like early childhood coordinators into jobs not performed by CTU. The resolution resolves to explore ways to regain these lost positions and "CTU will aggressively accrete the thousands more CPS employees that are eligible for union membership in the Central Office, Network Offices, and School units of CPS into the CTU as part of re-carding in preparation for the 2018 Janus court decision." 

The upcoming Janus Supreme Court decision is expected to whack the unions again hard (how else to further the divide between the very rich and rest of us?) by not automatically collecting union dues, you can refuse to pay your union dues.  

The last item for action was endorsing the following names for office - Kwame Raoul for attorney general, Ram Villivalam for state senator, Theresa Mah for state senator, Kelly Cassidy for state rep, Mary Flowers for state rep and Bridget Degnen for Cook County Commissioner.

Yours truly as delegate of Hammond Elementary asked why wasn't Aaron Goldstein considered as a candidate for attorney general. Goldstein is a progressive who upset Ald. Dick Mell for 33rd Ward committeeman and has pledged to take on the banks, something the union has fought hard for when it was discovered Bank of America made millions off toxic loans to the city while closing many schools. The CTU said it was unanimous to endorse Raoul, part of the machine, who has received $100,000 from big tobacco, tens of thousands of dollars from big utilities (watch our rates continue to rise for electricity, water and gas!), voted for the pension bill to whack our pensions hard - everything CTU preaches against!

Exciting mayoral candidate and principal activist Troy LaRavier has endorsed Goldstein.

Board arrests teacher

AMERICAN TEACHER ARRESTED AT
SCHOOL BOARD MEETING

THE WHOLE WIDE WORLD WATCHES

By Stephen Wilson

 

A teacher who has been asked to leave by

School board officials peacefully walks out

when a marshal {school resource officer}

approaches her. When she enters the corridor

the officer pushes her against the wall and

even shouts : " You are arrested for resisting

a police officer " . Her comments : " What are

you doing ? " Why are you pushing me ? " fall

on deaf ears as she is handcuffed and led

away to the local police station. Where did

this actually happen ? No, not in Russia or

Mexico but at a school Board meeting in

Vermilion, Louisiana on the morning of 9th

January. The case has made International

headlines due to social networks which allow

a recorded film of those very events to be

watched on U-Tube.

The American School Board and their officials

were accused of not only using : 'Excessive

force' but violating the teachers right to freely

express an opinion under the First Amendment

of the American Constitution. However, a

representative of the Board went so far as

to defend the action of the marshal on the

grounds that a certain amount of decorum has

to be observed and that it was the teacher who

was out of order and preventing discussion.

But if you watch this video attentively what

surprises me and perhaps many of my Russian

friends is how ' excessively polite ' the teacher

Deyshia Hargrave behaved by some Russian

standards. She never swore or loudly raised her

voice and calmly left the room when a marshal

asked her to go. Hargrave was detained but

finally released and the prosecution publically

declared they would not press charges. However,

the damage has been done . Now many people

can point to this incident and claim : " There is

no real freedom of Speech in America ! The

Americans are just a bunch of self-righteous

hypocrites when they are always lecturing

Russians about how they should maintain

freedom of speech. Put your own house in order".

When council officials were facing much stronger

language and abuse from local people opposed

to their renovation program, Russians did not call

the police and arrest people but tactfully tried to

calm down the crowd . They even made an effort

to listen to grievances. If you watch this video

what strikes you is how the school board makes

so little contact with the audience and just appear

to speak among themselves. It is as if they

follow the line : 'The officials must decide while

the teachers must remain silent '. Or rather :

'Cadres decide everything !'

What was Deyshia Hargrave protesting about ?

The main point of issue was whether a top school

official's pay be raised. The School Board voted

by 5 to 3 to increase Payau's pay from 110,130

dollars a year to around 140,000 dollars thus

representing a 30,000 increase . Payau argued

he deserved it because he had done a great

job, raised the rating performance of schools

worked hard and had not a raise for 5 years.

Deyshia Hargrave disagreed ! School class

numbers had risen from 20 to 29 a teacher

and conditions for both teachers and students

had worsened. In fact , teachers at Vermilion

earn an average of 47,522 a year and have not

had a raise for ten years.

Debbie Meaux , the president of Louisiana

Teachers Association stated : " I think it should

not have happened at an open public forum. We

expect to be able to speak and have our opinion

heard" . The local teachers at Hargrave's school

are shocked by recent events and feel as if it is

an assault upon all teachers. They back their

teacher 100 percent.

Rosemarie Faye stated : " The teacher did

nothing wrong and kept with protocol. She waited

to be addressed . She was acknowledged , and

then spoke in a respectful way and wasn't out of

order".

Deyshia Hargrave declared :"I'm appalled at

this and you should be too..... I'm hoping you

choose to speak out and don't let it become an

intimidation".

Woes of Russian Academics

PRINT AND PAY FOR ARTICLES OR YOU
ARE OUT!

How academic articles are a continuation of

wage cuts by other means

By Stephen Wilson

  

MOSCOW -- In order to boost the overall prestige and attain

and respectable ranking ; the Institute of Power

Engineering insists all English teachers must

write at least a minimum of 4 to 5 articles in

an academic journal a year . Should they fail

to win a prescribed number of minimum points

they will be punished by being offered less

hours and pushed out of work. That is you fail to

obtain a minimum assessment of above 11

points . How do you obtain those points ? You

are obliged to attend conferences, write articles

and perform some kind of serious research. The

problem with this is that it is all unpaid work and

not even explicitly stated in their contracts. In

fact, as far as Second City Teacher is concerned,

teachers don't have any rights or trade union

to defend themselves and can be dismissed for

even expressing a different opinion than their

officials. We previously interviewed teachers who

had been threatened with dismissal or unfairly

dismissed for simply taking sick leave guaranteed

by Russian labor legislation. Fortunately the

teacher Olga, who was unfairly fired, obtained

an alternative post. But she was fired in a

humiliating way in front of her colleagues thus

indicating not only illegal action but lack of basic

professional management skills.

I spoke to one teacher whose name has been

changed to Natasha. 

"I'm not sure I will be able to keep my job this year at the

institute," she told me. "I have not managed to get enough points and have had only one article published in a

Journal. If you fall below the threshold score you

will get only 1/7 or 1/8 of the normal workload

meaning it is just not worth your while continuing

to work . So people are not so much fired as

slowly sidelined ".

One of the basic grievances of teachers in both

schools and institutes is how academic

coordinators have the discretion to confer how

many hours a teacher is awarded. So if a

particular coordinator has a favorite teacher they

can offer the teacher more hours than other

teachers thus leading to tension in the office.

Where on earth can many overworked English

teachers find the time to do research or write

articles? Most of the English teachers have not

just one job but a few in order just to get by.

Another problem is that the teachers themselves

must pay for the articles to be published in

journals and not the institute . It is as if the

institute wants to have its cake and eat it!

The cost can be staggering. It ranges from a

minimum of 1000 rubles to 15,000 rubles for

one article in the most prestigious journals.

Very few people read those published articles.

I asked Natasha: "What if a teacher is very

good at teaching and can hardly afford to pay?"

Natasha answered: "Well yes, I know one

teacher who had to pay 15,000 rubles to get

one article published but she told me it was a

necessity so she could progress in her career

at another institute or university."

The result is teachers are being forced to accept

a pay cut to keep their jobs. In fact , being an

academic is an expensive burden that many

teachers could happily do without. Even if you

have a doctorate an academic journal won't

publish your article unless you pay them some

fabulous fee in a journal that is often obscure.

Maria Koroleva, an academic who works as a

linguist, had to struggle for years just to find

a post-graduate course and even then told me

she has to pay for a doctorate. And even if you

become an academic in America or Britain you

could find yourself on part time and short term

contracts. And those are the so called lucky

graduates who managed to find work in their

field in the first place. The rest are often working

in pubs and supermarkets .

Romantic ideas about working in idyllic

ivory towers shielded from acute problems of the

outside world is largely a myth. Instead,

universities reflect the problems of working in

other industries such as low pay, bad office

politics, overwork, insecure contracts,

threatened redundancies and lack of

empowerment. One may well ask: "Who needs

the prestige most of all: teachers or the Institute?"

I think most teachers would reply they simply

want to do their jobs well in peace without

prestige!

Russian Courts

KAFKA HAUNTS RUSSIAN COURT CASES

By Stephen Wilson

 

MOSCOW -- "Only when you yourself get into trouble do you begin to understand how difficult life is for people, the injustice they can come up against . As long as your own life is fine, you turn you back on people suffering", philosophically mused the ex-minister of Economic Development Alexei Ulyukayev, who was sentenced to eight years in a harsh penal colony for allegedly accepting a 12 million dollar bribe from 'a key witness', who didn't even turn up in court for questioning. 

Ulyukayev had been arrested for accepting a basket sent to him which he assumed was a gift of wine and sausages. But it turned out to be full of money. All the evidence points to a crude and primitive set up sanctioned by the Russian government. Ulyukayev later warned his fellow officials that : "Anyone is three clicks away from being charged with corruption". The case has shocked even members of the establishment as it represents the first unprecedented case of a minister being arrested under spurious charges. But he is hardly the only high-profile figure facing absurd charges. The director of the Gogol center has been under house arrest on corruption charges and Yuri Dmitriyiv, a Gulag historian, is in detention following baseless charges of child pornography. 

The good news is that the latter is to be released this year on the 28th of January.

Anyone who faces serious charges in Russia is almost likely to be convicted. Russia has a 98% conviction rate. While Aleksei Ylyukayev sat in court he was seen reading a work by Kafka called: 'The Trial'. The novel seems an appropriate choice. The plot of the novel tells of how a banker called Joseph K is arrested on charges he never discovers and attempts to unravel how the justice system works or rather doesn't work but is instead chaotic and capricious. Anyone can be arrested on a whim. The court cases are even held in secret attics above houses. The judges are angry, rude and arrogant. It sounds so familiar!

As a result of this case, officials are now refusing to accept any gifts at all, never mind baskets! Despite a law which stipulates that officials can accept gifts if they don't exceed the price of 3000 rubles, nobody is in the festive mood to give or accept gifts from strangers.

Ulyukayev may have been overstating things, but he is largely correct to state most people in Russia are indifferent to the fate of those arrested unless they experience a similar predicament. If people understood the trauma of being suddenly arrested on inexplicable charges and being thrust into a crowded confined cell they would think less about calling for this or that person to be put in prison. This reality was starkly brought home to me while I was working with the homeless in the 1990's . I and Jim Vail recall speaking to a wrongly imprisoned homeless Korean translator. He had been arrested and charged with murder after being found within the vicinity of a corpse. He was later released after many months. Being homeless in Moscow, he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. I recall him telling us: "Conditions were so terrible in prison you would not wish that your worst enemy go through what I experienced." We also found that one of the husbands of a volunteer at the soup kitchen had been arrested on charges of terrorism because some strange package was near him.

Having heard so many cases such as those I began to understand why so many people walk past corpses and bags. If you, yourself find a dead body in Moscow, the police might ask: "What did you do to this person?"

There must be thousands of innocent prisoners in Russia awaiting a trial where they have no chance of justice. Those cases have risen rather than gone away despite nonsense about how we have more law and order in contrast to the wild 1990's.

How do many people remain indifferent to those cases? They often just live in their own world. When you raise such questions they complain: "You are spoiling my mood," and "The Law is the Law. There is nothing to be done about it" or the trite cliche "This is Russia". Actually, it is not just Russia but Britain and America. Like in Russia, people will plead guilty to breaking laws they never broke because they don't have the money or the time to appeal to a lawyer. But something in deed can be done about things. Mass demonstrations, petitions and letters of protests have been known to be effective. It is often frustrating and endless hard work, taking even years. But prisoners have been released! We just have to keep knocking on the door hard enough until it opens!